What’s your speed run character

I suspect a sorc or pala to be fastest if you twink them out with prepared gear.
Sorc with mana on kill and low level req high quality items.
Holy Fire pala with prepared gear second.

Holy Fire pala ftw

i´ve a prepped gear for this. Tarnhelmet, Eye of etlich, +3 Holy Fire szepter, a few pieces sigon and a few res charms for cs and diablo. Just walk through the acts. everything is max 2 ticks from Holy Fire. bosses die in 10 hits max. You can also use Ravenclaw, but i prefer the extra dmg from + skills

You can check out some NG+ runs if you want to see what a truly optimized Act 5 rushing setup looks like for each class. Naturally, the Sorceress is #1 on the leaderboard and it's not even close.

Speedruns:
https://www.speedrun.com/d2r?h=NG-norma ... n.4qyk9z31

Downloadable characters and stashes:
https://github.com/SliveniusD2/NG-Files

A couple of eye-opening discoveries that significantly improved my Sorceress rushes were the Gnarled Staff of Charged Bolt and Gnarled Staff of Frost Nova. Iirc, both can be shopped from Akara on higher difficulties & clvl's. It's been a long time since I looked--so I don't remember the most efficient way to find them--but it's possible to purchase staves with Level 11 Charged Bolt or Level 8 Frost Nova charges that can be equipped at very low levels. I have a couple of each just to help with the charges:
These staves have higher level requirements on non-Sorceress characters (7 and 12, respectively), but on a Sorceress the requirements are much lower (0 and 6). That makes them exceptionally strong leveling tools early on.

One of the bigger advantages is that using charged skills doesn't Consume mana, so you're only limited by how effectively you can group enemies. Both staves are powerful enough to one or two-shot many of the earlier monsters you'll encounter while rushing, making the early game dramatically faster.

If you browse those files on GitHub, you'll see that there are a few other very exciting low-level items that you can acquire, but most of them are exceedingly rare or expensive to craft. The jewels and rares they use are largely impossible to find, but it can give you a sense of the theoretical ceiling. One of the more obtainable albeit costly items would be a Level 16 20fcr Caster Amulet. Here is one from Jymnasium:
I hope to craft one of these myself one day, but it is difficult to justify the amethysts and jewels that would be required.

The sorceress , I use
Repeating Crossbow and rixot to kill diablo.
Repeating Crossbow 5 os , 20 poison, 15 Light/other resistance 8 life +any good thing x 5.
Lv 6 get Static Field

Sorc, only need 1 point in Static Field, others no need, use bow and melee to finish diablo and get into a5 p1.

use Static Field to reduce it to very low level.
use rixot to reduce it further, swap to Repeating Crossbow when it has less than 10% hp.

Sorc can be best because in final part of diablo, he will go into Berserk mode, continue use red horse. That paladin need Dodge it
but Sorc can just use Repeating Crossbow shot it down. Not mention Static Field can kill 50%+ hp.

This is Lv 6 play, or remove Static Field, lv 3 play.

---Lv 7 above , follow previous post. --

departure wrote: 2 months ago

For what it's worth, I went down this rabbit hole as well.

forums/post-your-twink-gear-setup-t1481448.html

At the time I made that, I was going heavy into poison damage. You can give your level 1 sorc a bow with enough jewels of envy to be doing hundreds of poison damage. It's very fast at early leveling. But I eventually became convinced (partly due to NG+ runs), that it wasn't as fast as actually just using the sorc but making her better.

I will definitely look into the staff charges. That would make the first few levels even faster, after which you have enough skills and gear to stop using charges.

Don't sleep on stamina from charms. It's really helpful.

I came to the same conclusion myself. Jewels of Envy are very attractive at first glance, and they’re a great value for their common rarity, but the answer becomes obvious once you start to look deeper and deeper into making the Sorceress’ own toolkit better. Poison is a trap.

As for stamina, nowadays I just keep a Belt full of stamina pots until I feel I’ve out-leveled the need for them.

SP offline here, most of us are familiar with the SocketRocket sorceress, aka iSocket, aka Socketeer.

There's too much gear for me to go over everything, but as you play you always keep an eye on lower level stuff, especially with +mana, mpk, and skills. Charms are huge, a full inventory of them gives you a ton of mana. Hellforge Hammer until around lv 6, Charged Bolt 'til around 15, then Fireball until blizzard @ 24. Lightning doesn't work out past 15 since the Tainted / afflicted in late act 1 and scarabs in act 2 are very lightning-resistant, even in normal mode.

Once your merc is 27 and can equip Insight, it's off to the races. By then I have around 650 mana just from charms & gear (no energy) and can rush myself, teleporting past everything. Run normal & nightmare Baal a few times for fast levels, since you don't want to do nightmare below about 35, and hell before 70 - your merc gets crushed. Speaking of the merc you level much faster than him when rushing and have to re-purchase him a few times during the process, whenever he's really getting his butt kicked. The whole thing just takes a few hours, it's kinda fun, different way to play when it's all about speed. For normal characters I'm a completionist - every wp, every quest, This is the opposite.

Skoobdoobie wrote: 14 hours ago

Hellforge Hammer until around lv 6, Charged Bolt 'til around 15, then Fireball until blizzard @ 24.

Anything good in using Hellforge Hammer instead of poison bow and armor + hat with 20 poison charms?
I like standing and shooting rather than running after Mobs to hit them.
Hammer damage is also quite low comparing to 7*charms

dionisy_cn wrote: 13 hours ago

Skoobdoobie wrote: 14 hours ago

Hellforge Hammer until around lv 6, Charged Bolt 'til around 15, then Fireball until blizzard @ 24.

Anything good in using Hellforge Hammer instead of poison bow and armor + hat with 20 poison charms?
I like standing and shooting rather than running after Mobs to hit them.
Hammer damage is also quite low comparing to 7*charms

I just read about those jewels recently, I never realized they had no level req. I have 4 or 5 saved up, I'm gonna try it out soon. What level / area of game can you get to with that setup? It sounds awesome, can't wait to try it.

@Skoobdoobie
It gets you to lvl 17 easy . Where you can equip 5-6* Tal bow for both you and your A1 mercenary and proceed further.
At lvl 3 put on Hsarus Boots and Belt for AR
At lvl11 put on 2 Angelic set rings +Amulet or Armor for AR. Use Death set gloves + Belt for attack speed and Cannot be frozen. Leave Hsarus Boots on.
At lvl 12 put on any 2 pieces of Cathan set for additional fire damage Head + Armor are easy to obtain.
At lvl 13 replace Hsarus Boots with Cow King Hooves if you have them for additional fire damage.

In case you greedy and don't want to spend points in health at all - use Cleglaw bracers instead of Death set gloves.
Sigon set pieces also can be used but have high STR requirements.


@departure
I'll go shop for this too. But I don't think it will fit my playstyle much. I saw speedrunners using staffs like this.
Thanks for sharing builds. One for lvl 15is nice. I'll start collecting charms myself.
Note that instead of Tir runes you can use + 3 mana on kill jewels. Can have 3 OS Mask and 3OS Armor filled with those for more mana. Not sure if you need it having 600+ of it already

richhtx wrote: 2 months ago

And build look like

I just want to get to Larzuk on my own , in a speedy manner
instead of paying or waiting to pay for socket quests

Are you not allowed to rush yourself with alt accounts in private game anymore?



Distinctly remember convincing my GF in college exactly one time that this would be fun before just borrowing her computer when she was not using it to rush mules for infinite Hell Forge and Larzuk quests circa 2003 when all you needed was an email and internet for battle.net ...

SizzleZap wrote: 9 hours ago

Are you not allowed to rush yourself with alt accounts in private game anymore?

It is, for those who have multiple accounts. You need to buy the game multiple times (once per BNet account), unlike back in the D2:LoD days. And not everyone is interested that.

Skoobdoobie wrote: 13 hours ago

dionisy_cn wrote: 13 hours ago

Skoobdoobie wrote: 14 hours ago

Hellforge Hammer until around lv 6, Charged Bolt 'til around 15, then Fireball until blizzard @ 24.

Anything good in using Hellforge Hammer instead of poison bow and armor + hat with 20 poison charms?
I like standing and shooting rather than running after Mobs to hit them.
Hammer damage is also quite low comparing to 7*charms

I just read about those jewels recently, I never realized they had no level req. I have 4 or 5 saved up, I'm gonna try it out soon. What level / area of game can you get to with that setup? It sounds awesome, can't wait to try it.

you can try to search some people list
6 x 20 poison jewel no lv req = Ist

or like this, it is 1 jewel = 1-2 Ist

and get composite bow, which shoot very quick.
Long War Bow is 1 shot kill solution but...you need very expensive jewel. poison/res/life/req

basically, it is only more defense, if you play it right, 20 poison j in weapon is enough,

use Static Field and rixot to kill diablo at lv 6

---

And some people want alt account to pass middle, yes it can, you only need to create game, type same room name by switch account.
the only thing is that portal will disappear, you still need to walk your sorc from act 1 to end a5

I play offline and I have to do my socket quests by myself.
I ended up with a Holy Fire Paladin with this setup at level 6:

-- full Sigon's Complete Steel set - ( Sigon's Guard socketed with a Jewel of Freedom, -15 requirements to get only 64 Str needed)
-- Scepter of the Apprentice (+3 Holy Fire and +1 Resist Fire) - shopped at Drognan
-- two Nagelring for magic find
-- magic find amulet

-- large charms of strength (+3 Strength at level 2) to reach 70 Str

I level on P8 in Blood Moor to get the first levels and at level 6 you can equip all of these and switch back to P1.
I put the most points in Holy Fire and then add to Fire Resist.
Then you just run through the map and most of the enemies dies along the way.
I complete the Akara's, Atma's and Izual quests for another 4 skill points.

At level 14 I take 8 x Grand Charm of inertia (+7% FRW) and at level 18 I switch to Large Charms of Inertia (+5% FRW).
At level 20 you're done.

I tried to get the Nightmare quest also but it took too long as the enemies got tougher. So now I just do the Normal one.