MFing with Meteorb sorceress.

[KaijoIosk]

Recently I built a MF meteorb sorceress and I don't have problems with killing mobs. I have about 380 MF and I did about 10 Hell Andariel and Mephisto runs. A few minutes ago I ran Mephisto and I had this kind of drop:

Super Healing Potion.

Macig Sharktooth Armor.

Super Mana Potion.

Magic Naga.

Rare Spiked Club.

When I run hell Andariel or Mephisto I always get such drops. Always rare and magic normal and exceptional items. So what is this problem about, MF?

[lumpor]

Nope. It's about you not getting quest drops. There are ways to always get quest drops from bosses.

Andariel: When you kill andariel for the first time (and you advance the quest), go directly to warriv. If you leave the game or talk to another npc before you talk to warriv, the bug won't activate. If you do activate it, you will get quest drops from her after every kill for the rest of your life (with that char in that difficulty)

Mephisto (and also baal):
Meph gives a quest drop every time you kill him, and you haven't completed his quest. Normally this only means the first time you kill him. But if you join someone else's game, it will say "you cannot complete this quest in this game". If you kill him then, you will have killed him without having completed his quest, yet you can do it again! This method needs to be used every time though.



Quest drops don't make too much of a difference though. They eliminate the chance for no-rare drops I think, but of course you can still get 2 exceptional blues and cleglaws civerbs amulet, which still is a crap drop.

[KaijoIosk]

So..... the best solution is creating a new sorceress.:smug:


When I go to Warriv after completing the quest and I go to next act. Can I talk to townsfolk after activating the bug?

[sirpoopsalot]

Long term, exploiting the quest drop might be worth it, but simply sticking with it might also be quicker. Did you do 20 runs? 50? Such small numbers are a crapshoot, with random luck being the biggest factor by far. Most people measure their number of runs in the (several) hundreds or thousands, and during that many runs you're bound to get something "good" sooner or later.

I've been MFing for a long, long time, and although my definition of a "good" item has changed, I'd say that at the very best I don't average more than one "good" item every 1-3 hours of heavy-duty MFing.


And yes, once you activate the Andy bug you can return to Act1 and talk to everyone.

[Xena1985]

I found a spare Tal's armour recently (from pindle) and since I've been doing LK runs with a kicksin the idea came up to make my first ever sorc that went beyond level 30. It would speed up LK considerably if I had an innate source of teleport. LK has been good to me in terms of charms and runes

I'm sick and tired of running meph because he never ever drops anything worthwhile. ie all my drops were pgems on the sptf lame expectional unique weapons and armour that nobody ever uses. Meph abosolutly refuses to give me arachnid meshes hoz'es, stormlash, ect. recently I've been doing baal runs, pits, pindle ect. hoping to get tradables.

A question that arises for me is how good is this meteorb build at clearing level 85 areas, pindle and baal. Would it be better to make a blizzard sorc ?? I know nothing about sorcs so I'm pretty much going to follow a guide to the letter. I also want to make this as cheap as reasonably possible since I don't really enjoy builds that depend entirely on mana with no way to leech it back.

with regard to equipment for the meteorb would this setup work ??

Shako + ptopaz - I have this
Tal's Armour ptopaz - Have this
Tal's Ammy - Need this
Arachnid mesh - need this
War Travlers - Cheap
Chancies- Cheap
Occulus - Fairly cheap and + mana per kill I don't llike running low
Spirit shield - cheap
low raven for CBF - cheap
Insight for merc - have the runes and polearm

this setup gives +10 skills without any skillers, 9 framr cast rate, and plenty of MF. the only semi expensive part is tal's ammy byt I can probably afford it

Or am I better of going full Tal Rashas ?? which I also have - the ammy

[lumpor]

Hey wait, when you talk to warriv, do you have to go to act 2 as soon as you talked to him? I kinda talked to Warriv, dissed him, went to Kashya, deckard, akara and THEN went to a2. Am I screwed?

[sirpoopsalot]

@lumpor, you need to go directly to Warriv and straight to Act2. Yep, you're screwed.


@Xena, I built 3 different dual-element sorcs specifically for WSK/Baal runs (I run for items, not for experience, so /players1 all the way) and did a comparison thread. Although my wealth was pretty high for the equipment I chose, I think the build reviews & such are still pretty accurate. link. (http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=683498)

Summary of Meteorb in WSK: Fire Immune waves are annoying - I prefer a stronger cold attack as a primary skill. Or at least for the Meteorb, to pull some points out of my fire synergies and improve my cold attack.

[stephan]

@lumpor, you need to go directly to Warriv and straight to Act2. Yep, you're screwed.
No, no and no. It's not that difficult. All you need to do is talk to Warriv at some point after you killed Andariel for the quest and before you leave the game. If you talk to other NPCs before or after, go to act 2 or not makes no difference. There is a thread describing this in the statistics forum.

[guface]

Shako + ptopaz - I have this
Tal's Armour ptopaz - Have this
Tal's Ammy - Need this
Arachnid mesh - need this
War Travlers - Cheap
Chancies- Cheap
Occulus - Fairly cheap and + mana per kill I don't llike running low
Spirit shield - cheap
low raven for CBF - cheap
Insight for merc - have the runes and polearm



Use tal belt instead of the arachnid and you'll get more FCR and 80% more mf
War travellers - quite pricey if good mf.
rest are good choices. You can also use rhyme rw for the shield on switch with gull or alibaba.

[lumpor]

Hmm, Stephan seems to know what he's talking about, but I've never seen poopsy being wrong. Still, I think I'll trust Stephan (also because it makes me happier)

[Xena1985]

Gull on switch is a good idea but not really necessary for me. Her sole purpose in life will be running pits/AT and teleporting around LK. To that end I've been contemplating a pure blizzard cold sorc since AT have no cold immunes..... but I'm not sure if my gear setup would work and there's the small matter of getting the mat title.... need to save anya at the very least to get the extra 10% resistance. I'm a single player btw so I can't really team up with a hammerdin to get me past the tricky areas. I guess I could just get a wand on switch with LR charges for the getting the pat title.

My MF Assasin is superior as a boss runner except for Diablo damn OK's :). I'm too inexpierienced with the sorceress class to create a really good dual tree sorc for WSK. and Single tree will be slower than an assasin anytime she runs into something immune to her particular element.

Excellent suggestinon swapping arachnid mesh for Tal's Belt. cheaper and an extra 85% MF :) overlooked that

[guface]

sorcs are generally excellent boss runners.

Rush in, static to 50%, and then fireball/meteor (or timer/non timer spam).

Diablo has high fire resist so orb will be needed but with decent -ve resist and +skills, you're looking at easily killing them in 15 seconds.

[Xena1985]

hmm :) sounds sweet. My assasin takes 45 seconds or so to do baal and 10-15 seconds for meph. But this is with suboptimal MF gear. If she switched to duress, upped gore riders and equiped angelic set well GG baal :) Now she's wearing nagelring and some n00b ammy that I haven't yet bothered to replace which give mana leech and extra 15% MF.

I'm leaning towards pure Cold Sorc since she would own AT, Pindle, and perhaps diablo. IIRC there are no cold immunes there ?? and I can just imagine the utter devastation that can be wrought by spamming FO in such confined spaces.

She is level 6 ATM with no skillpoints spent. I've named her Pindle_Slicer :thumbup:

[sirpoopsalot]

I'm leaning towards pure Cold Sorc since she would own AT, Pindle, and perhaps diablo. IIRC there are no cold immunes there ??

Oblivion Knights are cold immune... they're not a lot of danger to your sorc, but they definitely have a nuisance value when your merc kills himself to IM.

Otherwise you're fine with a cold sorc, but I really dislike the fact that Diablo and the seal-bosses/packs are capped at TC84 drops and the number of random-bosses is "less-dense" than most other level85 areas. When going after high-end items, I don't run RoF/CS/Diablo because those limitations do have an affect on the "top-end-item-drops over time" equation.

I'd stick to almost entirely to Pindle, Meph & AT with a pure-cold sorc, with maybe cows (and/or Andy - if you like that type of thing) added to the mix. Throwing on a 2nd attack element would make you able to go just about anywhere though, if you can get your power strong enough in both elements.



@stephan,
Thanks. Again. ;)

[stephan]

Otherwise you're fine with a cold sorc, but I really dislike the fact that Diablo and the seal-bosses/packs are capped at TC84 drops and the number of random-bosses is "less-dense" than most other level85 areas. When going after high-end items, I don't run RoF/CS/Diablo because those limitations do have an affect on the "top-end-item-drops over time" equation.
I agree with this. CS is one of the hardest areas of the game and the pay-off is less than it should be, compared to some of the easier lvl 85 areas. I don't see any reason to go there for MFing really.


@stephan,
Thanks. Again. ;)
:crazyeyes:

If you are not sure if you bugged Andy, just check if the magic items she drops do not contain any failed sets for a dozen runs orso. If she drops a magic item that does not have double dura (make sure it is dropped by her!) she is not bugged.

Beats rebuilding.

[lumpor]

Failed sets? What's that?

[Robobaby]

If you think those sorts of drops are out of the ordinary then you do not understand probability. 99.99% of the stuff all bosses drop is worthless crap. Rubbish yellows and blues. The good stuff has such an astronomically low chance to drop that it isn't uncommon to see people do hundreds of andy runs before they see a Soj drop. The best odds you have for a Soj is something like 1 in 1000 on every unique ring drop from her (assuming you have something like 300+ MF and you are running NM Andy). Most of the time those unique rings will be manald heals, assuming you even get a unique ring drop in the first place.

A Soj isn't even that rare on the scale of things. The odds of getting say a Death's Fathom from pindle are tiiiiiny.

[guface]

The best odds you have for a Soj is something like 1 in 1000 on every unique ring drop from her (assuming you have something like 300+ MF and you are running NM Andy). place.

mf has nothing to do with what the unique ring becomes. All it increases is the chance of a unique ring.

Also it is 1/31 chance of a unique ring being a soj from nm andy.

[Xena1985]

Alright cold sorc it is for me. This doesn't deserve a thread so I'll ask it here.
I'm gonna be maxing Blizzard, FO, Ice Blast, and 10 points in mastery. Now the question is whether to max ice bolt, or glacial spike ?? Ice bolt synergizes blizzard, FO, and Ice blast, while glacial spike also synergizes blizzard and gives a nice duration to ice blast. It's also not a bad spell to use on it's own IIRC

Edit: Merc will be taking out cold immunes. I'd rather pwn in certain specific MF hot spots the be mediocre at the cost of going anywhere. The faster she can clear and area and kill the objective the faster she can restart the process. AT are basically as good as pits. I've even noticed slightly more boss packs though it may be my imagination. Pindle is Pindle he rarely spawns cold immune and as I said I'm going to be running LK for l33t r00nz. I get Pul's Lem's Io's hel's there all the time and they can be cubed quite nicely. There's also the hope of a Ber/Sur dropping which would be enough raw $$$ to outfit several chars. That's not even taking into account the pgems and charms. after 200-300 runs I've got enough vita and balance small charms to outfit several projects

[Rancors]

go with pure blizz sorc. it's the fastest boss killing sorc out there. u dont even need to static, and u can drop andy for like 4 sec and meph for 6-7 sec.

[redground]

Why not make a FO/ES sorc?

They have solid Dmg (you can drop andy with 2 FO and meph with 3-4) and they can get beat up a lot before dieing.

[stephan]

Failed sets? What's that?
A failed set drops when the game decides a dropped item should have the set quality, but the base item does not have a set equivalent or the boss can drop the base item but not the the particular set item. If this happens the item will get the magic quality (blue) and will get double durability (if it has dura).

For example:

The games decides a scourge should drop with set quality. Problem is there is no set scourge, so instead a magic scourge with double dura will drop.

For uniques a similar thing can happen, except failed uniques will be changed to to the rare quality (yellow) and get triple dura.

You can use this to determine if Andy is bugged or not, because a quest-bugged Andy will never drop below rare quality. She can still drop magical items however, but only if they are a failed set. So if you find a magical item from her that does not have double dura, she is not bugged.

[lumpor]

Ok, thank you for the information :)