Patriarch Igor_Horkov - Whirly/Goldy/Pindly Barb

[sirpoopsalot]

It's going to take me a while to figure out his exact details relating to the equipment he wears for his 2 remaining jobs, but he just killed Baal, so...

(hopefully the equipment list makes sense)


History:
As I explained recently in TheReadMenace's thread about Pindle runners, this barb was built with 3 purposes in mind. First was to try my Grief+Fortitude on a whirlwind barbarian and quest it through the game.

But since it took a few months to make Grief, I had lots of time to pre-plan this barbarian. When planning the skills, I couldn't think of a "good" 4th skill to dump 20 points in: (Sword) Mastery, Whirlwind, and BattleOrder's are obvious 20 pointers, but none of the others is especially necessary (or useful) for questing through the game. So I decided that I'd throw the excess in Find Item and then figure out how to make him a GF-runner (his second purpose) after he beat Baal.

Finally, when I was playing SpongebobIII, at one point in Act2 I was running around with a Sanctuary aura pwning physical immune undead. It dawned on me that Sanctuary + Find Item + reasonably fast kills + MF = a very solid Pindle runner. Since I've never once used Azurewrath before, mixing Pindleskin, Azurewrath, and MF runs became his third purpose.


Details:
Level85+
Str: 172+
Dex: 136+
Vit: everything else
Ene: base
Currently unspent stat points: 42

Resists:
Questing: 75/64/80/75
GF: ~50+f / ?? for the rest
Pindle: no idea

Life: ~2500
Mana: ~200
Damage & AR: ????
... but my AR is pretty low; that's my biggest concern so far, since Grief's ITD doesn't work on boss-types. It's also why I put an Eth instead of an Eld in the Azurewrath.

Skills:
20 Sword Mastery, Whirlwind, Battle Orders, Find Item
2+ Increased Speed
1 Natural Resists, Berzerk, Taunt, Battle Command, prereq's
remaining points will likely go into Increased Speed, with maybe one or two making it into Natural Resists.

Equipment:

- Weapon1:  Grief Phaseblade (356)
- Weapon2:  ethereal Oath Colossus Sword  (1.07 hax, 332%)
- Weapon3:  Azurewrath (eth rune)

Grief + Oath, will be for questing & GF runs
Grief + Azurewrath will be for Pindle runs.


Weapon Switch (for horking):  
- 2x LemLem AliBaba's (GF)
- 2x MF jewels AliBaba's (Pindle)


Armor:  
- Fortitude (questing), 
- Wealth (GF), 
- Fortitude / Skullder's / Tals / ??? (for Pindle)


Helm:
- Arreat's (questing)
- Lem'ed Crown of Thieves (GF)
- Shako / Arreat's / ???? (Pindle)


Amulet:
- Tancred's Wierd (questing & Pindle)
- Cresent Moon (GF)


Ring1 (might potentially swap out for Pindle runs, but I doubt it): 
 
Beast Grasp
Ring
Required Level: 48
Item Version: 1.10+ Expansion
Item Level: 87
Fingerprint: 0x6e9e41f4
+12 to Strength
+13 to Dexterity
+115 to Attack Rating
Fire Resist +21%
Lightning Resist +7%
Cold Resist +7%
Poison Resist +7%
+50 poison damage over 3 seconds


Ring2:
- Dwarfstar (GF)
- ????  for Pindle (Nagel or dual-leech is most likely)


Gloves:
- Dracul's (questing)
- Chance Guard's (GF & Pindle)


Belt:  Goldwrap Battlebelt
(I'm going to try some crafting to get a replacement with resists, GF 
and maybe FHR, but who knows if I'll get anything decent).


Boots:
- Infernostride (GF)
- Tancred's (questing & Pindle)


Charms:
- 1x Gheeds
- Resists & Sharp/Fine of various sizes & details

Mercenary:
Level85, Might aura
Reaper's Toll (Shael) / Obedience eth Thresher
VampGaze (IAS) / Kira's Guardian (IAS)
Duress / Fortitude / Shaftstop (IAS) / Guardian Angel (IAS) / eth Treachery

Like the rest of my gear, his has been in a state of flux so far. The emphasis will be (and has always been) on making him survive (1st) and making him kick butt (2nd). I may rely on my mercs for tanking and making the occasional kill, but I don't EVER rely on them for MF (they're too slow to be consistent for that).

For the weapon, he started with Obedience, but the Reaper's became more useful later on when he started battling monsters that were higher level than him (it keeps him alive better). I might try switching back to the Obedience around level ~88+, but it's possible I'll stick with the Reapers. Or maybe I'll (somehow) get my hands on another eth Reaper's and settle it that way.

For the armor & helm, if I'm not using the Fortitude myself, I'll probably stick that on him. Otherwise he'll use Shaftstop for PindleRuns and who-knows-what for GF runs. Likewise, Vampgaze is a certain for Pindle runs, but the Kira's might become more desired if I feel it's safer for GF runs. At the moment, I don't have an Ist for Delerium, or that would get some consideration too.


Finds:
- Dol/Io Hellforge. :( (two characters in a row with not one rune over Lum)
- Shimmering Jewel of Hope (8/16)
- Blood Raven's Charge
- The Redeemer
- Bonehew
- Fanatic GC of Life (12)
- Vermillion Jewel of Wrath (+20)
and so close:
- rare gauntlets: (22l / 11c resists, 3% LLeech, 10 IAS, +2 Passive & Magic)... d'oh.


Notes:
1. Have a look at my boots & amulet. Nice & stylish, eh? I've often wondered why Tancred's aren't used more for some pure-MF builds. Since this barb doesn't gain a lot from those slots it's a perfect combo for boosting his MF and allowing him to use other slots for more useful gear. For example, compare Fortitude + 2x Tancreds to WarTrav's + Tal's Armor + Highlord's... it's probably reasonably close in effectiveness, but the 300% ED on the Fortitude is something I'd like to keep (and it might actually be the better combo).

2. Questing was pretty straight forward and uneventful. He's only a little stronger than my Oath+DC whirler (from what I remember), but having both weapons indestructible is an improvement.

3. I died quite a bit, mostly because my equipment was in a constant state of flux and I had ~150 stat points saved (combined with a moderatly heavy investment in dex & str) - and I would whirl through anything... (read: "hmm... there's 3 Oblivion Knights on the other side of this massive pack of Abyss Knights... I should run around to avoid IM, but a direct whirl is much easier, and maybe I'll be lucky ").

4. He's still a little fragile for GF runs, depending on the spawn, but I haven't tried that task in 4 levels, so maybe it's better now that he's 85. I think 2-3 more levels and some practice will do the trick. Before fighting Ancients, he went from 81 to 84.5 on /p7 Pindle runs (with questing gear) and I don't think he'll have the slightest problem running Pindle - at any setting.

5. Speaking of Pindle, I think I'll do some testing on him for a bit. I'm sure I can spank him on lower settings, but I want to try some higher settings setups that maximize speed, MF, and safety. Once I get those somewhat figured out I'm going to do a proper comparison between him and my Blizzsorc. I'm pretty sure he'll outperform the Blizzy on lower settings (horking = 52% more items, meaning if his MF and speed are moderately comparable, the barb should win), but I'm not as sure about maintaining MF, speed, and safety at higher settings.

I'll post that comparison in its own thread when I'm more confident of my findings. Many folks might not read Pat threads, but anyone with thoughts on seriously running Pindleskin will (hopefully) want to read that thread.

6. This post has the links to the obligatory GF-running screenshots.



Thanks:
- Jaedhann for donating all of the ingredients (including runes) for the Oath, as well as his GF barb writeup (that was a nice sanity check for my Travincial planning and for tracking down +GF gear).

- Bassen (and Wanchu as the original source) for donating the Azurewrath

[NagisaFurukawa]

Congrats! Very confusing list of equipment you have there. =P. What players setting are you doing GF runs on?

I think partial Tancred’s shows up in some MF guides, but it’s true that very few people actually make use of it. Maybe it’s because the boots are actually kind of rare, or because the items look totally useless on their own. *shrug* Classic sets are quite underrated. GG for using one.

[sirpoopsalot]

In full-GF gear he's a little too slow and unsafe for anything over /p1.

I'm hoping that the unsafe-factor will be removed once he gets a few levels above the council (at level81 it was pretty dicey for him at times, and especially for the merc), otherwise I'll tweak the gear a little. But, since at least one of the council (Toorc Icefist) always spawns StoneSkin, I doubt my killspeed will ever be especially high. Berzerk + Grief is very reliable for high-physical-resistance monsters, but not especially fast (especially with my low AR).

I'm guessing /players1 will remain the most efficient setting overall, even if I do manage to improve my safety to "consistently very safe."


FYI, (I think) my runs at level81 were about ~50 seconds, so I hope once I'm safer (and have a few more points in Increased Speed and a better level-differential against the monsters to help my AR) I can hopefully knock another 10-15 off of that... which I think becomes a pretty solid rate to farm ~350k gold. If I can get it down to 40 seconds average per run, that would put me at roughly 1M gold every 2 minutes, or 30M per hour... assuming I'm not mis-remembering my speeds. If that's right, it means I'll probably spend almost as much time muling it over to my level95 sorc, gambling with her, and sorting the itamz.

I also forgot to mention the sets/uniques that the council drops, but so far it's been one every 2-3 runs. They dropped The Redeemer on my ~10th GF run. Nothing better yet, but the quantity of rares (or better) has been remarkable (pretty much 1 or 2 of a desirable base-type every run so far). Fortunately, a lot of +GF equipment has nice MF too (Gheeds, Chance Guards, Wealth, Goldwrap, & Alibaba's), which never hurts.

Of course, the ~25 runs I did is hardly a big sample to work from, so throw some caveats in my findings so far.


Edit: I forgot to detail my merc earlier, so I just added his info to the first post too.

[Jcakes]

A thing I like to do on my physical MF characters is to use 3 part tals, Tals Helm, Armour and belt. I have found that reasonably effective (though TBH if I had a fort I would probably keep that)

[Caly]

(read: "hmm... there's 3 Oblivion Knights on the other side of this massive pack of Abyss Knights... I should run around to avoid IM, but a direct whirl is much easier, and maybe I'll be lucky ").

Hehe.

Well done! I look forward to your Pindle thread, I'm curious to see how this guy will do there.

Good point on the Tancred's, too. Sometimes I forget about those lower-level sets because they have no useful visible bonuses, so unless I have the set bonuses memorized I just tend to overlook them.

Also, I have to say it again: best name for a horker ever.

[Starloader]

Last time I talked to you about this character you said you're still working on improving him. I think that was about 6-12 month ago.

What's the status now? Can he outrun sorcs? What are his average run times including horking?

[sirpoopsalot]

I never really got back into Pindle running with him, so he's still unoptimzed. But I did experiment a little today to check. I've always been a little slower of a runner than many other folks, so keep that in mind.

With 400/600 MF, he's around 35 seconds on /p1 - with room for improvement. My best times with my blizzsorc are around 25 seconds on /p1. Since that includes ~50% horking, I think that pushes the barb ahead in the end.

[Starloader]

Right now my blizz sorc is at 17sec on /p1 and 20sec on /p7. However the first 10 seconds pass until I reach the portal.

Still, judging from what you said and counting the fact that Barbs are fast runners I think they can actually beat Sorcs.
Imo WW is mandatory for Pindle (or maybe Frenzy, but that takes too many Skillpoints) so there's the question about how to deal with physical immunity. Berserk is too slow to clear all of them (unless you Howl first, but then you miss lots of drops).

Do you use bo? and what armor type were you wearing when doing those tests and how much FR?

[sirpoopsalot]

... so there's the question about how to deal with physical immunity. Berserk is too slow to clear all of them (unless you Howl first, but then you miss lots of drops).

Azurewrath (or Lawbringer) have Sanctuary auras, which bypasses physical resistance/immunity. Problem solved.

And if Pindle's PI, his minions still won't be, so you only need berserk against Pindle anyways. So Azurewrath/Lawbringer aren't really that necessary (if you drop the single point in Berserk you're all set).

Do you use bo? and what armor type were you wearing when doing those tests and how much FR?

I use BO, but could probably do without it well enough. Manaburn/Extra-Fast Pindle can be a little of a problem if you get whacked by 2-3 charges pretty quickly though. So taking the extra bit of time to cast BO isn't necessarily a bad idea since barbs don't really have any skills/defense (beyond your high life) to avoid getting charged (the sorc has teleport to position the tank-merc and GlacialSpike/IceBlast to freeze them solid, but the barb leads from the front with the merc lagging behind).

FR as in Fire Resists? No idea, but it was probably pretty low... I was using Tal's armor & helm (& belt), but other than ~3 points in Natural Resists and the 3 Resistance scrolls from rescuing Anya, I can't remember anything else that would've boosted the resists higher.

So that would probably be something like ~25 Fire resists.

[Starloader]

Yeah Sanctuary works great against Undead ... forgot to check your item list again

And I wasn't refering to Fire Rests, but to Faster Run. For most barbarians Pindles explosion won't be much of a problem.
I asked for the FR % because with sorcs you lose plenty of time just by running through the base.

I guess I'll have to stop being lazy and build one myself (hopefully not just another project on the pile of planned characters ...).

Thanks for the help though, I'll get back to if I achieve any results (although this won't happen any time near).