MF'ing and teleport

[Woodman]

The thing is, I'm wondering if in terms of MF'ing, if it's actually better for a character that can clear WSK easily to teleport away from all those quick kills. It's hard to believe that bypassing all those kills in a high level area like WSK is less profitable than just rushing to the finish.

Does anyone have any data or experiences clearing WSK vs just killing Baal over the long term? I haven't really kept track, but it seems pretty even in my experiences.

[krischan]

The WSK consists of easy and not so easy kills. I often fight the easy kills there, but I avoid the others. It's about time as well and if you need 3 minutes to kill e.g. a frenzytaur boss pack because you have to apply hit&run and fight them one by one, it's not worth it.

IMO, Baal runs aren't worth it if it's about Baal alone, but there are also the five minion waves which can produce nice drops, apart from providing huge amounts of XP.

[Shanksie1337]

agreed, my best drops recently whilst baal running have all come from the minions not Baal himself.

On my Hdin i tele thru WSK, but as my merc doesn't have an insight I stop once in a while when i see a boss pack, kill, loot & redeem. Tho i'm yet to get anything decent drop whilst doing this i'm doing it more for the mana.

[Woodman]

Well, I'm a Fishymancer, with pretty much optimal gear. Really the only thing for me that goes down slowly are PI/FI packs with high HP, and those are rare except for Frenzytaurs. Those guys could actually wipe out all my minions before I got geared and decided to max out mages. I can drop them with ease now, if not with great speed.

I dunno how many times I cleared my way to Baal before getting my Enigma, but in general, it seems the trash along the way is best for dropping runes, charms and gems. I rarely get any uniques from them, but I get maybe 2-3 charms a run, a pgem or so worth of flawless drops, a Hel-Mal rune maybe every ten runs or so, and it's a good way to get socketed items or whites worth socketing. I haven't really seen a lot of good drops from Baal's summoned minions. They do give massive xp though.

The main benefit I've seen so far from not having to pay for teleport charges, is that it's much more worth it to kill other bosses besides Big D and Baal. Meph and Andy runs are painless now, and the goodies all over Meph's room often make him a more profitable kill than Diablo. Trying to run those guys with a 200k repair bill for teleporting to them was a pain in the ***. Now I find myself doing almost a full clear. I'll run Pindle, Eldritch, Baal, D, Andy and Meph in about 20 mins or so.

[MFDeath]

It's all about efficiency; anything you can kill without slowing down should be annihilated and anything giving you more than a few seconds worth of trouble should be skipped. MF% doesn't pay off unless you pile on the rolls, so the more stuff you kill per run the more chances you have of your MF affecting those drops.

[SeCKSEgai]

It's all about efficiency; anything you can kill without slowing down should be annihilated and anything giving you more than a few seconds worth of trouble should be skipped. MF% doesn't pay off unless you pile on the rolls, so the more stuff you kill per run the more chances you have of your MF affecting those drops.

That pretty much sums it up - also keep in mind that your chances for some items are insanely slim to begin with, and, because of diminishing returns, no amount of MF will improve your chances enough to justify focusing on it over efficiency.

In order for your mf to even make a difference, the item(s) you want have to drop in the first place. It's amazing how frequently you'll see greens and uniques of junk only to see blues and yellows of the items you'd actually want. While you can get lucky from time to time, overall efficiency and total number of kills will play a bigger role than mf.

As fars as WSK - the uniques actually drop better than the waves, so you're more likely to get good stuff from the bosspacks along the way than in the throneroom. As has been said above in previous posts, if it takes too long to kill something along the way, its better to skip it.