At the moment I just farm here and there a little bit, like described here Mission: Max Usable. At some point in the future I might want to regulary farm the EtSC adventure. In this regard I like the signature of @Sir Veza : "If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." - Clint Smith To be honest, my tactics in EtSC really sucks. So far I tried the usual Burft build with Searing Pain and a lot of cycling on the wizards and a buffing priest. That is working okay, but is slow. After this I tried to farm with some Time Travellers, a build focused around Dimension Traveller and Accelerate Time along with a draw spam priest. But this was really slow and in some adventures I was not able to win at all. What kind of builds to you use for farming the EtSC adventures? I would prefer a team which I can run at most if not all the modules, like my low level farming teams focussed around Firestorm, for which I have a build forlevel 2 - 8 and another team for level 9 - 15. It should be fast and reliable. I don't mind a little bit risk as for example I run Staff Of The Inferno over Mullik's Blisterstaff on the lower modules. May be my approach of using mages is already bad? It is possible that a team of Vamps of even Warriors may do much better. Any ideas?
I have tried three Elven Vamps, which are as fast as the Burft build, but a little bit more fragil. The build which works good and was faster, than I expected, was a standard melee team with two dwarf warriors and one dwarf priest. The warriors are equipped with Xek's Nanocarbon Plate, which should be a The Softener and as weapons BJS and DS as well as The Strongarm. This way they had tons of damage and damage of different types. I could need a second Angry Jack's Helmet for this build. Also important are boots with Sparkling Cloth Armor for additional mobility. The priest is focused around Martyr Blessing and Inspiring Presence, which synergies great with the Cushioning Armor and some Reliable Mail the warriors had. Elf warriors may be stronger, but I never played any elf warrior in the campaign. I may level up some and try them. I would not recommand this team for the Throne of the Mechanical Man, but otherwise it works like a charm.
It's really boring, but I've always found nimbus/burst/terrain as a good mix, tweaked for the levels where the mobs have special protection from the terrain mage.
I am not afraid of boring teams. When I had less gold I farmed the first battle from Caverns of the Troglodytes for some more hours. Or I made some thousands Meph runs in D2. What I care about is a fast way to play through the maps. Burst with Nimbus is definitly a reliable way, but the nimbus is slowing down the progress. But maybe that is because the high level adventures are that difficult.
I get that you may be trying to farm Sky Citadel for a particular level of items, but if this isn't the case, I've found the drop rates and completion times from Caverns to be far superior. Levels 1-5 can be quickly farmed, levels 6-10 can be tougher, but try going as far as you can and then resigning if a battle looks unwinnable or you get a bad party draw in terms of damage output (like the jelly warrior or the geisha mage). Yesterday I completed Caverns for a second time and picked up four legendaries along the way (two at 2-5 and two at 6-9). Total play time was somewhere around an hour.
That is true and it is much more interesting than farming the low levels again with Firestorm, which are dropping also a lot items. But the main problem for me with CoC is that it can drop all levels, as you guessed. Especially getting another Staff of The Misanthrope or Sharp Shell or what not is meh. The best thing for general drops are the constructed leagues, which I will join now.
