New ToPK A/Me Solo (With Video)

From The Blackness

Ascalonian Squire

Join Date: May 2011

09 May 2011 at 07:40 - 1

I know most of the assassins out there have proclaimed ToPK to be dead. I wish to change your view. ToPK is alive and well for ecto farming, but you have to crack the shell. That is to say, all of the juicy ecto is sitting after level 1. I made a new build to do this about half an hour after the update and I feel it is time to share it.

The 1st level takes about 2.5 minutes to solo through, which is almost nothing when one considers how much ecto is hiding in the latter levels. Here is what you will need:

Template Code: OwVSM4PTRQLB6MHQmAsixlul

Attributes:
Shadow Arts 12+1+3
Inspiration Magic 12

Armor:
Armor vs Slashing Insignias
Sup Shadow Arts

Weapons:
20% enchant, +5 energy 1 handed weapon
Shield with +10 vs slashing or demons

I have made a video showing the tactics used to clear the 1st level.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H62doAXJu8

I have not made a video showing level 2 tactics because they are identical in goal as the level 1 tactics. Ball things up and degen away. Personally, I usually kill the ecto droppers on level 2 and zone out and repeat because the worms take a bit of time to kill.

If anyone has any questions, please ask away. This is a 1st posting, so I am sure I did not cover all of my bases.

Q and A:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nijntjuh View Post

just wondering if there is a reason you use arcane echo instead of deadly paradox to maintain SF?

I use Arcane Echo instead of Deadly Paradox for energy reasons. During 2 casts of Shadow Form, a DP bar would use 40 energy while this only uses 25. Also, this would trigger channeling 3 times instead of two. This comes in handy on level 2 when you ball up a ton of grasps and they try to spike your energy.

Quote: Originally Posted by RedDog91 View Post

Is there a reason for Great Dwarf Armor?
Shroud of Distress seems as though it could keep you alive alone. It's not. 16 health per second is not a ton of healing so the basis of the build is to prevent damage coming in. You could deal with small groups of grasps without it (like 6), but there are places where you will want to pull twice that many and then you would be hurting.

Quote: Originally Posted by Adam Silverwing View Post

Looks interesting. If you could upload a video of level 2 I'd appreciate it

How many ectos will you get/hours on average?
Adam The way I do it now (Clear level 1 and just kill the ecto droppers on level 2), nets about 2 ecto per run. A run takes 14-15 mins, excluding zoning time sitting in town. So, you're looking at about 7-8 ecto per hour with quick zoning and about 6 if you like to salvage everything between runs. If you decide to kill everything, you will get fewer ecto/hour. So, it gets a person probably 55-65k per hour between ecto and drops. When you factor in that there are no cons or pcons used, it is one of the most profitable farms in the game.
As for the level 2 video, I don't think I will be doing that soon. My internet connection can be roughly approximated by covering a turtle in molasses, and even that short video took me forever to upload. Level 2 would take 4-5 times longer.

Quote: Originally Posted by SkekSister View Post

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

What would you suggest as an optimal build for farming on level 2? I ask because I have permas on two accounts so could easily use one to get me to lvl 2, then use the second to do the actual farming once there. (Using GW multilauncher to run two instances of the game.) There are 2 things this build is slow with. Dream riders are not fleshy, so they take 11 casts of Rad Field to kill (with a respectable Asuran rank). This translates to 190.33 seconds if wielding the suggested weapons. Once the grasps are dead, you are free to switch to a staff for HSR. This will knock some seconds off that time. Luckily, you only need to do this on 3 balls in level 2 if you ball properly. The other thing this build takes a long time with is the worms. If you are bringing another character to get to level 3, bring whatever bar you would like just to get rid of the worms. Then, clear all but the worms on your 1st sin and use the 2nd for cleanup duty. I would only bother with this if you really want to get to the next levels. The greens at the end are worth diddly-poo and you will net more ecto per hour zoning and repeating instead.

Quote: Originally Posted by In Game Pm's I have had many pm's asking about Arcane Echo and Unseen Fury. If you read the skill, you will see that Arcane Echo "ends prematurely if you use a non-spell skill." This means you cannot use Unseen Fury between Arcane Echo and SF. You can, however, use it during the cast of Arcane Echo.

Quote: Originally Posted by In Game Pm's Waaaaaaah! The Dream Riders run away and I can't ball them up so they take forever to kill! The Dream Rider's will try to go around you to your right (clockwise on the edge of your aggro bubble on the radar). While facing the ball of Dream Riders, have a wall adjacent to you on your right and they will not run away because they cannot follow their desired path.

Quote: Originally Posted by Sinny survivor View Post

Would it be any faster to run a hero with bonds/nukes and just have the sin pull/have more offense? Unfortunately, this will not help you much. The blocking and blinding skills are on the bar for adrenaline denial as much as they are for damage reduction. The only skills you could readily part with would be Great Dwarf Armor and Channeling, but you would be hard pressed to replace them with anything that would speed up the run. There isn't a skill that could knock out all the Scythes of Chaos any faster because you can't ball them in any tighter. The only thing you would be able to speed up, possibly, would be the Grasps. The issue I see with this is the grasps only take another 12 seconds to kill once you kill the Scythes. I would expect putting up bonds to take at least this long, negating any positive effect. There isn't a nuke that you could bring that would hit all things and not break aggro onto the nuker, and bringing heroes would decrease your ecto drop rate on level 2. I would try to avoid it. Though, EoE would add massively to the spike. If you bring a friend with just EoE on his or her bar, it would knock those 12 seconds off level 1 and greatly speed up level 2 killing the dream riders. I can't say I would bother bringing it on a hero though.

TL: DR-->No.

Quote: Originally Posted by In Game Pm's Isn't this just a big gamble that they won't interrupt you? Yes and no. Isn't using shroud a gamble because you only have a 3/4 chance to block and things could theoretically never block? It's one of those things that is good almost all the time. Let me break it down for you.

The enemies you are worried about attack you with axes. Axes have an attack speed of 1.33. You have a 50% chance to block from Mental Block and a 75% chance to block from Shroud. This means that instead of hitting you every 1.33 seconds, they will hit you once every 10.64 seconds. When you blind them with Unseen Fury, they have an additional 90% chance to miss. If you used unseen fury every time it recharged, this would make them only hit you once every 19.15 seconds. Instead of this, however, you use it right before you cast important skills, so it's effect is lessened somewhat to around 18 seconds. The skill that interrupts you has an adrenal cost of 6 strikes. 6*18=108. That is an average of 108 seconds of attacking before a Grasp can interrupt you. Now, if you look at the video, you will notice that the 1st time a Grasp hits me is at 0:37. All the grasps are dead at 2:39. This is a 122 second window for your grasps to attack you. On average, each one will use an interrupt skill 1.13 times in this window. There are 11 Grasps. You can expect to have 12.43 interrupts thrown at you in the 1st level. Remember our blind and blocking? You are always blocking and you use blind before important skills. This means that an interrupt on an important skill has a 1/80 chance of connecting. So, you have a 15.5% chance of being hit with an interrupt during the blind phase. Only about 10% of this time are you casting important spells, so now we're down to about 1.5% chance to get interrupted in the run. This success rate is pretty darn good, but you can make it better. The Grasps will use their interrupts after they see you use a skill. If you notice in the video, I cast enchantments that do not need to be recast usually when they recharge. This keeps my energy up and coaxes out the interrupts. Employing this tactic, your effective rate of interrupt on an important skill is effectively 0.

TL: DR-->Use your other skills when they recharge, and the Grasps will waste adrenaline trying to interrupt those so you will be safe.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sinny survivor

On the second floor, do you avoid pulling the grasps/scythes all together, just pulling the ecto-droppers?. If so, how do you do this in the room with wurms? When you load into level 2, I like to pull everything in that first room, neglecting the group in the small area directly opposite where you start. Then, I ball them up and degen away. Here is where I ball them, usually. It's not a tight ball, but Rad Field hits em all. That's all I require.