Order of zones: Insane/Madness

[cctobias]

More observations about zones: Dreadfell seems to have about level 45 monsters, Ruined Dungeon and slave caves about the same or probably slighly less, Mark of The Spellblaze is about level 70 and on the Elven Ruins...wait for it...first thing encountered was a level 95 orc pyromancer with over 8 K health. Yeah.

So the order of zones I use in lower difficulties holds up pretty well here: RD, merchant and slave caves should be doable before Dreadfell and Spellplaze should be avoided for now. And like cctobias said, don't go into Elven ruins. Like for a long looong time.

If you wanted just to see for funs what the east is going to be like Elven Ruins is basically an "easy" way to put your foot in the water. Not saying to do it, just saying that the numbers you see will be similar to what you see in Vor Armory as far as level and hp.

[Mankeli]

What bout the random portals?? I have bearscape, Poosh and Santascape all in one madness game. Does the horrible HP scaling affect them too? And can you recall the out of these portals if things get real?

[cctobias]

What bout the random portals?? I have bearscape, Poosh and Santascape all in one madness game. Does the horrible HP scaling affect them too? And can you recall the out of these portals if things get real?

I never did those, as Mex said in your char report for necro I basically avoided all extra stuff except a few exceptions (I did do merchant and did buy a few useful arties).

However this piece of info may or may not be useful. That damn frigging halloween event was going on when I did my Madness run and it triggered during my Tempest Peak run at Urkis. My strategy for surviving in between unstoppable cooldowns was to go down to base level which is small and empty and rest (because it easy and I didn't feel like digging and there can be xorn ).

Well I started resting and BAM! a frigging unique ghost comes out of nowhere and starts trying to kill me. That thing was roughly similar to what should have popped within the zone.

On the other hand stormy Derth seemed to be non-scaled.

My recollection from some Insane runs is that the special portals like Bearscape basically behave like any other zone at your level and will have similar scaling. However those zones have extra "rares" so in a sense their "hardness" in Insane+ is just "normal" I believe they still spawn similar amounts of randbosses/uniques at Insane+.

Anyway I doubt they are any "easier" I am not sure there is any real advantage to doing them. For my run I was also unsure whether I would be able to find a decent place to rest between unstoppables too so I avoided them.

Is there some reason to do them? With classes like AM or Necro anything extra after about level 30 starts to be, well frankly, a lot of real world time.