Gather around the campfire adventurers, it's #d2r story time!
This is a screenshot of Ladder Season 10, taken about 16 hours from start. MQT, my team, is well positioned from rank 4 to 11.
I'm rank 11 in this screenshot but I also stopped playing about 3 hours earlier when I was rank 8. Rest of the team went on for a few more and overtook me.
What I love about this screenshot is that it tells a couple of different stories so let's dig in!
1/x
The first story is that of MQT, the "musquetters": we're a group of players that still love and cherish #d2r
Every reset, we gather a full team of 8 players and we start the ladder run. We've a house rule to not buy or trade anything in the first 24ish hours (or more appropriately as long as our first day stamina lasts). We go group self-found and we climb the ladder.
Screenshot below is taken from https://d2emu.com/ladder and it shows our group xp growth. As you can see we move pretty much in unison.
But what about the top 3?
2/x
The top 3 paints two different pictures!
Here's another D2Emu screenshot so we can dig into the details.
Glitch and ThatGuy are self-found as well. Look at that xp growth: they are going pretty much in unison with a similar shape to what us MQT were doing.
I am not sure if they were playing together but given the extremely similar clearing speed at the end of the curve it looks like so.
But, wait a minute, that xp growth line is for 8-players games. Not for 2-players games for sure. Where are the other six?
I don't have enough information to answer that question. The only thing I know is that they could've been fillers idling in their games or other humans pushing these two top players. Basically the other six players would clear Throne at slower speed than MQT while these two players were going for Terror Zones.
Bao, instead, is where things get wild.
3/x
I'm using the same screenshot as before.
Look at that xp growth for Bao: it was basically extremely slow up until level 56, then spiked up and at level 90 outpaced the other top players.
This is because Bao switched to a Mosaic build right on time.
Patch 2.6 introduced the Mosaic runeword (https://diablo2.io/runewords/mosaic-t1282119.html). It is a level 53 runeword and the center piece of the Mosaic Assassin: the strongest, fastest, density destroyer AND boss killer in the game.
Given the almost flat growth rate in early levels, it's very likely that Bao was playing solo with 7 fillers. The player then acquired runes and bases for two Mosaic runewords and smashed the xp run.
Mosaic is not prohibitively expensive to make but self-finding two Mal and two Gul runes around level 53 is close to impossible due to how #d2r drop tables work.
This is a indicator that they likely bought the material off the secondary marketplace - which is very well part of how this game works.
4/x
So, there you go: a screenshot of the top 14, some xp growth graphs and three different ways of climbing the #d2r ladder.
D2Emu is this amazing community site that lets you explore the ladder race. Go give it a try: https://d2emu.com/
The graphs for the screenshots above are taken from the following links:
- MQT team https://d2emu.com/ladder/208992166_208993852_208986820_208987984_208991536_208992530_208986810_208988456
- top 3 https://d2emu.com/ladder/209146210_208988214_208987422
Have fun and see you in the next Baal run!
5/fin
sid77
