Diablo II: Magic Find Olympics

The Magic Find Olympics (MFO) is a contest run twice a year on the Single Player Diablo II forum. The basic premise is that each contestant picks something to run: Baal, Mephisto, Level 85 areas or Super Uniques. Then everyone has nine days to run those areas as much as possible, the person with the best items found wins their respective section and can then take a few items from the losers.

I joined this with my one and only magic finder, Malice. In preparation for the tournament I leveled her from 83 to 88 in both the Pits and World Stone Keep (WSK). This was to make her more powerful, her mercenary better able to survive when tanking Mephisto and in search of a four open socket Monarch shield in order to make a Spirit runeword. On my very last Pit run before the tournament a zero socket Monarch dropped, so I used Malice's Hell difficulty socket quest reward to turn it into a mid level Spirit shield.

Then the games were on:

Sign-up Thread
Progress Thread
Results Thread
Meet the Olympians Thread

I ended up 7th in the Mephisto category, the winner actually took a week of vacation to participate so I didn't have a chance as I was only magic finding when I had free time instead of all day long. Overall here are some numbers of my participation:

201 qualifiers
2091 runs completed
10.4 runs per qualifier
39 hours 55 minutes 41 seconds spent overall

Each Mephisto run started off taking 74.35 seconds per each run. For each run I start in Act IV, use the Waypoint (WP) to Act III Durance Level 2 and then teleport to Mephisto. Once Mephisto is eliminated pick up my winnings, use a Town Portal (TP) to Act III town, visit Cain to identify the items and then Ormus to restock on potions and sell unneeded items. Then return via the WP to Act IV and quit the game. Rinse and repeat.

Obviously this is rather time consuming and as I played better ways were found that shortened the running time to 60.6 seconds per run. First was re-rolling the map to look more like this one, where only four teleports are required to reach level 3 of the Durance rather than the 12 I was using before. Also apparently it is possible to active a WP with the Telekinesis spell rather than having to walk/run to each one. These changes shaved 14 seconds off of my time and make the runs more effective, which became apparently when my best two drops occurred in the last two days of the tournament.

Overall it was fun, but a bit draining. I'm sure I won't be running Mephisto again anytime soon. Not only because I'm sick of seeing him but also because I have the vast majority of times he can drop in duplicate so the rewards wouldn't be very good. There won't be another one for six months so we'll see at that time if I partake again or not.