NM Mephisto farm question

[:1]I was wondering if i should farm mephisto in NMon p1 or p8 and if it makes any difference in drops?|||Short answer: no. Just run in p1.

Long answer: (from NF's MF oddballs guide)


Quote:




Player Settings:

This is one of the areas people make the most mistakes in. A lot of folks just type "/players 8" and assume that's the way to go for MF. It's not.

Before I get started, let me include something that has recently been discovered:




Quote:




Originally Posted by Thrugg

Just to summarise for everyone who can't be bothered following the math:

Extra players added using the /players command only count as unpartied players. This makes no difference to what we already knew for monster HP and XP. It does change what we thought was happening with drops. Unpartied players count as halves rounded down. So, when using the Atma drop calculator, you need to translate your /players setting into the number you put into the Players field:

1 or 2 -> 1

3 or 4 -> 2

5 or 6 -> 3

7 or 8 -> 4

This affects all monsters, not just Mephisto, although for unique monsters like Pindle and random bosses that have fixed drops, it won't actually change any numbers.




As far as I get it, it the gist of it is that 1) Adding players does a lot less than we thought. And 2) For drops you should have an odd number of players in the game.



Now, let's get down to buisness, starting with area: I don't really want to go too deeply into the maths of it. Sumendar did the numbers on it, updated to include thrugg's info:


Quote:




Quote:

Originally Posted by Sumendar

5) I did the math for the pit once. Approximating 150 regular monsters, 6 champions and 8 uniques, you'll get as many sets/uniques if you spend the time in column 2 at players setting in column 1:

Code:

plrs time

1 1

2 1.16

3 1.26

4 1.32




This means that if you are running at players 7 you have exactly 1.32 times as much time to do your run as you had at players 1. Same for players 8 but with the same number of drops.

Bottom line: Areas are almost always best run at players 1 for sets and uniques.



Similar things are true for act bosses, though the longer time it takes to get to them or the ease with which you can kill them might justify running them at higher settings. Personally I like to use 5 for andariel, 1 or 3 for meph and 1 or 3 for baal. Usually I will just leave meph and baal at 1, though. They give me good stuff like that was well and I don't think it's usually worth the wait. A blizzard sorc vs meph is an exception, though. He goes down so fast it doesn't matter if you're on 1 or 3. As a rule of thumb, if you notice a difference in run time, don't up the players|||So, this is a bit different for Act Bosses. What Baltha quoted is actually only relevant for area 85 calculations, and it's also very simplistic. If you want exact efficiency in A85, it gets more complicated, because different areas have different number of non-pack monsters, which changes the math quite a bit. It's different in the Pit and different in AT, etc.

I'm too lazy to find another source, so I'm using Silo's calc (Link):

Meph, Hell, Arachnid Mesh, 0 MF (MF doesn't influence the conclusion of this example):

/p1: 1:2659

/p3: 1:2232 (19% more)

/p5: 1:2166 (22% more than /p1, 3% more than /p3)

/p7: 1:2166

Conclusion: Never /p7, at most /p5. When I run him for essences (I can use nothing else from him) I run at /p3 because I run with a crazy zon with level 40 CS which kills Meph in under 2 seconds every time. But you need to measure whether the 19% increase in drop chance between /p3 and /p1 is worth your time. If your gear isn't amazing, chances are that it isn't.|||Guess it doesn't matter. If he is farming NM meph chances are that he doesn't have good equipment :P.