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When completing Quest 2 in Act 1, Kashya gifts you a random Rogue Scout which fights by your side and hiring new ones becomes possible.
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Same principle applies for anything that’s optimised/efficient vs things that aren’t. Act 1 - Rogue Scout This Mercenary can be hired at Kashya in the center of the Rogue Encampment, as a Cold or Fire variant. So in some ways it’s not much, but if you look at it another way, it’s a lot. And you play for 6 months, that’s 910 minutes, or 15.1 hours saved, or another way of looking at it is, that’s 15.1 hours more loot than you would have had if you used the less effective setup. And you play every second day for that duration so then it’s 35 minutes saved per week. And you do 60 runs per session, so that’s 600 seconds, which is 10 minutes.
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Maybe it saves you like 10 seconds per run by having a better base. The two most popular are Infinity for the Conviction aura (to reduce enemy resistance) and the budget Insight for the Meditation aura (mana recovery) although. Which is why I’d say CA is much better than Mancatcher, because the difference is minimal between bases and Mancatcher is only better at bosses, which you spend a comparatively very small amount of time killing compared to other enemies. But when you’re killing 10,000+ enemies (not bosses but all enemies) per gaming session, it adds up.
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