About 6 minutes faster (!) then my kettle run in my first full run attempt. Significantly less experience for my party, two dead teammates that need to be revived, but shaved serious time off.

Still looking for the best way to do a kettle grind. Next test will be save scumming on G'bli, but I'll need to figure out what levels / stats do for affecting steal chance to see if it's worth it. At ~15 seconds lost per reset, it can be timely to save scum. You also don't get any experience or extra gold from chests while doing so.

You can steal 70 to 200ish gold from G'bli that I've seen. If i stole an average of 100 gold it'd take 35 successful attempts to do so. If it took 3 resets per attempt to steal that 100 gold, it'd take about 26 minutes + travel time back to town, which together would take at least a minute or two. This attempt took 29 minutes so I'm not too confident on save scumming G'bli alone being worthwhile.

The nethermen group of 5 gives you about 76 gold, give or take, and can be found regularly in this area so it might be worthwhile to savescum the vampire fight at level 2 to get a fast level 3, since level 3 is when you first can start competing with the heavy hitters and have enough casts of Katino and Dios to not have to go back to town after a fight or two.

Ironnose has also been less than stellar for stealing, generally only giving 20-30 gold per (rare) steal, most items are junk. Occasional 90 gold hand axe.

Might skip out on the vampire entirely and instead check the doors near G'bli for chests via combat instead.

Could also potentially save scum fighting G'bli, since he often runs and winning can get you good scrolls like Scroll of Petrify, which sells for a decent bit.