Do different monsters in Nephalem Rifts grant more progress towards completion?
Solution 1:
I did some testing on this, and I'm convinced that the wiki is currently incorrect here (it says 999 monster kills).
In my experience (in Normal) counting monsters, it took ~ 5 white monster kills to reach an additional percentage. I also tried counting in Torment, and it seemed to be the same.
I did some additional data gathering counting the kills to reach 10% progress. It was difficult to get groups that were easy to count, and I avoided recording data for groups with the Illusionist affix, as well as enemies that continually spawn other enemies. If I was unsure in my counting, I would throw out the group of 10%, and kill whites until I reached the next 10%. Still, it is very difficult to count exactly how many enemies you are killing. This meant that I only got 2-3 data points per run. Here's my data:
- 36 white 7 elite
- 32 white 9 elite
- 41 white 3 elite
- 38 white 4 elite
- 34 white 8 elite
- 37 white 7 elite
- 36 white 8 elite
- 52 white
- 44 white 3 elite
- 35 white 7 elite
While this isn't a lot of data (and I didn't distinguish between Champions, Minions or Rares), we can make a couple of conclusions.
- Elites do count as more than one kill. Using 52 kills (per 10%) as a baseline, an Elite on average gives 2.58 kills.
- It takes ~50 kills per 10%. This would put the total monsters slain to complete a rift at 500.
- Counting monsters as you go is not a fun or efficient way to run a rift :-)
Solution 2:
I also did some testing and it seemed to vary, with each mob giving between .25% - .36% completion. I only tested this in one rift, recorded it and rewatched. And I agree it wasn't fun lol. Needless to say my rift didn't take 500 monster kills to complete; it varies based on rift. The one I needed required about 350.
It's hard to say whether or not some types monsters might count more or less than others (IE think swarm monsters, or big single monsters like trees, etc), but as far as I've seen completion is based purely on the number killed.
I tested for HP as well and it seems quite obvious that HP is not a factor. Killing 1 elite pack of 3 mobs on T1 had 99m HP and only yielded ~1% completion. meanwhile killing other trash mobs and looking at the HP numbers yielded 32m HP/dmg dealt for 1%, 15.3m/1%, 18.2m/1%, and 56m/1%. So there doesn't seem to be any correlation. For that last one (56m HP/dmg dealth for 1% completion), I hunted out high HP mobs specifically.
TLDR; leave high HP stragglers. For efficiency kill easy monsters in relatively high volume.