How to craft blood and hitpower gloves efficiently in Diablo II?
Ok the solution took longer than I expected. You can read the solution for the results only or the explanation that comes after that.
Conclusion:
There are two good possiblities for using specific characters for crafting. You can either gamble your gloves or farm them in level 85 areas like the Chaos Sanctuary for example.
Gambling (Hell):
A character that has a level of 82 can gamble and craft the gloves and will be in the perfect affix range. I considered only exceptional and elite gloves for that.
Finding crafting gloves in 84 + 85 areas:
When monsters drop items your characters level is not important. So you can farm those areas with your strong characters and collect them. But you need to craft with a level 75 character for best results. You can actually use any item with an item level from 84 to 93, if you are using a level 75 character.
If you want to include normal gloves into your craft you will need another character around level 55. This is not really worth it IMO.
You could probably calculate all possible answers with the help of statistics and probability. But I'll go for a pragmatic approach. I want to find a character level that works.
Blood Gloves:
Nef-Rune + Magic Jewel + Perfect Ruby + Heavy Gloves or Sharkskin Gloves or Vampirebone Gloves
Hit Power Gloves:
Ort-Rune + Magic Jewel + Perfect Sapphire + Chain Gloves or Heavy Bracers or Vambraces
If you really don't care about the defense of the gloves, you can use any glove type to craft, but I find that you should only craft exceptional or elite gloves (Sharkskin Gloves, Vampirebone gloves, Heavy bracers, Vampbracers). One thing to mention in advance is that you cannot buy exceptional or elite gloves. In fact you can't find any of the needed gloves in hell difficulty (vendors). So only thing you can buy are normal type gloves in nightmare difficulty. This method is very fast and very easy to calculate, because the bought gloves will always have the item level of clvl + 5. But again: the defense of normal gloves is extremely low.
So now that we know what we want, where do we find those gloves? You can buy them from vendors, gamble them from vendors or find them in the game. Although it takes longer to find the items in the game, you can know the exact item level of the gloves and predict exactly, if the gloves are material for a perfect craft.
Firstly we want the item level of the resulting craft to be higher than 71 (inclusive). This will guarante a perfect quantity of number of affixes. Which is 4, according to this:
Link: Crafting Handbook
Ilvls 1-30: 4 affixes (20 %), 3 affixes (20 %), 2 affixes (20 %), 1 affix (40 %)
Ilvls 31-50: 4 affixes (20 %), 3 affixes (20 %), 2 affixes (60 %)
Ilvls 51-70: 4 affixes (20 %), 3 affixes (80 %)
Ilvls 71+: 4 affixes (100 %)
What is most important to us is the affixlevel on the item. The algorithm to calculate the affixlevel will be posted, but it depends highly on the quality level of the item. The problem with that is that the you can use 3 types of gloves for each crafting recipie, which all have very spread out quality levels.
Heavy Gloves (qlvl 7)
Sharkskin Gloves (qlvl 39)
Vampirebone Gloves (qlvl 63)
Chain Gloves (qlvl 12)
Heavy Bracers (qlvl 43)
Vambraces (qlvl 69)
I suggest to have one or more characters that you don't play and use simply for crafting to have consistent results. But the spread out quality level won't make it simple: you cannot just have one character and craft all the gloves. You need different characters with different levels. I will only look at crafting exceptional and elite gloves, gambled from vendors or found in area level 85 (f.e. River Of Flame, Pits, Ancient Tunnels ...). The possible level spread for the magic item level for gambling items from vendors is: [min;max] = [clvl-5 ; clvl+4]. In level 85 areas you can farm for the best items in the game and know the item level of gloves for sure. It's level 85 from normal monsters, level 87 from champions or level 88 from elite monsters.
Now let's see the affixes we want or don't want. This german website shows the tables of the affix levels for gloves. The good thing is that Hitpower Gloves and Blood Gloves have the same affixes and affixlevels for all types of gloves (normal, exc, elt). The last affix that we want has an affix level of 59. All the affixes after level 59 are useless and the next one starts from affixlevel 63. So this means that the optimal affixlevel that we want has the range of [59 ; 62]. But the cool thing is that the next affix after that has an affixlevel of 68. And the rarity of that affix is very low, so I think that it's statistically better to include the level 63 affix. So this means that our optimal range is [59 ; 67]. This is a way bigger range and makes it easier to hit that with our craft. Now comes the algorithm for calculating the affix level. Here is the java code for that:
public static double calculateAffixLevel(double characterLevel, double magicItemLevel, double magicItemQualityLevel)
{
double craftedItemLevel, affixLevel;
craftedItemLevel = Math.floor(0.5 * characterLevel) + Math.floor(0.5 * magicItemLevel);
if (craftedItemLevel > 99)
{
craftedItemLevel = 99; // this can't really happen for crafting gloves!
}
if (magicItemQualityLevel > craftedItemLevel)
{
craftedItemLevel = magicItemQualityLevel;
}
if (craftedItemLevel < (99 - Math.floor(0.5 * magicItemQualityLevel)))
{
affixLevel = craftedItemLevel - Math.floor(0.5 * magicItemQualityLevel);
}
else
{
affixLevel = (craftedItemLevel * 2) - 99;
}
return affixLevel;
}
Again gambling items can have an item level of a range of 9 levels. And this can influence the resulting affixlevel. So we need a character level that gives us our desired affix level with any of the 9 levels in the range of gambling. And one charcter level that works for nearly all exceptional and elite gloves is 82 (more to that later). The possible item levels from gambling are 77 to 86 and they all result in an affix level of [59 ; 67].
The second scenario is finding the gloves in level 85 areas. The possible item level of the gloves can be from 85 to 88 in those areas. So we are again looking for a character level that always gives us the affix level in the optimal range. And this level through testing is level 75.
Here are all the area levels that work for a level 75 character. Any monster that you kill in these areas can drop exceptional or elite gloves for crafting:
Area Level Diablo Wiki
LV LEVELNAME
85 The Worldstone Keep Level 1
85 The Worldstone Keep Level 2
85 The Worldstone Keep Level 3
85 Throne of Destruction
84 Halls of Vaught
84 Halls of Death's Calling (Halls of Pain)
85 Chaos Sanctuary
85 River of Flame
84 City of the Damned
85 Disused Reliquary
85 Ruined Fane
85 Forgotten Temple
84 Forgotten Reliquary
84 Disused Fane
84 Ruined Temple
84 Sewers Level 1 + 2 (Act 3)
85 Ancient Tunnels
85 Maggot Lair Level 3
84 Maggot Lair Level 1 + 2
85 Mausoleum
85 The Pit
Here are the outputs for the algorithm with changed the different parameters. So again: we are looking for affixlevels in a range from 59 to 67 (inclusive). The output show the affixlevel of the gloves for crafting. Since we are looking at a range of possible item levels, the output shows all affix levels that come out of them.
Gambling (gambling + crafting with a level 82 character):
Sharkskin Gloves (qlvl 39): [60.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0, 63.0, 65.0, 65.0, 67.0, 67.0, 69.0]
Vampirebone Gloves (qlvl 63): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0, 63.0, 65.0, 65.0, 67.0, 67.0, 69.0]
Heavy Bracers (qlvl 43): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0, 63.0, 65.0, 65.0, 67.0, 67.0, 69.0]
Vambraces (qlvl 69): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0, 63.0, 65.0, 65.0, 67.0, 67.0, 69.0]
The only case where the resulting affix level exceeds our desired range is for heavy bracers and vampbracers with an ilvl of 86. This is quite a rare case with a chance of 1/9 for either of those items. So still level 82 is very good.
Finding items in level 84 + 85 areas (crafting with a lvl 75 character):
Sharkskin Gloves (qlvl 39): [60.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0]
Vampirebone Gloves (qlvl 63): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0]
Heavy Bracers (qlvl 43): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0]
Vambraces (qlvl 69): [59.0, 61.0, 61.0, 63.0]
Conclusion: See top of the post!