If self-muling does it make sense to start with a Barbarian?

Question

I read that Barbarians are able to attain the very highest Magic Find rating possible. Thus some people will use them to that purpose and dress other characters from the gear found.

In the context of playing on Battle.Net closed games, taking the risk of self muling (drop log out A, log in B, pick up, log out B) does it make sense for my first battle.net character to be a Barbarian?

I have previously defeated the game in Nightmare using a Paladin, and think that I would use a Paladin again otherwise.

Thanks

Answer

If you want to play a Paladin, I don't see why it makes sense to spend the huge amount of time to try to create a Barbarian with max magic find to get equipment for him. Until you are near max level with your paladin, you would almost certainly increase in power faster by playing your paladin and using whatever gear drops for him, than by playing the barbarian and passing the equipment over to your paladin.

Think of it this way. Let's say that you want to get some great level 70 gear for your Paladin (gear is a lot less important at lower levels, so it is unlikely that you need to worry about that). I don't recall how long it takes to level up characters, but let us say that it normally takes 40 hours to level a character to 70. So you spend 40 hours leveling your barbarian, and now you spend 10 hours doing MF runs with him to get stuff for your paladin.

Now you need to START leveling your paladin. You got some cool gear to pass him, so now it only takes you 25 hours to level him up. So at the end of 75 hours, you have a level 70 paladin with some nice gear.

But if you had spent all 75 hours on your paladin, he would probably be level 90, and probably have much better gear as well (simply by having spent more time fighting high level enemies).

That sort of strategy only seems to make sense if you want to gear up a lot of characters and so you can recoup all the time spent getting your barbarian up to a high enough level over multiple other characters.

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