Blanche: Hell Difficulty Part One

My biggest concern was therefore keeping Blanche alive since she had no summonable minions to hide behind and no Teleport for blinking away to safety. Jarulf had been a loyal and valuable companion but tanking incoming monsters was very much not his job. Blanche was in good shape from a health perspective thanks to keeping her at the minimum 43 Strength needed to equip a Crystal Sword and dumping everything else stat-wise into Vitality. I'd rather be over 1000 HP but this wasn't bad for a Sorcie. Resistances were more of an issue, with lightning and poison in good shape while cold resistance and especially fire resistance were problematic. Or more accurately, those resistances were OK for the moment, however Blanche was going to break out her cold sundering charm soon which would allow her to break enemy cold resistances... at the cost of -72% to her own cold resistance, ouch! On top of that, I also wanted to swap over to a Monarch shield for another Spirit runeword as soon as one of them dropped, which would necessitate dropping her 3 Diamond shield which was currently granting 57% resist all. A Spirit shield grants 35% resistance to lightning/cold/poison but absolutely no fire resistance at all. So while Blanche was looking decent for the moment, she really would need some resistance upgrades going forward if I intended to make another Spirit runeword. I was desperately hoping for a Lum rune to appear for a Smoke runeword which would help enormously with 50% resist all in the armor slot.

Anyway, it was back to the Bloor Moor for the final time with Blanche where she was reintroduced to the dangers of Hell difficulty. No matter how many times I've played Diablo 2, I always have to emphasize that the top difficulty is extremely dangerous and not to be taken lightly. Literally everything can kill the player where monsters are juiced up with extra damage, extra speed, and bosses are sprinkled liberally across every area. Blanche was happy to find that the fallens and quill rats died instantaneously to her upgraded Ice Blast spell, both of them getting one-shotted in a way that I hadn't seen with Ice Bolt since back in early Nightmare. She had to step carefully as the first quill rat boss exploded Jarulf when he wandered too close to its minions, however Blanche had no trouble bowling them right over herself. Lots of offense on both sides, it seemed.

The biggest problem was that not everything was vulnerable to her spells. All enemies have at least one damage immunity in Hell and the zombies in the Blood Moor were all Cold Immune. Unfortunately Cold Mastery no longer breaks cold immunities as it did in earlier patches and therefore Blanche was stuck relying on Jarulf whenever they crossed paths with a zombie. This happened very frequently, of course, and Blanche would quickly kill everything that was not a zombie in mixed mobs, then swap over to her Prevent Monster Heal (PMH) javelins on weapon tab 2 and try to plug the shambling creatues with a hit to stop them from regenerating. While that wasn't really necessary for normal opponents, it's not like there was much else for Blanche to do. D2R has helpfully added an animation to show when a javelin or arrow misses the target, making it easier to tell when Blanche actually hit something with her dismal no-Dexterity 10% odds to attack successfully. Zombie bosses were tougher and against them the PMH javelins were legitimately worth using; I had to manage Jarulf carefully to keep him from suiciding by standing in place while spellcasting. This was a slow process but it did work to clear out the first area.

The Den of Evil was worse as it had two different Cold Immune opponents, the same zombies along with Gargantuan Beasts. It was grimly amusing to see how Blanche would destroy every non-immune fallen in a split second and then be forced to stand around for several minutes as Jarulf painstakingly slew the zombies and big furries. His Static Field did help out a lot and this would have been even worse with a fire-based Act Three mercenary. Due to there being so many Cold Immune targets, the Den of Evil was a legitimately difficult area to clear for maybe the first time ever. Corpsefire at the end had Cold Enchanted to inflict chill on his melee attacks and then Extra Fast to increase the danger level significantly. Despite all my efforts to heal him and port him back to town when in danger, Jarulf still died against this boss several times which cost about 100,000 gold in resurrection bills. I even had to pull out the zombie minions individually for disposal as it was too tough to fight all of them when concentrated together. All of this to clear out the freaking Den of Evil, sheesh!

You might be wondering, why not use that Cold Rupture grand charm to sunder enemy cold immunity? I certainly would have done so, however that charm has a character requirement of CLVL 75 which Blanche was still a good bit short of reaching at CLVL 68. I had done the math earlier and calcuated that she would reach the level requirement somewhere towards the back end of Act One if I were doing a normal full clear. Should I pause somewhere without Cold Immune opponents and power-level her to that point right now? As a quick refresher on XP gain in Diablo 2, most enemies have an experience value associated with them which the player gains by killing them. The player gains full experience for monsters at the same level as their character, as well as up to 5 levels below their current CLVL, then the XP gains start dropping off from there when facing enemies with a lower monster level. For opponents with a higher monster level, the player gains the ratio difference between their levels (so CLVL = 70 fighting MLVL = 80 yields 7/8 of the default XP) and then there's also a global penalty to experience gain once the player hits CLVL 70. If you've ever wondered why the leveling pace drops off a cliff upon hitting about CLVL 80, it's due to this inherent penalty (CLVL 98 characters are only gaining 0.5% of the listed monster XP value on top of also facing penalties for being higher than enemy monster levels - it's brutal).

To make a long story short, I didn't think it was worthwhile to try and grind to CLVL 75. Although I would do so if absolutely necessary to continue, I wanted to try my best to continue forward normally with Blanche while relying on Jarulf for the Cold Immune targets. This meant tackling the Cold Plains next:

It turned out that the "Cold" Plains was an appropriate name as two of the four potential enemies here were Cold Immune. I knew that the fallens would be Fire Immune and hoped to get the Dark Spearwoman enemies who have Lightning Immunity. The other two possibilities were Dark Hunter rogues and Gargantuan Beasts again, both of them Cold Immune, and my plan was to reroll the Cold Plains with new game sessions until I only had one of those two opponent types to minimize the amount of immune opponents. Well, I started a gaming session and cleared out about 15% of the Cold Plains, defeating a whole bunch of the two rogue enemies (one immune and one non-immune) which made me think I had a playable draw. Then a Gargantuan Beast showed up and I realized I had indeed gotten two different Cold Immune foes - argh! But with close to 20% of the area cleared already, it was too late to start over again. I had to grit my teeth and slowly work my way through the remainder of the Cold Plains with Jarulf landing most of the kills.

This was a slow, slow process. Every time that more than one Cold Immune target appeared on screen, I would have to run them backwards towards the waypoint where there was safe space cleared out. Then Blanche would tag them with her PMH javelin and try to distract them while Jarulf slowly wore down their lifebars. Over and over again, I would have to run away so that Jarulf would stop standing in place and letting the monsters beat on him. He could only take a few hits and I could not afford to keep resurrecting him endlessly. Bosses were plentiful and I think that we downed seven different Cold Immune versions before all was said and done. As taxing as this process might have been, it did work in practice as Blanche slowly cleared out the entirety of the Cold Plains, bit by bit, one enemy at a time. The whole thing took about 90 minutes and I was more than glad to have it finished by the end. Bishibosh wasn't encountered until the final corner and then exploded into ice shards in maybe ten seconds - he wasn't Cold Immune, heh.

I wanted to lock in my progress after taking the time to do this excruciating clear so Blanche continued on into the Stony Field. To my blessed relief, there were no Cold Immune enemies to be found there! This area had skeleton, crows, and a new type of zombie with lightning instead of cold immunity, all of which was music to my ears. It was kind of ridiculous watching Blanche clear the Stony Field in barely 10 minutes after spending so much time in the Cold Plains. There was a single zombie boss inside who rolled Cold Enchanted trait and therefore became Cold Immune, something that neither Blanche nor Jarulf could hurt, so they left that single enemy parked in a corner and slew everything else. I could see that things should get a bit easier moving forward from here; Act One has an unusually high concentration of Cold Immune monsters in the first few areas. Many of the upcoming places either had no enemies with that immunity or only one out of four or five possible options on the monster draw which could be worked around if necessary.

I had skipped over the Caves earlier and returned at the start of a new gaming session to clear out the underground caverns. There's exactly one enemy inside with cold immunity: Coldcrow, as everything else lacks the same protection. Blanche entertained herself blasting apart skeletons and corrupted rogues and fallens who had no protection against the freezing power of her Ice Blasts. On that note, Ice Blast innately freezes whatever it hits when it doesn't kill it outright, an incredibly useful property that's even better than the chilling effect of Ice Bolt. This also results in every single corpse shattering on defeat which completely removes the threat from fallen/shaman encounters. It was quite weird watching the little buggers shatter on every death and never get back up again, making it easy to walk in a straight line to the shamans and eliminate them as well. The ice Sorcie has one of the strongest character builds against this enemy type.

Then Blanche raced through the Cold Plains (which was full of monsters again by virtue of this being a new gaming session) over to the Burial Grounds, where she had to off several of the Cold Immune stragglers that had followed her through the gates. Blood Raven herself wasn't much of a threat since it was simple to stay ahead of her slow moving zombies. They didn't have any cold resistance and could have been defeated without issue, however they all die instantly when Blood Raven perishes so Blanche simply focused on the boss. Blood Raven runs around erratically and was a bit difficult to hit with Ice Blasts, eventually Blanche got the job done though (even if Jarulf foolishly walked into a bunch of zombies and died in the process). I'll also highlight the mana cost of Ice Blast: at 18 mana per cast and with a lot of fast casting gear, Blanche could run herself out of mana in a real hurry. That was never an issue with Ice Bolt because of its pitiful 3 mana casting cost but now I was back to juggling mana potions and frequently drinking blues off belt once again. It was another small thing that I had to manage as a player, though continuing to rely on Ice Bolt at this point would have been enervatingly slow.

I made sure to full clear both the Crypt and the Mausoleum in this same gaming session after removing Blood Raven. These are unusual areas because they always have the same two enemies, Skeletons and Hungry Dead zombies, along with an unusually high monster level on both. Most of the outdoor enemies were MLVL 68 to essentially match Blanche's CLVL while the undead in the Mausoleum have an MLVL of 85! These are big areas and the two slow-moving melee undead opponents inside don't pose much of a threat so it would have been a good place to grind for XP if needed. Nothing of interest dropped and Blanche didn't encounter anything dangerous so I have nothing else to report. For the next session, Blanche popped back to the Stony Field waypoint and entered the nearby Underground Passage. It too avoided having any Cold Immune monsters lurking inside, as Blanche dodged the Vile Hunter rogues that can spawn here. Instead, she had fun gunning down the carvers and skeleton archers and Misshapen demons that lurked inside. Easy peazy.

At least, until Blanche went down to Underground Passage 2:

The Caves, the Underground Passage, the Hole, and the Pit all have a small second basement level, and apparently they can roll a different monster mix on that lower floor. Remember those Vile Hunters that Blanche dodged on the main first floor? They were present here on Underground Passage 2 and Blanche woke up four of them with no room to maneuver at all. I could only lead them back to the cramped platform next to the staircase and then try to run in circles while Jarulf used his lightning magics on them. This, uh, did not work very well at all, even with Blanche hitting them with Prevent Monster Heal to stop their regeneration. There wasn't enough room here for Jarulf to hit and run, with him instead tanking hit after hit. Although I fed the mercenary red potions constantly to keep his health up, he still died several times and I was forced to return to town something like 7-8 times for emergency heals. It was absolutely not cost-effective to engage in this kind of combat, but dang it, I was going to kill these blasted Cold Immune rogues! Eventually Jarulf got first one of them, then two, and the final two rogues were a lot easier to down from there. Afterwards, we pulled several more Cold Immune rogues to this entry area in ones and twos for disposal, culminating in reaching a rogue boss who was, ummm, Lightning Enchanted and therefore both Cold Immune and Lightning Immune. I parked that boss using a town portal and cleared out the rest of Underground Passage 2, which fortunately had mostly fallens and carvers on the west side. Good grief, are we having fun yet?!

Blanche caught a stoke of luck when the Dark Wood on the other side of the Passage had the waypoint located right by the exit. This allowed me to save my progress and then re-roll the monsters in the Dark Wood to avoid facing even more Vile Hunters with their Cold Immunity. Look, I had fought enough of those things already, OK? I had to re-roll the area three times before finally getting a Dark Wood with them not present. This allowed for an easy clear against skeleton archers and non-immune corrupted rogues and a whole bunch of carvers. The carver camp was almost laughably fast to clear out when everything froze and turned into icicles to stop the shaman resurrections. I had earlier seen the Tree of Inifuss graphic on my minimap and deliberately left it until everything else was clear because I knew this was coming:

Treehead Woodfist was very much not easy or routine; he's always Extra Fast / Extra Strong and here in Hell difficulty he's also always Cold Immune. Despite my care, I experienced a bit of a jailbreak moment on approaching the Tree with all of the minions racing out towards Blanche. They massacred Jarulf and then I did my best to separate them with footwork with Blanche alone, then returned from the waypoint with mercenary in tow to start downing them with his lightning damage. This was hard stuff because of the Extra Fast on the Brutes, which made them so fast that Jarulf basically had to tank damage nonstop because he couldn't get away from them. It took some time to defeat all of the minions, with several more resurrection bills, and then Blanche still had to come back for Treehead himself who was an even stronger version of the same problem. I basically had to open a town portal, let Jarulf cast as many spells as he could get off before being redlined, then step through the portal to heal him at Akara and then come back again. We did this maybe eight times in a row before Jarulf managed to land the kill - thank you Prevent Monster Heal!

Tristram does not have any Cold Immune monsters present inside so I thought Blanche could clear it out quickly. I took her north at first where there was a goat boss who rolled Cold Enchanted / Lightning Enchanted / Magic Resist traits... and therefore was both Cold and Lightning Immune. Oh come on! Blanche carefully maneuvered to eliminate its minions, which were not immune, a task made more difficult by the invincible boss running interference the whole time, then portal parked that stupid goat to the north of the monastery. Blanche came back through the red portal and proceeded clockwise for a change, taking down a Magic Resistant but not Cold Immune Griswold in the process, followed by a whole bunch of skeleton archer bosses. They had enough damage here in Hell that Blanche couldn't stand in place and trade shots with them, instead having to hit and run to avoid as many of their arrows as possible. It all went well enough as Blanche full cleared the rest of Tristram and rescued Cain, which was rewarded by getting an insultingly bad reward ring from Akara - thanks.

The Black Marsh was next and I had to reroll the area twice before I managed to get a monster draw without the Cold Immune Brutes being present. I had already proven that Blanche could full clear an area teeming with Cold Immune opponents if necessary, but why bother to spend 10x the time investment when she could simply fight non-immune enemies instead? While I'm quite willing to be patient at this game, there's a point at which you're just torturing yourself for no reason. After a few rerolls, Blanche was able to get a monster draw featuring crows and skeletons and the pictured Carver camp above. Then towards the end of the Marsh, Blanche opened a random treasure chest and found a Lum rune inside! I swear to anyone reading this that I wrote the introductory section above before Blanche found this particular rune; I write the reports as I play through each character's journey and I wasn't trying to foreshadow that Blanche was about to find that rune.

The obvious choice was to make a Smoke runeword armor. I hadn't been saving a two socket exceptional or elite armor since I wasn't expecting to have this rune appear, which meant that Blanche would be on the lookout for a good candidate on the base item. I also didn't feel the need to make the runeword immediately; Blanche wouldn't really need these additional resistances until she either found a Monarch shield for a second Spirit runeword, or until she reached CLVL 75 and began deploying that cold sundering charm. In fact, I kind of needed the 25% faster cast on Blanche's current Stealth armor to stay at her 9 frame casting animation for Ice Blast. Therefore, the plan was to keep her current item setup and cross my fingers that a Spirit-capable shield would drop sometime in the near future.

The Forgotten Tower thankfully does not have any monster types with innate cold immunity. There are four enemies that can appear in there (Devilkin, Ghosts, Blood Clan goats, Dark Archer rogues) and the game will randomly choose three out of those four to appear on each tower level. This place is infamous for having bad stairs traps and bosses swarming the player at the entrance to each new dungeon level, however this time around Blanche remarkably avoided facing a stairs trap on any of the five floors. Huh, I guess sometimes it works out that way. While there were a bunch of bosses across the various tower levels, most of them were melee opponents that could be frozen and never made it close to Blanche. The ghosts were a bit more dangerous because they couldn't be frozen, having resistance to chilling as an innate property. The only scary moment took place on the first cellar level where Blanche ran into a Multishot archer boss who rolled the Cold Enchanted trait and therefore became Cold Immune. That corrupted rogue was hanging out with her full minion group and they plugged Blanche full of arrows before I fully understood what was happening. I saw her health orb display "150 HP" as I was in the process of mashing the full rejuv button before it instantly refilled again - whew. I ended up having to park that archer boss because she was immune to both cold and lightning damage, though Blanche was able to slay everything else on these floors without too much trouble.

Most of the bottom floor was cleared by Blanche and Jarulf without issue. However, apparently the minions in the Countess' final room were a different type of corrupted rogue than the archers present everywhere else in the dungeon. These things were technically Dark Stalkers and, you guessed it, they were all Cold Immune. I was forced to lead them back to the large central room with the blood fountain where Jarulf had to kill them all with Lightning blasts and Charged Bolts. He died several times in this process since there were about ten of those minions in all. The danger was basically over by the time that the Countess alone remained, where once again Jarulf had to do all of the work against a Cold Immune target. The Countess dropped a pair of Ith runes for my troubles, then the quest treasure chest bugged out and failed to open entirely. I couldn't complain because Blanche had just gotten that Lum rune, but still, come on dude.

I wanted to clear out the Hole next, only to find that it kept generating more Cold Immune Brutes inside. I rerolled that underground area fully ten times and it spawned with Brutes on all ten occasions. Either Blanche was cosmically unlucky or the Hole is hardcoded to always force Brute encounters; either way, I could come back again later after she reached CLVL 75 (which was getting closer with Blanche only needing three more levels to go). Instead, I pushed onwards into the Tamoe Highlands where there was a big fight near the main Carver camp but otherwise things were pretty routine. Incredibly, one of the Thorn Beast quill rats dropped ANOTHER Lum rune when its frozen corpse shattered - I am not making this up! Blanche didn't need a second version of this rune but sure, why not, the more the merrier and all that. A Splendor shield wouldn't have been bad, it was simply outclassed by making a Spirit shield instead. I also skipped the Pit subdungeon for the moment, there were multiple monsters with cold immunity down there and I certainly wasn't about to try the Pit Level 2 deathtrap without having the upcoming cold sunder charm unlocked.

The Outer Cloister is a really small area in Diablo 2 but it has its own monster mix (for that matter, the miniscule Monastery Gate also has its own separate enemy list!) which unfortunately contained multiple Cold Immune targets. Blanche had the bad luck to roll both of them, Black Rogues and Yetis, along with much easier Devilkin and their shamans. Since this was such a small area, I took the time to full clear everything despite the cold immunity, which largely consisted of pulling rogue after rogue and yeti after yeti back into the empty Tamoe Highlands where Jarulf could defeat them. There was a well not too far from the monastery entrance and Blanche drank from its clean waters about a dozen times in all. I think there were four different bosses with the Cold Immune tag, with the worst one being the pictured Brute boss due to its Extra Fast trait. Jarulf had no idea how to kite these enemies, who were faster than him, and I had to keep pulling him back to the Rogue Camp over and over again for healing. In the end, Blanche did eliminate everything in the Outer Cloister but it was a lengthy and painstaking process. How much longer until CLVL 75 again?

The Barracks was very heavy on skeleton archers that kept peppering Blanche with their projectiles. There was one point where Blanche turned around a blind corner right into the packed mass of an archer boss with all its minions. She had to drink a full rejuv for safety while shooting them down, though fortunately the boss dropped an immediate replacement full purple potion upon defeat. The Smith rolled Extra Fast trait to increase the danger factor but had no cold resistance at all and died very, very quickly. He has about 38,000 HP in Hell difficulty and Blanche's Ice Blast inflicted more than 3500 damage against enemies with no cold resistance at all, so yeah, about ten shots was enough to bowl over the demon. There was one item drop here of note, though not for Blanche: the String of Ears unique demonhide sash. This belt had 8% lifesteal on it (which normally cannot appear in the belt slot) and therefore would have been nice on some melee character builds. I stuffed it in the shared stash for potentially someone else to use; I'm going to have to get the Reign of the Warlock DLC soon purely for the extra stash space.

There are no monsters with innate cold resistance anywhere on the three floors of the Jail, though some bosses could and did roll with Cold Enchanted trait to create an immunity. All of these floors had some mixture of Dark Ones (with no shamans), ghosts, goats, and skeleton archers/mages. For the most part these were readily handled by Blanche, with Ice Blast freezing everything where it stood and lots of doorways and jail cells constraining the movement of the enemies. The exception to that rule was the ghosts since they could fly through bars and had immunity to being frozen. Sure enough, the worst threat on these dungeon levels was a Fanaticism ghost boss that I was unable to screenshot which raced at hyper speed at Blanche and forced her to drink another full rejuv when she took a nasty hit. I was able to defeat the thing while kiting it backwards though it had been a bit dicey for a moment. Pitspawn Fouldog had four boss traits but died in mere seconds anyway - no cold immunity meant a very dead boss.

A fun set item randomly dropped and I decided to equip it on Jarulf: this was the Dark Adherent set dusk shroud which I largely gave him due to its big defense rating boost. The extra fire resistance raised Jarulf's resists high enough that I might try to upgrade from his three Diamond shield with 57% resist all; sadly he would never have enough Strength to equip a Spirit shield unless I gave him a helmet with +Strength on it (thereby locking out his Lore runeword) or Blanche reached some ridiculous character level in the 90s. Anyway, with progress to the Inner Cloister secured, Blanche and her trusty companion pushed on into the Cathedral. Bone Ash was Cold Immune, as always, however Blanche had overwhelming experience at dealing with those opponents by now. A single skeleton mage that required Jarulf's lightning bolts wasn't much of an issue. Bone Ash dropped a Grand Charm which turned out to have +1 to Assassin Traps on it, hmmmm. I've never played an Assassin before and the Traps version is the build that I would be most likely to use (since it's basically another spellcaster). This was another item that went into the shared stash and my running list of future D2 characters to play now had about seven different builds, heh.

The first two floors of the Catacombs were pretty uneventful. There were a bunch of Dark Ones + shamans to be found here and Blanche remained extremely well suited to handling them. Ice Blast everything, all the bodies shatter, the shamans are very sad puppies. Blanche also dealt with Tainted demons in the same fashion, along with Rat man fetishes on the first floor and then Arach spiders on the second floor. There was even a scattering of Gargoyle Traps which Jarulf had to smash by virtue of their cold immunity. All of this was routine stuff and Blanche cleared these floors at a brisk pace.

The third floor was a different story:

Cats 3 always has the same three monsters present with no variation: zombies, Afflicted demons who spit lightning, and then Banished vampires. It was that last group that caused headaches for Blanche because, you guessed it, they are always Cold Immune and there's no way to reroll the dungeon floor to get around them. If Blanche wanted to full clear this dungeon level, she had to eliminate all of these opponents with the help of her mercenary. The Banished are ugly customers as they have high health for this portion of the gameplay (about 8500 HP) and innate lifesteal whenever they deal damage to go along with the regeneration that all enemies get on Hell difficulty. Repeatedly, I watched them drop down to low health and then run away, only to come back a minute later with a full healthbar again. Blanche and Jarulf had to work hard to chase them down and get complete kills, a bit like how I remember having to herd the Zealots of Act Three with WillPower to control where their retreats would take them. Fortunately the gameplay seemed to treat the Banished as minibosses of a sort, generating them significantly less frequently than the zombies and Afflicted that made up the rest of the floor. The total number of Banished that Blanche had to deal with was relatively low.

Unfortunately, there were two Banished bosses on Cats 3 and both of them required a lot of time and effort to handle. The Extra Fast trait on the pictured boss had him and his minions zipping around all over the place, making it hard to track them down when they went into their retreating animation. It took several long minutes to split up the group into ones and twos, then tag them with Prevent Monster Heal, then wait for Jarulf to cut them apart. The whole time this was happening, their Fireball spells were tearing into Blanche who was still operating with 25% fire resistance. It was bad enough that I swapped over from Blanche's +2 cold skills amulet to the Nozokan Relic which had 50% fire resistance and brought her up to 75% total. The pictured boss finally died about eight rooms away from where Blanche had initially encountered him after a great deal of chasing. The second Banished boss wasn't encountered until the very end of the level, which was good because it rolled the Lightning Enchanted trait to make it both Cold and Lightning Immune. I was eventually able to get it to chase Blanche into a corner of the dungeon and portal park it there, then return with Jarulf to slay all of its minions one at a time. This third floor took more time to clear than Cats 1, Cats 2, and the Cathedral combined.

Cats 4 thankfully dropped anything with cold immunity from the monster mix. Blanche quickly cleared out the entry room by the blood pool, then shot down a zombie boss hiding right behind the double doors in the throne room. She eliminated some Dark Ones on either side, along with a second zombie boss, before Andariel finally woke up and came chasing after her. The Maiden of Anguish was also immune to being frozen and eagerly ran up into melee range while Blanche was spamming out Ice Blasts. In a fortunate coincidence, several Antidote potions had dropped in the previous room and I happily drank one down to clear the green coloring from Blanche when she was poisoned. I slid over to the right and kept pelting Andariel with Ice Blasts, noticing once again that her health was dropping quickly. While Andariel might have 66% cold resistance, Cold Mastery cut that to -75% which translated into Ice Blasts dealing about 2600 damage apiece. Andariel has 60k health which meant only about 25 Ice Blasts needed to land the kill - this might be a good time to remind the reader that Blanche could shoot about 3 Ice Blasts per second.

So Andariel chased after Blanche but her health just kind of ran out barely 10 seconds into this fight, if it can be called that. I cleared poison a second time from Blanche with another Antidote potion and even had a third one available to toss at Jarulf which kept him alive, hooray! I definitely had not been expecting the mercenary to survive. Andariel dropped Bloodfist, the unique heavy gloves (though unfortunately an ethereal version), which can be fun on other builds with its 10% faster attack speed and +40 life but didn't work for Blanche. She needed the resists that she was getting on her current gloves, plus the item had a Strength bonus which would be helpful later for equipping a Monarch shield. The ethereal property meant that this item was sale bait, as was an earlier drop of Iron Pelt (the unique trellised armor) which wasn't good enough even for the mercenary to wear.

Blanche finished Act One about 75% of the way to reaching CLVL 74. She would need to finish off that level and then gain one more before unlocking her cold sundering charm, and then I could go back and complete the Hole and Pit side dungeons. For the moment, it was on to Act Two where her freezing spells would hopefully counter the resurrections of the greater mummies. Stay tuned!