Blanche: Hell Difficulty Part Two

One complication that I had known about ahead of time was the cold resistance penalty on the Cold Rupture charm. It carried a penalty of -72% to Blanche's cold resistance, which was actually a good roll as the penalty can be anywhere from -70% to -90%. Even though I had tried to emphasize additional cold resistance on Blanche's gear, the item still dropped her cold resistance to -30% which was a dangerous place to be for Hell difficulty. I noticed right away that getting caught in the death explosion of a Cold Enchanted boss put a real hurting on Blanche due to her negative resistance in that field. I'm used to having maxed or nearly maxed resistances in each category and the lack thereof was making a real difference. An enemy cold ability that deals 1000 base damage would only hit for 250 damage with maxed resistance - and would deal 1300 damage in Blanche's current state, yeouch! After finishing the Hole and Pit, I shuffled some equipment around and managed to get her cold resistance to -4% at the cost of dropping lightning resistance down to 44%. I really needed to make that Smoke runeword but was still holding out for the moment because I didn't want to give up Stealth and its 25% faster cast until finding a Monarch shield for Spirit. Sooner or later though, I'd have to address this weakness in Blanche's character build.

Next up was a return to Act Two and a continuation of the desert wastes. The Dry Hills did manage to roll leapers, the only one of the four potential monsters with natural cold immunity, but fortunate this was no longer that big of a deal for Blanche. They have very low health for Hell difficulty (about 3000 HP apiece) and Blanche's sundering charm worked like a, well, charm. The Halls of the Dead normally stand out for being the first location that introduces greater mummies as a normal opponent. Blanche was actually quite happy to see those things though, as their skeleton minions were easy to shatter with cold damage and the greater mummies had no cold resistance. It still took a lot of work clearing everything out, as the picture above indicates, but the Hollow Ones were not the dire threat for Blanche that they've been for so many of my other characters.

Blanche had more trouble with the spear cars throughout the Halls of the Dead as they remained Cold Immune and forced the use of the sundering charm to deal damage. For that matter, I guess that I technically could have swapped out the charm for areas that lacked any monsters with natural cold immunity. However, there are so many bosses that can roll Cold Enchanted or Magic Resistant trait and then pick up an elemental immunity, I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and kept the charm in inventory all the time. This felt more in keeping with the variant anyway: Blanche had received this giant boon and therefore needed a penalty to offset it for sake of fairness. The most annoying enemies in this dungeon were surprisingly the Mummy Sarcophaguses which also had Cold Immune status and took forever to defeat even while sundered. Those things had 54,000 HP (!) and took something like 100 shots of Ice Blast to smash while pumping out more mummies all the while. I hated any time one of them appeared in a dungeon room since it would always take roughly three full mana orbs to destroy it.

Bloodwitch isn't a particularly famous Diablo 2 boss and I don't think many people come back here after getting the Horadric Cube in Normal difficulty. She was a scary opponent for Blanche though, thanks to innate Cold Immune status plus the Extra Strong / Cursed combination. Blanche had to retreat back across nearly the entirety of Halls of the Dead 3 while kiting her backwards until finally landing the kill, Jarulf having long since met his maker along the way. The tail end of the Halls of the Dead yielded up a real treasure though: a non-magical, non-rare Monarch shield! Blanche could take that thing back to Nightmare difficulty and use her socket quest on it for the long-awaited second Spirit runeword. That would reset the map though and I was in the middle of a gaming session, so I decided to push onwards into the Far Oasis and clear it out, then go back to the prior difficulty. I was also still looking for a two socket armor to use as the base for Smoke and hadn't found anything of note yet; I somewhat optimistically was hoping that a useful armor might drop in this upcoming area.

The Far Oasis didn't have anything with natural cold immunity, populated instead with beetles and insect swarms and vultures. That was an insanely easy monster draw and everything went down quickly to the power of Ice Blast. I tried to get a screenshot of Beetleburst and I think Blanche killed the boss before I even recognized it was on screen. Then it was into the Maggot Lair which was once again straightforward for Blanche. All of her damage was single target and fired in a straight line which made it ideal for the corridors of the bug nest. Thankfully I didn't have to worry about shepherding minions through the tunnels or dealing with the awkward flight pattern of Blessed Hammers, just spam out the Ice Blasts and hit whatever might be in the way. Making things even nicer, the maggots and beetles and bug swarms that inhabited this area all had zero cold resistance whatsoever. Did I... did I actually enjoy clearing the Maggot Lair with Blanche? It was a bit of a stretch to say that, but she really didn't have much trouble going through these three floors.

Coldworm was the rare triple Fire / Cold / Lightning Enchanted boss, though amusingly she couldn't apply any extra elemental damage from those traits because Coldworm never attacks. This was the only enemy that required cold sundering of an immunity, so therefore Blanche killed all of the other maggots in the chamber first and then worked with Jarulf to slay the mother breeder once she was alone. Now I was ready to wrap up this gaming session and, unfortunately, no usable exceptional or elite armors with two sockets had appeared to date. Well, it's not as though defensive rating means anything in Diablo 2 anyway. I started out Blanche's big gear transition by returning to Nightmare difficulty to use the socket quest on that Monarch shield, then created another Spirit runeword:

The most important number here was the amount of faster cast which scored a massive win by rolling at 33%, same as the 33% on Blanche's Spirit sword. The available range is anywhere from 25% to 35% which meant that hitting 33% twice in a row was something like a 90th percentile outcome. This was a huge deal because the 9 frame casting window for the Sorceress class requires having 63% faster cast. Blanche's dual Spirit runewords allowed her to hit that mark WITHOUT needing any faster cast gear from rings or amulets! I had been holding onto a rare ring with 10% faster cast and some other mediocre bonuses because I had been expecting to need it in order to maintain Blanche's current Stealth-boosted fast cast setup. Now that wouldn't be necessary and I could use the jewelry slots on items with other, better affixes instead. And while Blanche theoretically could have reached the next 8 frame window on casting animation by maintaining her Stealth armor (25%) plus two more instances of faster cast on rings and amulet (20%), that would have been overkill for her character build. She needed resistances more than slightly faster Ice Blast spam and I had to work around the penalty on that sundering charm.

Now Blanche had to reset her stat points so that she had enough Strength to equip that Monarch shield. The 156 Strength requirement is a tall order and would divert a lot of stat points that I would have preferred to keep in Vitality. However, Blanche was assisted by somewhat randomly having about +30 to Strength on various parts of her equipment which minimized the investment needed in base Strength. I reallocated the stat points (and skill points which all remained exactly the same), then finally managed to put the shield on. As a last step, Blanche then swapped out her Stealth armor in favor of a new Smoke suit of protection:

While the 75% enhanced defense went to waste, Blanche very much wanted the 50% resist all along with minor bonuses to Energy and faster hit recovery. For the base armor, I did the best that I could by returning to Normal difficulty and refreshing the town merchants until Fara offered a Breast Plate with two sockets. This gave Blanche the shining golden appearance shown above which I really ended up liking on her. She looked like a regal figure now and the one thing that would top off the new threads would be replacing her silly Lore helmet with a circlet that had +skills on it. Then I spent about a million gold gambling rings until I found something with some minor resist all on it, which wasn't perfect but allowed me to get the displayed resistances above. Blanche was overcapped a bit on lightning and especially on poison which I hoped to swap out in favor of more fire and cold resistance. She had lost about 100 max HP which wasn't ideal but ultimately I was pretty satisfied with the big equipment transfer.

I think I buried the lede on what should have been the biggest detail here: that Spirit shield gave Blanche another +2 to all skills! Her Ice Blast damage went up by a good margin, from an average 1675 to an average 1975 per casting, plus two more points in all skills meant another two points in Cold Mastery for -150% cold resistance in total. Against enemies with no innate cold resistance, Blanche was dealing roughly 4000 damage per Ice Blast (since there is a cap of -100% to resistances even though Blanche's Cold Mastery could theoretically take enemies lower than that), on a skill with a cooldown measured in fractions of a second. She had more than enough damage to complete Hell difficulty at this point, the biggest issue was whether or not I could keep her alive to keep pounding out all of that raw damage.

The next couple of areas were really easy for Blanche as she broke in her shiny new equipment. The Lost City was very heavy on Plague Bearer zombies which were about the least dangerous enemies possible for Blanche's freezing setup. She dodged seeing the Cold Immune Marauders while the poison gas-tossing cats failed to put up any fight whatsoever. I cleared out the whole outdoor area and then ventured down into the Ancient Tunnels, which was another place featuring lots of melee opponents. The underground area was chock full of more zombies along with mummies, and then some Invaders who were Fire Immune instead of Cold Immune to make them easy pickings. I realized after the fact that I didn't even take any screenshots from the Ancient Tunnels which was a sign that Blanche never encountered anything dangerous. These places rushed past quickly.

Next up was the Claw Viper Temple which can often be an easy area as well. That was not to be the case this time, however:

Blanche drew an all-snake dungeon this time around, nothing but Claw Vipers and Salamanders with no third monster type. Normally that's a good thing since most character builds prefer to avoid the Guardian greater mummies and their resurrecting skeletons. Blanche was the exception to the normal trend though because both Claw Vipers and Salamanders are naturally Cold Immune in Hell difficulty, with Blanche only able to damage them due to her sundering charm. Even with that advantage in her pocket, she could only deal about 600-700 damage per shot with Ice Blast to the snakes as compared with the roughly 4000 damage that Blanche was inflicting against everythig else. And while both types of snakes are relatively low health opponents at about 5400 HP per reptile, it was a daunting task to clear out an entire dungeon where EVERYTHING was innately Cold Immune with no easy targets. That was a lot of Ice Blasts needed for each kill and a lot of mana potions required to keep blasting away.

I knew I was in for some tough sledding when Blanche immediately began running into bosses right at the outset of the Claw Viper Temple. That's bosses plural, mind you, not a single boss. Blanche had rolled the dungeon layout with a small loop area at the stairs and then three pathways leading to the northwest, northeast, and southeast. That's usually one of the better dungeon layouts but this time there was a snake boss down each of the three directions and Blanche lacked any room to maneuver. She managed to kill this Spectral Hit / Extra Fast / Mana Burn boss although she lost Jarulf in the process and then woke up a really, really nasty boss with Extra Fast and Cold Enchanted traits. That thing was zipping around at warp speed and charging Blanche again and again, chilling her in the process, making it impossible to run away before the next charge landed a second later. I had to drink full rejuv after full rejuv before barely managing to get into a corner and escape with a town portal scroll. Yikes, that had been ridiculously dangerous!

With the worst boss parked for the moment, Blanche returned via the Lost City waypoint and began clearing out the rest of the dungeon. I knew that I would need retreat space to deal with that boss and ended up exploring down the northeast corridor, beyond which lay the bulk of the temple. I left Jarulf dead for the moment as I suspect he wouldn't last long against these monsters and slowly cleared out one room at a time. Things became much easier once Blanche had several cleared rooms available for retreat purposes, plus the non-boss snakes were a lot easier to deal with. I took the time to clear essentially the whole dungeon before going back to the snake boss that Blanche had portal parked earlier. That's a picture of the boss above who apparently had a Conviction aura for the third trait. Even with tons of space available and no minions to hide behind, this boss *STILL* nearly killed Blanche! Things were working well enough at first as Blanche launched Ice Blasts from a distance, but as soon as the cursed thing managed to get an initial hit on Blanche, she became chilled and then was too slow to run away. The viper would charge and stun Blanche, then charge again, then charge again, with no opportunity to dodge or move to a safe distance. I drank four more full rejuvs (after consuming five in the earlier encounter) before Blanche managed to stumble around a corner, get enough distance to have some safety, and then finally down the thing. This was the closest that Blanche had come to death so far on her journey and only fast reflexes on drinking the purple potions had kept her alive. I really should have revived Jarulf to take on the boss, I simply did not think that one Claw Viper on its own would be that dangerous!

Oh, and Blanche still wasn't done yet. She still had to clear the tiny Claw Viper 2 and hope that Fangskin wouldn't pose as many problems as its cousins on the first floor. I made sure to have Jarulf in tow as Blanche descended down the staircase, hoping for once that there would be greater mummies instead of snakes here. No such luck: once again, the bottom floor was an all-snakes draw, sigh. Blanche crept along the northern edge of the small chamber and managed to draw out several Claw Vipers and Salamanders for initial disposal, getting about half a dozen of them in small groups before Fangskin woke up. The boss had been camping at the bottom of the altar and came roaring out together with its minions, fortunately drawing Spectral Hit and Mana Burn for the two extra traits. This could have been a lot worse with something like Cursed or Extra Strong or an aura. I left Jarulf to deal with Fangskin where he bought a few precious seconds before dying, as Blanche raced around to the right in the hopes of escaping onto the altar. What I didn't know was that there was a SECOND Claw Viper boss over on the right side of the altar, oh come on! There was barely enough space to wiggle free as Blanche froze its minions in place, then she scampered up onto the altar and was safe. The monsters will not climb onto the altar itself which allowed Blanche to shoot them all down one at a time and claim the Viper Amulet. There were rougly 25 monsters in total packing Claw Viper 2 and it had not been easy getting up to the altar without having Teleport.

Snakes, why did it have to be snakes, heh.

This experience had been harrowing enough that I spent some time refreshing the town merchants in search of a belt upgrade. Blanche was wearing a rare belt where the only meaningful affixes were 45 life and 28% fire resistance. I could potentially find a magical (blue) belt with better versions of both of those things and shopped Elzix for a while looking for an improvement. I couldn't find the Garnet Belt of the Whale that I wanted, but did manage to get a Plated Belt of the Whale with 99 life on it. I resolved that I would wear this in areas that lacked fire element damage, then swap back to Blanche's current belt in places where there was fire damage to worry about. The Plated Belt of the Whale added 55 max HP which made me feel a good bit safer on Blanche, at the cost of dropping her fire resistance to 4%, yikes. I either needed more health or more fire resistance in some form; swapping these belts would have to suffice for the moment.

The Palace floors don't have much in the way of fire damage so Blanche equipped her new life-boosting belt for the moment. These areas are known for featuring skeleton archers and those Horror Archers were indeed the biggest issue for Blanche as well. While the various melee enemies could all be frozen before they drew close enough to present a threat, it was basically impossible for Blanche to avoid taking at least some damage while clearing out nests of entrenched archers. There were a couple of times where their shots downed Jarulf and forced a pricey revival bill, and one time where I drank a full rejuv out of safety's sake as Blanche fought her way through half a dozen skeleton archers crouched in a corner together with a Mutishot boss. Overall though, these were straightforward levels to complete and lacked anything nearly as dangerous as the Claw Viper Temple. Blanche didn't encounter a single enemy with natural cold immunity across these four floors and they were completely cleared in barely over half an hour.

The Arcane Sanctuary was tougher due entirely to the presence of one enemy: the Ghoul Lord vampires. Those things were kind of a grabbag of everything that Blanche didn't want to face: Cold Immune, high health, spellcasters that used fire element damage, etc. I had to swap back over to the other belt and maybe should have used the Nozokan Relic as well, though I decided to maintain Blanche's amulet with +2 cold skills for the additional damage. The vampires took lots and lots of shots to defeat, on the order of 15-20 apiece, and then even more for minions and bosses when they showed up. On top of that, they also had innate lifesteal to make them even more annoying. The biggest saving grace was the fact that the vampires don't have a dangerous AI routine: they like to sit back and cast spells from a distance, and it's always easy to retreat in safety if things start looking dicey. It's also not that hard to step out of Fire Walls and make sure to heal before their ticking damage over time effect becomes fatal. Therefore it was unlikely that any of the Ghoul Lord vampires would actually kill Blanche, but fighting scores and scores of them across the length and breadth of the Arcane Sanctuary wasn't much of a picnic.

At least the two other monsters in here, Hell Clan goats and the flying Spectres, were essentially irrelevant. Both of them died in two shots of Ice Blast apiece, with the ghosts being at least marginally more concerning since they could fly over terrain and were immune to being frozen or chilled. The goats though, sheesh, those things were just sad. Blanche observed once again that the majority of bosses were all clustered in the first quadrant she explored, hitting seven bosses in that first quadrant and then two more total in the other three. That can't be a coincidence since I've seen it so many times and I suspect D2's monster generation deliberately spawns the bosses as soon as possible to deter people teleporting around to find the exits quickly. It doesn't work, of course, as most players endlessly farm Mephisto or the Countess using Teleport anyway, heh. The Summoner was located at the end of the third quadrant that Blanche explored and died in fewer shots than a normal vampire, pretty sad.

The big news was the discovering of two Grand Charms that both had big +life modifiers on them, one with 32 life and another with 28 life. I know it might sound like I'm making this up but those things really did drop virtually back to back at a really timely moment for Blanche. I would end up using both of them with Blanche, clearing out some small charms with excess poison resist she didn't need and then shaving her available inventory space even smaller. Blanche was down to a mere 8 inventory slots not taken up by charms and tomes, all of which I would then fill up with red/blue potions, leaving her enough room to carry exactly one item back to town. It was awkward and clunky but survivability had to come first. Less important but still interesting was a Lem rune dropping from the grouped treasure chests at the end of a quadrant. This was something else that I didn't need for Blanche and would hold in stash for a potential other character later. With three total Lems saved up, that could maybe be a Pul rune for an Enlightenment armor on a future Sorcie.

The Canyon of the Magi had a friendlier monster draw for Blanche; I had been crossing my fingers that the Crusher brutes would be absent and thankfully they were a no-show for her. Those things are the fastest and scariest opponents that can appear in the Canyon, plus they're naturally Cold Immune to boot. Instead, Blanche was left with maggots and beetles and spear cats, none of them Cold Immune, all of them falling readily to her Ice Blasts. While things could get a bit hairy when a spear cat and its minions were all clumped together, this was about as good of a result as I could have expected for the final outdoor area of the Act. I used the Canyon as a warmup for what looked to be a long gaming session and then prepared to tackle the seven Tombs of Tal Rasha.

As a quick overview of the Tombs, there are six different monster types that can appear inside: the famous Burning Dead / Unraveler combo, Apparition ghosts, Steel Scarab beetles, Preserved Dead mummies, Ghoul Lord vampires, and Gorebelly blunderbores. Each tomb randomly picks three of these enemies to generate, though I'm not sure that they all have equal weighting since the Unravelers seem to appear much more often than the ghosts or the Gorebellies. For Blanche's character build, there was unfortunately a lot of natural cold immunity amongst this group of opponents, with three of the six options forcing her to rely on the sundering power of her charm. The very first room of the first False Tomb highlighted why this was a problem:

It was an ugly stairs trap in Tomb #1, a four pack of Unraveler champs standing right around the first corner, and then another Extra Strong / Magic Resistant / Lightning Enchanted Unraveler boss around the next corner beyond this one. Things might not look that bad in the screenshot above, however that was after Blanche had shot down about two dozen skeletons and mummies that had previously been choking every inch of space at the entrance stairs, fortunately with all of their bodies shattering to prevent resurrection. Even the four Unraveler champs by themselves were no cakewalk, as all of them were Cold Immune and required about 25 Ice Blasts apiece to chew through their health bars. The damage from their Unholy Bolts was heavy enough that Blanche had to drink a full rejuv for safety's sake and the whole thing was a wild scramble conducted in a sardine can's worth of space. This was not how I wanted things to go in the very first room of the False Tombs!

Fortunately things did settle down from there and I found that the Unraveler / Burning Dead combo wasn't too bad for Blanche to deal with, not once she had enough space to fight and move properly. The Unravelers themselves were annoying since they always had that cold immunity and took a bunch of shots to defeat. However, the Burning Dead were an absolute joke for Blanche since they fell in two shots each and could never be raised to fight a second time. I was a bit surprised to find that the Unravelers were reasonably tough on their own, often running forward into melee range to breathe poison on Blanche or Jarulf once their skeletons were all gone. Anyway, the rest of Tomb #1 and Tomb #3 were uneventful (Tomb #2 being the True Tomb this time), with the most notable development taking place when the unique grand crown appeared. This was the Crown of Thieves which had 9% lifesteal, 25 Dexterity, 50 life, 35 mana, and 33% fire resistance on it. While that definitely wasn't an item for Blanche, the lifesteal and Dexterity and extra health on an item in the helmet slot might be useful on someone else if I ever tried to do some kind of melee fighter build. Into the shared stash it went.

Tomb #4 introduced some new monsters that created additional headaches for Blanche. This tomb had one of the open layouts at the entrance (the stairs were just barely out of view to the right, over by that lantern on the ground) and I knew from experience that this tends to be one of the worst places for getting swarmed out of the gate. Sure enough, enemies immediately began pouring out of the corridor to the southwest including a whole bunch of vampires and Gorebellies. I was well familiar with the Ghoul Lord vampires after having faced them across the long expanses of the Arcane Sanctuary, with the undead things still remaining Cold Immune and requiring a whole bunch of shots with Ice Blast to defeat. What I hadn't expected was the Gorebellies, who were the third Cold Immune enemy to be found in the Tombs and packed even more health at roughly 11,200 HP per pinhead. These Gorebellies were part of a Cursed boss pack (I didn't know what the other boss traits were as yet) and there were simply too many of them arriving all at once for Blanche to handle. She could freeze any one Gorebelly in place and lock it up with Ice Blast to pump in the 20-25 shots needed to secure the kill. But when there were half a dozen of them racing after her all at once, inflicting Cursed status on every successful hit, plus several more vampires raining down fire, plus no room whatsoever to retreat or maneuver? It was a recipe for disaster.

Jarulf bought Blanche a few seconds and then he was gone, leaving her to conduct a fighting march backwards firing Ice Blasts all the while. The Gorebellies weren't especially fast and Blanche could chill them with her spells - if only there were more room to kite them backwards! I did the best that I could but still took several big hits, forcing the drinking of full rejuvs for safety. I had to lead these things away from the entrance and managed to drag about four of them off to the end of the northwest corridor where Blanche escaped out of a town portal. I revived Jarulf in town and returned from the Canyon waypoint, slaying two Gorebellies that had remained near the entrance and then carefully pulling out the remaining members of that initial mob for disposal in smaller numbers. I took care to clear out the whole rest of that False Tomb before heading down the southwest corridor in earnest where I finally discovered the Gorebelly boss itself had Cursed / Extra Strong / Lightning Enchanted traits, sheesh! No wonder those minions had been hitting so hard; even the Lightning Enchanted part was dangerous because the sparks can also inflict Cursed status. Let me tell you, I was glad that the whole rest of the False Tomb was empty before fighting that guy and I made very certain to keep Blanche out of his melee range.

Those were the worst hairballs that Blanche ran into over the course of several hours spending clearing all of the False Tombs. I discovered over time that the Gorebellies were definitely the most dangerous of the six enemies that could appear in the Tombs, not for their normal versions but rather when they would spawn as bosses and get powered up with traits like Extra Fast or Extra Strong. Their slow speed meant that they could be kited without too much trouble, but only if Blanche had proper retreat room secured ahead of time. I continued to worry about getting caught in a situation like the one above, with Gorebellies pouncing on Blanche at the entry stairs, though fortunately nothing quite like that manifested again. Blanche was helped a good bit by rolling beetles over and over again in the various False Tombs, with the bugs being quite speedy but falling readily to Blanche's Ice Blasts. Tomb #6 kept extending on and on which meant that it had to be Kaa's Tomb, fortunately this one lacked any Gorebellies inside. There were lots and lots of Unravelers inside though, including Kaa himself in one of the back corners. His traits weren't anything special though it was amusing as always to see a boss sporting five of them at once.

The final False Tomb over in Tomb #7 had Gorebellies present again, including several of them near the staircase, though by now I was pretty used to facing them with Blanche. All of these fights started to blend together over time as Blanche cleared out dozens and dozens of rooms across all of these various Tombs. I had passed the two hour mark by the time that Blanche was ready to enter the True Tomb itself, which did not have any Unravelers inside but did have Gorebellies and vampires (the other two Cold Immune enemies) along with the easily killable mummies. I did not particularly enjoy spending the next hour leading Blanche through such a gigantic maze where two of the three enemies were Cold Immune but what else was I supposed to do? Early on in the True Tomb, I spotted a Gorebelly boss with a Might aura as Blanche edged around a corner - yikes! She wanted no part of that and I went off to clear other parts of the True Tomb, coming back half an hour later when there was plenty of extra space secured. This allowed me to kite that boss backwards through four rooms without issue, thus defusing a potentially deadly situation. The dungeon still continued onwards afterward, with a seemingly endless number of Cold Immune targets. Even with the cold sundering charm, this was still taking forever!

But it had to end eventually so there you have it, the whole True Tomb cleared out from top to bottom. Blanche had not encountered any truly dangerous situations since that scrape in Tomb #4, and I was proud of how she had killed something like 30 additional bosses since that point without putting herself in mortal peril. The one other tidbit that I'll pass on is that Blanche discovered the unique full plate mail armor along the way, good old Goldskin which I had used on my Defiance Paladin Meatbag back in the day. I honestly would have used this armor on Blanche as well for its 35% resist all property if she hadn't found the Lum rune to make her Smoke armor. Thus while I wouldn't be using Goldskin for Blanche, I did have to get a screenshot of her wearing the thing which looked downright awesome here in D2R's higher resolution.

I definitely wanted to bring Blanche's higher HP belt for use against Duriel as resistances are essentially useless against him. Blanche and Jarulf entered the orifice chamber and she immediately began pelting the boss with Ice Blasts as Jarulf heroically distracted Duriel with his lightning magic. Just as I had seen with Andariel, Duriel's healthbar began dropping fast - like really, really fast. In terms of numbers, Duriel has 84,000 HP in Hell along with 95% cold resistance. That should make him one tough cookie against Blanche's all-cold setup, right? Unfortunately for the big bug, there was very little difference between a monster having 0% cold resistance or 95% cold resistance at this point. Blanche's Cold Mastery subtracted 150% from everything that was not Cold Immune, with that cap of -100% resistance being as low as it could go. Thus monsters with 0% base cold resistance would go to -100%, monsters with 50% cold resistance would also go to -100%, and Duriel's 95% resistance left the demon lord at -55%. That was better than -100% but not by much, as Blanche's Ice Blasts would still hit for more than 3000 damage per cast. It honestly did not matter how much cold resistance an enemy had at this point: either they were Cold Immune, and required the sundering charm, or they were not and died very, very fast.

Thus Duriel might as well have been some random vulture out in the Dry Hills. He wasn't Cold Immune and that was all that mattered. By the time that Duriel had finished dining on Jarulf, his healthbar was already under half and was still dropping quickly. I looped around the small room once with Blanche while firing off more Ice Blasts, then Duriel collapsed before Blanche had finished her second loop. The whole thing was shockingly easy - wasn't this supposed to be one of the more dangerous bosses in the game? Oh well. Duriel dropped the unique dirk (The Diggler) and the unique Poleaxe (The Battlebranch), both of which were unsurprisingly not useful for Blanche. I paid the fee to revive Jarulf and took the boat off to Act Three.

Act Two is the longest Act in the game if the player takes the time to full clear everything. I was quite glad to have this one over with as Blanche managed to pass through some very deadly areas without suffering an untimely death. She was roughly halfway through Hell difficulty at this point and I could only hope that her streak would continue as she advanced further into the later stages of the gameplay.