Blanche: Hell Difficulty Part Three

The forests had a bizarre layout as Blanche actually found the entrances to both the Great Marsh and the Flayer Jungle before she came across either of the jungle alcoves containing the two spider-based dungeons. Those areas were a bit more challenging largely due to their smaller spaces and the presence of so much poison damage which had Blanche feeling green for most of her time spent underground. There was absolutely no cold resistance on anything in the Spider Cavern or Arachnid Lair and it wasn't too tough to keep the big spiders from closing into melee range. These places were packed with Giant Lamprey maggots and Blanche spent much of her time drinking more mana potions to deal with all of their little bugs. The one tense moment came when I turned around a corner and accidentally got Blanche stuck in a little alcove with a swarm of maggots and spiders in front of her, which required bailing out of a town portal and coming back from the waypoint for safety. Aside from that idiocy on my part, everything went smoothly as these two caverns were completely cleared out. Sszark drew non-dangerous Stone Skin and Cold Enchanted extra traits which prevented him from getting close enough to make use of his Extra Strong / Cursed combo.

Most of this gaming session was spent hacking through the seemingly endless jungles that make up the first half of Act Three. Blanche full cleared the Spider Forest and then headed into the Great Marsh, which was located to the south of the first area and which I already knew would be a gigantic dead end. The Great Marsh was even heavier on fetishes with both the melee and blowdart versions, with a scattering of the swamp frogs as the only other monster present. This made for long, long marches through the swamps fighting off one group of fetishes after another. While each fetish was individually easy to kill, there were so many of them that Blanche inevitably took a good bit of damage from all of their little projectiles. Ice Blast could only hit one target at a time and I felt the lack of any area-of-effect damage here; Jarulf normally helped with that but continued to be useless as all of the fetishes were Lightning Immune. I also did have to watch out for the Inferno attack on the fetish shamans since Blanche only had 4% fire resistance with this setup and those flame tongues hurt a lot whenever Blanche was caught in one. On the plus side, Blanche found a Fal rune in the final Marsh alcove which was a nice souvenir to hold onto.

The Great Marsh doesn't have any subdungeons inside so Blanche cleared the whole thing out and then crossed back over the Spider Forest into the Flayer Jungle. This area replaced the earlier fetishes with flayers, and this time that minor change in enemy type made a real difference. The fetishes had been Lightning Immune but now the flayers were Cold Immune and that was obviously a lot worse for Blanche. Whereas the fetishes had died in one or at most two shots of Ice Blast, these new flayers took five or six shots apiece to defeat, which was a lot when two dozen of them would come racing out of the trees at once. Now fortunately this was one of the big outdoor areas with virtually endless space to run to safety, meaning that the actual danger level posed by the flayers was minimal. Blanche could always retreat backwards to break up the flayer charges and heal up the damage she took with a steady supply of red potions. It also helped that the other monster type in the Flayer Jungle was Winged Nightmare vultures who were absolutely pathetic and died immediately whenever they appeared. Mostly, the Flayer Jungle just took longer to do the same kind of clearing that Blanche had been carrying out in the first two areas.

There are three alcoves in the Flayer Jungle and the first one proved to be completely empty. The second one held the Gidbinn pyre and the Flayer Dungeon; the flayer boss that showed up when Blanche lit the pillar was Lightning Enchanted / Cold Enchanted / Teleportation and fast enough that Blanche had to drink a full rejuv potion when she was swarmed by its minions. It was not fun facing half a dozen speedy flayers who were all taking minimal damage from each Ice Blast. And things were about to get worse as Blanche entered the Flayer Dungeon where her freedom of movement was about to be sharply limited. The first floor of the dungeon immediately began throwing boss after boss at her, as the monsters began showing up as soon as she entered the first hallway. First it was a dozen Cold Immune little flayers trying to push through the initial doorway, then a wraith boss, then the Cursed boss pictured above with its own swarm of followers. The flayers were so small that I had difficulty hovering over their character models to see what boss traits I was up against, though the Cursed trait was easy enough to understand as soon as the red glow appeared above Blanche's head. Again and again Blanche kept having to retreat back towards the stairs, kiting the enemies backwards while slowing and shattering them with Ice Blasts. The Amazon Basin states that there can be up to six bosses on the first floor of the Flayer Dungeon and Blanche definitely hit that max number, almost all of them located within the first two rooms.

Did the second floor get any better?

No, no it did not. That was an undead flayer with a Might aura pictured there; I never managed to find out the other two boss traits because Blanche was frantically trying to kill the thing before it could explode on her. The undead flayers are technically supposed to be highly cold resistant with 75% protection, though by now Blanche's Cold Mastery meant that anything not Cold Immune was essentially taking the full damage from her spells. I found that the little things exploded for about 300 damage when Blanche was close enough to get hit, and I had to be really careful not to trigger multiple death explosions in succession which could easily be fatal. Jarulf was a real help here since the mercenaries are apparently immune to the death explosions of the undead dolls; I had suspected that for some time and Boro confirmed it on our Discord server. There were four other bosses on this floor, some of them quite nasty, but I had trouble documenting the combat because all of the little buggers were moving so fast and it was hard to screenshot any of them. I wasn't in the mood to take chances and drank full rejuvs liberally whenever Blanche was threatened, I think three of them in total at different times, with those things fortunately easy to replace in Hell difficulty. Flayer Dungeon 3 was notably easier as it had more space to maneuver and only a handful of bosses, capped off by Witch Doctor Endugu who was Cold Enchanted and therefore Cold Immune. At least Blanche's cold sundering charm made that a moot point as the shaman was quickly gunned down.

I still didn't have the Flayer Jungle waypoint secured so Blanche pushed onwards a bit further through the outdoors until reaching the final alcove with the waypoint and the Swampy Pit. I stopped the gaming session there since it had been running for more than two hours, then picked up again the next day. I didn't want to begin with the dangerous Swampy Pit and instead continued onwards through the remaining jungles until finding the gates of Kurast. It turned out that Blanche didn't have much further to go before reaching the temple city, only a few more bends around the river until the little gold piles began appearing to foreshadow the return of civilization. Stormtree rolled Spectral Hit and Cold Enchanted for his extra traits which weren't too bad, though the boss was innately Cold Immune along with his minions to force a whole bunch of Ice Blast shots. Jarulf died here as a result of being too dumb to retreat properly but Blanche calmly kited Stormtree and his minions without them ever laying a finger or her.

The next goal was securing Blanche's progress forward which required full clearing Lower Kurast and discovering the waypoint. This proved to be an almost laughably easy task, with the first part of Kurast containing leapers, vultures, and Zakarumite zealots. None of them were Cold Immune, none of them had dangerous AI routines, and all of them were low health opponents. The leapers in particular only had 3300 HP and zero cold resistance which meant that they always died in a single Ice Blast, heh. The other two enemies were only barely more sturdy, dying in two shots instead of one, and even the bosses and champions couldn't last more than a few seconds. It's rare to find an area quite this easy in Hell difficulty and I enjoyed this brief respite for Blanche.

Now that I was warmed up as a player, I returned Blanche through the Flayer Jungle waypoint to tackle the Swampy Pit. This underground dungeon is completely optional and hardly anyone goes inside since the monsters are dangerous and there are far better places to hunt for rare item drops. I found that the Swampy Pit was just as crowded with bosses as the Flayer Dungeon had been, though fortunately this area had enemy types which were less scary overall. The first floor was full of Gloams which looked awesome as pictured above but weren't too bad for someone like Blanche who had maxed lightning resistance. There were also a bunch of Fiend bats which similarly lacked any cold resistance. The second floor had lots and lots of zombies (one of the least dangerous monster types in the whole game) along with even more bats. It is possible for the undead dolls to appear on these floors but thankfully Blanche didn't see any. Then the third floor was a big and empty maze that largely served to waste Blanche's time. All in all, things could have been much worse here and now Blanche was completely done with the jungles.

While Lower Kurast had been an utter joke, the Kurast Bazaar rather surprisingly was not. In place of the pathetic opposition she had faced earlier, Blanche now had to deal with Thrasher thorned hulks and Faithful / Sexton pairs, all of which were naturally Cold Immune. (The third monster type was bug swarms which didn't even register on the threat level.) Those two enemies took a whole bunch of Ice Blasts to defeat, especially the Thrashers who required about 20 shots each, which required Blanche to stay on her toes. As I've mentioned before, she could lock up any one monster with repeated Ice Blasts to freeze them in place, however that didn't work so well when a dozen enemies were chasing after her simultaneously. The good news was that Blanche's freezing abilities worked well against the zealot enemies, as she could keep them from running away to receive healing. Their monster AI doesn't go into retreat mode until their healthbars are nearly gone, at which time Blanche would lock them in place and finish them off. The Thrashers took more work to defeat simply because of their massive healthbars and I spent a lot of time running back and forth to town for additional mana potions.

The Kurast Baazar contains the first two of the Kurast Temples, infamous deathtraps that everyone avoids aside from completing the Lam Esem quest. My characters always full clear everything though so into the Disused Fane went Blanche and Jarulf. This dungeon had a Spider Magus boss pack accosting the two of them immediately upon exiting the stairs; Blanche was aided here by the spider character model being too big for more than one of them to fit through the hallway doors at a time. Those spiders also had no cold resistance which allowed Blanche to gun them down quickly and establish a foothold in the dungeon. She circled to the left side of the mini-dungeon and cleared out two rooms, only to have a Flesh Hunter corrupted rogue boss come flying out of the next doorway at mach speed. I immediately realized that the evil thing and all of its minions were Cold Immune which meant that they could not be killed quickly. Jarulf was bowled over within seconds and then Blanche was running for her life! I tried to open a town portal but couldn't get through it fast enough, then opted to race back to the stairs and escaped up them with the boss and her minions snapping at Blanche's heels. Whew, that was too close for comfort!

After catching my breath, I revived Jarulf and returned through that town portal that Blanche hadn't been able to jump through earlier. Blanche now had control of a back room while the boss controlled the stairs, allowing me to clear out the rest of the Disused Fane before creeping back to the entrance area while picking off a few of the minions. I was able to get three or four of them before waking up the boss, finally getting a picture of her full abilities with the expected Extra Fast trait. Downing the boss gave Blanche control of this first temple and I could only hope that the other five wouldn't be as bad.

The famous Ruined Temple was next and this time Blanche drew the non-"T" formation, something which only appears about a quarter of the time. I cleared out a series of Wailing Beast brutes who lacked cold resistance and didn't put up much of a fight for Blanche, then some Night Lord vampires who were innately Cold Immune and required a lot more Ice Blast shots. It turned out that most of the enemies in the Ruined Temple were concentrated in a single back room that must have had some 25 or more bodies crammed together. I worked very carefully to draw them out in small groups, starting with an entire vampire boss pack that I most certainly did not want to fight at the same time as Sarina. After that thing and its pyrotechnics were eliminated, Blanche began luring out Sarina's corrupted rogue minions and downed about half a dozen of them before the unique boss herself came raging through the doorway. Sarina had Teleportation and Magic Resistant for her extra traits, an excellent roll for Blanche, but her innate Extra Fast trait and the three additional minions that followed their leader made this into a real hairball. Jarulf bought a little time before dying and Blanche was able to shoot them all down rather quickly, not before I drank a full rejuv for safety though. I had plenty of them saved in stash and Blanche was very much in "safe before sorry" mode as she drew deeper into D2's endgame stages.

I genuinely do not like the Kurast Sewers due to their large size and the generally bleak environment that prevails down there. Blanche had a pretty good draw this time though, avoiding the undead exploding dolls and instead getting a bunch of mummies and bats along with the Horadrim Ancient / Horror skeleton combo. She was one character who didn't mind the greater mummies appearing and everything down in the smelly tunnels died pretty quickly. This is a large area and it took some time to full clear the whole place, which Blanche would have needed to do anyway since I didn't find the stairs down to Sewers 2 until the last possible moment. Icehawk Riftwing and his fellow bats guard the staircase down to the tiny second floor, posing a greater threat than normal since they were all Cold Immune and didn't take much damage from Ice Blast. I tried to draw them out from long range only to wake up Icehawk himself who was packing Cursed and Fire Enchanted for the extra two boss traits, not a great combo given that Blanche wasn't wearing her belt with extra fire resistance. The boss landed a couple quick bites and Blanche had to drink an emergency full rejuv, her health orb temporarily flashing near empty, before several more Ice Blasts finished the thing off. Most of the Sewers had been a snoozefest but not this last challenge!

Upper Kurast proved to be similar to the Kurast Baazar, with the Thrashers back again to cause more annoyances. I initially exited the Sewers into the middle of Upper Kurast, only to stumble into a Cursed / Extra Fast Thrasher boss with its minions which forced Blanche to escape via town portal and then come back through the main entrance from the Kurast Baazar waypoint. There were two types of zealot enemies here, the actual Zealots who were Fire Immune and therefore irrelevant, and the Faithful who were innately Cold Immune and took a little more work. Again, this was all highly similar to the setup in the Kurast Baazar and Blanche handled it all without issue.

That left the four remaining Kurast Temples, and given how rough things had been in the first two, I wasn't looking forward to what lay in store for Blanche. First up was the Forgotten Reliquary which started out OK with a few Wailing Beasts in the entry room. Blanche shot them down and proceeded into the next room where suddenly a corrupted rogue boss lept into action:

These were more Flesh Hunters, the same enemy type as Sarina, and yes they were also innately Cold Immune to cut the damage from Blanche's Ice Blasts by something like 80%. The boss and her minions were moving so fast that I didn't see her traits at first, though I knew she had to be Extra Fast due to their terrifying speed. I also knew what the second trait had to be when the Cursed effect went off, and let me tell you, the Extra Fast / Cursed combo on Cold Immune targets in a breadbox's amount of space was not something that Blanche wanted to see. There was no chance to fight this boss and her minions in this spot so I had to run Blanche blindly deeper into the dungeon where she was able to drop a town portal (Jarulf having obviously perished by this point). Unfortunately the boss followed Blanche to her portal and prevented me from getting out, so I turned around and ran back the other way, drawing the boss away from the portal and then exiting via the initial staircase. This allowed Blanche to return with a revived Jarulf through the newly vacated portal, clear the back end of the Forgotten Reliquary where she defeated a series of Wailing Beast champs, and finally kill the rogue boss back near the entry staircase once there was space to retreat backwards. What a tough bit of work.

The Forgotten Temple was more forgiving as it didn't have a boss waiting at the stairs when Blanche entered. Beetles were the main enemy inside and those things had always been one of the easier monsters for Blanche: freeze them in place, then shoot them down. This temple wasn't entirely without danger though as it had corrupted rogue archers and one of them rolled a Fanaticism aura along with Spectral Hit and Mana Burn traits. The half dozen of those evil archers fired a volley into Jarulf to one-shot him and nearly did the same to Blanche despite my attempts to dodge out of the way. That was another full rejuv down and I was glad that I always keep about 15 of them saved in stash plus having a dozen of them on belt. Oh, and if anyone was wondering, these corrupted rogue archers were also naturally Cold Immune, heh. That cold sundering charm was getting a workout as Blanche managed to navigate this latest threat.

After clearing out another boss on the tiny Kurast Causeway, Blanche entered the Ruined Fane and... oh come on!

This is why the Kurast Temples are so dangerous, they frequently feature brutal stairs traps like this one. Blanche could of course kill these beetles and snakes given, you know, some actual space to take a few steps. Instead that was a full Serpent Magus boss pack (another Cold Immune monster type, hooray) to make it impossible to stand and fight. Once again Blanche raced deeper into the little dungeon drinking full rejuvs all the way; I think she burned through three of them in her panicked flight. This time I was able to execute the normal portal parking maneuver, leading the snake boss into a corner and abandoning it there, followed by returning with Jarulf through the main entrance and carefully clearing out enough space in which to fight the thing. Eventually I discovered that the boss traits were Fire Enchanted / Spectral Hit / Mana Burn which weren't even that dangerous as a group. Imagine if this thing had rolled Cursed / Extra Strong / Might aura instead, heh. You'd have to be crazy to keep full clearing all of these temples if your goal was to finish the whole game without dying.

So of course Blanche descended into the final temple where the Disused Reliquary forced her to fight on two fronts:

This certainly wasn't as bad as the previous temple, though it wasn't exactly fun either. The entry staircase was just offscreen to the northeast, with this initial room leading into two additional rooms to the right and left. Monsters immediately began pouring out of both doorways, with beetles on the left and corrupted rogue archers on the right. Blanche was firing Ice Blasts to each side, alternating them to keep whatever was standing in the doorway frozen as much as possible and avoid a jailbreak of ravenous monsters. She was mostly able to keep things under control but eventually enough of the archers made it through to kill Jarulf once again (the poor mercenary was not having a fun day) and force me to drink yet another full rejuv to be safe. Arrows fired from an Extra Strong archer boss hurt a lot and Blanche couldn't dodge all of them. Anyway, once this mess was sorted out Blanche was able to clear the remainder of the Disused Reliquary and finally wrap up this exceedingly stressful portion of D2's gameplay. Blanche had come close to dying on multiple occasions and only fast potion-drinking reflexes trained over long years of past experience had gotten her through the six temples in one piece.

This seemed like a good place to stop and take a break.

I returned later that evening with the intention of doing the final Travincal through the Durance push to wrap up the Act. Travincal is one of the best parts of Diablo 2, always full of dangerous yet manageble battles against vampires with their Meteor spells and Hierophant / Zealot pairs with their Blizzards and Lightning. There was a Cursed vampire boss near the entrance to Travincal who put up a good fight; you'd better believe that I had brought Blanche's fire resistance belt since I knew there would be plenty of pyrotechnics in this area. The monster mix wasn't especially kind to Blanche's character build since both the Night Lord vampires and the Hierophants themselves were innately Cold Immune and therefore required far more shots to defeat. The Zealots were not Cold Immune though which allowed Blanche to blast right through them and removed any concern about the Hierophants healing them. Unfortunately the Hierophants could heal each other which was a problem when they clustered together; Blanche had to wait until some of them started teleporting apart from one another when she fought a Hierophant champ pack in the center of the temple city. While the combat was far from routine, it never rose to the level of truly dangerous and I enjoyed the half hour spent fighting across the extent of Travincal.

Once everything other than the central altar room had been cleared, Blanche began drawing out the Council members. She pulled out three minions first and was delighted to discover that they died very quickly. I guess that I had gotten so used to everything being Cold Immune that these non-immune targets collapsed like a popped balloon. There was no chance for the Council minions to heal one another, they were gone in four or five shots of Ice Blast. Among the bosses themselves, Geleb came out first and despite rolling Cold Enchanted as an extra trait he still died in maybe ten shots of Ice Blast. Toorc was second and took a little more time since he's always Cold Immune, then Ismail was last and followed the same pattern as Gelb. This was easy enough that Jarulf even survived which I had not been expecting.

Now I had the longest slog of the night in front of me, clearing a path through the Durance of Hate. There are four total monsters that appear in the Durance: Cadaver mummies, Dark Lord vampires, Mauler blunderbores, and of course the Undead Stygian Dolls that everyone hates. The gameplay will randomly pick three of these four enemies to appear on each floor and I was hoping to dodge at least one of the vampires or undead dolls for each floor. The vampires were the only Cold Immune opponent of the bunch which made them the hardest to kill while the undead dolls were by far the most likely things to kill Blanche outright. Durance 1 was missing the undead dolls which was a good sign, though it was the vastly larger second floor which mattered more in terms of the enemy draw. Blanche came down the stairs and found herself confronted immediately by this Extra Fast Mauler boss, with the increased speed making the thing much more dangerous. It would have been trivial to kill this things under normal circumstances, with proper retreat room, however this confrontation taking place in literally the very first room of the Durance dialed up the danger factor considerably. Blanche managed to get it done with some tight circling largely thanks to the Maulers having only modest cold resistance and therefore taking the full damage from her Ice Blasts. They were up to about 4400 damage per shot against non-resistant targets and that cut even the big pinheads down to size.

The rest of Durance 1 was uneventful, with the vampires being annoying and taking some time to kill but not really posing too much of a threat to Blanche. She found the exit stairs immediately and then went back to clear out the rest of the medium-sized floor. Once that was done, Blanche descended down to Durance 2 where I ran into a dungeon layout that I'd never seen before:

She came down the stairs, passed through a single room, and then the next room had the stairs down to Durance 3. What an insane result from the map generation given the enormous size of this floor. The players who do endless Mephisto runs would absolutely kill for a setup like this, though they're playing on Battle.net and have to roll a new map for every game so they wouldn't be able to exploit it more than once. Anyway, Blanche was required by variant rule to full clear everything which meant she had an hour of hard work ahead of her. Unfortunately Durance 2 dropped the Maulers and replaced them with the undead dolls, who had announced their presence with a champion group fought in the previous room before even spotting the Durance 3 stairs. I didn't hate the undead dolls that much since they were at least easy to kill, falling in two shots apiece to Ice Blast despite possessing 75% cold resistance. Blanche simply had to remain on her toes at all times; I would carefully peek her head into each new room and wait to see if the dolls would come running out, and only then enter normally. She was usually able to run backwards and get them stuck on top of Jarulf where their death explosions didn't cause any harm. Unfortunately Blanche still did get caught occasionally and those death exposions were inflicting roughly 350 damage apiece. There was one moment about halfway through the Durance when two of them went off simultaneously and I was left with Blanche sitting on a life orb reading 150 HP remaining. There was nothing else near Blanche so she could safely stand in place and drink two red potions but sheeesh, that was too close for comfort!

Thus Blanche and Jarulf spent an hour hunting through every nook and cranny of the Durance until all of the monsters were destroyed. There had been several vampire bosses which had taken the most effort to defeat, it being rather tricky to face down half a dozen Cold Immune targets with boosted health as they rained down Meteors into Blanche's 35% fire resistance. Thankfully the vampires liked to chase after Blanche which made it fairly easy to split them up with some footwork and Blanche was good at freezing an isolated target and shoving it full of Ice Blasts. Here's the mandatory picture of the full minimap for the curious, with the waypoint off-screen to the left side.

I also tend to enjoy the battles on Durance 3, though this time around the floor was hostile in the extreme and I would have a lot of work to do in order to complete Act Three. There was nothing at all in the initial room after coming down the stairs, only for Bremm and his minions and several vampires to all wake up at the same time when Blanche passed through the main gate. Bremm had rolled Cold Enchanted for one of his extra traits and I'm pretty sure that created a cold immunity as he took a ton of shots to defeat. There were frankly too many enemies on screen at the same time and Blanche had to spend some time running around in circles as she first cut down Bremm's minions (who were not Cold Immune) followed by whittling down Bremm himself. At least the boss aura had been Holy Shock which wasn't very dangerous.

I followed my usual pattern of circling over to the left to draw out Maffer next, and this time Mr. Dragonhand had rolled a truly deadly combination of abilities. Maffer is always Extra Strong / Extra Fast and this time he also had Cold Enchanted trait to make him - you guessed it - Cold Immune and slash Blanche's damage enormously. Even worse, he now chilled Blanche's movement speed whenever he landed an attack which combined together frightfully with Maffer's own Extra Fast trait. The demon was actually faster than Blanche which made it extremely difficult to kite away to safety, and then Maffer's Extra Strong trait inflicted punishing damage every time he landed his melee attacks. Blanche was easily taking 300-400 damage per hit, from an enemy who was faster than her, and who was barely being scratched by Ice Blast. I couldn't even bring Jarulf back to life for assistance here because Maffer was also Lightning Immune too!

The next five minutes consisted of me running around in the room near the entry staircase while desperately trying to hit Maffer with Ice Blasts. He was slower than Blanche when she managed to chill him, though that effect lasted for maybe two to three seconds before it would wear off and had to be reapplied again. I tried to do the fight while mostly drinking red potions although Blanche was forced to consume purple after purple when Maffer landed several blows in succession. Even more annoying, two vampires had woken up along with Maffer and were throwing their fire magic around at the same time, as if Blanche didn't have enough problems to worry about. Through trial and error, I was able to get the vampires separated from Maffer, slay the two of them, and then continue slowly wearing down Maffer interspersed with many retreats back to town for healing and additional potions. Eventually he ran out of health and collapsed to the floor, the most dangerous foe that Blanche had yet faced finally overcome. Let me tell you, this enemy would absolutely not have been possible to defeat without that cold sundering charm and it had taken all my skill to overcome Maffer without Blanche dying in the process.

Durance 3 still wasn't finished though, not quite yet. Wyand's room on the right hand side was absolutely packed full of enemies, starting with Wyand himself who rolled Cursed and Magic Resistant as his extra abilities. However, Wyand lacked the Cold Immune status of Bremm and Maffer which caused him to suffer the same fate as Geleb and Ismail, splattered on the pavement almost immediately. Then it turned out that there were not one but two vampire bosses hiding out in Wyand's chamber which meant a full dozen vampires running around in there after accounting for their minions. Blanche had to lure them out in small groups to shoot them down at roughly 25 Ice Blasts needed per vampire, and of course the two bosses were immune to freezing effects. For as much of a pain in the rear as this was, it could have been a lot worse: what if the double vampire bosses had appeared in Maffer's room instead of Wyand's? I might have needed to bail on Durance 3 entirely if that had been the case.

With everything else slain, Blanche could now activate Mephisto and pull him over to Wyand's emptied space where there was ample room for dodging. Mephisto was not Cold Immune and therefore took heavy damage from Blanche's Ice Blasts, about 3500 damage per shot, which didn't take too many hits to achieve victory despite Mephisto's 94k healthbar. However, what I hadn't been expecting was how much damage Mephisto would deal with his own spellcasts. Blanche only had 30% cold resistance and the Lord of Hatred's cold shot hit her for roughly 300 damage when it landed. Mephisto also used his Blizzard spell at one point and it instantly dropped Blanche's health to 450 HP before she could run out of its radius, yikes. So this was an offensive showcase on both sides and I had to drink yet another full rejuv during the fight because I did not want to suffer a stupid death here after everything Blanche had fought her way through. The fight was short, barely a minute long, but way more tense than it had any right to be. Blanche landed a few final Ice Blasts and watched with satisfaction as Mephisto collapsed into flame:

I've rarely been so happy to claim the soulstone quest reward for completing the Act. The back half of Act Three had been exceptionally nervewracking as it felt like Blanche went from one deadly situation to another with little to no breaks in between. It helped drive home just how dangerous Diablo 2's gameplay can be for characters that don't have any minions to block for them and no escape skills like Teleport or Leap to fall back upon. You can tank that kind of damage if you're a Barbarian with Battle Orders running or a Druid werebear with 4000 HP, it's a different story for a little Sorcie with barely a thousand health. I was really enjoying Blanche's fast-casting ice spells but I swear that this girl was going to give me a heart attack with all of these close calls. Act Four should theoretically be easier and then we'd have to see if she could bring the journey to its completion in Act Five. Not much further to go now!