Blanche: Hell Difficulty Part Five

I was also working here to rebuild my full rejuv stash which had been cleaned out against Hephasto back in the previous Act. Typically I will only grab the full rejuvs that drop from bosses and champions in Hell difficulty as enough of them appear to replace occasion potion usage. I needed every possible purple potion to restock Blanche's diminished holdings, however, which meant ferrying the minor rejuvs back to town so that every three of them could be Cubed into a full rejuv. I even took the time to use the Cube recipe that transforms a normal gem plus three red potions and three blue potions into a full rejuv. That's a recipe that I almost never use but Blanche broke it out three different times over the course of this gaming session as she painstakingly rebuilt her rejuv supplies. I'm looking forward to the Reign of the Warlock DLC where all rejuvs stack on top of one another and only take up a single inventory slot!

The Frigid Highlands have fully ten different enemies that can appear inside. Believe it or not, Blanche managed to roll the only two of them that happened to be naturally Cold Immune, heh. These were the spear cat Slingers and then the Lasher overseers that whip the Baal minions into suicide status. Out of these two the Slingers were definitely harder to deal with, especially when bosses or champ packs appeared and they could concentrate a bunch of spear throws together. There was one Multishot boss that I didn't manage to screenshot because I was too busy dodging out of the way of its projectiles. The final enemy in this area was the pictured Vile Archers who gave the place a strong ranged vibe. These corrupted rogues were not Cold Immune, however, which meant that they wilted immediately to Blanche's Ice Blasts and lacked the same threat level as the Slingers. These outdoor areas in Act Five are all gigantic and it took a while to push through the three barricaded layers before reaching the stairs to the next region.

It was a relief to find Abbadon relatively early in the Frigid Highlands if only for a change of pace. The hellish subdungeon was the first place that the dreaded minotaurs could potentially appear, though Blanche dodged them in favor of witches and skeleton archers and more imps - another place with tons of ranged enemies. None of these foes were Cold Immune and they all collapsed readily to Blanche's spells. However, the Horror Archers had an extremely strong poison tied to their arrows which forced me to return to town on many occasions despite having maxed poison resistance. The Amazon Basin claims that they only do 30 poison damage which is clearly not correct; I had all kinds of issues with these skeleton archers when playing WillPower and I continue to suspect that this is some kind of unintended bug. There's no way that random skeletons should be doing thousands of poison damage on every arrow shot! The bony things died in two Ice Blasts apiece though so at least this area could be cleared quickly.

Blanche continued onwards to the Arreat Plateau as I wanted to find the next waypoint before stopping for the night. This was another area with nearly a dozen potential opponents for the game to choose between, only this time Blanche rolled a virtual lottery ticket as she was confronted with an incredibly easy set of monsters. The Plateau had Slinger spear cats once again, but this time not Cold Immune and therefore dying instantly whenever they appeared, along with lightning skeleton mages and yet another type of imp. All of these enemies had low health totals, none of them were Cold Immune, and Blanche was killing most of them with a single Ice Blast. Yes, one shot = one kill in Act Five of Hell difficulty! I couldn't believe how easy this area was for her. It was so easy that I was actually hoping for the Arreat Plateau waypoint to be located as far in the back corner as possible, which is essentially what happened since it appeared about 75% of the way through the area. The most notable event was a Multishot imp boss blinking into one of the Barricaded Towers where it fired... three Inferno blasts at once? I didn't know they could do that! Anyway, Blanche absolutely breezed through this region and I was kind of sad when it was over.

She still had to clear the Pit of Acheron subdungeon before wrapping up with this area, and guess who was lurking in there:

It was the first minotaurs of Hell difficulty, technically Blood Lords with physical damage immunity. The minotaurs are always dangerous for every character build, between their high health totals and insane damage, while presenting an even bigger threat for Blanche because several of the types are immune to being chilled or frozen. That wasn't the case for these Blood Lord minotaurs and Blanche was a bit lucky in finding only this single minotaur boss who was separated by a lava flow from her position. Blanche wasn't as safe as she seemed here because that thing also had the Teleportation ability, though she killed the thing before it ever blinked over to her. Most of the bosses in the Pit of Acheron rolled as imps or witches, both of which were vastly less scary for Blanche to deal with. These ranged monsters died immediately since they lacked innate cold immunity and didn't have enough health to survive more than one or two Ice Blasts. Therefore the subdungeon proved not to be particularly dangerous even though it could have been much worse if the bosses had rolled as minotaurs instead of imps and witches.

The other thing that I was tracking throughout this gaming session was how much damage that ethereal coronet was taking. I wanted to wear the thing as much as possible but of course it could never be repaired and eventually would shatter from accumulated damage. I figured that I would see where it stood at the end of this session and evaluate whether or not it would make it to the end of Act Five. So go ahead, take a guess at how many damage it had taken from clearing through the first three outdoor areas:

The correct answer was zero, zero durability lost thus far. I have no idea how the durability formula works but it looks like it was changed at some point over Diablo 2's extremely lengthy patching history since there's no way an item would have gone this long with no durability lost back in the day. In any case, if the coronet hadn't lost even one point of durability thus far, I was confident that it could make it through the rest of Act Five without breaking. Therefore I went ahead and used my socket quest to add a single socket to the item, stuffing a Ral rune inside for 30% more fire resistance to max out the stat. This would allow me to swap over to the health-boosting plated belt while still having solid fire resistance, plus give Blanche better protection against Nihlathak and his Corpse Explosion later on. Cold resistance tends to be less important than fire resistance in Diablo 2 and Blanche would still be able to get that number close to 60% with Malah's resistance scroll later - pretty amazing given the -73% cold resistance that Blanche was working around from her cold sundering charm.

My next gaming session focused on passing through the ice caverns that make up the middle portion of Act Five. Blanche entered the Crystalline Passage and started out by facing a witch boss that filled the cold tunnels with fiery projectiles. This monster type was Succubuses and fortunately it was one of the rare enemies in the Crystalline Passage that lacked natural cold immunity. There are ten different monsters that can appear in this area and fully six of them are Cold Immune! Anyway, that boss was quickly cleared out only to be replaced by a more dangerous threat: an Infidel boss with a Holy Freeze aura:

The Infidels were nasty customers for Blanche, packing innate cold immunity along with breaktaking speed and an attack that chilled without the need for Cold Enchanted trait (though this boss had that trait as well). Blanche ran into this crowd after exploring perhaps 10% of the Crystalline Passage and I could see immediately that it was going to spell disaster. Jarulf went down in a heap and I began sprinting back towards a small cul-de-sac that Blanche had cleared out earlier. She was barely able to toss down a town portal and escape, allowing me to come back from the Arreat Plateau waypoint and begin clearing the rest of the icy cave while that boss remained parked. I found that even the normal Infidels made for tough battles; this text report doesn't do a good job of conveying how fast their movement speed was and their chilling damage made them considerably faster than Blanche whenever they managed to hit her. Blanche made it about halfway through the floor before hitting a group of four Infidel champions, which was even worse in some ways than the first boss because all four champs were immune to being frozen. Jarulf died again and Blanche had to kite her way across virtually the whole Passage before she managed to down the champs. Their cowardly AI routine kicked in when they dropped low on health and turned to run away, something that helped a lot in breaking up that four-pack of champs. Eventually the whole floor was emptied out and Blanche returned to deal with the boss, which went much smoother now that she had proper retreat room. All told, I played this in textbook fashion for a character with Blanche's limitations but there was real danger here and even a minor misstep could have gotten her killed.

The Crystalline Passage waypoint was located near the Frozen River entrance while the Glacial Trail stairs were a good distance away. As such, I had Blanche push onwards into the Glacial Trail next in case she didn't have time to do all these areas in one session. The Glacial Trail didn't have anything nearly as dangerous as those Infidels, instead being packed full of Cold Immune opposition. There were Pit Viper snakes, Bone Mages tossing cold projectiles, and Rot Walker prowling skeletons - all three monsters having natural cold immunity. Again, that wasn't a surprise since all of the ice caverns in Act Five are packed full of Cold Immune monster types. It was amusing to face the skeleton mages where both sides were hurling ice magics at one another inside these frozen caverns. But most of all, the Glacial Trail was absolutely stuffed with the Rot Walker shambling skeletons, they were everywhere and outnumbered the other enemy types by something like a 2:1 margin. This was perfectly fine with Blanche as the slow-moving melee skeletons almost never drew close enough to hit her, even with their unpredictable charges. She could also shut down their gimmick of sometimes coming back to life after being defeated since their corpses would always shatter upon defeat. I considered this an outstanding roll on the monster draw and happily cleaned out the whole area.

I was much more concerned about the Drifter Cavern due to its tiny size; the Amazon Basin states that there can be as many as eight bosses in Hell difficulty which held the potential for various horrible things to go wrong. Blanche and Jarulf entered through the stairs and were immediately confronted by Succubus witches and more cold skeleton mages hurling their attacks from off to the right. That was honestly good news as those were two of the less dangeous enemies that can appear in this area, though Blanche had her hands full as this was a double boss pack and Jarulf was too stupid not to stand right in the middle of a full volley of incoming projectiles. She cleared out those initial threats and then circled around to the south, continuing to hug the outer edge of the Drifter Cavern, until running into a double boss pack of the skeleton mages:

The boss duo included the pictured Extra Fast skeleton mage along with another Fire Enchanted / Multishot / Stone Skin customer right next door. In fact, you can see the purple full rejuv potion that the first boss dropped on the ground if looking carefully above. Although there were lots of cryotechnics here with all of those cold blasts and Jarulf's lightning magic, the danger level wasn't too bad despite Blanche only having about 50% cold resistance. Other monster types would have made for a much worse double boss pack. I made sure to clear the entire outer edge of the cavern before venturing onto the center platform, and that proved to have been a wise decision when the third enemy type finally appeared in the form of Infidel champs. Argh, not those guys again! They killed Jarulf and forced another full rejuv before Blanche could defeat the pair that showed up. It turned out that there were two champ packs of Infidels lurking in the final third of the area and I was incredibly glad that those things hadn't been camping out at the entrance. This small cavern probably would have been undoable if they had jumped Blanche out of the gate. All told, Blanche made it to the gold chest in the back corner after having cleared seven different bosses, very glad to be done with this deathtrap.

I had time enough remaining to tackle the Frozen River as well before stopping. This area had one extremely easy opponent in the form of Ghosts, low health opponents with no protection against Blanche's cold damage who usually died in a single Ice Blast. Then there was a medium-difficulty enemy in the Succubuses, back yet again and often flying together in big covens. Situations like this one demanded hit-and-run tactics, firing a few Ice Blasts and then dodging around a corner, because it was impossible to stand in place and tank the full damage of their Blood Stars. Jarulf did not understand this concept and repeatedly he would stand in place to eat a full volley of witch projectiles, costing me huge amounts of money on his resurrection bills. The witches also liked to drop his defensive rating with their curses, something that's irrelevant for players but which matters a lot for the mercenaries who rely on having high defense to survive.

The third monster type in the Frozen River was the most dangerous, Snow Drifter yetis who were all tanky and all Cold Immune. These things always increase their speed after losing half their health and they had an innately chilling attack as well; in other words, another reprise of the same threat posed by those Infidels earlier. The map layout of the Frozen River helped Blanche for most of this dungeon, as she was often able to snipe the yetis in safety from across the river. She faced a Cursed yeti boss early in the level and I calmly led the thing to a back corner where Blanche escaped through a town portal, only to return from the Crystalline Passage and execute the thing from the other side of the watery divide. Hooray for tactics! Anyway, the normal enemies throughout most of the Frozen River weren't too bad, however Frozenstein at the end was another story. The shaggy thing unfortunately rolled Extra Fast and Cursed for its additional traits which made the boss about ten times more dangerous than normal. I was able to confront Frozenstein with only two minions in tow rather than the huge mob, then had to run for dear life as they chased Blanche around and around the bridges in the Frozen River. Jarulf had obviously died quickly against this threat (though he did get his Static Field off first, good job) and Blanche only managed to stay ahead of the boss by virtue of the slow swinging animation on the yeti melee attack. Eventually she managed to trap the three enemies on the other side of the river, slay them in safety, and come back with Jarulf to get the rest of the mob. Scary, scary stuff when Frozenstein had been chasing after Blanche with enough damage to kill her in probably three hits.

Anya handed over one of the best quest reward items I've ever seen:

Now this wasn't an item that Blanche herself would be using but holy cow, what a sweet orb for a Blizzard-based Sorceress! The item had +2 to Sorcie skill levels along with another +3 to Blizzard itself. That could be combined with a Spirit shield for +7 to Blizzard from the two arm slots alone, easily reaching SLVL 30 for Blizzard with other gear and maybe with the potential to hit SLVL 35 in a high roll scenario. I was curious what that might look like and ran the numbers on one of the D2 character building websites. A high level Blizzard of that sort would deal about 4000 damage, per tick of the Blizzard, hitting with area-of-effect damage, and that was before facting in the effects of Cold Mastery which would basically double the damage in practice. Yeah, that sounded rather powerful, heh. It's easy to forget sometimes just how much of a variant I'm playing with these characters in comparison to the standard D2R builds. I didn't even consider Blanche to be a particularly restricted build, however she still had no Teleport, no Static Field, no Energy Shield, and her whole offense was based around a CLVL 6 skill. The people who only use the most overpowered skills and rely on traded/twinked/muled gear aren't really playing the same game here.

I almost always dedicate a full gaming session to Nihlathak's Temple and followed the usual pattern for Blanche. I wasn't expecting the small entry area to pose much of a problem, then noticed that the Prowling Dead outside were all naturally Cold Immune - uh oh. This meant that the skeletons would take about ten shots apiece instead of two shots, though fortunately their corpses would shatter without rising again. Upon entering the red portal, I made sure to run over to the right hand side before the skeletons woke up. You want to do this to provide an escape through a town portal while still leaving the possibility of re-entering through the red portal. That was exactly what happened with Blanche, as I had to leave via town portal two different times when too many of the Prowling Dead swarmed her position. Blanche was making some progress with each trip back into the temple and her third venture inside secured enough territory to be safe. Pindleskin landed a single charge that dealt something like 800 damage, yeargh! I have no idea what happened there but Blanche drank her full rejuv and blasted the living daylights out of the boss (who was strangely not Cold Immune). Too bad I didn't manage to get any screenshots of this action, there was a little too much going on at the time.

The three floors of Nihlathak's Temple are another place with a wide variety of potential enemies and how difficult they prove to be depends greatly on what the gameplay happens to roll. The Halls of Anguish produced a monster mix that would have been tough for many other characters while presenting few issues for Blanche: Devilkin with their shamans, Flayers, and Tomb Creeper leapers. The devilkin are normally a pain in the butt due to getting resurrected by their shamans... except that never happened for Blanche due to her Ice Blasts, making these critters very easy to handle. The flayers were similar (and did not have their own shamans present), lacking cold immunity as well and typically dying in a single Ice Blast. While the total number of enemies was high between the devilkin and the flayers, they couldn't cause that much danger with both of them getting one-shotted. The leapers were in fact Cold Immune, however they had barely 3500 HP and still died in relatively few Ice Blasts. The leapers are supposed to be a bad enemy type for Sorcies but I've never had much trouble with them due to how slowly they attack. The highlight of the floor was a Cantor Trophy shield dropping with +3 to Necromancer Poison and Bone skills. That could be really useful on a future Necro build so into the stash it went.

The Halls of Pain were a different story. After that amazingly friendly first floor, Blanche found herself walking into a traffic jam down on the second level. The Halls of Pain were packed full of Blood Maggots, tons and tons of maggots everywhere, including a double boss pack near the entry staircase. They kept breeding more and more of the little bugs which all required an individual Ice Blast to squish, with Blanche's only spell still limited to single-target damage. Mixed in with the maggots were Razor Spine quill rats who dealt heavy poison damage and had projectiles that were all but invisible against the dark brown features of this temple. At least the third monster type was the utterly irrelevant Temple Guard baboons, who had a weird ghostly coloring and were immune to being chilled, and yet lacked cold immunity and therefore died in rapid fashion. Mostly the whole floor was spent clearing out maggots and quill rats, a tedious business that caused Blanche to spend most of the Halls of Pain glowing green with poison. On the positive side, this wasn't really dangerous in any way unless I acted like Jarulf and just stood in place eating one volley of quill spines after another. It could have been so, so much worse: Night Lord minotaurs and Grotesques with their breeding pups are both possibilities here.

The Halls of Vaught are a much smaller area and this time had a heavy undead feel, with more Prowling Dead along with plenty of skeleton archers. Blanche failed to find Nihlathak down the first few quadrants that she explored, instead discovering several batteries of those skeleton archers that pincushioned Jarulf with their arrows. Nihlathak was hiding in the final quadrant that Blanche visited and I began the careful process of drawing out as many monsters as possible for disposal, far away from the traitor himself. Blanche's freezing spells gave her an advantage here compared to most other characters, as her defeated foes exploded into ice crystals on death without leaving bodies behind for Nihlathak to blow up with his Corpse Explosion. That meant there was no danger, right? Unfortunately not so much: Jarulf would sometimes kill an enemy with his lightning to leave a body behind, or Nihlathak's summoned suicide minions would detonate before Blanche could freeze them. I brought Blanche's alternate amulet with 99 additional life on it to cover those situations, and sure enough, Nihlathak still managed to detonate one body that dealt more than 800 damage to Blanche! I saw 300-something health on her orb and drank a full rejuv; the corpse that had blown up hadn't even been remotely close to Blanche's position, sheesh. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the monsters in this room didn't leave a body behind and that neutered most of the threat that Nihlathak could pose. By the time that I snapped the screenshot above, the room was nearly empty of enemies and a series of Ice Blasts tore right through Nihlathak to secure the kill.

Afterwards, I tried to see if I could personalize Blanche's Cold Rupture charm only to discover that no, that wasn't possible. Apparently only equipment can be personalized in Diablo 2 and therefore I used the quest reward on Blanche's ethereal coronet. It had finally taken some damage to its durability while still holding at 43/46 remaining - Blanche looked plenty good enough to finish the rest of Act Five. She had also leveled to CLVL 83 during this session and had exactly one level remaining before capping out at CLVL 84 with the quest reward from the Ancients. Ice Blast was averaging 2434 damage per shot which was doubling to 4800 damage against nearly everything that wasn't outright Cold Immune via her SLVL 28 Cold Mastery. Against Cold Immune targets, that base damage was reduced by 64% to about 875 per Ice Blast which was why Blanche experienced such a bifurcated experience against Cold Immune or non-Cold Immune targets. She was dealing nearly 5000 damage or merely 875 damage depending on immunity status - and essentially nothing in between. There's a reason why I keep talking about cold immunity over and over again in these reports!

Blanche continued onwards in a new gaming session that emerged outdoors onto the Frozen Tundra. This tends to be one of the easiest parts of Act Five and Blanche did indeed draw a friendly group of monsters: witches, imps, and the Death Berserker creatures that send their tentacles into the ground. None of these enemies had cold immunity and everything died in either one or two shots of Ice Blast. The ranged projectiles did cause some problems for Jarulf, as he never had sense enough to avoid walking into them and dying, so I left the mercenary dead for the entirety of the Frozen Tundra. The danger level was very low for Blanche and frankly she didn't need his help against this collection of non-immune targets. The other noteworthy event was the Frozen Tundra waypoint spawning right next to the entrance from the Glacial Trail, quite literally three steps away in a spot that I've never seen before. In other words, this was a completely useless waypoint and Blanche would have to continue onwards to the Ancients Way to make any real progress.

There is a subdungeon in the Frozen Tundra, the last of the reprised Act Four areas known as the Infernal Pit. I had my fingers crossed that Blanche wouldn't roll the deadly minotaurs inside, a prayer that was answered as instead this place was heavy on Balrogs and blowdart fetishes. While the fiery red Balrogs looked pretty cool from a visual spectacle, they didn't have any cold protection and died in droves to Ice Blast. This turned into another easy area and I didn't have to work very hard to full clear it with Blanche.

The Ancients Way was much more difficult and the challenges began immediately when Blanche ran into Abominable champions shortly after coming down the stairs. She had previously seen another version of these yetis back in the Frozen River and the issues remained the same: Cold Immune, fast movement speed, high health, etc. The biggest problem here in the Ancients Way was confronting these things so quickly after coming down the entry stairs with little room to fight or escape. Jarulf's initial suicidal stand managed to buy enough time for Blanche to kill one champ, then there was a tiny side alcove where Blanche led the other three champs and escaped via town portal. That meant a long, long walk back from that earlier waypoint in the Frozen Tundra via the stairs; Blanche then lured out and killed the other three champs one at a time, working with minimal room near the stairs. Just when I thought this was over, a few more steps down the icy tunnels produced an Abominable boss with the pictured Extra Fast trait, argh! That prompted a second retreat back to the little alcove and escape through a town portal, a second walk back from the Frozen Tundra waypoint, and then another slow process of luring out the minions who at least could be frozen and disposed. Blanche didn't face the boss until all of them were dead, at which time I took the above picture. It was another case where the screenshot shows things under control, which was emphatically not the case when the battle was first joined.

Oh, and then another half a dozen steps down the same corridor was yet another boss, this time a less dangerous cold skeleton mage though it did have the Cursed trait to keep me on my toes. Here's a quick diagram showing where all of these enemies were located and the tiny confines in which Blanche was forced to operate. All of the worst threats in Diablo 2 tend to be like this, shoved right up into the player's face where there's no room to operate. Anyway, the third monster type in this area was the Afflicted demons that spit lightning, about as good as Blanche could have hoped for. It took a while to clear out the Ancients Way since the yetis and the bone mages were both Cold Immune and required lots of shots to eliminate. There was an additional Abominable boss and another Abominable champ group later on the floor; both of them were confronted with most of the area cleared though which minimized the danger level. If Blanche had room to kite backwards, she was usually pretty safe.

Now the Icy Cellar subdungeon remained to be cleared, an area similar to the Ancients Way in boss count but with about 20% of the space, lovely. Blanche came down the stairs and found an Undead Stygian Doll boss right out of the gate. It had the Extra Strong trait but thankfully was located on the other side of the waterway running through the little cavern, allowing Blanche to destroy it and its minions at a safe distance. I'd have to be on my guard for the exploding dolls though since there would surely be others lurking in wait. The outer edge of the Icy Cellar was surprisingly empty and Blanche circled around to the bottom of the area before running into more opposition. The other two enemies proved to be Abominables (again) along with Siren witches, both of them unfortunately Cold Immune. Most of the bosses rolled here as Sirens, which was good luck as I preferred to see them rather than the yetis. It wasn't good luck for Jarulf who died pretty quickly to massed Siren Blood Stars; I left him dead temporarily as Blanche exchanged fire with the witches. Blanche took down two Siren champ packs and then two more Siren bosses, all of whom were hanging out on the central island in the middle of the Icy Cellar. Once they were gone, I revived Jarulf because there were more undead dolls skittering around and he was handy for absorbing their death explosions. Snapchip Shatter was protecting the gold treasure chest with his minions, and I realized upon spotting him that Blanche hadn't seen any of the frozen ice monsters throughout the entirety of Act Five. Those things are Cold Immune and can't be chilled or frozen, but are also so slow-moving that they don't present any real danger. I wouldn't have minded drawing them more often, though Blanche had similarly dodged the minotaurs throughout this Act so she couldn't complain.

I'll mention one other small tidbit. Blanche had to return to town a lot, both because her inventory space was so limited but also because she constantly had to restock blue mana potions when facing Cold Immune enemies. A single Abominable monster would drain more than half of her mana orb and even heading out into the field with nine mana potions (four on belt and five more in inventory) she still ran out pretty frequently. So Blanche went back to town a lot and on one occasion Malah did not have any mana potions for sale! I think I've seen that happen exactly one other time in several thousand trips back to see Malah over the years, heh. Blanche had to step outside Harrogath and re-enter which refreshed the town merchants, with this being unusual enough to comment on.

I closed out this gaming session by taking on the Ancients, one of the biggest danger factors in the whole game. Each of the three Ancients will roll two additional boss traits in Hell difficulty and what they end up getting can make the fight substantially more difficult. I prepared the battlefield with additional red and blue potions and clicked the statues to get started. Jarulf lasted the milliseconds that I expected against the Barbarian trio while I tried to squint and read what traits they had. As they began chasing after Blanche, I realized that Talic had drawn the Cold Enchanted trait which must have created a cold immunity. Korlic is always Cold Immune in Hell difficulty but this meant that Blanche would have to face two of them with that defensive property, not what I wanted. I opened a town portal and rerolled the fight, only to discover on this second attempt that Talic had rolled the Extra Fast trait. I discovered this in the worst way possible, Talic sprinting out of the gate and Whirlwinding on top of Blanche which did close to 900 damage - ouch! He was faster than Blanche with that Extra Fast trait which was a total disaster; Blanche drank a full rejuv and ran screaming out of a town portal. Whew, it couldn't be much worse than that, right?

Wrong: on my third attempt, Talic was EVEN FASTER. He flew at warp speed over to Blanche and Whirlwinded on top of her for an instant one-shot kill:

Wow... I was completely stunned, just staring at the screen in disbelief for nearly a minute afterwards. I've fought the Ancients dozens of times and I've *NEVER* seen anything like that. Talic was preposterously fast and he eliminated Blanche's healthbar in a flash, with absolutely no time to react. I don't think there was anything that I could have done differently here, any Sorceress that came to this fight without Teleport was never going to escape this death. It all happened so quickly that I didn't get a chance to read the boss traits, but what I think happened was Talic rolling the Extra Fast / Extra Strong combo and with another one of the Ancients rolling a Fanaticism aura. That setup would have given him quadruple normal damage while also moving at roughly triple the normal speed. Like I said, I had no time to react and didn't get a glimpse of the actual traits, it's my best working theory though. (I should consider recording footage in the background while playing D2 so I can go back and look at this stuff later.)

This sucked, this whole thing really sucked. However, it wasn't as if Blanche had a deathless streak going so I figured I might as well return for another shot at the bosses. On attempt #4, one of the Ancients rolled a Might aura and that was another situation that she had to dodge. By this point I kind of wish that I'd simply taken the first battle even if it meant facing double Cold Immune opponents, sigh. Blanche nearly died again making it out of her town portal since a Madawc axe throw with that Might aura did insane damage. The fifth attempt was finally playable:

Granted, it still wasn't good as ALL THREE of the Ancients rolled the Extra Strong trait. I knew that if Talic ever caught Blanche, with a full Whirlwind and the Extra Strong affix backing it up, then I'd be adding another death to her ongoing tally. I simply had to ensure that the three Barbarians never caught up to her, which is exactly what happened over the following tense minutes of combat. Madawc (Extra Strong / Spectral Hit) did not have cold immunity and led the charge as we ran in loops around the pillars. He ate all of the initial Ice Blasts and did first. Talic was next as I was exceptionally careful never to let him get within range of Blanche. That left Korlic (Extra Strong / Magic Resistant) alone, who I had known would be the last one standing due to his cold immunity. Korlic's constant jumping via Leap Strike also caused him to jump over many of Blanche's Ice Blasts and the combat stretched out for an extended period. Blanche was dealing roughly 800-900 damage per shot against a target with 115,000 HP so this did take a while. My in-game clock stated that it took about a dozen minutes for this last and successful attempt to play out.

As disappointed as I was to see Blanche suffer another death, I genuinely don't think there was much she could have done differently here. If the rolls on the boss traits are really bad for the Ancients, and you're playing a character that doesn't have summoned minions or an escape skill, well, there aren't a lot of options available. I should mention as well that the Ancients are all immune to chilling effects which was certainly bad news for poor Blanche! Hopefully I'll never again see whatever trait combo that was, sheesh.

Before booting up what I hoped would be the final gaming session for Blanche, I took a few minutes to look over the monster list for the Worldstone Keep floors. I concluded that the only enemy type that I didn't want to see was the minotaurs as everything else looked a lot less dangerous. Blanche hurried up from the Ancients Way waypoint and entered the Worldstone Keep, only to find... yep, you guessed it. There were Death Lord minotaurs here right out of the gate with only a small amount of breathing room established. These things were also immune to being chilled, making it impossible to slow them down in any way, though they were fortunately not Cold Immune and therefore took full damage from Blanche's Ice Blasts. I was able to take down the first boss while Jarulf was in the process of getting killed, thankfully with the individual minions only taking about six shots apiece and the boss a few more than that. There would be three different minotaur bosses over the course of this floor but only the first one was truly dangerous given the limited space available at the time. Scary as this was, Blanche's Ice Blasts did enough damage to force the minotaurs into hit recovery animation and she was never chased into bailing out through a town portal. I slowly lured out the minotaurs in small groups and handled the floor in about as much safety as possible. It was a sign of my familiarity with this character that Blanche was able to defeat such dire opponents without ever losing control or coming close to death.

I didn't bother writing about the other two enemies on Worldstone 1 because they were irrelevant; only the minotaurs posed a dire threat to Blanche's continued survival. (They were Unholy Corpse prowling dead and Ghoul Lord vampires if anyone cares.) Worldstone 2 is the only one of the three floors where the minotaurs can't appear, instead having Black Soul gloams and Claw Vipers and poison-tossing skeleton mages. None of these enemies were Cold Immune (despite the snakes having been so back in Act Two) and Blanche rolled through without too much trouble. The Death Lord minotaurs were back again on Worldstone 3, however this time there were no minotaur bosses and only a single minotaur champ pack. That decreased the danger level enormously since the bosses rolling as Oblivion Knights or Soul Killer fetishes were inherently much easier to face. These last two floors went past quickly and the whole Worldstone Keep was cleared in about 45 minutes of real world time. I tried to enjoy this time with Blanche since her journey was coming to a close.

The Throne of Destruction entry staircase was not trapped this time, something I always note given how often there are a dozen monsters jammed into that first corridor. The small maze of tunnels held Horadrim Ancient greater mummies with no undead minions present (which always looks weird) along with witches and one final instance of the Undead Soul Killer exploding dolls. I was able to keep all but a handful of them from detonating on top of Blanche thanks to hiding behind Jarulf whenever they showed up. The first few bosses in the throne room were easy for Blanche to deal with, since both Colenzo and Achmel rely on reviving their minions over and over again. That didn't happen thanks to the power of cold damage, something I will sorely miss with my next D2 character. The skeleton mages brought along with Achmel were all Cold Immune but the boss himself and his fellow greater mummies were not, which I think was better than the other way around.

The last three bosses were a bit tougher. Bartuc rolled Fire Enchanted / Extra Stong which kept him from developing an immunity to cold damage. He and the other Council minions pushed Blanche backwards but without having enough health to last for very long. Jarulf had surprisingly lasted throughout all of these battles before falling against Ventar as the Extra Fast trait on the Balrog boss was simply too much to overcome. Ventar pushed Blanche backwards out of the central gate, with my ice Sorcie firing off Ice Blasts all the while, with the demon's healthbar nearly running out by the time of the screenshot above. This was the most threatening of the five bosses but, again, a lack of cold immunity allowed Blanche to chop down the demons at a reasonable speed. Lister was unexpectedly much easier than Ventar due to his slower movement speed. Lister had Extra Strong trait but I made certain that he never drew close enough to chomp on Blanche.

I brought back Jarulf for the final confrontation with Baal though I didn't expect him to last for long against the game's final boss. To my pleasant surprise, Baal utterly failed to show up for this boss fight, egregiously mailing in his performance while doing nothing of consequence. Blanche planted herself at the base of the bridge, with Baal over on the other side of the screen, and then held down the right mouse button unloading Ice Blast after Ice Blast into the Lord of Destruction. Baal responded by casting a few spells here and there but mostly he just... kind of sat there getting pummeled with ice projectiles and making a bunch of grunting noises. Something similar had happened back in Nightmare difficulty for Blanche, surely Baal would do SOMETHING here in Hell difficulty, right? Nope: Baal teleported to the bottom of the bridge when he had about 25% health remaining, which caused me to back up Blanche a few steps and resume spamming Ice Blasts. He was dead about 15 seconds later:

I did not have to return back to town for more potions and Jarulf survived the whole battle untouched. The in-game clock stated that barely a minute had passed - what an absolute joke! Mephisto was the only one of the Act End bosses that had posed any kind of a threat for Blanche, the others had all fallen over like bowling pins. It turns out that Ice Blast is a genuinely powerful spell when beefed up with a bunch of extra skill points and full skill synergies. Anything that wasn't Cold Immune died in a hurry against Blanche's setup, and if her character build wasn't great at dealing with area-of-effect threats, she was downright amazing when it came to single-target damage. Fast casted cold magic could lock up nearly any threat and make them cry for mercy.

As far as evaluating Blanche as a whole, unfortunately this character proved to be a failure in terms of the goals that I set for her. My goal was to make it through all three difficulties without dying, in pretend Hardcore fashion, and she failed at that not only once, but twice. Hephasto and the Ancients both showed that high speed plus high damage plus Cold Enchanted trait together spelled doom for Blanche, as she was unable to get away from the melee threats that killed her. However, I want to make one thing clear to anyone who might be reading along: it's OK to fail sometimes! Diablo 2 is a challenging game on Hell difficulty, made even harder when slapping additional variant restrictions on top of the standard character builds, and sometimes everything isn't going to work out perfectly. With a tiny bit more luck on the boss traits rolled by Hephasto and the Ancients, Blanche certainly could have made it through the whole game without dying. Conversely, with worse luck on her own character run, Electric Tsunami easily could have suffered one or more deaths of her own instead of having a perfect deathless streak. You do the best that you can while understanding that not everything is completely under your own control, and sometimes things are simply not going to work out. I always remember the old Teddy Roosevelt quote for those situations:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Blanche may have failed at what I set out to do, but at least I'd like to think that she "dared greatly" along the way. I should also mention that I had an absolute blast playing this character and confirmed that the sundering charms work really well in practice, therefore opening up at least half a dozen future single-element character builds that I hope to test out down the road. That, I think, will be the true legacy of Blanche, the Ice Queen of Diablo 2.