Corvus: Hell Difficulty Part Three

I was more concerned about the two underground areas in the Flayer Jungle since both of them have the chance to hold the dangerous undead dolls with their death explosions. The Flayer Dungeon was the first of the two that Corvus came across (and the only one that's mandatory to complete Act Three) which prompted a trip down into its narrow passageways. To my great relief there were no undead dolls on any of the three floors of the Flayer Dungeon, instead lots and lots more of the flayers and soul killers to fight through. These were threats that Corvus could handle, even when the flayer bosses rolled annoying auras like Holy Freeze and Blessed Aim. Witch Doctor Endugu on the bottom floor had a Might aura on an otherwise heavily defensive Stone Skin / Magic Resistant combo. He was easy pickings once Corvus could actually find a path to the gold treasure chest through the maze on the bottom level.

By way of contrast, the Swampy Pit did have the exploding dolls:

The good news is that the chittering little things only appeared on the first floor and failed to show up on the other two, whew. I was very careful in moving Corvus through the hallways as soon as I spotted the undead soul killers, casting spirit wolves into each new intersection and around corners to avoid Corvus himself getting attacked by the monsters. This was another place where having the spirit wolves made a huge difference as compared to Nightmare difficulty, warm bodies to stand in the way of the enemies and tank those death explosions when they went off. The ravens certainly had no trouble killing the undead dolls and the my top priority was therefore not standing anywhere near them when they went off. There were a good number of gloams and bats that made up the rest of the monster mix in the Swampy Pit and I had the good fortune to avoid seeing any dangerous boss traits on the one floor where the undead dolls were present. This really wasn't too bad and certainly could have been much worse.

One small item note from the Swampy Pit: Corvus found an Aegis shield inside which is another one of the elite shields that can hold up to 4 sockets. It's far inferior to a Monarch shield as the basis for a Spirit runeword though because it requires a truly hefty 219 Strength as opposed to the 156 Strength for the Monarch option. I hardly wanted to drop an extra 63 points into Strength to equip this Aegis shield but at the same time Corvus still had not seen a single Monarch shield for the entirety of his journey. I put it in stash for now in case he continued to have horrible luck at finding the shield he needed. (Corvus had found roughly two to three dozen elite shields thus far and not one of them had been a Monarch shield.)

The Swampy Pit and the Flayer Jungle waypoint were situated in the final jungle alcove which meant that it wasn't much further to the gates of Kurast. After pushing aside Stormtree, Corvus once again found himself relaxing his way through easy opposition in Lower Kurast and the Kurast Bazaar. These regions had lots of thorned hulks again along with vultures, leapers, and zealot/sexton pairs. Corvus had already seen other versions of these monster types previously and cleaned them up with ease, the only new enemies being the zealot/sexton opponents. The healing from the corrupted monks proved to be insufficient to keep the zealots alive as long as I made sure to focus all five ravens on a single target. Again, these places were a total breeze in comparison to the deadly ending stages of Act Two and I was running Corvus on autopilot as he looted his way across the huts of the jungle city.

Unfortunately the easy parts of Act Three were about to come to a close as Corvus was confronted with the Sewers, the Kurast Temples, Travincal, and then the Durance. I started out by tackling the two temples located in the Kurast Bazaar, the infamous Ruined Temple with Lam Esen's Tome and the much less well known Disused Fane. Let me be clear here: the Kurast Temples are quite possibly the single most dangerous areas in the entire game. They are known for having hellacious stairs traps, each temple is miniscule in size with no room to manuever, and each one always has two bosses present in Hell difficulty. This was where I lost my last pseusdo-Hardcode character Lernie and it was one of the most likely remaining places for Corvus to suffer his first death. With that in mind, I entered the Disused Fane first and...

Corvus was confronted with this insane stairs trap immediately upon entering. It was apparently three spiders and ten corrupted rogues although I couldn't tell the exact numbers until after I went back and looked at this screenshot. The monsters were so tightly packed here that Corvus couldn't even move; I tried to scramble off to either side and open a town portal to clear space at the stairs only to find that Corvus wouldn't take more than a step in any direction. All that I could do was flee back up the stairs which were fortunately still next to my character's position. I tried three different times to fight my way into the Disused Fane and had to escape back up every time - just no room whatsoever to move in any direction. At least it had been normal enemies and not a boss at the steps or else Corvus likely would have died here. This is why the Kurast Temples have a danger factor off the charts: you're always stepping blindly into a situation that could result in unavoidable death. If this had been back in 2000 or 2001, when graphics cards were much slower, the monsters almost certainly would have killed Corvus before the dungeon could even load onto the screen. I had that happen many times with characters back in the day. It's a shame that Blizzard never fixed these areas so that characters could actually GET DOWN THE DARN STAIRS before being overwhelmed with opponents, sigh.

Anyway, I would have to come back to the Disused Fane in the next session when the enemies inside would be rerolled and hopefully not spawn in the same position on top of the stairs. Corvus headed over to the Ruined Fane which proved to have a vampire boss pack right on top of the stairs. That was nowhere near as deadly though since the vampires liked to sit back at range and shoot off their Fire Ball and Meteor spells which gave Corvus at least a tiny amount of room to maneuver. Six vampires dropping Meteors in a sardine call was not an insignificant threat but Corvus was able to down them without too much trouble. He had drawn the left-facing "T" formation and I made absolutely sure that both of the little side wings were cleared out before slowly inching forward into the main chamber. One step, two steps... and then Sarina came charging out with her whole crew in tow:

Sarina drew Cold and Fire Enchanted for her extra traits which wasn't too bad all things considered. I wouldn't have been overly worried except that there was a second spider boss who emerged with the evil rogues, and the arachnid was also Extra Fast with a Might aura to pump up the damage of everything in the room - urp. I did some calculations afterwards and based on the spider's MLVL that was an SLVL 14 Might aura increasing the physical damage of the other enemies by a whopping 170%! Thus everything was moving at hyper speed from the double Extra Fast traits and hitting vastly harder than normal. I watched in horror as the line of spirit wolves starting caving inwards under the pressure of that rampaging mob of enemies, bending backwards as if a real physical force was being applied to it. For once in the game, I was exceedingly glad that Corvus was getting some faster cast from his Spirit sword as it allowed me to summon more spirit wolves at a faster rate. I was holding down the spirit wolf hotkey and spam-casting as fast as the animation would play to replace the poor minions as they died. This meant that I couldn't target the ravens as usual and yet they seemed to have a mind of their own as they went after Sarina early in the fight and took her down quickly - bless those birds! I only knew Sarina was dead from the fire/cold death explosion going off in that packed group of evil foes. Just needed the spirit wolves to hold the line a little... bit... longer!

It turned out that they could, just barely. The monsters were exceedingly close to breaking through that narrow doorway where Corvus was making his stand; if they had broken through into the more open space on the other side, their weight of numbers would have been enough to surround Corvus and I would have had to flee back up the stairs. I don't think this would have been possible without having SLVL 28 ravens and spirit wolves, as the wolves in particular wouldn't have been able to tank long enough without all the extra life they were getting from those extra skill points. Regardless, the monsters were not able to punch through the spirit wolves and the ravens threw them back in a mass slaughter at that doorway. The spider boss was one of the last to fall as I'd been unable to point the ravens at the creature to remove the Might aura. Corvus was rewarded with five additional skill points to spend which became 11 more total HP. Better than nothing, certainly. And with that finished, I had one out of the six Kurast Temples done. Only five more to go!

I started up the next session of Diablo 2 the following day and picked up from the Kurast Bazaar waypoint, needing to return to the Disused Fane after that earlier abandoned attempt. This time the place was a total anticlimax: there were no monsters crowding the stairs and Corvus was able to enter normally followed by working his way through the little subdungeon one room at a time. Neither of the two bosses were noteworthy enough to screenshot and the whole thing was finished in about two minutes. This was a good example of how random the Kurast Temples can be, sometimes incredible deathtraps and sometimes barely even worth a mention.

I had to brave the Sewers next for the final Khalim's body part and unfortunately the place turned out to have horrors and horadrim ancients as one of the monster types. I wasn't exactly dancing for joy at having to face greater mummies yet again, however this time around I found that they were much easier than the slog through the Tombs of Tal Rasha. The Kurast Sewers simply didn't pack as many greater mummies in one place as the Act Two tombs had done and it was rare for Corvus to see more than two of them hanging out together down here in that dark. That made it much easier to dispose of them and prevent long periods of skeleton resurrection. Corvus may have also been helped here by the other monsters in the Sewers, mummies and mosquitos, avoiding the undead soul killers which could have shown up in the Sewers. This is a huge area and it took a good while to clear out everything though without nearly the frustrations of the previous time that Corvus had seen the greater mummies.

Upper Kurast was another easy outdoors area that Corvus could have done in his sleep, the only encounter of note coming against a Cursed / Extra Strong / Extra Fast thorned hulk boss who hit incredibly fast and incredibly hard. I've never seen one of the evil tree monsters do that much damage before and Corvus had to spam-cast the spirit wolves once again to keep his wall of protection in place long enough for the ravens to peck away at the mob. That left the remaining four Kurast Temples, the two in Upper Kurast and the two on the Kurast Causeway, with it being a total toss of the dice as far as what Corvus might find inside. It turned out that he had good luck and managed to avoid any more absurd stairs traps; there were enemies near the entrance on several occasions but each time Corvus was able to get the spirit wolves in place before he was assaulted. There were several vampire bosses and a Cursed spider boss in the two temples located in Upper Kurast, nothing rising to the level of real danger. The Disused Reliquary on the Kurast Causeway served up the biggest hairball of the group:

The place was crawling with Serpent Magus snakes with bright blue scales and Corvus found his minions drawn into an intense conflict at this doorway. Two of the snakes had funky colors and I realized that this had to be a double boss pack, one of which had the Extra Fast / Cursed traits visible in the screenshot above; the other one I wasn't able to capture before it died. Much like the struggle against Sarina earlier, the serpents tried to crush Corvus and his spirit wolves through sheer weight of numbers with only the narrow confines of that doorway keeping them at bay. The bodies just piled up in heaps due to the gruesome slaughter taking place; it would have been even worse if the spirit wolves left a body behind instead of puffing into smoke. Long story short, Corvus was able to keep the monsters at bay with only the blood-drenched floor bearing testament to the vicious fighting that had taken place here. There were more snakes, bats, and corrupted rogue archers in the Ruined Fane but nothing that led to this kind of intense battle. Corvus was pretty lucky that the second half of the Kurast Temples was so much easier than the initial two he entered. As bad as it had been, things could have been much worse.

I love Travincal as a final conclusion to the long march through the jungles of Act Three and it delivered an exciting spectacle once again. The vampires were out in force hurling their Fire Balls and Meteors at Corvus, combining at times with the hierophants who would drop Blizzard spells from the sky. Corvus did not have 90% cold resistance this time around and those things hurt if he stood in them for any length of time. While none of these foes were too bad when encountered individually, large groups of enemies could combine together to make them a lot more troublesome. There was a hierophant champ pack located near the two pools in central Travincal and they were all healing one another to prevent Corvus from bursting down individual targets. The four of them stacked their Blizzard spells on top of one another at one point and Corvus had to drink a full rejuv as his health orb plummeted out of nowhere. I resolved this little mess by dragging a couple of the hierophants away from their friends for solitary disposal.

The Council was handled in pretty much the same fashion since they kept running out of the central temple one at a time rather than staying united as a group. First a couple of the minions came out to be killed followed by Geleb who had Extra Fast and Multishot traits to go along with his innate Extra Strong / Fire Enchanted. Geleb didn't have any resistances that Corvus cared about though and the ravens were very much up to the task of defeating him once the spirit wolves had the Council boss locked in place. Ismail followed shortly thereafter and I don't recall even seeing Toorc; he must have been part of the big crowd of enemies that clumped up at the entrance to the main temple. I honestly thought that the Council would be tougher than they proved to be in practice and it all went off about as smoothly as could be.

Unfortunately Corvus now had to full clear his way through the huge expanses of the Durance of Hate thanks to the place being inflated in size for Hell difficulty. The first floor wasn't that bad as Corvus avoided drawing any of the undead stygian dolls, instead getting the other three potential monsters (mummies, vampires, and maulers). This floor was particularly heavy on the vampires which were probably the least dangerous of the three enemies; the mummies did hit hard if Corvus ever wound up close enough to be in range. I wasn't so lucky on the much larger second floor which did have the undead dolls present, the same pattern that had occurred back in Nightmare difficulty for this character. Unlike Nightmare difficulty, however, this time around having the spirit wolves made all the difference as I could plant them in front of the skittering bone creatures to keep them off of Corvus himself. It also helped that most of the bosses on Durance 2 popped up as vampires or mummies; I think there was only one undead doll boss in the whole place. That's not to say that there was no danger here, as one time an undead stygian doll minion exploded next to Corvus and dealt about 400 damage, ouch! A group of them going off at once would absolutely spell death and I couldn't exactly tell the ravens and wolves to stop their attacks. I took things very carefully and made sure that the undead things only set off their death explosions against the wolves at a safe distance.

It wound up taking about an hour of real world time to complete Durance 2. Remember that the huge size of the floor doesn't contain any more bosses than much smaller areas like Upper Kurast which means that the vast majority of the place is full of low-danger normal monsters. It was honestly kind of relaxing as Corvus methodically made his way through all of the rooms and for whatever reason I wasn't as annoyed as I had been back in Nightmare. There was one item drop of note: a Monarch shield finally appeared! Only it was a magical version of the item which meant that it could never be used for a runeword, argh! There's no way to turn a blue magical item back into a white normal item in Diablo 2 and runewords don't work on a magical item even if it happens to have sockets. This was another cruel joke from the game as Corvus continued to search in vain for a usable 4 socket elite shield.

Durance 3 dialed up the challenge level again with a double boss pack at the gates leading into the central room:

Bremm Sparkfirst added the Multishot and Extra Strong traits to go along with his base abilities, and then note that Corvus was also Cursed here from a second vampire boss who was hanging out in the same area as Bremm. I had to step very carefully around the Council member dealing quadruple his normal physical damage; fortunately Bremm had Holy Shock for his aura which didn't do anything to magnify the physical damage further. Corvus was able to lure Bremm and his minions into the entry room first and then pick off the vampires in smaller groups once the sparking one was dead. This turned out to be the worst threat that Durance 3 would toss out for Corvus; Maffer had the Stone Skin trait to make him Physical Immune but he was lacking any vampires for cover and went down quickly to the full pack of spirit wolves. Wyand was Extra Strong / Multishot in a repeat of Bremm, however without the Cursed debuff in effect that was readily handled by the animal crew. Mephisto was the only foe remaining afterwards:

Unlike in Nightmare difficulty, Corvus had the spirit wolves to lock him in place and prevent the Prime Evil from moving around. Also unlike in Nightmare difficulty, Corvus didn't have 90% cold resistance anymore and ate one of Mephisto's cold shots which did almost 400 damage to him, yikes! That thing is definitely something to be feared; the Amazon Basin says that it does 203 lightning damage and 291 cold damage in Hell difficulty. After that I made sure to keep Corvus well away from any incoming projectiles while the spirit wolves and the ravens did their thing. It took them about two minutes and a lot of wolf resummons to chew through Mephisto's healthbar for the kill. This boss is infamous for dropping lots of high end gear (thus the endless treasure hunting Mephy runs online) and Corvus found the unique light plate Heavenly Garb in the resulting loot. While it wasn't anything particularly amazing, Heavenly Garb was probably about as good as the Hawkmail armor that Corvus had been wearing for ages. I held onto it as a potential option for later although I'd gotten so attached to the green color of Hawkmail on Corvus that I was reluctant to give it up.

On then to Act Four which is probably my favorite overall part of the game. The Outer Steppes turned out to be a near preview of the Chaos Sanctuary with corpulents, doom knights, and Doom Caster finger mages for the three monster types. Most of the bosses rolled as Doom Casters which was a pleasant surprise as they were the easiest opponents to kill by a good margin. The finger mages had roughly a third of the health of the corpulents and their mana draining ranged attack didn't mean much to Corvus. I think that I faced four total finger mage bosses along with a champ pack and only one apiece of the other two enemy types in this area. Danger was low and Corvus made steady progress across the landscape. After crossing into the Plains of Despair, the Druid menagerie ran into Izual almost immediately:

The fallen angel is typically known for being a tanky opponent who takes some time to wear down. That was not the case for Corvus, however, as Izual only had 30% physical resistance and a mere 57k health. That was only marginally tougher for the ravens to take down as compared with a normal corpulent which had 50% physical resistance and 16k HP. I was surprised at just how fast Izual went down for the quest reward, granting two more skill points that Corvus would never assign. The rest of the Plains of Despair looked very similar to the Outer Steppes, with corpulents traded out for venom lords and the other two enemies remaining unchanged. The liveliest fight took place against a Doom Knight boss who rolled Cursed / Extra Strong traits and had its whole crew hitting for 4x normal damage. As usual, Corvus made sure to keep the spirit wolf brigade in place and kept a quick finger on the resummon button as the ravens did their thing.

City of the Damned was pretty much the exact same story again, with the lightning-spitting Damned opponents appearing to go along with ranged abyss knights and corpse spitters. I couldn't have been much happier with the enemies that Corvus was drawing, particularly the way that he was dodging the stygian hags and their endless breeding of little demon pups. The presence of two different ranged foes in the City changed things up a little bit, and there were a couple of occasions where a cluster of abyss knights holed up inside some of the building architecture where they took some effort to dig out. The spirit wolves were quite handy there as well since they could be cast directly into the path of incoming projectiles to block their effects. There's a reason why most Diablo 2 characters have a mercenary or minions of some kind to tank damage for them.

It was starting to get a bit late on the clock by the time that Corvus finished the first three areas of Act Four and I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue with the River of Flame or save it for another evening. I decided to poke down the stairs and see what the monster draw looked like before making a final decision. Well it turned out that there was a big mob of abyss knights right by the staircase which forced a rather intense fight to clear them out, and by the time that the smoke cleared I realized that Corvus had another fabulous monster draw again: more abyss knights, more finger mages, and some baby venom lords (officially Pit Lords). This was a serious fail in terms of getting some enemy variation but I couldn't have been more delighted to see these easy opponents popping up again. Corvus never saw a single stygian hag or maggot or leaper throughout the entirety of the act. When he reached the Hellforge offramp, he discovered that Hephasto had drawn the Cursed trait and had Fanaticism for his innate aura - eep! This was another place where the spirit wolves were worth their weight in gold since the boss could not kill more than one of them at a time. Hephasto swatted one away with each blow and Corvus summoned a replacement animal to match. Rinse and repeat until the ravens landed the kill for the Hellforge Hammer drop.

After clearing out the remaining enemies around the Hellforge, it was time for the last big dice roll of the run: what rune would Corvus pull from his quest reward? I was hoping to land either Um or Mal runes since either would allow Corvus to make the Rain runeword armor for +2 Druid skills. (Rain's recipe requires a Mal rune but I could use the former Um rune from the Nightmare difficulty Hellforge quest to Cube double Ums into a Mal if it showed up.) The odds of this weren't terribly high, a straight 2 in 11 chance (18%) since the Hellforge quest has equal odds to deliver any of the 11 runes ranging from Hel to Gul on the top difficulty. I crossed my fingers and swung the hammer...

The result was a Gul rune, the highest of the 11 possible options! Amazingly Corvus had hit the highest possible rune from both the Nightmare and Hell quest rewards; a million mule accounts must have been screeching in annoyance at my pure character hitting the 1 in 121 odds of this happening. Unfortunately this wasn't really what Corvus needed and I was stuck without any use for this high end rune. This is a good example of the massive difference between a pure character and your normal ladder denizen who could easily flip the Gul rune in trades for an Um or Mal rune plus additional goodies. Instead, Corvus would have legitimately been better served by getting a Lum rune here which would have at least opened up Smoke as a possibility. He had at least one copy of everything up to Io but then no Lum or Fal runes to make Smoke or Lionheart a possibility. And still no Monarch shield to use as a base for a 4 socket Spirit runeword either! I held onto the Gul for lack of other options, I did have the thought that perhaps it could be used for the Paladin-specific Principle runeword on another character down the road one day.

I was somewhat disappointed with this result (from getting the highest possible Hellforge quest reward - ha!) and picked up from the River of Flame waypoint the next day. After fighting through the river maze, Corvus arrived at the entrance to the Chaos Sanctuary for the final tests of the act:

This storm caster boss was waiting just inside the dark cathedral and there were another half dozen of them waiting further back inside its depths. (In pre-expansion days there was only one boss to be found in the Chaos Santuary; now there are always 6-7 of them on Hell difficulty.) The nastiest battle took place at the southern end of the first lava pool where Corvus ran headlong into an oblivion knight champ pack that drew in a venom lord boss along with lots of additional foot soliders. I went through four mana potions over the course of that combat, grabbing more of them off the ground as they were dropped by monsters and using them to fuel more summoning of ravens and spirit wolves. The unique shako helmet named the Harlequin Crest also appeared from the final oblivion knight champ to be killed and I was really wishing that Corvus had found an item this useful in another item slot. A helmet with +2 to all skills, 10% physical damage reduction, and major bonuses to life and mana would have been a keeper on almost any other character. I didn't think that I could justify dropping the old Hawk Helm with +3 to both Raven and Sprit Wolf though, not with Corvus so reliant on +skills gear for additional damage. I put the Harlequin Crest in stash for the moment with the thought of maybe bringing it out for use against Nihlathak where the physical damage reduction and extra HP would be most useful.

Once the Chaos Sanctuary was clear it was time to face the three seal bosses. I started with the Infector and this time wasn't able to trim down the whole venom lord mob behind the safety of a tiny little cathedral alcove. The ravens took down one minion before the Infector himself rushed up into Corvus' face and I escaped out of a town portal that he had set up ahead of time. After returning via the River of Flame waypoint, Corvus was able to lure away several minions individually for disposal which thinned the ranks enough for the spirit wolves to tank the rest of the demon crowd. De Seis was the most dangerous opponent this time around due to rolling an insane trait combination: Extra Strong / Fanaticism aura / Cursed / Stone Skin. That was probably the single worst boss setup possible for Corvus and it had the doom knight minions dealing something like 8x normal damage with their physical attacks. I had never seen the spirit wolves perish faster than this over the whole course of the run, literally dying as fast as Corvus could resummon them. I thought that he would have to bail out of a town portal again but the ravens killed just enough of the doom knights to stabilize the situation and the minions held the line by a fingernail. Corvus probably went through about 40 spirit wolves in the course of 90 seconds to defeat De Seis and his minions, sheesh. And then the Grand Vizier was a freaking joke who died in like ten seconds, heh. Well I guess they can't all be epic struggles.

That left only Big D himself. Corvus had all of the tools on hand that he needed to deal with Diablo: maxed fire and lightning resistances, a solid HP total, and minions to distract and tank the demon's attacks. There was even a skill shrine next to the pentagram that I'd saved for this encounter which boosted the ravens up to SLVL 30 where they dealt 1746-2000 damage per hit. What I hadn't expected was the fact that Diablo refused to leave the pentagram; I'd been hoping to draw him over to the more open space on the left where it's easier to dodge his attacks. This forced the spirit wolves into a narrower chokepoint where they were more vulnerable to Diablo's Flame Wave and Lightning Breath of Doom abilities. The combat was basically easy when Diablo stuck to his melee attack and harder when he would shoot off one of his fire-based AOE attacks which would decimate the ranks of the spirit wolves. Nevertheless, Corvus never had to get anywhere close to Diablo which meant that the whole battle was about as safe as it could be. I ate one Flame Wave due to mispositioning and otherwise was completely fine, just a couple of red potions drunk with no need for full rejuvs. Game, set, and match:

Act Five was all that was left now, one more set of quests to reach the end of the journey for Corvus. The conclusion of the story takes place on the next page of the report.