Corvus: Hell Difficulty Part Four

Another elite Aegis shield dropped during the course of this session and, with Act Five already halfway over, it was now or never if Corvus was ever going to create a Spirit runeword for the shield slot. The Monarch shield that I wanted had simply never appeared despite the tens of thousands of monsters that Corvus had slain over his journey. One trip to Larzuk to cash in the Hell socket quest and Corvus finally had his Spirit shield:

Just look at that horrible 219 Strength requirement to use the thing though, argh! Corvus had been working with all of 45 Strength until now which meant that he was short about 175 points of Strength - just a wee bit too weak at the moment. Of course I had all three stat respecs with Akara available but having to convert that much Vitality into Strength was going to be pretty brutal. There was nothing to be done about it though and Corvus bit the bullet back in Act One, first placing all of his skill points back into the same skills again with no change. Then I clicked the Strength button about 200 times on the character sheet to meet the necessary 219 requirement before putting the rest into Vitality. I made one major gear change once the respec was complete, dropping Corvus' old boots in favor of the unique Waterwalk boots since they had a much-needed +57 life on them. Waterwalk also grants +5% to maximum fire resistance which Corvus had a chance to reach with some more tweaks to itemization.

This was also the moment to burn the final socket quest from Nightmare, adding a socket to the Hawkmail armor that Corvus had been wearing ever since Normal difficulty. I'd been wondering if I would be able to turn up something better for the armor slot and it appeared that it was never going to happen. Then I placed the Um rune from the Nightmare Hellforge quest into the second socket of Corvus' helmet for +15% resist all, followed by a Ral rune into the new Hawkmail socket for 30% additional fire resistance. Along with some shuffling of charms in inventory, this was enough to max out all resistances other than poison and bring Corvus almost back to 1000 HP:

Those resists were looking pretty tasty, with two of them above the normal cap of 75%, but a max HP total of only 976 was dangerous territory indeed. If only Corvus had been able to turn up a Monarch shield he could have stopped at 156 Strenth and had another 60+ stat points to place in Vitality instead - that could have been 125 more health to take him right back to 1100 HP, practically where he had been before! I guess it was not to be though, sigh. There was still the chance that he could turn up a Monarch shield naturally, roll 4 sockets in it via the Horadric Cube recipe, and make a new Spirit runeword followed by using the Normal or Nightmare stat respec. Without much of Act Five remaining though, I wasn't exactly holding my breath on that taking place.

The big payoff for all that otherwise wasted Strength was another +2 skills for Corvus to play around with. He now had SLVL 30 Raven dealing the pictured 1746-2000 damage which was a significant jump over where Corvus had been before. It was immediately noticeable that the birds were dealing about 20% more damage than before while the spirit wolves had an even bigger increase in damage (from 351 average to 435 average). This was also the first time that I'd ever been able to get a skill up to SLVL 30 on any of my Diablo characters and I felt that I had to take the opportunity even if it almost certainly made Corvus more likely to die before reaching the end of his quest. Go big or go home and all that jazz.

This was the time when I opted to face Nihlathak's Temple which is my least favorite part of Act Five. I had learned from Corvus' experience in Nightmare difficulty and immediately raced off to the right side of the small entryway area, where the newly buffed ravens and spirit wolves tore through the prowling dead as they arose. Their cold immunity meant that their bodies could never shatter on death and Corvus had to re-kill some of them a couple of times before it was safe to face Pindleskin at the main entrance. The Halls of Anguish are another area with a wide range of possible opponents which can swing the difficulty of the area pretty dramatically. Corvus found himself with a favorable draw at the easier end of the spectrum as he was up against poison shot skeleton mages, beetles, and leapers. There weren't even many of the leapers which meant that most of the floor was full of the poison mages and beetles, neither of which posed much of a threat. Both of these enemies had low health totals for Hell difficulty and the ravens were absolutely shredding them to pieces. This was a great example of why it's not necessary to itemize much in the way of poison resistance as Corvus could simply return back to town to clear the effect whenever he was hit by a green shot. It's vastly more important to load up on fire and lightning and even cold resistances to protect against various kinds of burst damage whereas there's always time to react and get to safety when hit by poison.

The Halls of Pain proved to have a kind draw as well, with Corvus dodging greater mummies, maggots, and grotesques to instead find himself up against infidels, goats, and hierophant/zealot combos. The hierophants and their zealot attendants were the most dangerous enemies in this collection and sometimes it was worthwhile to pull the zealots back out of healing range to speed things up. At least the Blizzard spells from the hierophants weren't too scary now that Corvus was back to having 90% cold resistance once again. The infidels and goats were pretty toothless unless they rolled a combination of dangerous boss traits which I don't think ever took place. It can take hours to full clear these two floors of Nihlathak's Temple and I was highly relieved that Corvus was able to speed through them in less than 60 minutes.

The bottom floor of the Halls of Vaught had the worst enemies of the night, with double Physical Immune opponents in Night Marauder jungle bunnies and Hell Temptress witches. Corvus was lucky that these annoying foes were appearing on the much smaller floor where Nihlathak himself hangs out. I found the traitor hiding in the second quadrant that Corvus explored and as usual he had an absolutely packed room with monsters of all types crowding the area. Corvus had to pull them out of reach with retreating maneuvers one group at a time:

I was slowly edging forward at this point behind the protective line of spirit wolves while making sure not to stand on top of any corpses. Nihlathak's chamber was off to the left as pictured above but Corvus absolutely could not go around that corner until he had cleared out the defending enemies and created safe space to stand. This task was made much harder by the witches and jungle bunnies both being Physical Immune and requiring the spirit wolves to kill them with about one-fifth the physical damage that the ravens were dealing to everything else. Nihlathak himself was highly active with his Corpse Explosion spell, blasting apart one body after another in explosions of fiery death. I had swapped out Corvus' normal helmet in favor of the Harlequin Crest unique that he'd found back in the Chaos Sanctuary, dropping down to SLVL 29 ravens and spirit wolves in exchange for +125 HP and 10% physical resistance. Despite all of my care, Corvus was still tagged by Corpse Explosions twice which each dealt about 500 damage. That was despite having 80% fire resistance and 10% physical resistance in place too, sheesh! I think that Corvus could have survived two such explosions without dying since he had 1100 HP but I certainly wasn't going to test that in action, instead drinking a full rejuv instantly each time for safety. The spirit wolves also took a pounding from the explosions and there were several points in time where *ALL* of them died from a particularly large group of corpses going off at once below where they were standing. Corvus was glad that they were the ones off on tanking duty and not him.

After several minutes of carefully pulling monsters out of the room, Corvus was able to enter the empty southern side which was free of bodies and send the ravens off to land the kill even as the spirit wolves ran interference duty on the remaining minions. Nihlathak himself wasn't tanky at all and perished in less than 30 seconds once the ravens could finally reach him. I think that I played this about as well as could be done given Corvus' overall setup, minimizing the amount of risk that he faced against this exceedingly dangerous opponent. Now he just had the Ancients and the final boss gauntlet as serious threats to suffer a death (along with whatever random bosses with nasty traits might pop up along the way). I was even able to gamble an improved ring at the end of this session and shuffle some gear around to get health back over 1000 with the default Hawk Helm - hopefully a good omen.

It was nice to be back in the open spaces of the Frozen Tundra once again at the start of the next session. This was another place where the challenge level was dialed down significantly as Corvus found himself facing an all-ranged draw of opponents: skeleton archers, witches, and more imps. I've written a number of times before about how all-melee or all-ranged monster setups tend to be easier than having a mixture of both to worry about. These foes were a fragile bunch (especially the imps who still had zero physical resistance) and the ravens made short work of them despite their blinking around. At times the screen could be pretty full of projectiles but there was little chance of Corvus suffering a death without anything to tank for the witches and skeleton archers. For whatever reason, the bosses were heavily clustered in the first third of the Frozen Tundra (before reaching the first line of fortifications) which meant that the back portions of the level were pretty dull. Corvus also found a Lum rune while clearing the place which arrived too late to be of much use. I would have made a Smoke runeword if that had dropped earlier however there was little purpose right now with Corvus already having his resistances maxed out. (If a Fal rune were to drop, I would seriously consider Lionheart though and did have an elite 3 socket base armor ready to go.)

The red portal to the Infernal Pit appeared within a stone's throw of the stairs up from the Glacial Trail and Corvus cleared it out before tackling most of the Frozen Tundra. It was a vastly more difficult area thanks to having some of the worst enemies for Corvus: witches, minotaurs, and the doom knight / oblivion knight pairs. The witches were bad news because they kept tossing out Amplify Damage curse onto Corvus and his minions, something which I really did not want to see with the Frenzy attacks of the minotaurs around to cause problems. Those minotaurs had 16k HP apiece along with 66% physical resistance to make them exceedingly tanky on top of their terrifying damage output once they wound up their ability; I was glad to have SLVL 30 animal companions on hand for their extra damage output. Corvus spent a lot of time trying to take down minotaurs and doom knights across lava segments where he was safe from danger. There were no close calls or truly dangerous moments going through here but only because I was cautious.

The Ancient's Way was a complete contrast as Corvus was able to pick up the pace through the icy underground tunnels. I quickly figured out that this area had quill rats, frozen terrors, and lightning-shooting Afflicted enemies which were all pretty easy pickings for his build. The quill rats were honestly the most dangerous of the group because it was hard to see their little spines in the dark environments underground and they were sometimes able to shoot around the front line of spirit wolves. The Afflicted and frozen terrors were basically just cannon fodder, both of them with low physical resistance and easily blocked by the spirit wolves for the ravens to do their work. Even an Extra Fast / Might aura Afflicted boss fell rapidly to Corvus and his merry band. I have a real-life note to relate here: our baby son was taking a nap while Corvus was going through the Ancient's Way and I was rushing my Druid as fast as was safe because I wanted to finish the full clear and get the Icy Cellar done before the baby woke up. That could have been a recipe for disaster but instead the easy monster draw meant that nothing bad happened. Corvus was able to get the whole place done in less than 15 minutes as he practically flew through the second half of the caves.

I did have to slow down for the Icy Cellar since it was another potential deathtrap due to its small size. The Icy Cellar is only a little bit bigger than the town of Harrogath and yet always has 6-8 bosses present in Hell difficulty. Sometimes there will be multiple bosses right at the stairs and it can be nearly impossible to establish enough space to manuever. On this trip the stairs were blessedly free of opposition but Corvus immediately spotted one of his most dreaded enemies across a frozen river segment: undead stygian dolls. Ugh, what were those things doing here?! The skeletal dolls were fragile and easily killed by the ravens but that wasn't really the issue since their death explosions had the potential to wipe out Corvus. I carefully slew the initial champ pack with ravens across the river segment, then killed a Cursed Abominable boss to the right of that bridge pictured above. Five more steps forward resulted in ANOTHER champ pack of undead stygian dolls popping out, the ones pictured above. I was exeedingly glad that Corvus had been able to down the Cursed boss before pulling this second champ pack out from hiding - sheesh!

The whole Icy Cellar was like that, one threat after another with no breaks in the action. The champ pack of undead stygian dolls were only halfway defeated when an Extra Strong doll boss raced out of the fog as well, thankfully with unimpressive traits for the other two boss slots. I honestly didn't know if Corvus could survive a death explosion from these things and I wasn't eager to find out; he almost certainly would have been one-shotted if tagged while Cursed. Thank heavens for the spirit wolves which physically barred the route forward of those little dolls and tanked their death explosions once the ravens were able to focus them. Please note that Corvus had advanced through roughly 5% of this floor and had already killed two bosses and two champ packs including three different undead stygian doll opponents. There was a fifth boss, another undead doll, a bit to the left and then another champ pack of stygian dolls on the eastern edge of the cavern. Thankfully Corvus destroyed that last champ pack before hitting Snapchip Shatter who was Cursed / Extra Strong and smashing the spirit wolves left and right once the Cursed effect was in play. This was a real test of skill keeping Corvus safe from all of these threats, one which I was fortunately able to pull off thanks to lots of practice. None of the undead dolls was ever able to get off an explosion next to the Druid himself.

I wasn't too concerned about the Ancients given Corvus' animal minions although naturally I took the time to prep the summit area with extra potions and a bailout town portal. Corvus hit the central statue and was relived to find no boss abilities which would have required resetting the fight:

Korlic (Spectral Hit / Cold Enchanted) found himself immediately locked up on the spirit wolves. I have no idea what he was doing, he never used his Leap Attack at all and simply stood in place swinging his big polearm. The ravens focused him first due to his stationary nature and I was perfectly fine with that, with the Barbarian spirit taking about a minute to fall. Madawc and Talic both moved around the arena and I told the ravens to focus on Madawc next because I was more concerned about his ranged attacks. Madawc's Holy Freeze aura was somewhat annoying (which did chill Corvus - recall that Cannot Be Frozen doesn't work against this aura) but fortunately didn't affect the ravens at all. That's one nice thing about them being untargetable, no chance to get slowed or disabled by enemy abilities. Once he was gone, the spirit wolves were able to tie up Talic (Extra Strong / Mana Burn) against one of the pillars and prevent him from doing anything other than using Whirlwind in place. The whole thing was remarkably easy, much easier than Nightmare difficulty where Corvus didn't have the spirit wolves available and had to run in circles for 10 minutes while the ravens slowly killed the Ancients. It also helped that these bosses have less physical resistance in Hell difficulty for no clear reason and Corvus had added so many +skills items since his last trip here. This wasn't much of a test for Corvus.

Into the Worldstone Keep he went then and holy cow, the first floor was a real nightmare:

Right away Corvus found himself up against more Death Lord minotaurs along with witches and zealot/hierophant pairs. It was the same thing that Corvus had seen back in the Infernal Pit, witches keeping Corvus in perma-Cursed mode while the minotaurs piled on the damage with their Frenzy blows. I was particularly concerned here because this minotaur boss pack was fought mere steps from the entrance with zero room to retreat if the monsters broke through the line of spirit wolves. Corvus didn't make it much further before running into a Stone Skin minotaur boss who was Physical Immune and had to be chipped down by the spirit wolves with the help of Prevent Monster Heal to block its innate regen. Throw in a bombardment of witch Blood Stars and the Lightning and Blizzard spells coming from the hierophants and it was tough, tough going across the whole floor. I really didn't enjoy facing all these threats while effectively sitting on 500 HP due to perma-Cursed status that doubled all physical damage and especially not when all the bosses and champ packs seemed to be minotaurs of some kind. It took more effort on my part to clear out the small Worldstone 1 floor than the Frozen Tundra and Ancient's Way combined.

Worldstone 2 followed this up with a real laugher in terms of opposition, snakes and mummies and Greater Hell Spawn versions of Baal's minions. This was a complete joke compared to the deadly threat of the minotaurs and the witches on the previous floor; even a huge mob with a double boss pack buffed up with Fanaticism aura was easily handled by the ravens and spirit wolves. Mummies and hell spawn simply were not a threat at this stage of the game and would never get close enough to Corvus to deal real damage. Then the third floor was nothing but ranged enemies, full of skeleton mages and imps and blowdart fetishes. These things were definitely annoying and I had to take some care when they grouped up in massive swarms to toss their blowdart projectiles. Nevertheless, these all-ranged opponents were relatively low in terms of their damage output and died very quickly once the ravens were able to target them. The avian blind effect also worked wonders here at shutting down some of the incoming fire. Corvus drank a good number of red potions without feeling the need to break out the emergency purple ones. I did feel a bit sad passing through these final floors; I tried to enjoy these fights as I knew my time with Corvus was coming to an end, one way or another we were about to hit the end of his long journey.

The Throne of Destruction thankfully only had a couple of Burning Souls at the foot of the stairs; this is another place where stairs traps are all too frequent. Corvus began the process of clearing out the side wings only to find... more undead soul killers?!

Seriously, did Corvus really have to face these things one final time? It was like the game was pulling out all of the stops to try and induce a cheap death at the absolute last second. There's a surprisingly long list of potential monsters that can appear on the Throne of Destruction floor and yes, the undead soul killers are indeed one of them. The aforementioned Burning Souls were also present and they were not easy opponents at all, with 90% physical resistance and a nasty Lightning spell that the Amazon Basin lists as dealing 240 damage per shot. Even with maxed lightning resistance Corvus was feeling the sting when he was tagged with several of those lances of crackling white energy. I worked the left side of the floor first, clearing out a Burning Soul boss, then headed over to the right side which had an undead soul killer boss plus an undead soul killer champ pack. I swear that the game desperately wanted one of those things to detonate on top of Corvus and result in a last-second death but I refused to allow it, casting spirit wolves out in front of every blind corner to tank incoming little dolls before they could reach the Druid himself. It took me a full ten minutes to clear out all of the side passages of this floor and I felt that my skills with Corvus had been put to one last final test before the ending boss gauntlet.

I was ready as I could be for the Throne of Destruction bosses after so many hours spent piloting Corvus. Colenzo and Achmed were reminders of the days spent facing shamans and greater mummies in the first two acts, some of the most difficult opponents that Corvus had come across. I was able to burst down Colenzo without much trouble since the fallen minions kept retreating whenever one of them died. Achmed was a bit tougher since he spawns with several other greater mummies in tow; Corvus managed to find a safe spot among the pillars on the right where he was left alone, then focused down the greater mummies one at a time with his ravens. Bartuc raised an impressive fireworks showcase of Hydras when he appeared with the rest of the Council members. For all of that fire and fury, however, they were unable to push through the line of spirit wolves while I targeted them with the ravens until they collapsed. It was the same story with Ventar and his venom lords, they pushed back the spirit wolves at first only for the line to stabilize and then hold in place, leading to a massive pileup of dead demon bodies in one spot on the floor. I was helped here by an inexplicable lack of any physical resistance on Bartuc and Ventar which made them much more fragile than expected for Hell difficulty. Was that some kind of oversight on the part of the developers?

Lister typically requires a retreat back into the passages leading to the staircase in order to string out his minions for easier disposal. Once again the spirit wolves were pushed back but I found to my delight that they were largely holding in place, standing like a brick wall against the demon onslaught. Meanwhile the ravens were doing a fantastic job of focusing down one target at a time instead of wasting their damage on a bunch of enemies simultaneously. They are really good at doing this on their own and, as I've mentioned repeatedly, a savvy player can focus them against desired foes with a great deal of precision. Corvus was like a symphony conductor controlling an orchestra as the ravens did exactly what he wanted - a true master Ravenlord indeed. I picked off each minion one at a time until Lister was the only one left, then finished the performance by downing the last boss of the game as well. I hadn't known that this was possible going into this variant; the Raven skill truly exceeded all expectations in terms of what it can do with enough skill points and a whole lot of practice.

Baal was the only foe left to complete the full 3 dot run. Baal really isn't a satisfying conclusion to Diablo 2's gameplay, certainly not as much as Diablo was back in pre-expansion days. He simply doesn't do that much as an opponent, largely sitting back at a distance firing off his cold wave and the occasional orange shot while summoning his clone and a bunch of Festering Appendage tentacles. It's particularly amusing to face Baal with Cannot Be Frozen gear and 90% cold resistance as his cold wave does virtually nothing at all. Corvus found that Baal liked to hover around the northern end of the central bridge next to the Worldstone itself, blinking around with his Teleport ability but never straying too far from that spot. I kept the ravens and spirit wolves focused on the Prime Evil (his Teleport would drop aggression so Corvus would have to re-target with his minions) and otherwise largely stood in place watching the action at a distance. There's no sense of danger here, nothing like the concern I have when my characters face Diablo that he might run up into their face to shoot off the Lightning Breath of Doom. Baal just kind of... sits there and occasionally shoots off a projectile. Pretty boring.

Unfortunately Baal has an absurd amount of health to chew through, 493k HP on Hell difficulty. (By comparison, Diablo has 113k and Mephisto has 94k health.) I've written many times before that this does nothing to make the battle more challenging or interesting, only stretches it out for a needlessly longer period of time. Baal summoned his clone at one point and Corvus didn't do anything different, just let the ravens and spirit wolves kill the clone (which was blocking a safe route over to Baal himself) while remaining at a safe distance. I could have taken up knitting as a hobby while watching this slow grinding process play out. According to the in-game clock it took a little over ten minutes to defeat Baal; Corvus went back to town one time for potions and that was it, never feeling anywhere close to enough threat to warrant drinking a full rejuv:

Like I said, it was a real anti-climax compared to many of the dangerous monsters that Corvus had previously defeated along the way. He did make it completely through all three difficulties though, every area full cleared, all monsters slain, zero deaths incurred. The only blemish on Corvus' record was the one Save and Exit back in the Stony Tomb in Nightmare (of all places) when he was stuck against the wall with no place to move. Having the spirit wolves for Hell difficulty helped prevent that sort of thing from happening again and made things much easier; I can safely say that it would have been completely impossible to make it through the final difficulty with only the ravens available. The monsters were simply too strong for the ravens to kill everything without having some kind of assistants to tank for Corvus, not to mention a way to deal with Physical Immune opponents. I was pleased that Corvus barely had to use his Act One hireling Fiona at all, only for dual Physical / Cold Immune enemies and the nearly-so resurrectables at the end of Act Two. This is one of the rare character builds where everything played out pretty much exactly as I envisioned before starting.

Corvus was my first Single Player character to make it through the entire game without dying. Skulla came extremely close before dying at the Ancients thanks to a bad set of boss affixes that I should have rerolled, and then Electric Tsunami had a perfect deathless run in a team environment. But Corvus was the first to be an effective Guardian even if I wasn't officially playing in Hardcore mode. While I can't prove it, you have my word that he never died once across his whole journey. I think that this was a pretty tough variant overall given the limitation to only two skills (one skill for Normal/Nightmare difficulties!), essentially no mercenary outside of rare situations, and reliance on finding all gear naturally on a single pass through the game. Corvus never did find that Monarch shield for a Spirit runeword which is just incredible over the course of the whole game (three different magical Monarch shields without ever getting a normal one). Diablo 2 is vastly easier when the player can trade or mule for all their needed items and skip over the most dangerous optional parts of the gameplay. I'd probably have more characters go deathless if I didn't insist on full clearing literally everything but where would the fun be in that?

I have exactly one more character idea at the moment for Diablo 2 which I may or may not have time to run, and then we'll see what Diablo 4 brings when it releases in Summer 2023. Until then, thanks as always for reading along with the adventures of my characters - I hope this was an entertaining journey. Corvus bids you farewell.