Zed-F: FroznOdin

Raven 20
Arctic Blast 20+2
Cyclone Armour 20+2
Twister 1+2
Tornado 1+2
Hurricane 20+2

Hurricane was just for the synergy with Arctic Blast and Cyclone Armour. I didn't bother to pump Tornado or Twister for synergies as I didn't really need more Cyclone Armour and couldn't use Hurricane.

As far as equipment goes, it was distinctly underwhelming, but then I never really needed better gear.

Weapon 1: Gull (+100 MF)
Shield: Small Shield (from act 1 normal), Perfect Topaz & Flawless Ruby.
Weapon 2: Skystrike (hand-me-down from Dathon.)
Hat: Rare Antler with +2 elemental skills and sundry mods.
Armour: Rare Breastplate, +30 life, +25 lightning res, and sundry.
Belt: Rare Demonhide Sash, +24 fire res, +24% FHR, and sundry.
Gloves: Sander's Taboo (for the +40 life)
Boots: Rare Boots, +10 FRW, +28 lightning res, +21 poison res, and sundry.
Amulet: Amulet of the Colossus, +80 life
Ring 1: Rare, +7 STR, +28 Fire res, and sundry.
Ring 2: Crafted, +25 life, +84 mana, +9% mana regen, 1/2 freeze, and sundry.
Charms: +~180 life, +70 mana, +some fire & lightning res, and sundry.

Really, aside from the charms, almost all junk items, several of which were found in Act 1 normal. As far as Sirian's admonition not to play a variant within a variant... well, pfft to that. I'm too used to playing variants like Slackers. I never bothered to try to get better gear or allocate most of my stat points. I never needed to.

We had a party full of summonable tanks, not to mention a couple melee characters, so almost all monsters wound up focusing on them. Unlike ViolentVertigo, FroznOdin didn't have much reason to be near the front lines; Arctic Blast at level 22 has a pretty good reach to it. So, for FroznOdin, it was pretty much standard caster fare: hide behind the tanks and nuke (or at least try to nuke.)

Facilitating keep away tactics, we had Ravens. Surprisingly, these proved to be of occasional use. I had expected them to be pretty much purposeless outside of Normal diff, since we had a surfeit of disposable and not-so-disposable tanks in our group and blind doesn't work in melee range. That said, if you pump up ravens they actually can blind one or two targets pretty consistently. I figure that, like howl, their ctc blind works based off clvl+slvl compared with mlvl, so if you pump them up enough they can blind pretty consistently. They tend to target only one or two monsters at a time, which is not so good, but also not a huge liability if you're a backline caster hiding behind a wall of tanks; they will tend to target leakers and flankers first, blinding them and potentially giving you some breathing room. Of course, they were also good for overwriting Dathon's curses with blind, which proved an occasional annoyance as well.

I knew going in that Arctic Blast was not a good damage dealer, as it suffers from the same bug that prevents Inferno from being effective; moreover it doesn't benefit from anything like Fire Mastery or a Leaf staff to get the slvl up into the mid-thirties where the skill actually becomes useful for something. I figured that the chilling effect would at least be useful, though I was disappointed on that score as well. Chilling only rarely seemed to make much of a difference in monster attack rates, and all the tanks were easily absorbing the damage anyway. Being relegated to slowly whittling down dual phys/fire immune monsters (and then only after someone had tagged them with PMH) was a bit disheartening; a lot of the time I felt like I was contributing fireworks and little else. The one thing Arctic Blast did have going for it, though was range. Unlike Violent Vertigo, I could 'blast' monsters from most of the way accross the screen in perfect safety.

Even when AoE attacks or other caster-unfriendly situations did crop up, though, I never had to worry. We always had at least one Oak Sage floating around, boosting my hit points from dangerously low to a pretty respectable level. And I had access to one of the best defensive skills in the game, Cyclone Armour. With Cyclone Armour up, I rarely had to worry about pesky ranged or AoE attacks that might otherwise have proven problematic. Despite my unimpressive gear and stats, I rarely died. Even against Uber-Diablo, where several of the other characters died multiple times, I only died once, thanks in large part to Cyclone Armour. Overall, this certainly was not one of the harder variants I've played, but I suppose it doesn't have to be super-difficult every time.

It was a bit unfortunate that I couldn't show up on time more. My daughter's usual bedtime is about half an hour after the game was scheduled to start, and it sometimes takes a while to get her tucked in. As a result I wound up a couple levels under everyone else. Still, it didn't really affect anything, all things considered.

One thing that I hadn't counted on joining the group was how tedious the character would turn out being to play. There wasn't much to do as far as positioning or switching up attack types to keep things interesting, and not much of a threat factor when hiding well behind a huge swarm of tanks. It was pretty much just follow everyone around and spam arctic blast. However, the good side was the conversation and playing with a group of interesting folks I hadn't gamed with (for the most part) before. That kept things lively enough that I continued to return to the game, despite the scheduling and other issues.

Thanks to everyone for an enjoyable game, and hope to game with you again sometime!