Doktor Faustus: Hell Difficulty Part One

I was quite pleased with Faustus' character build thus far after finally managing to upgrade both of his ring slots towards the end of Nightmare. He had a total of +6 to all Warlock skills and my biggest hope at the moment was that a Monarch shield would drop so that Faustus could create a second Spirit runeword for another +2 to all skills. Beyond that, he had the Peasant Crown for +1 skills in the helmet slot which could potentially be replaced by a really nice circlet (unlikely but possible) and a plain +1 Warlock skills amulet which would be the subject of my gambles for the moment. I did make one change to Faustus' equipment for the start of Hell, dropping the Sanders Riprap set boots and their 40% faster run in favor of some rare boots with excellent resistances: 35% cold resistance, 28% fire resistance, and 18% lightning resist. The big drawback was that there was no faster movement speed on the new boots, something that I prioritize on my characters, but Faustus did have 15% faster movement on his Peasant Crown and three minions to tank for him so the need for fast footwork was lessened here. His overall resistances were excellent for the start of Hell and having nearly 1300 HP on hand made for a comfortable safety net.

The stats on Faustus' demon summons also underwent an upgrade upon reaching Hell difficulty, everything except the bound demon getting higher numbers to reflect the increased difficulty level. This was most noticeable on the goatman summons who more than tripled their damage (!) from roughly 450 per hit to about 1600 damage. The goatman summons also saw a boost to their health of more than 50% which would hopefully keep them alive longer; the goatman was the summon that tended to die the fastest since it lacked the tankiness of the bound demon while also fighting in melee range. The tainted demon experienced roughly the same life boost but without gaining any damage whatsoever. I had experienced the same thing at the start of Nightmare and it was now clear that the goatman summon gained higher base stats while the tainted summon had better scaling over time as more skill points were invested. In particular, the tainted demon had a 20% damage synergy with the Blood Boil skill that I was going to start pumping soon after I ran out of dropping skill points into Summon Goatman, Summon Tainted, and Demonic Mastery. The current plan was to stop skilling Summon Goatman here at SLVL 16+6 and max out the other two skills, then add everything else into Blood Boil until the end of the game.

Anyway, the big question was how the demon summons would do against the monsters here in Hell difficulty. The immediate answer here in the Blood Moor was that they still didn't seem to have any real problems, not against fallens and zombies and quill rats anyway. The biggest change was the greater number of bosses which of course were everywhere; there are usually 3-4 of them in each area on Nightmare which doubles up to 7-8 per area in Hell, making it far more likely to draw double and triple boss packs. Each boss also has three traits instead of two in Hell difficulty which meant more Cursed bosses, more Multishot archers, more Might and Fanaticism auras, etc. The good news was that the monster immunities didn't seem to be causing any trouble thus far. Although the tainted demon was helpless against fallens and their fire immunity, the goatman and bound Lister demons tore them apart while their tainted brethren picked up the slack against this Physical Immune quill rat boss with Stone Skin trait. I do want to point out that I wasn't seeing one-shot kills against enemy bosses any longer, though they still didn't last for long once Lister started chomping away.

Oh, and the Blood Moor had *THREE* experience shrines this time around! There's always one experience shrine located there but I've never seen anything like that before. RNG at its finest.

The Den of Evil introduced Fallen Shamans and I had to use some Engorge for corpse cleanup when it wasn't possible to get the quick telekill with Death Mark against the shamans. Sometimes there were so many fallens running around that I had to keep the demons located on top of Faustus himself for protection, and in those instances Engorging everything that hit the ground was the best course of action. Corpsefire rolled Stone Skin trait to make him Physical Immune and that caused him to last noticeably longer than his minions, with the tainted demon once again getting the job done there. Corpsefire had been hanging out in a busy area with three different Fallen Shamans and their companions running around which involved a bit more work on my part. The highlight of the Den of Evil was finding a really, really nice Small Charm with 16 life and 6% fire resistance on it, a keeper for sure. I would have probably used that charm with either of its two properties, much less both of them.

The Cold Plains were up next and Faustus fought his way through a double boss pack of corrupted rogues near the entrance, with enough hostile bodies hacking away at the demon summons that I needed to use some more Engorge healing for safety. None of the demons had actually died yet but I was having to work at least a little bit now rather than simply falling asleep while they did everything. There was a Gargantuan Beast boss with Stone Skin trait here for yet another Physical Immune opponent and then Bishibosh was overseeing his camp of fallens on the eastern side of the region. Bishibosh is a super elite boss and he could have been a target for Bind Demon as well; apparently he can revive Fallen Shamans and they can revive more Fallens to have a massive crew following the player around. While this would be amusing to see, it's not really that strong in practice and I was quite content to stick with my Fanaticism aura Lister from the end of Nightmare. I actually overextended Faustus' position to capture that screenshot, causing him to get stabbed by a few of the red critters, so I backed up a bit and began mass-clearing the fallen corpses with Engorge to clear a path to the boss, with Bishibosh swiftly disposed afterwards.

Blood Raven was a joke and I had to keep casting Death Mark to teleport the demon minions after her as she tried to run away. The toughest fight in this area took place down in the Crypt and not against Bonebreaker. It was this pictured zombie boss that also had Stone Skin trait to create a physical immunity along with Cold Enchanted trait for the chilling effect. There was also a second zombie boss here that I didn't get vision on because Faustus and his minions were under the effects of a Conviction aura that lowered all of their resistances. This zombie group did enough damage to the goatman that I had to cast several Engorges for healing and the physical immunity made this encounter take longer than the typical pace of running over everything. The rest of these areas were uneventful, and then Coldcrow was brushed aside in the Caves even though she rolled with a Cursed trait. I think the issue with Coldcrow was that she only had 15% physical resistance and 7800 HP so she simply crumbled instantly when Lister was teleported into her face. There was a tougher double archer boss pair on Caves 2 where one of them had the Cursed trait and the other was Extra Strong which required some legitimate care as their arrows hurt when they landed. Things were still pretty routine but I couldn't say that this was a total cakewalk any longer.

I cleared all of those areas in a single session and then started gambling amulets before signing off for the night. What followed was one of the most bizarre sequences of gambling that I can ever remember in Diablo 2. First Faustus gambled a Devil's Amulet of the Locust, +1 Warlock skills with 5% lifesteal. The lifesteal was completely useless for Faustus but sure, why not, and I swapped out the plain Devil's Amulet for this newcomer. Several gambles later Faustus received a Devil's Amulet of Precision, +1 Warlock skills with 15 Dexterity attached. Ummm OK, Faustus didn't really need Dexterity but perhaps it would let him equip some kind of better dagger, why not. Then that was followed with a Devil's Amulet of the Mind, +1 Warlock skills with +5 Energy. That was slightly better since Faustus did use mana for his spellcasting but it was also getting eerie how he kept rolling these +1 Warlock skills amulets with secondary properties. Then he finally gambled a rare amulet with +1 skills to the Warlock Demon tree, 10% faster cast, 7% fire resist, and half freeze duration - what in the world was going on here?! That was the best result yet since Faustus only used the Demon skill tree, despite arriving in an utterly bizarre fashion. I should note that I received no amulets with boosts to the skills of any other classes, just four different versions of Warlock +skills in sequence. Was I being trolled by some kind of cosmic entity?

Faustus continued onwards through the Stony Field which contained mostly skeletons and enemy goatmen, with the superior summoned goatman showing them who was boss. There was a double boss pack where one of the bosses rolled Cursed and the other one had a Might aura, that was enough to drop the demon minion healthbars below the max briefly. Otherwise this was an easy area and Faustus rolled right through it with his crew. Nothing of note popped up in the Underground Passage, then the Dark Wood was absolutely crawling with carvers as usual. I found Treehead Woodfirst fairly quickly and the big brute had spawned with a Might aura to go along with his innate Extra Strong / Extra Fast traits. I started pulling back towards the right side of the screen, only to discover that there was a separate boss with a Fanaticism aura over there, sheesh! The good news was that Lister was still dealing terrible damage and not really taking much of anything in return, easily able to tank even this nasty threat and put it into the grave in short order. Overall, Hell difficulty was clearly tougher than Nightmare while still falling far short of its usual challenges.

Tristram proved to be uneventful, Griswold rolled with Mana Burn and Lightning Enchanted extra traits to make him a non-issue. On then to the Black Marsh which shoved multiple Brute bosses into Faustus' face immediately after entering. Two of these bosses had the Stone Skin trait to create a physical immunity which meant that they lasted long after all of their minions were dead. I've mentioned before that the tainted minion handled these Physical Immune opponents, but it's worth pointing out that the Spectral Hit trait on the bound demon also inflicted a good amount of elemental damage. Only the goatman was truly out of luck against these foes. I tackled the Hole next and this archer boss on Hole 2 was strong enough to put a dent in the tainted minion:

She had a Might aura and the tainted summon ate a face full of arrows to drop its health into the red. With no corpses on the ground yet for Engorge healing, I opted to re-summon a fresh tainted minion at full health right in its place. See, that's another reason why the summoning Warlock is so strong: if teleporting the minions with Death Mark and healing them with Engorge still isn't enough, the goatman and tainted minions can easily be replaced at the drop of a pin for a modest mana cost. There just aren't many weaknesses to this class that the Warlock has to work around. Anyway, the Hole was interesting because two different unique items popped up inside. The first was a set of Frostburn unique gauntlets, an item that was an absolute must-have for Sorceresses back in the pre-expansion days due to the 40% increased max mana property. I can remember gambling a pair of Frosties back in early 2001 (back when you could actually gamble for uniques) and getting so excited to use them for my online Sorcie. The other unique item was Silks of the Victor, the unique ancient armor, which is another item that was viewed as being really strong back in the day. I stashed both items because I couldn't bring myself to sell the Frostburn gauntlets, though the Silks might legitimately go to another character down the road due to their +1 skills property.

I closed out this session by tackling the Forgotten Tower and the Countess quest. To my pleasant surprise, none of the five floors of the tower proved to have a stairs trap at the entrance. Even if there were monsters near the entry stairs, at no point did Faustus have to face one of those situations where he was getting hit before the screen was done loading. This was the first area to contain a normal monster with physical immunity in the form of the ghosts, and thankfully the demon crew never missed a beat at handling them. The tainted fireballs pierced through each ghost and could hit multiple of the wispy flying things at once which certainly helped. There were a number of archer bosses scattered across these floors but nothing too concerning. Down on the bottom floor, the Countess' minions were more than happy to race out of their room and into the biting jaws of Lister to leave her as easy prey. The rune drops were a Tal and a Shael so nothing spectacular on that front either. Gambling afterwards with Gheed produced an amulet with +3 skills for the Warlock Eldritch tree, close but no cigar.

The Tamoe Highland had a bunch of skeleton archers and melee corrupted rogues as usual, nothing special. It always has one big carver camp as well which led to chaotic scenes like the image above; these places could be slightly tricky because of the sheer numbers of bodies running around. If there's one small weakness for the summoning Warlock as compared against the Necromancer, it's that the small number of demon summons can sometimes get overwhelmed when there are monsters attacking from every direction. Of course, the ability to reposition the demons at will with Death Mark almost entirely negates this as an issue but it's still worth mentioning. Faustus continued onwards to the Outer Cloister to secure the waypoint, then backtracked into the optional Pit dungeon. There wasn't much worth mentioning on Pit 1, however the Pit 2 is an infamous deathtrap due to its tiny spaces. Faustus encountered a situation that would have been a true nightmare for most characters, double bosses on the second level of the cavern with one having Cursed trait and the other having a Might aura. That made for 4x normal physical damage which would have crumpled most summoning builds. The demon summons seemed to be OK though, with Lister leading the way and telekilling the Might aura skeleton boss quickly to remove that threat. The rest of Pit 2 collapsed from that point, with Faustus spam-casting Engorge for Devilkin corpse cleanup and keeping his minions topped off at full life at the same time. What could have been deadly for other builds was routine here.

Now at this moment in time while playing Faustus, completely by accident, I stumbled across a discovery that had the potential to revolutionize how my Diablo 2 characters are put together. I randomly found a YouTube video by someone named Not A Data Scientist who managed to crack the gambling algorithm used in Diablo 2. He essentially discovered a way to determine which of the 4 billion different gambling seeds the game happens to be using from entering the items on the gambling screen, then created a script that can list an exact set of steps to produce unique and set items. The online tool looks like this:

Gambling Diablo at Deadly Boss Mods

First the player goes through the steps of determining which gambling seed is in use, inputting their game version, platform, character level, difficulty, and which vendor in which Act they happen to be using. The tool also requires starting a new game session from scratch, though that's not hard to do since all gambling always takes place in town. Then the player enters in the exact items in their exact positions on the gambling screen; it needs about half of them to work though I've usually inputted all of them since it's fast to do. The tool uses this information to search through all of the billions of gambling seeds and determines the one currently in use, then on the right side of the screen the player can search for any desired uniques or set items or even just ensure that they only gamble rare items instead of magical ones. This current example was searching for exceptional versions of unique and set items, with the unique espandon, unique sharkskin belt, unique demonhide boots, and unique serpentskin armor listed as the top results. To find the unique serpentskin armor, I had to refresh the gambling screen 305 times, then buy a set of chain boots, then refresh 36 more times, buy a club, refresh again, and buy two leather armors. Did it work?

You bet it did! Skin of the Vipermagi is an outstanding armor for a spellcasting character, only exceeded by some of the true high end stuff, and there were tons of past characters who would have loved having access to this. This new gambling tool makes it vastly easier to produce desired unique and set items on demand, similar in many respects to the pre-expansion version of Diablo 2 where uniques were relatively easy to gamble (I think they had 1 in 50 odds or something like that). Now there are a number of limitations to this new tool, starting with the fact that many items can't be gambled. Any class item (including stuff like wands and staves and now daggers) never show up as potential gambles so they still have to be found the traditional way. The gambling tool can only be used in offline mode which few people other than me even use since most everyone has their characters on the Battle.net servers. What unique and set items are available tends to be really random and it's not possible to find one specific unique item without repeatedly starting new games and refreshing the gambling tool. The availability of items seems to be heavily tied your character's level as well: "normal" uniques were easy to find for Faustus here at CLVL 73 and the exceptional version of uniques were possible to get, if difficult. The elite versions of uniques were almost nonexistent from gambling at this point and would require a higher character level to have any kind of realistic chance of appearing. This is a normal part of Diablo 2's gameplay: check out this graph that shows how the odds of exceptional / elite version of items go up as character level increases. To get something like the elite unique shako, Faustus would have to first roll the unique version of the cap, then also have it appear as elite at roughly 2% odds on top of that - even with a script like this, that was virtually impossible.

But even with this limitations, this was a true game-changer. I play nearly all of my characters solo so they don't have access to item trading online, and I've never had the faintest interest in grinding out endless Mephisto runs in the hopes of getting better loot drops. There are many, many character builds that I've always wanted to try but couldn't do because I lacked the very specific unique or set items which could make them work. In particular, I rarely play classes like the Barbarian or Amazon because they're so heavily weapon-dependent. A Sorceress gets her damage from her spells, and while having lots of +skills gear for more damage is nice, you can easily finish the whole game with SLVL 25 skills instead of SLVL 35 ones. A Barbarian without a good weapon, however, just can't play the game, and this has restricted me over the decades. This new gambling tool had the chance to remove those limitations and could be truly revolutionary for my character builds in the future. My head was honestly spinning at all of the possibilities that this new tool opened up, I could not have been more delighted to discover this!

One clarification is in order though: Faustus is a pure character and I regard this form of manipulated gambling luck as a form of item twinking. Faustus therefore will not be using this option and my plan is that any future characters will specifically decide if they will or will not use the gambling script before starting out. It's an amazing feature but it doesn't fit into my traditional "use only what gear you can find" playstyle since it is essentially a version of cheating.

Getting back to the main narrative, I planned to push from the Outer Cloister to the end of the Act in one more gaming session, helped along by the continued speedy pace of Faustus and his crew. There was a decision to be made in the Barracks: should Faustus try to bind the Smith or stick with his currently bound Lister? This was a pretty close call, with the Smith having a slightly higher monster level (MLVL 73 against 69) and about the same amount of total health as Lister, but having less in the way of resistances. I still wasn't sure whether or not to attempt the switch when Faustus found his way to the Smith and spotted that his traits were Extra Strong / Extra Fast / Cursed. That was a mixed bag on the trait draw, since Extra Strong and Extra Fast were essentially wasted by being innately part of the Bind Demon skill. Cursed was much better and is seen as one of the best boss traits to steal, however that trait was also badly nerfed in Patch 3.2 such that it only activates 5% of the time when the bound demon inflicts damage instead of the 75% of the time that the Amplify Damage curse normally goes off for monsters. I was paralyzed enough by indecision that this became a moot point when Lister simply tore the Smith to shreds in a matter of seconds. I guess I was sticking with Lister for the time then - this really was close enough that I doubt it made a difference either way.

The next few floors were pretty quiet, lots of skeletons and goatmen and then Physical Immune wraiths. These floors in the Jail flew past quickly and with virtually no danger at all to Faustus, routine stuff that isn't worth much in the way of comment. Pitspawn Fouldog drew Multishot trait but that was pretty useless when Lister teleported into his jail cell and bit his face off. The wraiths with their physical immunity lasted slightly longer, enough to be noticeable whenever they were in a mixed mob, while still falling prey to the fire damage of the tainted summon. The Cathedral also zoomed past quickly, with Bone Ash dying in a single hit before I could capture a screenshot, and then it was down into the Catacombs. The big breakthrough took place on Cats 1 where a Monarch shield finally dropped, hooray! That meant a second Spirit runeword though it would require a stat respec, I planned to do that after finishing the Act. Cats 2 then held this interesting opponent:

The Arach spiders are naturally Fire Immune in Hell difficulty and then this one rolled Stone Skin on its boss traits to turn its innate 50% physical resistance into a physical immunity. The creature was immune to both of the main damage types dealt by Faustus' demons, what was he to do? The good news was that the Bind Demon skill also grants Spectral Hit to anything that gets bound upon reaching SLVL 15, and Spectral Hit randomly adds one of the five elemental types of damage on each successful hit: fire, lightning, cold, poison, or magic damage. The Amazon Basin states that the Spectral Hit elemental damage ranges from MLVL * 0.66 to MLVL * 1.00 which meant 45-69 damage for Lister, and yet the bound demon seemed to be dealing way more damage than that to the terrified spider so this must also be amplified in some way by the Bind Demon skill. Whatever was going on here, the Arach boss died after about 30 seconds of Lister repeatedly hitting it. Spectral Hit trait was apparently more than enough to get the job done against these double immune foes.

The bottom floors of the Catacombs mixed in vampires and zombies who were both quite tanky with their heavy physical resistance, however they still died without doing much of anything. The single biggest danger moment in the Catacombs came when I accidentally walked Faustus into a group of spiders and took several hits before I realized what was going on, whoops. Teleporting his minions onto Faustus' position was enough to get him out of that jam. Down on Cats 4, Faustus cleared out the entry room by the blood pool and used the familiar tactic of spam-casting Engorge to clean up the Dark One bodies and prevent resurrection. I did my best to clear out the little side wings of the main chamber beyond the double doors, while leaving some bodies on the ground for Engorge healings. Andariel soon came rushing out:

Her initial poison spray hit Faustus and the goatman demon which started draining away both of their health quickly. I had essentially zero poison resistance on Faustus (not in the negative digits but not positive either) and the green goo started draining away his health quickly - I should have brought at least one Antidote potion. I started burning through the corpses on the ground with Engorge to keep the goatman alive... only to find that Andariel was dead after about 20 seconds of real world time, slain by Lister and the other two demons in short order. She never so much as scratched Lister, though that would have been tough to do given that Lister has 95% poison resistance, heh. I kind of wanted to use a better screenshot than this one for the report but I never managed to get a second one because Andy died so fast. She dropped Tearhaunch the unique greaves which is a solid set of boots, not as good as what I was already using on this character though.

While that would normally be the end of the Act, I had a few more housecleaning duties to attend to with Faustus. The Monarch shield drop from earlier meant that it was time to respec Faustus for enough Strength to equip the heavy thing, requiring a whopping 156 Strength. I went ahead and did so, losing a fair chunk of Vitality in the process, then headed back to Nightmare difficulty to use the second socket quest reward on the shield to create a second Spirit runeword. This one rolled on the low end with only 27% faster cast (range is 25-35%) and only 90 mana (range is 89-112) but fortunately Faustus didn't really need faster cast or much in the way of mana for his build. The 22 Vitality on the item helped make up for some of the health he was losing, and after all was said and done the total drop in health went from 1419 HP to 1263 HP. That was pretty solid and Faustus was able to keep his resists at the same level as well, thanks to leaning on the 65% extra fire resistance he was getting from his tainted summon. In return for dropping that health, Faustus picked up another +2 to all skills which was simply fantastic. He technically lost one skill point in Summon Tainted because that had previously benefited from +3 on his prior codex but everything else received a major boost.

Now there was one other small problem: the respec at Akara didn't just reset all of Faustus' stat points, it reset all of his skill points as well. This meant that all of his demon summons disappeared, and while losing the goatman and tainted was no biggie, losing Lister was a serious blow. I resolved to replace Lister with the Hell difficulty version of the Smith, since it was an easily reachable super unique that only required walking from the Outer Cloister waypoint. This was an opportunity to test out how the demon summons would do without a bound demon in the mix, and the answer was that yes, they were absolutely viable on their own even if the clear pace was slower. Eventually I bound a random corrupted rogue along the way and made it back to the Smith, succesfully binding a Fire Enchanted / Magic Resistant version of the demon. That would have been perfect except that the Smith rolled Vigor for its aura, argh! I didn't want the faster movement speed aura and resolved to try again. I was honestly curious about this: could you bring a bound version of the Smith and have it fight against a non-bound version of the Smith? The answer was apparently yes as pictured above so I guess Diablo 2 was engaging in multiverse theory or something.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to bind the Smith on this second try and the previously bound version of the Smith killed its doppleganger. I tried again and failed the bind attempt again. I tried a third time, another failure. Was I just getting unlucky here, or was it not possible to bind the Smith if I already had the Smith bound? I didn't know the answer but I resolved to unsummon the bound Smith and continue trying. On his next effort, Faustus successfully bound the Smith, only to receive a Vigor aura again. Then I tried once more, Vigor aura for the third time! What was happening here?!? The odds of rolling Vigor for the aura are 2 out of 7 so this was getting comically unlikely. Finally, finally, the next try saw the Smith roll Fanaticism for its aura which was a definite keeper. I was kind of hoping to get Holy Freeze aura since I hadn't been able to experience that yet but Fanaticism again would absolutely do the trick.

Fausus and his new pet will see you in Act Two.