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Faustus continued his journey at the start of Act Two in Hell difficulty, having recently put together a second Spirit runeword in the shield slot at the end of the previous Act to give him a total of +8 Warlock skills. This was a very big deal indeed for a spellcasting character as it meant more power in his primary skills (Summon Goatman, Summon Tainted, Bind Demon, and Demonic Mastery) along with extra "free" ranks of his various one-point support skills. Blood Oath at SLVL 1+8 gave the demon summons 330% bonus health and 53% resist all, Engorge now healed for 38% of the HP on each demon and gave them 31% lifesteal and 23% attack speed which lasted for a full 29 seconds, etc. Faustus was finished putting skill points into his primary abilities (in part because I held Summon Goatman at a base skill level of 15 after the respec) and from this point forward the new points would go into Blood Boil for its damage synergy with Summon Tainted. The tainted demons can deal a tremendous amount of damage once that synergy gets activated and it made sense to keep improving them since they were the only source of ranged and non-physical damage for Faustus.
The first destination in Act Two was the Sewers as usual, an area which was very heavy on fire immunity. The melee and spellcasting Burning Dead were both Fire Immune, plus the Sand Raiders, while the archer skeletons were merely 75% fire resistant - the tainted demon was not a fan of this place. There were also some tight corridors like the one pictured above and I wanted to highlight something that could be an issue with Faustus' minions. When he used Death Mark to teleport them, the demons would all appear on the exact same tile. Normally this didn't matter as they would quickly move apart to attack enemies, however sometimes the tainted minion would start using its ranged attack and then the goatman and bound Smith would be stuck in place, unable to move because they were apparently occupying the same spot as the tainted. This was even worse when the tainted demon was shooting fireballs at Fire Immune skeletons, doing precisely nothing while the other two minions were blocked from moving! I could always resolve this by casting Death Mark again and usually I teleported the demons directly on top of monsters where they could attack even if they couldn't budge from the spot. Still, this happened often enough that it was annoying for Faustus.
Radament was found near the entrance of Sewers 3 where he was hanging out with a giant mob of skeletons, a double boss pack plus his own Horror minions all grouped together. This was a situation where Faustus relied on Engorge to clear a path forward by cleaning up all of the skeleton bones as they dropped to the floor. Radament was tanky with 50% physical resistance and 60,000 HP but not tanky enough to last for more than a brief moment once the Smith caught up to him. The enemy boss dropped the unique cleaver, the Butcher's Pupil, not something that I rolled using the new gambling hack described on the previous page. It was useless for Faustus but an exceptional weapon with 30% increased attack speed, deadly strike, and open wounds made for something worth holding onto in stash.
The following desert areas were nice and easy once again, lots of wide open spaces and monster types that don't have dangerous abilities. The pictured spear cats and vultures stood essentially no chance of ever managing to kill Faustus through his demon minions, despite the best efforts of the local bosses who applied Cursed status something like four different times. The Stony Tomb is one of the few underground areas in Act Two that never has greater mummies to worry about, instead serving up lots of skeletons and beetles and mummies. One of the skeleton bosses turned out to be a Multishot poison mage which might have gone better for him if poison actually stacked in Diablo 2. Faustus did get poisoned a lot in the Dry Hills since one of the enemies there was the poison-tossing cats. This was annoying, not dangerous, and I mostly had to keep drinking a supply of red potions to counteract the green stuff since Faustus had little in the way of poison resistance. Next it was on to the Halls of the Dead:
Unlike the Stony Tomb, this place was full of Hollow One greater mummies and Faustus was left with no choice but to engage with their resurrection antics for the first time in Hell difficulty. For whatever reason, most of the bosses rolled as Hollow Ones on these floors which meant lots and lots of practice at dealing with them. In situations where the Hollow Ones were isolated, Faustus could teleport his minions forward and get the quick kill with Death Mark followed by smashing apart their undead followers. Any time where there were multiple greater mummies clustered together, however, Faustus had to resort to mass corpse cleanup with Engorge since the Hollow Ones would revive the skeletons too quickly if left unattended. There were also times where the sheer press of enemy bodies was too great to get anywhere near the greater mummies; the room pictured above was crammed full of double Hollow One bosses and all their minions which spilled out into the hallway. Faustus had already defeated and Engorged something like two dozen skeletons by the time that the image above was taken since he couldn't even get close enough to see the greater mummies initially. All in all, this was still fairly easy as compared with other characters while also requiring more effort on my part to juggle everything properly.
I do not have any screenshots from the outdoor portion of the Far Oasis which should tell you something about how routine it was. As for the Maggot Lair:
Lots and lots of beetles and bugs down there, yuck! Faustus was the rare character who didn't care about the confining spaces of the tunnels, he kept positioning his demon minions in front of him using Death Mark and moving them around as necessary when they became stuck. The fireballs from the tainted minion continued to piece through enemies which made them perfect for the straight lines that are so common down there. Faustus could even cast his minions blindly around bends in the caves where they would fight against unseen targets and keep them from ever reaching Faustus. As for Coldworm, she literally went down in four or five swings from the Smith who was wielding that hammer like he was angry. Coldworm has a very low Defensive rating as compared with other monsters in Act Two Hell which likely explained why the demons were able to hit more accurately than normal here.
I don't have much to say about the next few areas so I'll run through them quickly. The Lost City held more poison-tossing cats (equally annoying and no more dangerous) along with zombies. None of these monsters rose to the level of a real threat and Faustus plus his demon boys rolled right on through the unnatural darkness. The Ancient Tunnels were full of more zombies, mummies, and lightning skeleton mages which, I mean, come on! Faustus had the Smith under his control which was buffed up with four bonus boss traits, 35k health, and something like 2000% extra damage. Do you really think that those hapless undead were going to stop him? 
The Claw Viper Temple this time around had fewer snakes than normal and much more in the way of undead, both mummies and Guardians/skeletons packing most rooms. This simply turned the temple into another version of the Halls of the Dead with Faustus treating it much the same way. Claw Viper 2 was strangely deserted, with only a single Guardian greater mummy on the north side of the room and then Fangskin plus its minions over to the south. Faustus cleared out the Guardian and its skeletons, then the demons simply tanked Fangskin while barely taking damage. That was, uh, easy - Faustus was in Hell difficulty, right?
The Palace floors are most famous for having skeleton archers as a threat, turning around a blind corner and walking into a firing squad where a dozen of them are packed together. However, there were relatively few of the skeleton archers or skeleton mages in these areas for Faustus who instead seemed to keep drawing the melee monsters (Invaders, Dune Beasts, and Blunderbores) over and over again. Most of the time these things weren't an issue as the demon trio cut right through the defenders without breaking a sweat. However, there were several occasions where the monsters were clumped together in huge groups or had multiple bosses joined together which made things more interesting. The scene pictured above was one such hairball, as there was a double boss pack here (one Dune Beast boss and one Blunderbore boss) with well over a dozen opponents in a small space. The smart thing to do would have been to open the door and face them in the single tile chokepoint. Instead, I brazenly teleported the demons over to the other side of the fence, blinking them from the right side of the mob to the left side and back again as they started to get swarmed. They were able to tank through this mess with the use of Engorge healings (and left a massive pile of corpses behind) but the damage threat of this many monsters was enough to cause real harm to the demons.
Then on the next floor there was a Blunderbore boss who rolled with a particularly deadly series of abilities. These enemies are naturally Fire Immune and the boss appeared with Stone Skin trait to create a second physical immunity, nearly blocking nearly all of the damage from Faustus' minions. OK, he had seen that before back in Act One Hell when an Arach spider rolled the same two immunities. However, the other two boss traits on this Blunderbore were Cursed / Extra Strong for 4x normal damage output, yikes! The demon summons slew all of the minions for this boss since they lacked the same damage immunities, then they began pounding their heads against the brick wall of the boss. While I waited for the Spectral Hit elemental damage to wear down the boss, it was still running amok and dishing out real punishment. The annoying thing killed the goatman, then when I resummoned it, killed the unfortunate thing a second time! Faustus eventually got the job done but it took some time.
The Arcane Sanctuary was pretty fun for Faustus as this was a character build that didn't mind dealing with narrow walkways. The Spectres inside were a complete joke despite their physical immunity, since they had no fire resistance whatsoever and simply collapsed whenever they were touched by a tainted fireball. I'd been able to drop a decent number of skill points into the Blood Boil synergy for the tainted demon and its damage output was skyrocketing, now cresting 3000 damage per shot and with 50% additional attack speed above the base amount. With its ability to pierce on each shot, the tainted was dealing nearly as much damage as the bound Smith whenever it was able to fire into mobbed opponents that lacked fire resistance. The Ghoul Lord vampires were barely more of an issue than the ghosts since Faustus' minions didn't seem to be bothered by their flashy spell effects, and then the Hell Clan goats were surprisingly the toughest opponents. They were Fire Immune to neutralize the tainted demon and then had 50% physical resistance to at least slow down the two melee summons. While Faustus was still able to clear them rather quickly, I kept noticing that the goats were the last ones left standing in any mixed mob of opponents. The Warlock seemed to have chosen his demon minions from a hardy stock!
The end of the Arcane Sanctuary meant the end of that particular gaming session, and I always closed them out by spending the accumulated gold on more gambling. I was using the new gambling tool to see what unique and set items were potentially available, even if I wasn't going to use them with Faustus. If there was anything interesting available (and there wasn't always), I would follow the script's instructions to purchase a single unique item and then go back to the normal gambling for amulets. In this fashion, Faustus accumulated Natalya's Soul mesh boots from the Assassin set, Trang-Oul's Claws from the Necromancer set, and the Dwarf Star unique ring, none of which I would be using for this character. That last ring actually highlighted one of the limitations of the gambling tool: it could tell me that doing these steps would allow me to gamble a unique ring, but it couldn't tell me WHICH unique ring it would be out of the nine different unique rings in Diablo 2. I actually gambled Dwarf Star a second time when I went for another unique ring, still hoping to find a Stone of Jordan since I've never seen one in all my years of playing this game. I was having so much fun doing this that I realized I was partly playing Faustus just to save up more gold to do more of these gambling searches! As for Faustus himself, he found a ton of different amulets with +skills but none that were specifically for the Warlock Demon tree. I'd have to keep searching.
After a short Canyon of the Magi that did not have its most dangerous monster present (the Crusher brutes), it was on to the Tombs of Tal Rasha. I always run the entirety of the False Tombs with my solo characters and to my great surprise, I discovered that the first one I entered was Kaa's Tomb. In fact, I passed through four or five rooms and immediately stumbled upon Kaa himself, something like 2 minutes into the first of the seven Tombs! I can't recall that ever happening before and Kaa himself went down very quickly, with me barely managing to capture this screenshot to record the occasion. Finding the super unique greater mummy right away seemed to have set the tone for this playthrough, as Faustus ended up drowning in Unravelers over the course of the remaining dungeons. The Unravelers and their Burning Dead minions were present in 5 of the 7 total Tombs, including both Kaa's Tomb and the True Tomb which are the largest ones by far. Over and over and over again Faustus was forced to wade through the ranks of the undead, with no choice but to use Engorge for corpse cleanup along the way. Even Faustus couldn't use Death Mark telekills every time that the greater mummies appeared as there were simply too many skeletons walking around clogging up the place.
This was pretty tedious and slowed things down a good bit for Faustus, even as his clear speed remained lightning fast in comparison to many other characters. He proved able to full clear the Canyon and all seven of the Tombs in a little under 90 minutes which would have been nothing short of incredible for some of the variant builds that I've done. There were no dangerous moments or close calls along the way, not with the demon minions able to block incoming damage and Death Mark doing such a fabulous job of teleporting the summons behind closed doors and preventing any unpleasant surprises on the other side. I did make one discovery along the way though: even the new stash system in Reign of the Warlock caps out at stacks of 99. Faustus reached the limit of 99 full rejuvenation potions so I guess there was no need to keep picking them up - can you tell that I'm a bit of a packrat?
I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from Duriel, but whatever I expected was more than he was able to muster. I started the battle by rushing to a safe distance and then summoning a new tainted demon out of range of Duriel's Holy Freeze aura. This was supposed to replace the previous tainted summon but apparently replaced the goatman demon instead, oh well. Duriel aggroed onto the bound Smith and it was a true match of demon against demon... which went very poorly for the Lord of Pain. Duriel has 84,000 HP and hits for about 160 damage per swing in Hell difficulty, while the bound Smith had 38,000 HP and hit for roughly 10,000 damage at a time. Even with Duriel having 50% physical resistance, that wasn't a math problem which would ever work out in his favor. Long story short, Duriel lasted maybe 15-20 seconds in combat and you can visibly see from the lifebars in that screenshot how Duriel was approaching death's door while the Smith had barely been tickled. Ummm, should the Warlock's bound demons really be straight up stronger than the Act end bosses?! That doesn't feel right but apparently that's how this ability works in practice.
Normally I separate Acts Two and Three of Hell difficulty into their own separate report pages. Faustus was tearing along so quickly though that I decided to combine them together as there wasn't much worth discussing in many of these individual areas. (The clear trend in my Diablo 2 writing is that harder / weaker characters have longer reports since they find themselves in difficult or interesting fights so much more often.) The Spider Forest was an easy area for Faustus with lots and lots of fetishes running around the jungle paths. They were immune to lightning damage but had little fire resistance and zero physical resistance:
The Smith was of course killing an enemy with every swing, however the real star of the show was the tainted demon as its fireballs ripped through the masses of screaming anklebiters. There were numerous points in time where I saw a single tainted projectile wipe out an entire clump of blowdart fetishes, something I loved to see. This was another jungle layout where the Spider Forest quickly branched off into the Great Marsh to the south and the Flayer Jungle to the north, with all three of them running in parallel but the Spider Forest and Great Marsh both leading absolutely nowhere. Soon enough Faustus found the jungle alcoves with the underground Spider Cavern and Arachnid Lair. The theme in both of them was poison damage, from a combination of Poison Spinner spiders and Giant Lamprey maggots. There was one point where Faustus was bitten by a poison spider and I got to experience the joy of a monster attack that deal 5956 poison damage; there was no choice but to clear it back in town. For whatever reason the demon minions didn't seem to care about the poison, which was a good thing given that the Smith naturally has -50% poison resistance. Sszark had Spectral Hit and Teleportation for his extra boss abilities which basically eliminated him as a threat.
The Great Marsh had a strikingly different monster mix as the place was packed with Drowned Carcass zombies. It's common to see these zombies in the Marsh but rare to have them dominate the individual enemies to such a degree; Faustus felt as though he was barely fighting anything else in this region, including nearly every boss rolling as a zombie. Things became more interesting when the Drowned Carcass bosses spawned with Stone Skin trait to make them Physical Immune along with their natural fire immunity. This guy was slow enough to kill (and presented no danger) that Faustus could break out his iPhone and walk up close to take a selfie with his minions. The Marsh was also noteworthy as Blackoak Shield, the unique Luna, dropped here from a random monster. That shield has some really interesting properties, with much faster blocking and cold absorb along with boosts to Dexterity and HP. However, it has no resistances at all which makes it tough to work into a build since the shield slot usually needs to provide some degree of global resists.
It was back to flayers and soul killers in the Flayer Jungle once again, tons of the tiny troublemakers crashing against Faustus' demons like waves against the shore. The only other monster type in this outdoor area was vultures so yeah, I think Faustus and his demon pets could handle that. The two underground dungeons in the Flayer Jungle dialed up the challenge level a bit, though Faustus remained protected to a greater degree than most characters due to his summons. I could always have them scout the way forward and absorb any incoming attacks, repositioning them at will should monsters suddenly start emerging from an unexpected side corridor. The undead exploding dolls were here too and Faustus made certain to keep them as far away as possible. The demons were good at absorbing the explosions which apparently deal no damage to them; Boro confirmed this on the Discord, as the designers felt (probably correctly) that minions and hirelings had to be immune to the doll explosions or else would face certain death whenever they entered these areas. Things were pretty routine overall and Faustus made his way down to the bottom floor where he could claim his Khalim's Brain... at which time I realized I had missed Khalim's Eye. I had full cleared the entirely of the Spider Cavern and simply never opened the gold chest, whoops! This was all in the same gaming session so I sheepishly returned to the deserted earlier dungeon and claimed it.
I had two more really cool item finds over the course of the Flayer Jungle and its subdungeons. The first was one of the rare Grand Charms with +skills on it, a Natural Grand Charm with +1 Druid Elemental skills. It even had +11 to life on it as well, heh. I actually have a lot of equipment saved in stash for an elemental Druid and haven't played one since I haven't been able to come up with a character build that I like yet. The other item find was the Immortal King's Stone Crusher maul which is part of the top Barbarian item set. I already had the Immortal King's Will helm from a previous solo character (which is the only one that can't be gambled) and with the new gambling tool I might actually be able to put the rest of the set together. That would probably be enough to get me to try a Barbarian character just for the sake of experiencing a full six item set like that.
It was a long slog through the jungles until reaching the gates of Kurast at last. I used some teleporting trickery with Death Mark to pull out a few of Stormtree's minions individually, then discovered this was completely unnecessary when the Smith ran up and killed the boss in three hits - how dare you spoil my fun like that! Lower Kurast was an easy area which had a bunch of zealots and vultures inside, the zealots without any of the enemy priests that heal them. This pictured Holy Freeze vulture was the only one that stood out as being interesting due to the chilling aura. I stopped for the night after full clearing the short area and then headed over to Alcor to do some gambling. I was shocked with Faustus finally managed to hit the amulet that he was looking for:
It was a Malevolent Amulet with +3 Warlock Demon skills, yay! 
This was gambled in completely natural fashion after rolling for maybe 150-200 total amulets throughout Hell difficulty thus far. Truth to tell, I couldn't have cheated here even if I had wanted to, since the new gambling tool can only identify the type of items for sale, not what specific affixes they happen to contain (this would only have shown up as a "blue" magical amulet on the tool). Nor could I have farmed this amulet on another character and gifted it to Faustus, as this was my first Reign of the Warlock character and the Malevolent prefix didn't exist prior to the release of the downloadable content. I happily sold the old amulet with +1 Warlock skills and a handful of other minor bonuses, replacing it with this new item that had the net effect of +2 points to every single skill in Faustus' toolbox. He now had +10 skills in total for SLVL 30 Bind Demon, Summon Tainted, Demonic Mastery, and so on. The tainted demon was now dealing nearly 4000 damage per shot while Engorge at SLVL 1+10 was healing for 40% of max HP and granting 35% lifesteal. From this point forward, I could gamble for circlets and fish for the unlikely chance to hit the same Malevolent prefix in the helmet slot.
I highlighted the other find from this gambling session, which was *NOT* gambled legitimately and which Faustus wouldn't be using. The Rising Sun is one of the better unique amulets in the game and a great fit for a fire element spellcaster with +2 to skills and scaling fire absorb based on level. Every time that I conducted a gambling session with Faustus, I was using the online tool to search for any unique or set elite items (which almost never appeared as a possibility) and then checked to see if there were any interesting exceptional items. If none of them were appealing, I would try to gamble a unique ring or amulet and see what popped up. Since there's no way to tell what the exact item will be, only the item type, Faustus could get anything from awesome stuff like the Rising Sun to fairly weak offerings like the Nokozan Relic. There are nine unique rings and twelve unique amulets, plus a bunch of set items of each type, so there was plenty to keep me busy for the forseeable future rolling the slot machine and seeing what came back.
The next session started with one of my least favorite parts of the game, the Kurast Sewers. Faustus didn't draw any of the Horadrim Ancient greater mummies and made rapid work of the underground denizens, not even getting any screenshots in the process since Icehawk Riftwing died before I knew that he was there. I failed to run across anything of note in the Kurast Bazaar either, though I will mention that the Faithful/Sexton pairs were a complete joke. Remember back in Nightmare difficulty how the demon minions kept one-shotting the Sextons to shut out any potential healing from their corrupted priests? Yeah, that was still happening here in Hell difficulty apparently. I can remember having to spend hours contending with that wretched healing on some of my low-offense variant builds, and then here came the summoning Warlock sauntering in and trivializing the whole thing. This class still feels wildly overpowered and I can only imagine what things were like before the nerfs were applied.
I began the run of the six Kurast Temples with the Disused Fane, the one that doesn't have the Lam Esem tome inside, and that's where the above screenshot was taken with a fairly bad stairs trap. Faustus came down the entrance and was immediately attacked by a Flesh Hunter corrupted rogue boss even as spiders poured in from the eastern doorway. The demon minions couldn't block everything at once and Faustus himself took a series of nasty hits that had my blood pumping. I drank one, two, then three full rejuvs for safety before gaining control of the situation. There was no reason to be stingy with the purple potions since Faustus had 99 of them sitting around in stash, heh. Anyway, the rest of the Disused Fane was uneventful once there was room to place the demon minions in between Faustus and the incoming threats. Then the Ruined Temple turned out to be a complete dud, with Sarina fought right at a doorway where she was neutralized and the rest of the small temple having only some vampire champs. I claimed the quest reward for 5 more points of Vitality as usual.
The remaining four Kurast Temples thankfully didn't have anything as rough as that initial stairs trap. There were three or four Serpent Maguses right at the entrance to the Forgotten Reliquary, however they spawned in such a way that Faustus was able to block their attacks with the demon minions and take only minimal damage. That little area was noteworthy for having double Physical Immune Wailing Beast bosses when a pair of them both rolled the Stone Skin trait. The other temples had a healthy number of beetles and corrupted rogue archers and vampires, none of them directly on top of the steps though and therefore handled without any real difficulty. By the way, I should also clarify something else that I've barely touched upon with Faustus. His Blood Oath skill (where I had invested only a single skill point and was now sitting at SLVL 1+10) not only gave all of his demons 400% additional max HP and 56% resist all. It also had the property of transfering 21% of the physical damage taken by Faustus over to his demons instead! Physical damage tends to be the most dangerous type in Diablo 2 because elemental damage can be resisted whereas physical resist gear is very, very rare. Therefore Faustus was essentially running around with 21% physical resist and an effective life total of 1700 HP against physical threats. He didn't get hit very often but he had this additional protection in his back pocket for threats that made it past the demons.
A new gaming session pushed on into Travincal where Faustus did battle against the Hierophants and Night Lord vampires with their electrifying spell effects. Unfortunately for the monsters, those spells did very little to protect them from a trio of demons being teleported into their faces, heh. The Smith was still one-shotting the Hierophants and their Zealots which meant that the enemy healing was useless. Vampires raining down Meteor spells from the walkway surrounding the temple city? Equally useless when Death Mark blinked the demons wherever Faustus wanted them to go. I enjoyed tearing through this area with Faustus but it has to be said that the defenders of Travincal put up very little resistance. This pictured nest of Hierophant champs would have been a tough task for most of my solo characters to clear due to the way that they cover for one another with endless healing. But for Faustus, it was just a case of teleport in, smash / smash / smash with hammer, everything dead. So much for any challenge.
Once the whole area was finished except for the central room, I began the process of luring out the Council members. While I think that Faustus' demons could have simply tanked and killed everything via a direct frontal assault, my goal was to pull out the three super elite bosses with the intention of capturing one of them. As great as the Smith had been, the Council members had a significantly higher monster level (MLVL 85 as compared to MLVL 73 on the Smith) along with more damage output and a better resistances profile. I was able to pull out the first few Council minions and drag them away from the building for disposal, constantly having to Death Mark Faustus' own demons backwards as they were slobbering at the prospect of attacking. After killing a couple of the minions, Ismail was the first of the bosses to appear and he was the one that I most wanted to capture with Bind Demon. Ismail always has the Cursed trait which would be excellent to have even in its nerfed state, plus Fire and Cold Enchanted would be nice complimentary traits. Unfortunately Bind Demon still only had 60% odds to succeeed on the capture and apparently Faustus rolled the 40% failure as he gave me the "I can't" message during the bind attempt.
Oh well, there were other targets available to try. Toorc was the next customer out of the building and this time the Bind Demon attempt succeeded. Faustus bid farewell to his faithful Smith and paused to look over his new recruit:
Holy cow, that was a lot of boss traits! 
Toorc always has Cold Enchanted / Stone Skin traits and then he rolled Magic Resistant / Lightning Enchanted for his extra Hell affixes. Then the Bind Demon skill added the Extra Strong / Extra Fast / Spectral Hit / Aura Enchanted bonuses for a grand total of *EIGHT* boss traits! The game's interface couldn't display them all even though the aura was absolutely still in effect and had rolled as Concentration, which was slightly worse than Fanaticism while still being quite good. The main effect of all these traits was to make Toorc exceptionally tanky: he started out with 32,000 HP and I'm not sure if that gets boosted by the 400% extra health from Blood Oath or not. Even assuming that Toorc didn't get any additional health, he also had an innate immunity to fire and cold elements, plus 50% physical resistance which was further boosted by Stone Skin trait up to 75% if I understand how the boss trait mechanics work. Stone Skin would have created a physical immunity here except that Toorc already had two immunities and the gameplay won't allow more than that. Then with Lightning Enchanted and Magic Resistant traits, I believe that Toorc also hit the 75% resistance cap to both lightning and poison damage as well! This thing dealt immense damage and was almost completely unkillable, plus could teleport at will with Death Mark and heal with Engorge should that ever prove to be necessary.
You guys, I'm not sure that this Warlock class is entirely balanced. 
Down into the Durance then where the biggest threat was the undead exploding dolls, at least partly because they're so difficult to see in the dark hallways. I was hoping to avoid them but Faustus ended up drawing them on both of the floors, including the gigantic Durance 2. Thankfully the demon minions did a good job of intercepting them most of the time, not quite as good as a full Necromancer skeleton army with two dozen minions but still more than serviceable. The only downside to their huge damage output was the fact that Faustus had difficulty telling them *NOT* to kill the little buggers; there was point where an excessively zealous tainted fireball detonated two or three of them at once and took nearly 1000 damage out of Faustus' health orb, ouch! The beast got a firm scolding after that minor fiasco but that's the trouble with demons, even the Warlock only has so much control over their actions. All kidding aside, these two floors passed by surprisingly quickly aided by a somewhat smaller layout for Durance 2 than normal. The one interesting item that dropped was an Io rune; Faustus now had two Ios and copies of every single rune below it, with nothing higher having appeared as yet.
The bottom floor of the Durance had vampires lurking on the west side of the entry room which were quickly dispatched. It was prudent to eliminate them first since Bremm was lurking right on the other side of the doorway with his full minions in tow. Bremm drew the Cursed trait and could have been a good target for binding, however I was content to stick with Toorc and his ridiculous eight boss traits plus the very useful Concentration aura. Readers may notice that Bremm was nearly dead in the screenshot above while Faustus' own minions were all sitting on full health. I think that was the aftermath of an Engorge heal but that's still kind of the point, a single corpse dropping could restore all of the demons right back to full HP even if they took some scratches in each combat. Like I've said repeatedly, the poor Necromancer can only wish that his summoning skills worked like that. Maffer was hanging out by himself in the western room for a change, then Wyand brought along a vampire boss in the eastern chamber, all of which fell quickly. I remembered my Nightmare experience and pulled Mephisto over to that eastern room to be able to use the corpses on the ground for Engorge heals if necessary:
But they were not needed, not at all. I cast one Engorge ability at the start of the fight for the attack speed and lifesteal boost on the demons, then sat back and watched as the demon trio easily tore Mephisto to shreds. Those demon lifebars in the corner of the screen had not been replenished in any way, that was simply how little damage they took while destroying Mephisto. The Lord of Hatred couldn't even defeat the GOATMAN demon, let alone the bound version of Toorc! I couldn't help but feel that the gameplay was actually getting easier against these Act end bosses as the difficulty level increased. Things had legitimately been harder back in Normal and Nightmare difficulties for Faustus. Afterwards, I failed to find any useful circlets for Faustus while gambling, though I did use the online tool to reroll the screen some 400 times and purchase five dud items to unlock Que-Hegan's Wisdom, the unique mage plate. That item is inferior to Skin of the Vipermagi (which I don't think the original developers realized how good it was) but it was still pretty cool to have on hand since I had never found it before. Maybe a future character will use it, maybe not.
Well. I kind of thought that things would be getting harder for Faustus by now and they really were not. He made his way from the Travincal waypoint to the end of the Act, including full clearing all of Durance 2, in less than an hour. I had allotted 2.5 hours that evening to be safe and then kind of embarassingly had nothing to do but watch some YouTube videos with the extra time. The only real question remaining was whether I would do something truly stupid and get him killed in the remaining two Acts - tune into the final part of this report to find out!
