Doktor Faustus: Hell Difficulty Part Three

The other monster type that I was watching was the Flesh Spawners. The breeding enemies had never showed up at any point in Nightmare difficulty and therefore this was the first real test for Faustus against them with boosted stats and extra movement speed. I was delighted to find that they were not actually difficult foes for Faustus: their key weakness was having zero fire resistance with casued the tainted demon to rip right through them and their little pups. A single well-aimed tainted fireball could disperse half a dozen of the little creepers in a single blow. Faustus also had the ability to Death Mark teleport his minions directly on top of the Flesh Spawners which went a long way towards shutting down their endless breeding. Long story short, I didn't have to deal with anything like the horrors of Rogue Revival which had faltered so badly against these opponents.

The Plains of Despair shifted over to the doomed pair, Doom Casters and Doom Knights, while keeping the Venom Lords for another extremely fire-resistant group. This section was easier since the Doom Caster finger mages collapsed so readily to damage from any of the demons; those things are such a joke for no clear reason. Izual was actually not tanky at all and fell in mere seconds to the demon summons, way faster than I had been expecting, wow. The extra two points went into Blood Boil for the Summon Tainted damage synergy, and sheesh, that damage was getting a bit out of hand. The tainted summon was averaging 5300 damage per shot (!) and it was really obvious whenever Faustus was facing monsters that lacked fire immunity just how much damage the tainted was outputting. It might have been worthwhile swapping out the goatman for a second tainted if there hadn't been such endless fire resistance here in Act Four. The City of the Damned brought back Stygian Hags and continued with more Pit Lords, to the point that I was getting pretty tired of the balrog monster type by this point. There had to have been nine or ten bosses scattered across the City and some lively fights, however Faustus avoided any real danger and no items of note dropped so I don't have much more to report.

The burning river below had Pit Lords present yet again and that meant with the Chaos Sanctuary still to come that Faustus had drawn balrogs in all five areas of Act Four, heh. They were so clearly more difficult opponents to kill than everything else and the gameplay kept shoving them into Faustus' face to slow down his progress. The rest of the River of Flame was packed full of maggots which were annoying to clear but certainly not dangerous to Faustus. Hephasto had Spectral Hit / Aura Enchanted / Stone Skin / Extra Strong traits which would have made him a poor demon for binding as he would only gain the Extra Fast affix. I was content to stick with Toorc for the time being. The Stone Skin trait made Hephasto Physical Immune and that caused him to stand there tanking the demon summons for close to a full minute before dying, though it also meant that Hephasto lacked much in the way of damage-boosting abilities himself. The Hellforge dropped a Lem rune which was a medium-tier result and not especially useful for Faustus. He tossed it into the stash in the hopes that someone else might one day find a use.

I love the aesthetics of the Chaos Sanctuary, the quintessential dark cathedral, and it actually forced me to use some real effort with Faustus in a way that the rest of the game hadn't done thus far. The Venom Lords and Doom Knight / Oblivion Knights pairings were strong enough that they could survive for a bit and inflict punishing damage when large mobs assembled. There was a huge fight at the bottom of the first lava pool with an Oblivion Knight boss and Venom Lord champs, enemies that forced me to pull back the summons once or twice when they were getting swarmed and use Engorge liberally for healing bursts. I was prowling around the combat zone with Faustus and looking for opportunities to blink the demons over to the Oblivions for the quick telekill before moving them back to protect Faustus a second later. The fighting would tilt quickly in Faustus' favor whenever he could eliminate the spellcasters with their curses (especially Amplify Damage) from the fighting and I was watching for the chances when they arose. This was great fun and I enjoyed the battles much more where there was at least some element of danger for the summoned demons. I managed to keep Faustus himself out of any trouble and only lost the goatman a single time, though its health dipped into the red zone on several occasions.

I popped the seal bosses as Faustus came across their locations, starting on the west side of the central nave and working clockwise as I always do. The Vizier was just sad and exploded into ashes in a second or two, he wishes he were as cool as the other two bosses. De Seis and his Fanaticism-backed minions were pretty nasty and put a real hurt on the demon summons initially. Then I realized that De Seis had sent all of his defenders forward in reckless fashion and therefore Death Marked the demons onto the boss directly. He collapsed and that removed the Fanaticism aura from the battlefield leading to a mop-up from there. The Infector's minions ran out to clash with Faustus' own demon crew... and the enemy Venom Lords were not strong enough to break through. Once again, just as in Nightmare difficulty, the friendly demons stood there and held the front lines until the enemies started collapsing and providing bodies for Engorge heals. I targeted down the enemies one by one with precise usages of Death Mark until only the Infector himself remained. I was worried that if I tried to bind him that Faustus could wind up with a useless aura, with no time to do anything else before facing Diablo, and therefore opted again to stick with Toorc and his Concentration aura.

Diablo was also tough, much much tougher than the laugher that Mephisto had been. I took the time to pull him over to the eastern wing of the cathedral where there were a bunch of corpses still remaining on the ground from the fight against the Infector. This took a bit of effort as both Diablo and the demon summons wanted to clash with each other, soon enough though I pulled the leash of Big D and had him where I wanted him, followed by combat being joined. And Diablo hurt the demon minions - hurt them a lot! They did not dodge out of the way of his Lightning Breath of Doom which flattened both the goatman and tainted summons instantly. I resummoned both of them and proceeded to lurk over on the right side of the screen where Faustus could grab bodies off the ground to fuel his Engorges. I must have burned through half a dozen of them over the next 30 seconds to keep the demon summons alive as they were roasted by Diablo's spell effects. On the other hand, Diablo was taking terrible damage in turn from Toorc and his buffed stats from the Bind Demon skill. This was a short fight that lasted less than a minute with heavy damage exchanged on both sides. It ended with Diablo collapsing on the ground and all of Faustus' minions still standing after that initial burst, whew.

Diablo dropped Iceblink the unique splint mail, an interesting item from the "normal" unique set due to having the ability to freeze targets. That was a really, really nice piece of gear back in the pre-expansion days and it's still an oddball enough item to be worth using in Normal/Nightmare difficulties on some character builds. Faustus wrapped things up and headed over to Act Five, where I remembered that there was another runeword I should be making:

Edge is a runeword that can only be placed in missile weapons and uses three common runes, with only the Amn being even slightly tricky to find. I had to pop back to Normal difficulty to shop the vendors for a bow with three sockets and then had to fish a Dexterity charm out of stash to meet the 28 Dex requirement on the thing. Obviously Edge wasn't for combat purposes, it was to make use of that unique property down at the bottom: "Reduces All Vendor Prices 15%". I had been goofing around with potential damage reflection / Thorns builds online and stumbled across the fact that this runeword (which grants a Level 15 Thorns aura) also had the vendor sales price reduction on it - and yes, that 15% reduction does work on gambles! I was honestly flabbergasted that I had never realized this with any of my past characters. How could I not have known about this thing?! All of my solo characters spend tens of millions of gold on gambles and simply having this item in their hands would grant them an additional 15% chances to pull winning lottery tickets. It was even more useful with the new online gambling hack since going through the dummy purchases needed to land some of those unique items wasn't cheap. Anyway, Faustus would be using the new Edge bow from this point forward whenever it was time for a gambling session.

When it came time to begin Act Five proper, Faustus found himself confronting Burning Dead skeleton archers. Lots and lots of skeleton archers, hanging out in big clumps all over the Bloody Foothills. Technically there were also Foul Crows here for a second monster type (no third enemy this time), however the ratio was something like 80% skeleton archers against 20% crows and I quickly grew tired of seeing the bright red bones of those archers everywhere. They were 90% fire resistant and that was enough to make them reasonably tanky for Faustus' setup, negating the tainted demon and forcing the goatman and bound Toorc to do all the killing. Eventually Faustus fought his way to the highest hilltop where Shenk was sporting a Might aura to go with his always-present Extra Strong trait. Once they were out of the way, it was on into the Frigid Highlands where Faustus discovered that he was facing... more Burning Dead skeleton archers! Yep, they rolled as a guest monster for the second area in a row which was annoying even if it wasn't that dangerous. There were also spear cats here and some melee corrupted rogues, the latter of which had only 25% fire resistance and perished very quickly to both the tainted demon and Toorc. If there was one fun aspect of passing through this area, it was the way that Toorc's insane damage could break down the walls and towers in a matter of seconds rather than having to wait around forever. Those towers have 43,000 HP and 75% physical resistance, plus fire element immunity, so it usually takes a long time to tear them apart.

The Abbadon subdungeon had a bunch of imps running around, which were not scary at all, and then minotaurs and more skeleton archers, which very much were scary. These were the Horror archers that inflict some kind of insane poison damage that I had seen before with other characters, one hit starts draining the life orb to zero almost instantly and no amount of poison resistance has any effect. I'm convinced this has to be a bug even though the developers refuse to do anything about it. The good news was that Faustus' demon crew seemed to be able to tank the minotaurs without much issue when they appeared in small groups throughout the dungeon. Situations like this however:

Well, this was when Faustus was glad that the minions were over there doing the fighting and not him. That was an imp boss and a skeleton archer boss grouped together in a tight cluster, with everything buffed up by the Might aura that one of the bosses was sporting. It actually wasn't as bad as it looked, however, since the danger from the archers came from their poison and the imps relied on their fireballs to deal damage, neither of which was boosted by Might. Since the demon minions also seemed to be immune to whatever buggy effect was taking place on the skeleton poison, they were able to wade into that crowd and start smashing things without any real issues. Faustus made it through this area without further trouble and even discovered the unique maul Bonesnap from the golden chest at the end. That was the weapon used by my werebear Druid in the Nature's Cabal variant team more than a decade ago, and if you ever wanted to see the silliness of the Warlock levitating this gigantic weapon, here's a screenshot for you.

I continued onwards into the Arreat Plateau where the skeleton archers finally disappeared, only to be replaced by fire element skeleton mages, heh. Monsters with ranged fire projectiles were a real theme of this gaming session. There were also more imps here and overseer / minion combos to make this another region with very heavy fire resistance. I was finding that these places where the tainted demon couldn't contribute its damage played out noticeably slower for Faustus even though the overall clear pace remained very fast. One nice little item find here was a small charm with 19 life, which is nearly the maximum possible value there (small charms cap out at +20 life). Then Faustus went down to the Pit of Acheron and discovered that there were fire-tossing Salamanders inside (continuing that ranged fire theme) along with Blood Lord minotaurs. The horned humanoids didn't look so bad at first, at least until Faustus ran into this group:

Ummmm. That was a lot of minotaurs. Like, a *LOT* of minotaurs. All of them were Physical Immune and had 16,000 HP to render everything but the tainted demon helpless against them. Even worse, those weren't just normal minotaurs, they were multiple bosses and their minions grouped together into a howling, frenzied mass that was only accelerating to faster and faster speeds as their Frenzy ability stacked up. Faustus made an important discovery here: he had finally discovered the limit of what his demons could successfully tank. They were not, in fact, able to stand their ground and fight against this mob which very rapidly started to overwhelm them. This was one of the worst hairballs that I can recall ever stumbling across in Diablo 2, but we should still be clear: I finally found a situation that the three demon minions were unable to handle on their own. Thus Faustus had to fall back on basic tactics:

The pathway through the river of flame curled around to the left and then doubled back again to create a narrow gap in the floor. Faustus had passed by here a bit earlier and shot down a few minotaurs across the small space. Now I left the demon minions in place to distract the enemies for a few seconds longer, ran back and around the bend in the path, followed by summoning the demons over to safety with Death Mark. The minotaurs followed up to the edge of the lava and then stood in place dumbfounded, wondering how they could find a way over to their enemies. The tainted demon then proceeded to shoot down the entire mob from this vantage point where all of their physical immunity and Frenzy attacks availed them not. I went ahead and circled the minotaur bosses: THREE of them were grouped together here, visible by their non-blue coloring that distinguished them from their minions. A triple minotaur boss pack, with all of them being Physical Immune, was very nearly the worst situation possible for Faustus to encounter. Outside of facing this as a stairs trap, it was tough to draw something too much worse. I was very glad that the terrain features allowed Faustus to navigate this situation without it turning into a deadly mess - remember, his minions could teleport with Death Mark but Faustus had to rely on his own two feet!

I had enough time remaining this evening to continue into the ice caverns that make up the middle portions of Act Five. The Crystalline Passage featured Bone Spear tossing Claw Vipers along with lots of Infidels. These enemies were not especially dangerous and they were far less sturdy than the minotaurs had been in the last two subdungeons, dying quickly to both the melee damage from Toorc and the fireballs from the tainted demon. What made this area interesting was another fun item drop: the battle boots Aldur's Advance from the Aldur's Watchtower set which I had never seen before. These boots had some really nice properties on them: 40% faster movement speed, 50% fire resistance, 40 additional life (normally something not possible to get in the boots slot), and a mini Nightsmoke belt property under which 10% of damage taken went to mana. Those are legitimately great stats but the item wasn't a good fit for Faustus who had plenty of fire resistance from the tainted demon's Resist Fire aura and needed the cold / lightning / poison resistances on his current boots. It went into stash for maybe someone else to use.

I had time enough to knock out the Frozen River which was full of Siren witches, Ghosts, and cold element skeleton mages. This was a very frail group of opponents with low health and little fire resistance which caused the tainted demon to have an absolute blast ripping right through them. The Physical Immunity on the Ghosts was irrelevant since they would always die in a single tainted fireball. I had even found an earlier skill shrine and resummoned the goatman and tainted demons at a boosted SLVL 32, since my understanding is that the summons will remain at that boosted stat level unless they actually perish. The tainted demon was therefore shooting its fireballs for something like 6500 damage apiece into Ghosts with 4500 HP and no fire resistance - it was a slaughter. I could stir up all sorts of trouble as in the screenshot above and the demons happily chomped their way through the opposition without breaking a sweat. In addition to being lots of fun, the Frozen River also dropped a Pul rune to become Faustus' highest tier rune to date. He rescued Anya and the resist scroll nearly maxed out his cold resistance; I simply needed a little more lightning resist which would likely come from socketing an Ort rune into Faustus' final helmet, either his current Peasant Crown or a circlet with +skills if I could find one.

Faustus began a new gaming session by heading through the red portal to Nihlathak's Temple, raising a bunch of the fallen skeletons in the outer courtyard before they could even activate. The first floor in the Halls of Anguish turned out to have poison skeleton mages, beetles, and then devilkin with their shamans. This was a pretty easy draw as far as the monsters were concerned, even if the poison bolts and the need to spam Engorge on the fallen devilkin proved to be annoying. Then the next floor had a similar threat for Faustus:

These flayers were the most common enemy as they ran around in big packs of a dozen or two each. Although the flayers were fragile and only had about 3500 HP each, they were also Fire Immune and that prevented the tainted demon from being able to hurt them. This was a shame since the tainted's projectiles would have been fantastic at mowing down the little buggers in big swaths; instead, Faustus had to target them one at a time with the two melee demons who lacked anything in the way of area damage. That made for slower progress even if the floor once again proved to be friendly overall, with only goats and Infidels for the other monster types and no minotaurs or Hierophants or Grotesques present. The Halls of Vaught were heavy on poison damage as it contained Arach spiders (which can bite for 18,000 poison damage - not a typo) and Tomb Vipers that spat poison element Bone Spears, which at least have been fixed from their old buggy version of the attack. Faustus carefully explored the individual quadrants until finding Nihlathak down the third one, then edged forward slowly while spam-casting Engorge to remove each corpse as it dropped. This was a little bit like a bomb disposal unit going over the ground and removing the landmines that they found along the way, eliminating any possibility for his Corpse Explosions. I must have been pretty efficient at this task since Nihlathak never managed to detonate any bodies and the demons soon caught up to his position for a quick and ugly ending.

I had enough time to continue this gaming session and therefore Faustus proceeded into the Glacial Trail. Apparently I took zero screenshots from that area due to its routine nature, I mostly recall having to use Engorge on all of the Prowling Dead skeletons that dotted the ice cavern to ensure that they stayed dead. The Drifter Cavern had some heavy incoming fire from Succubus witches near the entrance which the demon trio managed to intercept and then track back to its source. Once that snafu at the entry staircase was cleared up, Faustus continued forward through more corrupted rogue archers and Abominable yetis. The big furry creatures were surprisingly useless against Faustus thanks to having zero fire resistance and "only" 40% physical resistance (which wasn't that much for a melee opponent in Hell difficulty). They quite literally melted when confronted with the demon minions, opening up the path to a useless gold chest reward.

The Frozen Tundra was mostly tedious for Faustus as it ended up being very heavy on these Hell Spawn creatures. The melee monsters presented absolutely no danger whatsoever but they were also Fire Immune and that slowed things down once again for Faustus. This area also had more imps, who were also Fire Immune, and it was similarly tiresome having to Death Mark the minions after the imps as they teleported around. It was worth the effort to kill everything though because Faustus found a really, really nice unique item: Shaftstop, the unique mesh armor. Even better, this was an ethereal version of Shaftstop which was actually desirable here! For those who might be unfamiliar with this item, Shaftstop is mostly used as a mercenary armor due to its low Strength requirement, boost to health, and massive 30% physical damage resistance. Forget about stacking Defense in Diablo 2, giving your mercenary items with physical resistance is what allows them to tank for much longer spans of time. And while ethereal items can't be repaired, that doesn't matter for mercenaries who never see durability reduced on their gear. I might have to gift this item over to poor WillPower and see what a difference it would have made for the tanking ability of his mercenary.

The first two River of Flame subdungeons had both contained tough fights for Faustus and this third one in the Frozen Tundra turned out to be the same story. The Infernal Pit had Demon Trickster imps, Salamanders, and Doom / Oblivion Knight pairs for the monster mix inside. For the most part that wasn't dangerous or anything, however there was one clash where things became dicey:

There were multiple enemy bosses here that combined their abilities together in a nasty way. First of all, somewhere in the back was an imp boss who was giving everyone a Might aura for a big boost to physical damage. Then there was the highlighted Salamander boss who had double defensive traits in Magic Resistant / Stone Skin for extra beefiness plus Extra Strong trait to double its damage. Furthermore, one of the Oblivion Knights had just cast the Amplify Damage curse on the demon minions which resulted in the extremely dangerous Might + Cursed + Extra Strong combo. This caused the melee attacks of everything present to hit for 4x normal damage and the Salamander boss with the Extra Strong trait to attack somewhere in the 8-10x normal damage range, ouch! I didn't realize what was going on until I spotted that the goatman demon had been blasted out of existence and had to resummon it. That caused me to back up a bit to string out the enemies and reduce the total number of opponents that the demon summons were facing, which seemed to do the trick. The saving grace was that these monsters didn't have dangerous AI patterns so even juicing them up with vastly increased damage output wasn't too bad. I'm still glad that Faustus himself didn't have to wade into that mess and could keep directing things from the sidelines.

Faustus had saved up a lot of gold during this session and I headed off to do some more gambling at the end. I checked the online gambling tool as always and refreshed it a few times to see if anything really good was available. It's actually pretty unusual to see much in the way of elite uniques or elite set items available through the gambling hack, and even the ones that do show up usually aren't very useful. For example, the unique tomahawk (Razor's Edge) kept appearing as a potential gamble, which I'm sure is a perfectly fine weapon but not really something that I was interested in gambling. This time though, I spotted that one of the game's most desirable uniques was listed as an option and, well, I had to have it. Just refresh the shop 571 times, purchase a useless throwing spear, refresh 11 more times followed by gambling gloves and a shield, then refresh one more time and purchase three straight caps to unlock...

The Harlequin Crest, the unique shako hat. This is on the short list of most sought after helmets in the whole game and especially for spellcasting characters. While it doesn't have any elemental resistances, it does have virtually everything else that a character might want: +2 to all skills, giant boosts to life and mana, 10% physical damage resistance, and (critically important to lategame farmers) 50% additional magic find. Readers will know that I place essentially zero emphasis on magic find gear since my characters are trying to survive, not farm Mephisto endlessly, but this is a big deal if you're re-running the same bosses endlessly in the hopes of finding high end items. Given how close to the end of the game Faustus was at this point, and in the context of having rolled that blasted gambling screen 500+ times, I decided that I would go ahead and use the Harlequin Crest for Faustus. He only had the Ancient's Way to the finish line remaining and hadn't exactly been struggling with his Peasant Crown hat up to this point. Besides, the green coloring on the Harlequin Crest was distinctive-looking and made Faustus stand out against the white snows of the Act. He had actually worn some kind of cap for nearly his whole journey: first a socketed cap with two rubies for Normal difficulty, then the Peasant Crown for Hell difficulty after using a Lore circlet for a while in Nightmare, and now finally this funky shako.

If you want to refer to me as a cheating cheater for doing this, well, I can't say that you're wrong. I just wanted to actually use one of these cool endgame items for once!

The Frozen Tundra waypoint was located at the area's extreme back end, right next to the entrance to the Ancient's Way, which was convenient for avoiding backtracking. The last underground ice cavern held quill rats and more prowling dead which wasn't much of an enemy combo. This made for a nice warmup as I settled into what looked to be the final gaming session for Faustus. The Icy Cellar saw a flock of Ghosts hovering over the ice and beelining directly towards Faustus - only for them to get evaporated by the first fireball from the tainted demon, heh. There were more Pit Vipers in this small area along with Abominable yetis which all made for a friendly enemy draw. The Icy Cellar can sometimes be quite nasty and there simply wasn't any need to be concerned while clearing it out with Faustus. What was noteworthy was a cool-looking set item dropping in the form of Ondal's Almighty spired helm. This thing doesn't have very good stats on it and the Heaven's Brethren set itself is mediocre at best, however the whole thing is inspired by traditional Korean costuming which is a fantastic concept. Even if Faustus wasn't going to use this thing, the helmet looked awesome when he briefly tried it on. It's a real shame that this majestic crown has lousy stats while the goofy green Harlequin Crest is one of the best items in the whole game.

That brought Faustus to the Ancients who have unfortunately ended more than one of my deathless character runs. There was basically nothing that Faustus could do to prepare ahead of time so he hit the central statue and hoped for the best. What followed was Faustus standing in place, unable to heal his minions with Engorge due to the lack of corpses present, and watching to see if the stats on his demon followers were strong enough to defeat the Barbarian trio. Long story short: they were. I did absolutely nothing while the demons first slew Talic and Korlic (the two that were dumb enough to run forward and melee against Toorc) followed by Madawc last. I was prepared to replace the goatman and tainted summons if they were killed, however the Ancients never managed to pull that off. Losing Toorc would have been a disaster and yet thankfully he never dropped particularly low either, with the battle ending with him at roughly 85% HP remaining. Again, I kept expecting the gameplay to get harder for Faustus and it largely never did.

Well, that's not entirely true. The first floor of the Worldstone Keep was routine as usual, Faustus and his demons blasting through enemy vampires and witches and those Fetid Defilers that never seem to do much of anything. Then Worldstone 2 was a total poison-fest with huge numbers of mummies and poison-tossing skeletal mages. Clearing the poison was annoying but not anything to be concerned about. However, when Faustus ventured down the next staircase onto Worldstone 3, he found himself confronted with a genuine challenge:

That was, ummm, a lot of Soul Killers. These little buggers were surprisingly difficult for Faustus to deal with since they were Fire Immune to block the tainted's attacks and the other two minions specialized in single target damage, not area abilities. Even though each individual Soul Killer was no problem, Faustus found himself facing as many as three dozen at a time while tilted the math against his demons. In addition to the little fetishes, the other two monsters on this floor were Fire Immune Death Lord minotars and then the (Fire Immune) Doom Knight / Oblivion Knight pairs from Act Four. Actually every single enemy present was Fire Immune except for the handful of Oblivion Knights - the tainted demon was quite sad here! This was an ugly mixture of opponents since it was difficult to target the minotaurs when mixed in with so many of the Soul Killers, and then the Oblivion Knights kept casting Amplify Damage and Lower Resist curses from the safety of the monster back lines. Amplify Damage caused the minotaurs to hit super hard while Lower Resist exacerbated the poison damage inflicted by each and every blowdart attack. Believe it or not, Faustus kept getting pushed back and back until he was nearly pushed up the stairs over there on the left. I was having to work very hard by teleporting the demons around constantly and spamming Engorge for heals, then even had to drink a pair of full rejuvs on Faustus himself since the poison blowdarts made it tough to heal from red potions alone.

The situation really was close to collapsing for a few minutes at the entrance, and then again when Faustus rounded the first curve and faced a minotaur champion pack mixed in with another 20+ blowdart fetishes. The demon front line nearly faltered there and only the presence of so many corpses on the ground for mass Engorges kept everything up and fighting. The big breakthrough came when I realized I should unsummon the tainted demon and use a second goatman instead. This helped out enormously since the tainted had been helpless against all that fire immunity while the Cleave ability on the goatmen allowed them to hit multiple Soul Killers at once. It also helped that Faustus had more room in which to operate after clearing out the first side passageway and the rest of the floor proceeded smoothly from there. He reached his final level up here to CLVL 84 which resulted in the pictured damage for the tainted demon. There were still four more synergy skill points that could have been placed into Blood Boil but a tainted demon hitting for nearly 7000 damage per shot was surely more than enough against anything that lacked fire immunity.

The Throne of Destruction did not have a stairs trap at the bottom, though it did retain a monster mix that was nearly all Fire Immune with more Death Lord minotaurs and Doom Knight / Oblivion Knights, hooray. I opted to keep the double goatman setup for the moment while clearing out the side wings, then switched back to the tainted demon for the concluding boss rush. Colenzo went down very quickly but then Achmel and his greater mummies did something that I wasn't expecting: they started reviving the Oblivion Knights since they are technically undead! I'm not sure if I've ever seen that before and it forced more usage of Engorge to clean up the bodies on the ground. For both Bartuc and Ventar, I did my best to pull some of the minions away from the boss and spread out the threats a bit rather than facing them all at once. I was reasonably successful at this and managed to pick off a few minions in each case, constantly teleporting Faustus' own demon summons in the opposite direction to get the enemy minions to chase after them. This allowed me to keep everything alive - with a good bit of help from Engorge - even though Ventar rolled with a Might aura.

All of that was practice for trying to get Lister alone since I wanted to capture him with Bind Demon:

I knew it would be tough to seize control of Lister if he had all of his minions surrounding him, thus the attempt to retreat back into the maze and separate the enemy group. This worked pretty well, with Faustus luring out the first two Minions of Destruction and defeating them in isolation, followed by getting Lister to chase through the gateway with only two of his minions in tow. Then I just sat there holding down the Bind Demon key on Lister and crossing my fingers that it would work. Lister and his two minions gave the friendly demon summons a real pasting, nearly killing the tainted demon with their attacks while Faustus was still holding to his chain. I saw Lister's healthbar drop down to a mere sliver remaining and then whoosh, suddenly Lister was under Faustus' control for good. The hungry demon quickly destroyed his former allies and then we all returned back to the throne room to clean up the remaining minions that had been left there. The captured Lister retained its Cold Enchanted / Fire Enchanted traits and then gained the standard Extra Strong / Extra Fast / Spectral Hit / Aura Enchanted combo from the Bind Demon skill. While this was only six traits as opposed to the eight that Toorc had been sporting, Lister had much better base stats and a more aggressive AI behavior. To put some numbers on this, Lister had 56,000 HP, immunity to fire and cold elements, 95% resistance to poison, and 50% resistance to physical and lightning damage. He even came with another Concentration aura which was fine with me - I wasn't going to do much better than this for the Bind Demon options.

Baal did, well, nothing. The Lord of Destruction didn't like having the demons teleported into his face with Death Mark and largely stood in place snarling and shooting off ineffective spells that did no damage. The only time that I saw the health drop on the demon minions was when he pulled out his clone roughly 65% of the way through the battle; I don't know why this suddenly caused them to take damage but the tainted and goatman summons both dropped into the "yellow" health range while dealing with the clone. A single tainted demon would perish during the fighting and have to be replaced, that was it though. The goatman never died and the bound Lister never dropped below 95% of its healthbar. What an easy finish to this lengthy journey:

I created Faustus as a way to explore the new character class added in the downloadable content. While I can't opine on the Chaos or Eldritch skill trees, the Demon tree looks to be exordinarily powerful in comparison to the game's other summoning builds. I've played a bunch of summoning Druid and Necromancer characters and let me tell you, they were nowhere near as strong as Faustus with his demon followers. The goatman and tainted summons are both very solid in their own right, definitely strong enough to complete the whole game with just those two options and their support skills. Death Mark and Engorge are both absolutely ridiculous for 1 point skills (though I understand that Death Mark is often maxed by high end players), letting the demons teleport around the map with abandon and then heal while also cleaning up corpses to stop the annoying resurrecting monsters. Neither of these summons requires bodies like the Necromancer's skeletons either which makes the Act end bosses much easier to navigate.

But it's the Bind Demon skill that really breaks the game apart. The bound demons are insanely strong and can easily solo the whole game on their own; I mentioned repeatedly how a bound super elite demon could go 1 vs 1 against Duriel or Mephisto and win while barely taking any damage. No summon or minion follower should have that kind of power since it completely trivializes the rest of the game. Then add in the ability to teleport the bound demon around and heal it and so on - it's absurd. I'm glad that I was able to experience this phenomenon one time but I don't think I'll be doing another character build around this skill again. Here's one more fun fact about the Bind Demon skill: Faustus never had his bound demon killed over the course of his entire journey. Not even once! Now compare this to the poor Necromancer's Revive skill which is the closest analogy. Although the Warlock is only limited to a single bound demon at a time, the captured demon never times out, plus gets four different boss traits, plus insane bonus stats, plus can teleport around the map at will - sheesh! This feels more like a fan mod than a real skill.

I really did have fun playing this character and the speed with which Faustus cleared the whole game was a testament to that. He full cleared every area in the game, every monster slain, no deaths incurred, no need for Save and Exit bailouts. Faustus also gave me inspiration for something like half a dozen additional character builds so we'll see what I end up having time to play. Until then, thanks as always for reading along.