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Nova tore her way through Normal difficulty using an entire arsenal of unique and set items that had been gifted to her via gambling or other characters. She had faced essentially no challenges thus far and looked to keep rolling along as she prepared for the repeat journey through Nightmare. I believe that Nova had a unique or set item of some kind in every single one of her item slots aside from a rare amulet with +1 Sorceress skills and some modest resist all. She had accumulated +7 to all skills and +8 to fire skills at a time where most normal characters would only have something in the +1-3 range from the Lore helmet plus Spirit sword combination. Highlights of her equipment included Skin of the Vipermagi for her armor, Magefist in the gloves slot, the Peasant Crown on her head, and a Stone of Jordan for one of her rings. Fire Ball remained Nova's primary skill and had been maxed out at SLVL 20+8, with the pictured 1117-1237 damage range sitting much, much higher than a player would be expected to have at this point in the gameplay. (By way of comparison, Blanche's non-twinked Ice Bolt spell dealt all of 177-255 damage at the same outset of Nightmare.) Even the raw damage comparison undersold the strength of Nova since she already had 93% faster cast to reach the 9 frame animation window for extremely fast spellcasting. Nova also had very solid health and mana totals for this point along with maxed out resistances in every category - there really wasn't a clear weakness anywhere in her character setup.
After posing for a quick selfie with Akara, Nova headed out into the Blood Moor where everything continued, well, exactly the same as it had at the end of Normal difficulty. Enemies continued to die in a single shot of Fire Ball which meant that there was little need for Meteor or anything in the way of tactics. Typical enemies in Act One Nightmare have roughly 500 HP, with the low health monsters like Fallens down around 200 HP and the beefy opponents like Gargantuans up around 1000 HP. Readers might note that all of those numbers were well below the current damage range of Fire Ball and there still wasn't much fire resistance to contend with, only the fallen shamans having anything worth noting thus far. In addition, Fire Ball itself may have been maxed out on skill points but Nova could place her new points into Meteor which had a strong damage synergy with Fire Ball. Each point in Meteor increased the damage of that skill itself while also adding 14% more (base) damage to Fire Ball. This mathed out to roughly 70-80 more damage with each level up and therefore Nova's raw destructive power only kept climbing higher and higher.
The only thing that could slow her down was outright fire immunity which was still rare here in Nightmare. Bishibosh is always Fire Immune, of course, and this time around Nova had a better plan to deal with him than having to engage in melee combat. She took out as many of the surrounding Fallens as possible and cut Bishibosh down to size with Static Field, then switched over to the Chain Lightning skill to deal the necessary remaining damage. Chain Lightning had been a prerequisite skill for Energy Shield anyway and I figured that Nova might as well make use of it against Fire Immune targets. As it turns out, SLVL 1+7 Chain Lightning dealt pretty good damage in its own right and I dropped a single skill point into Lightning Mastery which then scaled up to SLVL 1+7 as well to add 134% more damage to all lightning skills. This took Chain Lightning up to 1-295 damage that bounced up to six times, and even though I've never liked the unreliability of the big damage range on the Sorcie lightning tree skills, this was more than enough to handle the rare fire immunes that popped up.
Very little happened over the first half of Act One as Nova crushed her way past a series of feeble opposition. I was placing her stat points into Strength at the moment due to the need to reach 95 Strength for her next gifted pair of boots which would be arriving at CLVL 45. For whatever reason, there was a big gap between the flurry of gifted items Nova had unlocked around CLVL 30 and then another large group which would be arriving at CLVL 45 around the beginning of the next Act. The only stuff that unlocked during these areas was the final set of gifted charms: a Garnet Grand Charm of Sustenance with 28 life and 24% fire resistance, a Small Charm with 16 life and 6% fire resistance, and then a pair of Small Charms that both had +19 life on them. The addition of these charms essentially offset the HP that Nova was not gaining by placing her stat points into Strength over Vitality, as she still managed to increase her max health up to roughly 600 HP. Outside of these charms, Nova was largely biding her time as she did the whole first half of the Act (from the start through everything in the Black Marsh) in a single gaming session.
Not much changed as Nova continued venturing deeper into the various floors of the Monastery. Her damage kept scaling upwards with each level and continued to outpace the rate at which monster health increased, with nearly everything still dying in a single Fire Ball. The only exception to that trend was the Dark One shamans that started appearing in the Cathedral, as they had 80% fire resistance and therefore required all of two shots instead. Notable events along the way included killing Pitspawn Fouldog and his minions with a single Meteor casting as they stood helplessly behind the bars of a jail cell, and then finding the Horazon's Hold set gloves from the new Warlock set. I had never seen those things before and I tossed them in stash even though the Horazon's set is designed to be used by a melee Warlock using the Eldritch skill tree which isn't a character build I'm likely to play. You never know though. Down on Cats 4, Nova cleared out a big champ pack of Afflicted in the room with the blood pool and eliminated the fallens over in the side wings, then moved to engage Andariel. I didn't bother to get close enough for Static Field and instead unleashed a barrage of Fire Balls and Meteors in her direction. She never made it past the end of the red carpet.
The first thing to do upon reaching Lut Gholein was hiring one of the Act Two mercenaries. Out of the ten mercenaries available, only one of them came with Holy Freeze aura and leaving town apparently did not refresh this list. Therefore, welcome to the team, Chalan!
Chalan was immediately kitted out with three unique items that I had gambled for him ahead of time. I also dropped a single skill point into Enchant so that Nova could keep that buff running on him as well, not for the extra fire damage but for the attack rating boost of roughly 100%. The weapon of choice here was the unique fuscina Kelpie Snare which I had amusingly gambled a good bit earlier, only to have a second copy of the unique item drop back in Act One Nightmare! I could have used this item for Chalan even without the gambling hack, heh. Kelpie Snare is a great item for an Act Two mercenary, with solid but not spectacular damage along with two useful defensive bonuses in the form of 50% fire resistance and scaling health per level. The real benefit of the item though is its slowing property: slows target by 75%. This slow applies to both movement speed and attack speed, plus it stacks with the slow from Holy Freeze as well. This is the whole reason why I wanted an Act Two mercenary (Boro suggested on my Discord that he would have preferred an Act One Rogue with cold damage and an Insight bow): Chalan's purpose was to serve as a crowd control bot. He didn't need to kill anything, Nova had more than enough damage for that. His purpose was to distract enemies, slow them with Holy Freeze if possible, and get the Kelpie Snare tag on opposing bosses. He could die after that and it wasn't a big deal, monsters would remain slowed once he hit them a single time. That was the plan at least and I'd have to see if it worked out in practice.
For defensive items, Chalan would be taking that very nice ethereal Shaftstop armor that Doktor Faustus had found towards the end of his journey. Everyone knows that Defensive rating is mostly pointless in Diablo 2 and that physical resistance is a far more useful stat for anyone intending to take on tanking duty. Shaftstop granted 30% physical resistance along with an additional +60 life plus some mostly-useless extra defense against missile attacks which I guess couldn't hurt. Chalan's helmet was the unique sallet Rockstopper which was mostly desired for an additional 10% physical resistance, along with adding more resistances and some faster hit recovery. The Vitality bonus was unfortunately useless since mercenaries don't have that stat, ah well. There was one notable weakness in this setup: no lifesteal anywhere on Chalan's gear. My thinking was that I might eventually socket an Amn rune into Chalan's weapon but I wanted to test how the whole thing worked before commiting a socket quest to this weapon. I could be completely wrong and switch to something else if the whole idea blew up in my face. I'll probably also swap Chalan over to a Bulwark runeword helmet once he no longer needs the extra resists from Rockstopper, since Bulwark is now makeable with non-ladder characters.
Chalan had his first test down in the Sewers and it turned out that he was... not needed at the moment? As expected, Nova was still killing the monsters way too fast for her mercenary to do much of anything right now. The melee Burning Dead skeletons were 75% fire resistant and therefore required a second shot of Fire Ball to defeat, otherwise though everything still fell in one blast. Even the Burning Dead archers still died in one shot despite their own 50% fire resistance. The one opponent who could slow down Nova proved to be the Burning Dead mages on the third floor since they are the first enemy in the game to be completely Fire Immune even here in Nightmare. I thought that Chalan would help out here, and he did, a little bit, however Nova still continued to make rapid progress by swapping over to Chain Lightning and cutting through the skeleton mages with lightning instead. Radament had no fire resistance at all which meant that he perished quickly despite his hefty HP total.
Once the Sewers were past, there wasn't a single enemy with any fire resistance in Act Two Nightmare until reaching the Fire Towers and Tomb Creeper leapers in the Lost City. Nova could only rub her hand together in glee at this development as she returned to one-shot kill territory against literally everything. Then shortly thereafter she reached CLVL 45 and the next wave of item unlocks were enabled:
This is apparently the character level at which items bearing the "Volcanic" prefix are enabled, the one that grants +3 skills to the Sorceress fire tree. Did I have some of these items already saved up from my many prior solo characters? Oh, you bet that I did! Nova was now the proud owner of a Volcanic amulet and a Volcanic coronet, granting a total of +6 to skills in the fire tree and a net of +4 skills over the equipment that had previously been occupying these item slots. These items took a character that had already been out of control and tipped the scales even further into imbalanced territory. Nova now had SLVL 32 Fire Balls! In Nightmare Act Two! Her primary damage skill was dealing 2670-2928 damage per shot, with fast casting and no cooldowns! Meteor was hitting for 6000 damage!!! The following desert areas can be summarized best with these emojis:
One shot, one kill. One shot, one kill. Nothing could stand in the way of Nova as she made her way through the remainder of the deserts with her newly buffed fire skills. Chalan had nothing to do since everything was falling so quickly, which may have been a good thing because his Holy Freeze aura only started out at SLVL 4 and definitely needed some more levels to hit a wider area of effect. There was another new item that unlocked for Nova at CLVL 46, which technically should have been CLVL 45 except that I had miscounted her Strength allocation and needed one more level up to reach the 95 Strength requirement. This was the pictured Aldur's Advance set boots which had been turned up during my previous playthrough with Doktor Faustus. While that Strength requirement might have been a bit high, Nova needed to get to 156 Strength anyway for her Spirit shield so I figured that I might as well use these boots too.
Aldur's Advance turned out to be an ideal set of boots for Nova in multiple different ways. 40% faster movement is the highest amount that can appear on boots and I tend to value extra speed pretty highly, even for a character with Teleport at her disposal. Getting an additional 50 health was a really nice bonus (since health normally can't appear on boots) and then 50% fire resistance was fantastic as well. Nova would need to use a fire sundering charm later on which would impose a huge penalty to her fire resistance, with these boots somewhat offsetting the negative 70-90% penalty that she would absorb eventually. Aldur's Advance can roll anywhere from 40-50% of this stat and apparently Doktor Faustus had gotten the max result, nice! There was even the "10% of damage taken goes to mana" property which synergized with Nova's Nightsmoke belt and use of Energy Shield. I had looked over the list of unique and set boots earlier without being able to turn up anything better: this item looked like a permanent keeper for Nova.
Act Two continued to fly past due to Nova's extremely fast clear speed. She could smash through essentially anything with a single Fire Ball cast and had Teleport to leap over walls at the click of a button, something that was extra fun in places like the Palace and the Arcane Sanctuary. Fangskin tried to rush Nova on Claw Viper 2 and she simply blinked onto the altar and downed all of the snakes from up there in safety, heh. One other thing worth mentioning is that Teleport is an incredibly useful spell for positioning the mercenary where the player wants them to go, rather than having them wander off to heavens knows where as they otherwise like to do. I understand that this is yet another reason that all of the top-tier builds run Enigma for their armor choice; well, having Teleport plus the magic find on the item. Anyway, Nova did finally reach an enemy who didn't perish in one shot: the Hell Clan goats in the Arcane Sanctuary who were 70% fire resistant. They died in two shots (or one Meteor) of course but Nova was still annoyed at their relative sturdiness. The rare Lightning Spires were even worse at fully 90% fire resistant (and outright Lightning Immune) so Nova teleported next to them and let Chalan do a little stabbing which quickly smashed the towers.
After clearing the whole Sanctuary, Nova popped back into Normal difficulty briefly so that she could use her first socket quest on the Skin of the Vipermagi armor. I had been doing some planning for her item build and concluded that she was likely to wear this thing for virtually her entire career: +1 skills, 30% faster cast, and 35% resist all were simply properties that were too good to ignore. Going up to +2 skills with something like the Sorceress runeword Enlightenment didn't feel worthwhile, as sticking with Skin of the Vipermagi could allow Nova to itemize more +skills items elsewhere. Therefore I socketed in an Um rune to take the resist all from 35% to 50% and now Nova had a really, really strong armor to use as the keystone of her itemization. She might replace this in extreme lategame but I knew that I'd get tons of value from this armor along the way.
The Tombs of Tal Rasha passed by quickly as I full cleared all seven of them along with the Canyon of the Magi in just under an hour of real world time. The Burning Dead skeletons had 75% fire resistance... and that still wasn't enough to keep them from being one-shotted by Fire Ball since they had about 800 HP apiece, not sufficient against the 3700 damage that Fire Ball was averaging per cast at this point. Her Meteors were hitting for more than 8000 damage and yet Nova rarely used them because they were simply too slow, everything underneath the targeting area having expired before the big space rock could land. Nova simply blasted her way from room to room, guzzling down blue mana potions constantly since her Fire Balls were quite expensive to cast and any damage that she took ate into her mana orb via Energy Shield. I generally fought in a front-to-back style, stutter-stepping forward and mowing down the skeletons and vampires and mummies in the way before reaching the Unravelers in the back. Occasionally Nova would use Teleport to jump over the heads of the melee opponents and get directly to the greater mummies, though that was a bit riskier and also typically not necessary. Chalan helped out a bit with his Holy Freeze aura but mostly he just stood around admiring the work of Nova as she relentlessly gunned down everything without mercy.
The Duriel fight was another "blink and you'll miss it moment". Nova raced over and cast Static Field a few times, then Teleported away to cast a Meteor on top of where Chalan was engaging the big bug. Then it was a matter of holding down the right mouse button to spam-cast the Fire Balls. The screenshot above captures the moment when the first Meteor arrived, only to find that Duriel was already down at 3% of health remaining. There was no need for a second Meteor and the whole process took perhaps 10 seconds from beginning to end.
Act Three proceeded in much the same fashion as Act Two. I had scanned the list of monsters ahead of time and the only things that had any fire resistance here in Nightmare were the Drowned Carcass zombies, which were oddly flame retardant at 75% protection. Almost everything else had zero fire resistance and the zombies didn't even show up in the Great Marsh this time around. Nova happily blasted her way past fetishes and crows and bramble hulks, with the big tree monsters dying to the same singular Fire Balls as the little shrimps. I'd like to make this sound more interesting but there really wasn't anything to say about the enemies thus far, everything fell so quickly that they were barely registering to Nova. She had been continuing to place her stat points into Strength for virtually the entirety of Nightmare difficulty thus far, as I figured that there was no reason to do a stat respec when Nova could simply work her way to the 156 Strength requirement for a Monarch shield naturally. I had failed to count the numbers properly ahead of time and thus even though Nova qualified for the hefty shield at CLVL 54, she needed another two levels plus the Lam Esem quest reward to unlock her second Spirit runeword:
Just as Spirit in the sword slot outperformed all of the various unique and set items that Nova had access to, Spirit in the shield slot similarly outdid everything else available. It's really tough to beat the combination of stats on this runeword: +2 to all skills (very rare in the shield slot), more faster cast, more faster hit recovery, 35% resist all to everything except fire, 22 more Vitality which translated into 44 additional HP for Nova, and then a hefty boost to mana as well. The only real downside was the 156 Strength requirement on a Monarch shield and that's something that I could probably respec later on to require less Strength investment once Nova started hitting the true endgame stuff with a bunch of bonus stat points. Nova was using Blanche's Spirit shield (and her Spirit sword for that matter) since Blanche's version of the item happened to have the best rolls on the faster cast and extra mana gain amongst my various characters. Faster cast can fall anywhere from 25-35% so this was a good roll there, a bit less so on the mana which falls in the 89-112 range. I certainly wasn't complaining though since Nova's prior Visceratuant shield had contained absolutely nothing of use beyond +1 skills and this was a massive upgrade over that item.
The new shield also boosted Nova up and over the next faster cast break point. She needed 105% faster cast to hit the 8 frame window and actually exceeded that by a good bit, all the way up to 126% faster cast which meant that she could drop some of this stat if needed. The 8 frame window is usually the sweet spot for an endgame Sorceress since the class has to go all the way to 200% faster cast for the final 7 frame animation window and that's simply not worth the effort. This was a casting speed that I had only reached with one previous character, Electric Tsunami, and those Fire Balls were now coming out *FAST*. I snapped two pictures here of Nova's casting speed with her new gear and then with no faster casting speed at all (the default animation speed is 13 frames) to illustrate that Nova was casting at nearly double the base rate. Faster casting speed even makes the character safer since it locks the Sorcie in place for noticeably less time with each spell cast. It makes a huge difference while playing, trust me!
Nova was now stronger than ever before and raced through the rest of Act Three at breakneck speed. She flew through the entire Act in ONE DAY (!) which is exceptionally rare for me, actually knocking out the False Tombs and Duriel in the morning and then speedrunning the entirety of Act Three during the afternoon and evening. Highlights included finding a Grand Charm that had +1 to Amazon Bow and Crossbow skills on it which was saved in stash, dodging any bad stairs traps in the Kurast Temples, then defeating the Council so quickly that I failed to get good screenshots of any of them. Durance 2 amusingly had the two staircases right next to each other, only three rooms separating Durance 1 from Durance 3, but of course I had to clear the whole thing because I'm a glutton for punishment. At least it all went by quickly.
The Durance also held the only real threat that Nova had faced thus far: the exploding undead dolls. The Undead Stygian Dolls were present on both Durance 1 and Durance 2 which was a serious danger as they turned Nova's own immense damage output back against her. Despite my best efforts, the little dolls were difficult to see and a single Fire Ball cast would of course detonate any of the enemies that it touched. Nova rounded a corner on Durance 2 and a bunch of them raced out at her unexpectedly; by instinct, I tossed a Fire Ball into the group and the explosion nearly killed Nova! 
She dropped down to virtually nothing on both life and mana orbs and I drank a full rejuv instantly, not capturing the moment with a screenshot since it happened so fast. I think that she legitimately would have died her without Energy Shield absorbing some of the damage before her mana orb gave out. Afterwards I adopted a better tactic: Teleport backwards whenever the dolls appeared. This would teleport Chalan on top of Nova's position where he could tank the incoming dolls and let Nova explode them safely. She never faced another close call after that and I'll need to remember this for the future - those dolls were scary.
Much scarier than Mephisto and the three remaining Council members on Durance 3, as it turned out. Bremm and the others had no fire resistance so they were gone in 3 Fire Balls, it was comical how quickly they collapsed against Nova. Mephisto was a matter of some quick Static Field casts followed by laying on the Fire Balls and Meteors; he lasted slightly longer than Duriel but still no better than 20-25 seconds. Chalan was barely even scratched to give an idea of the speed of this encounter. Mephisto dropped the Horazon's Hold set gloves which was the third time that this item had appeared for Nova, sheesh! I just played a Warlock character, I didn't need more of the Warlock set gear right now.
It was on then to Act Four and the dreary fields of hell turned into a speed bump that notably slowed Nova's progress. Act Four is infamously known as the Land of Endless Fire Resistance, and while Nova may have been far too strong to be stopped completely, this was still enough to drag her feet a bit. The game served up an initial test right past the entrance stairs when the Doom Knights on the Outer Steppes were all completely Fire Immune. Nova fell back on her Chain Lightning and Static Field spells against these opponents; although the damage was vastly lower than her fire magics, she was still hitting for enough damage to make steady progress against these melee opponents. Having exceptionally fast casting speed definitely helped here, with Nova's spammed Chain Lightning spells coming out so fast that they felt more like a lightning form of Inferno than individual bolts. Chalan was a big help here as well, slowing everything with his Holy Freeze aura and getting in some good pokes with his Kelpie Snare spear. I had been worried that the Doom Knights would be more of an obstacle and fortunately they turned out to be not that bad.
One additional boost for Nova was adding Bul-Kathos' Wedding Band as a new unique ring starting at CLVL 58. This was a replacement for the Manald Heal ring that Nova had been wearing previously, as she no longer needed its 10% faster cast since she could still maintain the 8 frame window without it. Bul-Kathos had about the same amount of extra HP (and would scale higher over time with more character levels) and most importantly added another +1 to all skills, a very rare property on rings. Nova now had SLVL 34 Fire Balls to play around with! After dropping two more synergy skill points from Izual into the Fire Bolt skill, the damage output from Fire Ball was sitting at 5222-5708 and Meteor had officially exceeded 10,000 damage per cast. Anything that wasn't outright Fire Immune was going to get roasted by that kind of immense damage output. It was a shame losing the life regen on Manald Heal, forcing Nova to go back to drinking a constant stream of red potions to remove chip damage, but I could live with that in order to add another +1 skills to her arsenal.
The toughest enemies in this Act were not the Doom Knights, nor the Venom Lords even though they were 80% fire resistant and had high health totals. No, the most annoying foe proved to be the Burning Soul gloams on the Plains of Despair due to the way that their lightning bolts interacted with Energy Shield. For those unfamiliar with this skill, the damage prevented by Energy Shield takes place BEFORE any resistances are applied. This doesn't matter for physical damage (unless the player is relying on the very rare physical resistance property on some uniques and high end runewords), however it's a huge deal for elemental damage where the game is designed and balanced around the assumption that the player will have a good chunk of resistances in place. The Burning Souls deal about 70 damage with their lightning bolts and that would get cut by 3/4ths by Nova's lightning resistance normally, down to about 17 damage taken. Her Energy Shield blocked half of that 70 damage, however, and then the 35 damage was multipled by 193% to drain about 70 mana out of Nova's blue orb. That was roughly 70 mana lost *PER* lightning bolt striking her and she was blasting away with her own spells at the same time. Long story short, whenever the wispy gloams showed up Nova would end up burning through a ton of mana despite my best efforts.
This causes a lot of players to skip Energy Shield entirely since it can be pretty annoying to work around the constant mana draining. I still think that it's worthwhile to grab, however, since Energy Shield works great against physical damage and anything that blocks incoming attacks goes a long way towards increasing survivability. The number one goal in D2 is to avoid getting one-shotted by an attack and Energy Shield effectively gives the Sorceress more health to avoid that. Anyway, the following areas were significantly easier since they lacked Fire Immune opponents or the Burning Souls and as a result Nova plowed right through them. Hephasto could not even close the distance with Chalan before he fell to the Fire Ball barrage, poor guy. The Hellforge reward dropped a Ko rune which was a decent result from the Nightmare version of the quest, not bad.
The Chaos Sanctuary was a lot of fun, with Nova having to mix up her spells between Fire Ball and the Static Field / Chain Lightning combination whenever Doom Knights showed up. I used Teleport liberally here, not to avoid the monsters in cowardly fashion but to position Chalan wherever I wanted him to tank and then place Nova in safety behind him. His mercenary AI still caused him to wander off in random directions constantly and Nova had to pull him back into proper line, heh. When it came time for the seal guardians, the Vizier was downed first and in rapid order despite being Fire Immune. All of the other Storm Casters wilted in seconds and the Vizier only has 3600 HP - did someone forget to add a zero to the lifebar there? De Seis was a matter of separating the minions from their master and shooting them full of Chain Lightning bolts, then the Infector stupidly chased after Nova as she teleported away and dropped Meteors and Fire Balls into the retreat path. I was genuinely surprised at how effective the Fire Balls had been against Venom Lords all throughout this Act, but then again I suppose that even strong fire resistance didn't matter that much in the face of Fire Balls that were closing in on 6000 damage per cast.
Diablo was another ending boss who fell quickly, Nova hitting him with Static Field a few times and then laying on the Fire Balls and Meteors. He aimed his initial Lightning Breath of Doom at Nova which took out her mana orb and about 200 HP off her lifebar, however that allowed Chalan to survive and keep poking from the other direction. Diablo was in the middle of shooting off a Flame Wave when he expired seconds later; he tried to trap Nova in a Bone Prison but of course she could just teleport out of that. Diablo dropped Crushflange the unique mace, something that was cute for Chronicle purposes if nothing else.
Act Five saw the challenge level drop for Nova as it often does, with most of that fire resistance disappearing and everything going back to one-shot territory for Fire Ball again. Imps and borrowed crows and spear cats as guest monsters simply were not as tough as Venom Lords and Oblivion Knights. The only opponents that took more than one Fire Ball were the Evil Demon Huts which required three castings since they had high health and 70% fire resistance; the various towers and barricades only took two Fire Balls to smash through. Otherwise these early parts of Act Five were a real cakewalk and the most noteworthy event was successfully rolling three sockets on a Grand Crown using the Cube recipe, then creating the Bulwark runeword for Chalan. This was one of the runewords added in Diablo 2 Resurrected and previously was restricted to Ladder only but now was available in offline mode as well. Bulwark had a lot of great stats for the mercenary: more physical resistance, some minor lifesteal, some faster hit recovery, a giant amount of HP regen (which really helps them out), and then 5% bonus max health. There was only one problem here: I had a terrible roll on the stats! The lifesteal range was 4-6% and the physical resist range was 10-15% with Chalan hitting the minimum value in both categories. I figured that this would suffice for now and then I could try again with an elite 3 socket helm at some point in Hell difficulty.
While there was nothing of interest in Abbadon, the Pit of Acheron subdungeon had Salamanders present who were completely Fire Immune. These things were annoying because they liked to toss their flame version of Bone Spears and that fast-moving straight line projectile was tough to dodge, eating away big chunks of Nova's mana orb through Energy Shield. By contrast, there were minotaurs present in both of the first two River of Flame subdungeons and the big creatures were no trouble at all, dying to a single Fire Ball in every case. Their lack of any fire resistance made them easy prey since they were never able to Frenzy themselves before falling. I can only hope that will remain the case in Hell difficulty.
The ice caves that made up the middle portions of the Act were if anything even easier. There was no fire resistance to be found here and Nova greedily smashed her way past witches, prowling dead skeletons, the shambling ice monsters, and so on. One shot, one kill - very satisfying. When she reached CLVL 62 it was time to break out another of Diablo 2's most famous items: the Harlequin Crest. This green cap is usually just called "shako" by the community since it happens to be the unique version of that item and it's packed full of amazing stats for almost any character build. Harlequin Crest has +2 to all skills, big bonuses to health and mana that scale with character level, 10% physical damage resistance, and then a big bonus of 50% additional magic find. That's a very big deal for the online farming community and would legitimately be useful for Nova as well when she moved into the postgame content later. You would probably assume that I found this item via the gambling hack tool, but nope, one of my solo characters turned this thing up years and years ago only to have it sit unused in stash for ages. Nova was finally the character who could make use of this amazing item which I intended her to wear for a long time.
She did have to remove the Volcanic Circlet to put on the Harlequin Crest which was a net -1 to fire skills. The Fire Ball spell dropped from SLVL 34 to 33 and this decreased the damage by about 8%, from roughly 6000 damage per cast to 5500 damage per cast. However, the Volcanic Circlet had absolutely nothing on it aside from that +3 to fire skills and it was more than worthwhile to trade away a single +skills point in exchange for more health, more mana, physical resistance, and some decent magic find. Furthermore this actually boosted Nova's various lightning abilities by +2 skills since the Volcanic prefix hadn't applied to them, handy whenever she needed to use Static Field or Chain Lightning against fire immune targets. Definitely another useful gear upgrade. (That's Frozenstein above getting plastered by a Meteor spell and he dropped two different uniques, the unique morning star and mage plate. Bonus magic find at work already?)
The green hat was the final bit of new itemization that Nova would get to play around with here in Nightmare difficulty. She explored her way through Nihlathak's Temple next and completed the three floors in about 45 minutes of real world time. Once again the minotaurs were present on both of the first two floors (this was a heavy minotaur draw across Act Five) and again they achieved nothing at all, always falling before they could get close enough to hit Nova. What proved to be more annoying was all of the poison damage in the Halls of Vaught where there were Arach spiders along with Tomb Vipers shooting poison Bone Spears. Nihlathak's chamber was the only place where the melee Baal minions appeared and Nova was able to down all of them in short order, then blink to the other side of the room away from all of the corpses and launch a barrage of Fire Balls to secure the kill.
I had some free time on a weekday afternoon and made the final push from the start of the Frozen Tundra through the end of the Worldstone Keep in a single gaming session. The outdoor region was very, very easy with more imps and some skeleton archers wandering around, then the last remaining section of underground caverns had minotaurs yet again backed by witches. In a familiar refrain, everything perished in one shot of Fire Ball except for bosses and Chalan proved useful during those rare exceptions. All he had to do was lock an enemy boss in place for a few seconds and they would be roasted to death with Nova's immense fire damage. Chalan was also very handy against the Ancients:
Nova managed to separate Talic and Korlic away from Madawc with some teleporting distractions and I probably could have isolated all three of them with a bit more effort. Talic and Korlic are both heavily fire resistant at 70% protection which kept them alive long enough to be real threats for Nova. Chalan was able to slow them both using his Holy Freeze aura and then managed to tag Talic with his Kelpie Snare slowing effect which had the barbarian champion moving at ludicrously slow speeds. This was probably the main reason why Chalan was able to keep tanking since Talic had rolled with a Might aura (!), one of the most dangerous things that can appear on the Ancients. Anyway, Chalan bought sufficient time for Nova to run Static Field + Fire Ball and land both kills, after which Mawdac and his zero fire resistance was an absolute joke. I watched the axe thrower vainly trying to attack after having been double slowed with Holy Freeze and Kelpie Snare - I think that Chalan could have finished things off from there by himself if needed. But that would have been slow and Nova didn't really do "slow" as a concept so she machine-gunned a few Fire Balls into Madawc's back to wrap things up.
The first couple floors of the Worldstone Keep had very easy monster draws, witches and mummies and melee Baal minions and even those Defiler things that never seem to do anything. Worldstone 3 had the Doom Knight / Oblivion Knight pairs to at least make things more interesting, between the fire immunity on the Doom Knights and the curses on the Oblivions. Chalan's Holy Freeze aura was really useful against those enemies to slow them while they were being zapped to death with Chain Lightning. The Throne of Destruction hallways had an infestation of Horadrim Ancient greater mummies, with one room where there were two full boss packs right on top of one another. That was rather ugly to clear out and Meteor really shined under those cramped conditions. Colenzo was once again the hardest of the final bosses due to his fire immunity and Chalan's physical attack did most of the work of landing that kill. Achmel and his minions were all hilariously one-shotted by a well-timed Meteor and then the final three bosses were each kited backwards while forcing them to walk into a hailstorm of Fire Balls and Meteors. Ventar had 80% fire resistance and Lister had 95% fire resistance so Static Field did most of the work against each of them.
And Baal was no contest at all, following the same pattern as the last few Act end bosses. Nova teleported into his face so that Chalan could get into range for tanking, burned through a series of Static Field casts for the percentage-based damage, then let 'er rip with more Fire Balls and Meteors. It was another kill that couldn't have taken more than 20 seconds to complete as Nova proved her mastery of this second difficulty level as well. Nova once again full cleared everything in Nightmare difficulty on one pass through the game, every area explored, every monster slain, zero deaths incurred. It would have been a bit embarassing if she had died anywhere along the way given how I was tweaking Nova out with this unfair gifted loot! The best sign of Nova's strength though was how fast she was clearing everything, much faster than normal for my solo characters. It took barely over an hour to full clear the whole Frozen Tundra to the finish line sequence and again that was with defeating every monster along the way. Furthermore, Chalan had not died even one time yet which was impressive for a mercenary even on Nightmare difficulty.
Time to do this one more time in Hell difficulty and then Nova could move on to the real focus of this character in the postgame content. For the moment though, she had to say hello to another old friend:
Nova will be mooooooving on to the top difficulty next - stay tuned! 
