Nova: Hell Difficulty Part One

Nova kept finding more Fire Immune enemies along the way, with fire-tossing skeleton mages in the Tamoe Highland plus the omnipresent fallen-type monsters and their shamans that appeared in every outdoor region even if they didn't roll there naturally. I had to equip the Nature's Peace ring more than I wanted because the shamans were such a frequent enemy for Nova. At least that ring was worth its weight in gold when dealing with the cramped spaces of the Pit Level 2. The basement floor of the dungeon happened to feature almost entirely Devilkin and their shamans, with three different such bosses, and this would have been a true disaster if Nova didn't have some way of cleaning up their corpses. Instead, she patiently worked her way from the upper ledge down to the bottom of the room, killing one devilkin after another and ensuring that they wouldn't be revived. One of the monsters in this area dropped Bul-Kathos' Tribal Guardian sword, which is a completely unrelated set and has no connection to the Bul-Kathos' Wedding Ring that Nova had been wearing. Those item names didn't make a lot of sense and the developers probably should have gone with a different choice for the ring to avoid confusion.

The Outer Cloister was straightforward and then there was more fire immunity in the Barracks plus the three levels of the Jail. At first there were more fire element skeleton mages, then endless swarms of Devilkin and Dark Ones who were all Fire Immune. I knew from past experience that Nova was drawing a disproportionately heavy concentration of the fallen opponents; you always see a lot of them in Act One but not THIS many, if that makes sense. The Smith was not Fire Immune and died very quickly despite his 38k health total; this was a more serious threat:

There were double Multishot skeleton mage bosses hanging out behind those bars with their full complement of minions in tow. These enemies put a lot of hostile fireballs into the air and any time that Nova took a hit her mana orb drained away due to the interaction with Energy Shield. I tried to fight these things head-on which only resulted in a fast death for Chalan despite his maxed fire resistance. Instead, I had to work my way around to the bottom side of the room and enter through a different doorway, allowing Nova to pick off one of the bosses by itself and then come back for the second one. This was the most challenging fight that she'd encountered in some time (largely because everything was Fire Immune, otherwise Nova would have blasted them out of existence before they could do much of anything) and the double skeleton mage bosses even took down Chalan a second time to force another resurrection bill, argh! By contrast, the rest of the Jail floors were fairly easy even if I continued to have to use more Chain Lightning than Nova wanted. This portion of the game was pretty heavy on fire resistance; even the Death Clan goats that lacked an immunity had 75% fire protection.

The battle in the Cathedral was a bit tricky as a Tainted boss came racing out through the front doors as soon as Nova opened them, followed by a series of Dark One shaman bosses hanging out together inside. They took a decent amount of effort to clear, much more so than old Bone Ash who lacked much fire resistance and collapsed in two Fire Balls. Another unique item dropped in this small area and it was the Peasant Crown again, the unique war hat that Nova herself had worn for a while back in Normal difficulty. This version had a lesser amount of life regen than the one that Nova had been using so it was sold back to Gheed. It's worth pointing out that the Harlequin Crest was clearly producing more unique and set items than a normal character would have found with its 50% magic find bonus, however Nova also wasn't finding so many of them that I would have sacrificed better stats just to get the extra magic find. (I seem to be the rare D2 player who feels this way.)

The Catacombs were also full of Fire Immune opponents, which really shouldn't have been a surprise because fire immunity is extremely common in Hell difficulty. There were plenty more Dark Ones and their shamans, often rolling as bosses, then the little Rat Men on Cats 1, Arach spiders on Cats 2, and the Ghouls on Cats 3 - yes, even the zombies were Fire Immune down here! Nova had to wear Nature's Peace ring the whole time to stop the shamans from bringing back their minions and spent a lot of time casting more Chain Lightning. It definitely worked but it wasn't a fast killer. By way of contrast, everything that was not Fire Immune fell in a split second to Nova, with the Tainted and the Banished vampires and so on barely even registering for her. The divide between "Fire Immune" and "Not Fire Immune" couldn't have been much more obvious for this character, which I guess I had only myself to blame for pouring every single skill point into a single elemental tree.

On the bottom dungeon level, Andariel still has -50% fire resistance even here in Hell difficulty so, ummm, yeah. You can probably imagine how that went. She dropped a Twisted Essence of Suffering which I'll take more about when Nova eventually reaches the postgame content, though I doubt she'll ever need to use that (since it's associated with respecing your character). Next was Act Two where the normal path is to head directly into the Sewers to complete the Radament quest for the free skill point. However, the monsters in the Sewers are extremely heavy on fire resistance and fire immunity, while Nova had recently hit CLVL 74 and was about to unlock her fire sundering charm. Therefore I put aside the Sewers for the moment and headed out into the desert landscape instead, clearing the Rocky Waste and then two floors of the Stony Tomb (which fortunately never have anything with fire immunity present). The big irritation here was the Sand Leapers who were Fire Immune and kept skittering away each time that Nova hit them with Chain Lightning. She was more than ready to finish clearing the outdoor area and be done with those things.

Finishing those areas took Nova 96% of the way to CLVL 75 and then she polished off the last remaining bit of XP in the Sewers. It was time to be done with fire immunity for good:

Nova could now use the Flame Rift grand charm which "sundered" enemy fire immunity. I talked about this back in Blanche's report but it's worth going over the concept again because the ability to pierce fire immunity was so important for Nova. The sundering property means that any monster with an immunity to fire damage has their fire resistance set to 95% instead. This makes it possible to deal damage to them, albeit at a very slow rate and with a big tradeoff in the form of a massive penalty to your character's resistances. All of these sundering charms (there's one for all four elements, plus magic damage, plus one for physical) will reduce the wearer's resistance to that specific element by 70-90% depending on what the charm rolled. Usain Bolter had found this charm a while back and it happened to have -82% fire resistance which was slightly below average. My character build for Nova had emphasized fire resistance for this exact reason, knowing I would have to offset the big penalty from the sundering charm, and I was able to get her up to 56% fire resistance after tweaking one more small charm. That was pretty darn good since Nova had a total penalty of -182% from Hell difficulty and her grand charm!

So now Nova could damage anything with Fire Ball and Meteor even if they were naturally immune to fire damage. The problem here was working through that 95% fire resistance was absolutely brutal - the sundering charm wasn't exactly a free lunch. Nova averaged right around 7000 damage per casting of Fire Ball, which calculated out to a big whopping 350 damage after going through that resistance penalty. Even with fast casted Fire Balls, it was going to take forever to kill anything at that rate. Blanche had gotten around this due to the innate nature of Cold Mastery lowering enemy cold resistance, and even if the skill operated at 1/5th effectiveness when breaking an immunity, it still went a very long way. A lightning Sorcie could use a Crescent Moon runeword on an Act Two mercenary who can reduce enemy lightning resistance on hit, or maybe eventually gamble the Griffon's Eye unique diadem which also reduces enemy lightning resistance. Instead, Nova had to rely on a funny-looking hat:

This was Hellwarden's Will, a unique death mask added in Reign of the Warlock. There are some nice stats on this item, including +1 to all skills and some additional faster cast that Nova didn't need, but the most important property was a reduction in enemy fire resistance. Hellwarden's Will can roll anywhere from 5-8% reduction on enemy resistances and Nova's version of the item had a mediocre 6% roll (I wish that this item had rolled 7% for the fire reduction instead of the magic reduction). While this might sound like a small difference, every point of enemy fire resistance removal made Nova's damage output much higher when dealing with sundered targets. I mentioned before how her Fire Balls would only deal 350 damage against sundered enemies; with the extra 6% reduction from this item for a total of 89% enemy fire resistance, that number more than doubled to 770 damage per Fire Ball. If she had rolled the maximum 8% on Hellwarden's Will, Fire Ball would have gone up to 910 damage instead! The math worked out such that even small increases in this stat were highly effective against sundered targets and much of Nova's future career would be spent hunting for items that had more of this property.

The tradeoff was that wearing Hellwarden's Will meant giving up Harlequin's Crest which was unquestionably a downgrade. It hurt losing a net -1 skills and giving up the extra 100 life and mana from the green shako. I definitely felt less safe without the item and I would end up swapping back and forth between the two helmets depending on whether Fire Immune enemies were present. For the Sewers though, there was no question that the sundering charm and Hellwarden's Will were necessary. The melee Burning Dead were Fire Immune, the Sand Raiders were Fire Immune, and even the ranged Burning Dead archers were 75% fire resistant which made the -6% fire resistance on the new helmet highly useful. I found that it took some time to defeat these sundered monsters with Fire Ball, something like 6 shots to blast away the Burning Dead and almost 10 shots needed for the beefier Sand Raiders. This made Meteor a much more useful weapon and Nova started to get into the habit of alternating Fire Ball and Meteor casts whenever she could line up a projectile on top of Chalan's position. His slowing abilities were becoming more and more useful in situations where the monsters didn't collapse instantly, and Nova's tactical combat increasingly operated around the position of the mercenary.

Radament had zero fire resistance whatsoever and therefore died instantly. It was easier to bum rush him via Teleportation than fiddle with Nature's Peace ring so that what Nova and Chalan did.

The Halls of the Dead was the first location to mix in greater mummies in the form of Hollow Ones. Unlike the fallen shamans from Act One, however, neither the Hollow Ones nor their Returned skeletons were Fire Immune and therefore I opted to skip using Nature's Peace for this area. Nova could simply blast her way past the skeletons so quickly that she didn't need to care about their possible resurrections. Often she could clear a path with Fire Balls over to the greater mummies and hit them from range; at other times, all of the skeletons would crowd forward around Chalan and Nova could leap right over their heads with Teleport to catch the Hollow Ones unaware. She had been limited in earlier difficulties by not having enough mana for the Teleport skill but that was no longer an issue. Double Spirit runewords plus the Harlequin Crest gave Nova oodles of mana, plus Teleport itself was actually cheaper to cast via free levels from +skills items. As for the Harlequin Crest itself, I used the item on Halls of the Dead 1 and 3 because there were no Fire Immune enemies present, then had to swap it out on Halls 2 because there were Fire Immune bats flying around. While it was a little annoying having to do these gear swaps, I really did want the green hat whenever the fire sundering charm + helmet weren't necessary.

The following few areas were basically the land of milk and honey for Nova. There are no Fire Immune monsters that can appear in the Far Oasis, none that can appear across the three levels of the Maggot Lair, and only the Tomb Creeper leapers can be Fire Immune in the Lost City who failed to appear on this pass through the area. Nova instead faced off against large numbers of beetles, maggots, spear cats, and zombies who were all easy prey for the power of high level Fire Ball spells. While she didn't exactly love the tight confines of the Maggot Lair, Nova's fire projectiles were good at shooting down straight corridors and she always had Teleport to get her way out of any traffic jams. The Ancient Tunnels did have Fire Immune Invaders present which forced a swap back to the sundering charm and the ugly Hellwarden's Will helmet, however the Claw Viper Temple had nothing but snakes and mummies which meant a return back to the shako again:

Claw Vipers and Salamanders hit hard and can be unpredictable with their charging attacks, however they're also essentially glass cannons that can't take much in the way of punishment. Fire Ball had just barely enough damage to one-shot them and then the Embalmed mummies with their zero percent fire resistance were even easier to defeat since they also had slow, predictable movement speeds. Nova flew through the first floor of the temple and then simply teleported onto the central altar which trivialized Claw Viper 2. I've mentioned before that I rarely use Teleport on my characters because it really does undercut so much of the challenge of playing Diablo 2. When you can hop over any wall or gap in the floor, or simply skip huge sections of every area, it doesn't leave that much gameplay left over for your characters to experience.

There were two item finds of note during this portion of Nova's journey though neither one of them was directly useful for her. The first of these was the war boots from the Immortal King's set which now took Nova to four of the six total set items, all of them found legitimately and not gambled. As I said above, if I could find the extremely rare Sacred Armor then I could assuredly use the gambling hack to turn up the final missing piece (the war gauntlets) and unite the entire thing. That would definitely be worth creating a Barbarian character and messing around with the whole set. The other item find was a *SECOND* Chilling Grand Charm with +1 Sorceress Cold skills! Nova had now found two of the things thus far - shortly after I had played through the full journey of another cold Sorcie with Blanche, argh! Getting an additional +2 skills from a pair of grand charms makes a huge difference; if those had been +1 fire skills instead then Nova would be dealing something like 15% more total damage. It was almost enough to tempt me to recreate Nova as a cold-based Sorceress; but no, she was always intended to be fire-based and that was what she would remain. My biggest issue with the cold tree is the way that Glacial Spike, Blizzard, and Frozen Orb are all gated behind spell timers which makes them significantly less fun to use than Fire Ball.

Sadly, the good times couldn't last forever and the back end of Act Two had lots of fire immunity for Nova to contend with. The four levels of the Palace were packed with Invaders, Blunderbores, and fire skeleton mages which were all completely Fire Immune. Some combination of those monsters appeared on every floor and forced the use of the sundering charm along with Hellwarden's Will. I mentioned this back in the Nightmare report but it's worth emphasizing again just how useful Teleport was in this environment. Nova could blink over walls or through the jail grates at will which meant that she could never really get into serious trouble. Blunderbores took some effort to kill with more than 10,000 HP (requiring about a dozen shots of Fire Ball) but it was all still readily doable.

Then the Arcane Sanctuary also required sticking with the anti-Fire Immune setup since all of the Hell Clan goats would otherwise be immune. It's remarkable to me how different character builds can struggle with each of the three different monsters that appear in the Sanctuary. It's far more common for characters to have trouble with the Physical Immune Spectres or the lifestealing, high health, Cold Immune vampires. That wasn't the case for Nova though as both of those other enemies perished instantly to Fire Balls, it was the melee goats who took by far the most time and effort to defeat. I spent a lot of time dropping Meteors right in front of where the goats clumped up on Chalan's position; while they weren't as tanky as the Blunderbores had been back in the Palace, there were also a whole lot more of them. The other tough foe was the infrequent Lightning Spires who were completely immune to lightning damage and 90% resistant to fire. They weren't resistant to getting stabbed though and Chalan happily eliminated them whenever they appeared.

With the Tombs of Tal Rasha upcoming next, I opted to commit some more of my resources to upgrading Chalan's equipment. I had been extremely pleased with his setup this far, between the Holy Freeze aura providing mass crowd control against large groups of enemies and then Kelpie Snare adding an even larger slow for the handful of single-target opponents that could survive Nova's burst damage. Since I had no desire to switch to a different weapon for the mercenary, I went ahead and used the Cube recipe to upgrade the base item portion of Kelpie Snare from an exceptional Fuscina to an elite Stygian Pike. This greatly increased the base damage from an average of 114 to 268, more than doubling the total damage output for Chalan. The biggest drawback was not having any lifesteal to take advantage of this extra damage; I was still waiting on swapping back to the Bulwark runeword helmet until Chalan gained some more levels to improve his resistances. (I also needed to find an elite helmet with three sockets to take advantage of re-rolling Bulwark in the hopes of getting better stats on the second attempt.)

There was also the tradeoff of using up Lum and Pul runes to use this Cube recipe, with Nova having only a single copy of each one. However, there were no runewords that Nova was immediately looking to make with these runes, and if she would have a Vex rune drop at infinitesimally low odds, well, I could always farm up another Pul rune sooner or later. Better to use the resources that I actually had to keep making Nova stronger instead of saving them endlessly for a future day that might never arrive.

The Canyon of the Magi also had Fire Immune spear cats present which meant that Nova had to continue with the same setup as before. The Canyon proved to be surprisingly tough because Nova rolled multiple Cursed bosses: those things were clearly the biggest threat to Chalan's life and he dropped twice in the process of cleaning them out. Then it was into the seven Tombs of Tal Rasha as Nova continued on her full clear pace. There's only a single Fire Immune opponent to be found in the Tombs; unfortunately that's the Burning Dead skeletons which everyone who has ever played D2 should be familiar with. Nova was forced to stick with her fire sundering charm and evil-looking helmet, plus I also swapped out Bul-Kathos' ring for Nature's Peace again. That was the first time I made that ring swap in Act Two, however there was no better time to do so than when confronted with hordes of undead which were both Fire Immune and revivable. Although this itemization dropped Nova all the way down to SLVL 30 Fire Ball (the horror!), it worked like a charm at handling the red-colored melee skeletons swarming through the tombs.

The Burning Dead have a little under 5000 HP apiece which meant that they died in roughly 6-7 shots each. They also loved to form big clumps at doorways or in front of Chalan's position which made them prime targets for Meteor. Nature's Peace ring was simply awesome in this situation, keeping the skeletons from rising again... most of the time anyway. Occasionally the Unravelers would be able to revive them for some reason, perhaps those were the handful of monsters who had been slain by Chalan instead. Nova would get plenty of practice in dealing with the Burning Dead / Unraveler combos since she found them lurking in the hallways of ALL SIX of the False Tombs, sheesh! That included Kaa's Tomb as well (which was the second one that Nova visited) and the big guy didn't act any differently from the dozen other Unraveler bosses that Nova took down across the remaining tombs. The clear pace remained fast and the greater mummies really weren't that bad with their resurrection ability removed. I was able to full clear the Canyon and all of the Tombs in a little over 90 minutes of real world time, pretty impressive for Hell difficulty. I don't think Nova's health ever dropped below 700 HP on her health orb as she and Chalan worked together beautifully as a team.

After the Burning Dead and Unravelers had been present in every single False Tomb, suddenly they disappeared for the True Tomb at the end. That was great news for Nova since the True Tomb is about the same size as three or four False Tombs, allowing her to swap out of her sundering charm gear and re-equip the Harlequin Crest and Bul-Kathos ring for more +skills damage. Fire Ball had exceeded 8000 damage per shot by now when using these items, still coming out of Nova's fingers at that ridiculously fast casting speed. Nova also had some nice luck when it came to rune drops across the various tombs, finding a Lum rune to replace the one she had used upgrading Kelpie Snare and then an even better Lem rune in the True Tomb itself. I was kind of thinking of that Lem rune as 1/64th of a Vex rune which was going to be a big target in the eventual postgame content for Nova.

Oh yeah, and there was still Duriel too. It was the same plan as before for Nova when it came to Act end bosses: get close enough to spam some Static Field, then unload with Fire Ball and Meteor as fast as possible. I noticed that Static Field required a lot more casts to get Duriel down to half health (having to work through his 75% lightning resistance) but the process was still fast overall. Chalan landed the Kelpie Snare tag to slow Duriel to a crawl and the demon expired before the mercenary could go down. Nice and easy. Three more Acts yet to go and then Nova can transition into the postgame stuff which is her real focus - I'm going to feel really dumb if I suffer a character death along the way with someone this powerful!