Our goal for the next night's session was to clear the Claw Viper Temple, which we knew would pose a significant challenge. Fortunately, the whole team was present so that we wouldn't have to get the Viper Amulet more than one time. Reflecting back on our experiences in the previous session, Cy posted this comment in the Rogue team thread on the Realms Beyond Forums:
Why in the world am I posting this? Just bear with me, after you read what comes next you'll see why it's funny. 
So we head to the Lost City waypoint and prepare to enter into the Claw Viper Temple. For no apparent reason, however, we end up standing around outside the entrance for something like 10 minutes. I think we were waiting for someone to finish either buying/selling in town or for one of the Rogues to finish a particular battle back in the Lost City. In any case, here we are preparing to descend into the depths of the Viper Temple:
The previous night's session in the Claw Viper Temple was only the second time we had ever completely lost an area (the other being Level 2 of the Pit), so I think everyone was eager to get another crack at it. I was personally praying we wouldn't get another all cold-immune draw on the monsters, but no such luck. Perhaps it was fated to be that way.
We draw a much more friendly staircase layout than the previous trip, with the stairs tucked away in a somewhat defensible cubby. Unfortunately, the first group of enemies we ran into was a big pack of Viper Champs. They start charging, there's no room to work with at all, and Rogues start dropping like flies. I high-tailed it out of there back up the stairs one step ahead of death, then wait to see if anyone managed to get a safe portal up. After a few minutes of chaos, Sirian set up a new portal in what appears to be a safe location:
Hawkmoon was certainly needed here! As you can see, by this point most of the Rogues have already lost their equipment. The entrance is beyond lost at this point, and we're somewhere in middle of the level without quite knowing where. This position is tenuous at best, and within seconds there are monsters pouring into it, WAY more than we can handle. The Rogues can't freeze or even chill the enemies since they are ALL Cold Immune, and the sorcie death shriek starts echoing up and down the corridor. In the confusion, I believe that door behind us was opened, by the monsters themselves, and more skeletons and snakes pour into the corridor from behind us. Rogues start teleporting in every direction (accidentally waking even MORE enemies), I manage to get out through someone's portal, and the situation is an utter mess.
We try to make a third stand further north of the stairs off another portal, and have some mild success, but then Sirian jumps into a closed room to scout it (thinking there are maybe 3 or 4 Vipers inside). Well, the whole room is absolutely packed with snakes, there's a boss in there too, Red_Rover is dead in less than a second, and then the monsters open the closed door (!!!) and come pouring out at everyone else. We've completely lost control of the situation, bodies are everywhere, monster boss packs roaming free throughout the level. At some point in time here, I get killed for the first time and lose my equipment.
This is the screen that everyone is seeing all too frequently at this point:
Everyone is now dead. (OMG, look at those bodies! 
) What's worse, we have absoulutely no place to regroup and begin a clear of the level. Bodies are everywhere, equipment is scattered across a huge stretch of the level from our three failed attempts to work the level. No portals are safe, or even remotely close to safe. Everything is beyond hosed at this point. There doesn't appear to be any possible way to defeat the level.
But the Rogues don't give up. They might get the crap beaten out of them again and again, but they always pick themselves up, clean the blood out of their skirts, and march right back into the fray again for another round. Even in a totally hopeless situation, our team kept on playing, with the Rogues hurling themselves down completely unsafe portals again and again hoping to find SOME kind of safe space to begin clearing the level again. This put even MORE bodies on the ground, but we had to do SOMETHING! Somewhere at the start of this process, Dathon managed to recover his gear, providing us with a scant ray of hope:
And yet the body count... Good lord was it ever high! I was indeed wondering if there was going to be some kind of limit to it (according to the Arreat Summit, there is in fact a limit of 20 bodies that get displayed on the ground for any one character). For a solid half hour, the Rogue game was nothing but constant death messages resulting from failed attempts to reset down in the Viper Temple. It was impressive in the Message Log, let me tell you. The situation still looked to be impossible, but everyone was trying to do something, anything to remedy it. Dathon and I stayed in town, however - Dathon because he actually had his gear, me because I still had too much experience to lose by getting Svava killed down there (or so I told myself, anyway). Here was Dathon's take on the situation, posted later in the Rogue thread:
"It was kind of amusing to stand in town by the portals and watch the Rogues running in circles. You know those old mechanized toys that kids have that's a bunch of little plastic penguins going up a set of stairs, sliding down a slide, then going again? I was reminded of that. Rogues pop down portals. 1-5 seconds later, their death message pops up. They appear on the mini-map at the other side of town, run to the portals, and repeat. Endless fun 
Of course, I would have been doing the exact same thing if I hadn't been lucky enough to land my gear 
Going to be rather interesting to try that fight when (if?) we get to four dots."
Finally, someone on the team realized that all of the dying had managed to clear out some space around the original staircase. This was not planned in any way, shape, or form, but the Rogues all gathered together to make one final, last-ditch effort at trying the level before giving up for the evening. Dathon would tank for us while the rest of the Rogues used their magical abilities to hit whatever we found. This was the scene when we joined up for the last try at the Viper Temple:
Oh my, LOOK at all those bodies! Hawkmoon called it a "Rogue slumber party", and she was right on the mark! But this is just what's visible on the screen, take a look at the minimap:
I have never seen anything even remotely close to this many bodies before in Diablo II, and I sincerely hope that I don't again! And these are only the bodies close enough to be seen on the minimap! As for what's actually going on in this picture, the team has managed to get into a fight with a single Viper Champ (two would have been undoable!) and Dathon is tanking it while the rest of the Rogues use their lightning/fire skills to help out. One other important thing to mention is that Erick had a Prevent Monster Heal dagger in his stash that we pulled out to use for this expedition. Without it, we couldn't have gotten even this far.
The Rogues manage to take out that first Claw Viper. Then we find a second one and kill that one too, then a third. Pretty soon, by clearing out the enemies one at a time, we've managed to clear out the first hallway around the stairs.
Over an hour of playing, hundreds of deaths, and we've managed to clear out that tiny space that you can see free of bodies on the minimap. But we're actually gaining ground! Small at it was, this was a significant victory for the Rogue team. As soon as we reached the main hallway, however, one of the (numerous) Viper bosses started coming after us, threatening the collapse of our house of cards operation:
Fortunately, we were just dealing with the boss and no minions, but this was still a tough task to handle. The boss immediately killed over half the Rogues, but Dathon was able to tag him with the PMH dagger, and from there we began wearing him down with arrows and spells. Lightning from ME0003, Cy, and Hawkmoon was about the only thing that could hurt him, since he was immune to cold and fire. The Rogues kept using hit and run tactics, popping from one side of the hallway to another between the two portals you can see above. With enough time and patience, the boss went down. Another victory for the team!
With the initial hallway secure, and a small amount of safe space in the main hallway, we next headed down the first western intersection to recover some more Rogue bodies:
On the minimap above, the yellow portal next to the word "Varecia" shows where the inital staircase was located. Sirian (Red_Rover) has a bunch of bodies in that area as well. We were working down that western hallway at the moment, clearing out enemies in ones and twos without waking up large stacks. In the room at the end of that hall, we fought and killed our first Guardians of the night:
Sirian's minimap has MUCH more stuff revealed than mine, due to all the teleporting around to try and secure some safe ground. It was very painstaking to have to kill Guardians who kept raising Cold Immune skeletons, but Erick and I were able to freeze the Guardians themselves and therefore keep their raising to a minimum. Not at all an easy process, but doable. In time, we worked our way into and cleared the room at the end of this hallway.
Here we are clearing out the last of the Vipers in that particular room. Imagine that, the Rogues actually have a secure room now! Almost two hours of work, and we have a secure room! That's only partly in jest, as this was another significant victory for the team. Next, we headed north up the main hallway to start recovering more bodies:
That picture does an even better job of showing which areas had been secured. But still - LOOK at those bodies! Good Lord. There is an unbelievably massive concentration of them at one spot on the minimap where two portals were located, and a boss pack there kept picking off Rogues as they emerged from the portals. Ugly, ugly doings there; the bodies were literally knee-deep in that corner. As we continue to advance through the level, however, the Rogues were only getting stronger as each one came across their original body and suited up with their usual equipment. With each step forward, with each monster fallen, we were making progress.
At this point, the team has made its way to the massive pile of corpses, and the Rogues are sorting through them to find out which ones belong to which person. "Is that my body?" "No, but I think there's three more of yours hidden under this one." There are a couple more things to note on this minimap. The room to the north at the end of the main hallway is the location where Sirian teleported into the room and lost his original body. There turned out to be two boss packs in there, which was way more than any of us had expected, and they had then opened the door themselves and flooded into the main hallway. We picked them off one at a time (carefully!) when making this final clear. If you'll look where MoonGrabber's portrait is and then follow it straight down, you'll find the location where Svava's main body was located. I was one of the last Rogues to get their equipment back.
Here's one of the bosses that had been in that room at the end of the hallway. I distinctly remember getting Cursed from this guy seconds before one of the early massacres took place. Now that we had some space to work with, we went back and took the boss down. The aura is Holy Shock, although it's hard to see in the picture.
Once we cleared out that room to the north and that second western hallway, we had space enough to feel secure in the level. Against all odds, the Rogue team had actually succeeded and was going to pull this one out. It took another hour of hard fighting against Vipers and Guardians and their ilk, but we did in fact get it done. Full clear of Claw Viper Temple Level One:
Looking at it there, it's not even that big of a level, heh. One thing I've tried to emphasize here that might not come across well is just how utterly hopeless the situation looked for most of the night. We had NO chance of getting this thing done, the final clearing attempt that proved to be successful was a last-ditch effort scraped together on a wing and a prayer. But once we got going, the momentum kept building and we persevered through to the end. Absolutely unbelievable, the stuff that legends are made from.
The night wasn't quite over yet, however, since we still had to get the Viper Amulet down on Level Two. This had been a real pain on Nightmare with an Extra Fast Fangskin blinking around all over the place, but on this night the D2 gods shined on us and we drew a setup where Fangskin was not on the central pedestal. Everyone teleported into the center, and the shooting gallery was on:
As you can see, Sirian is making use of an item with Confuse charges to make our life easier. Cy is doing a fantastic job serving as our tank once again, standing at the top of the stairs and refusing to move so that the rest of us can keep shooting away. (Cy later said he had an entire inventory full of red potions and just kept drinking them!) Fangskin never really got close enough to hurt anyone, and he went down pretty easily. He's about to hit the deck in the picture above.
By this point, most of the monsters are dead and we're clearing up the remnants. Dathon's rarely-used Inferno makes for an interesting sight in this picture as well. At some point before this was taken, a number of Rogues teleported off the central safe spot and killed the Guardians in the corners of the room, who had previously been reviving the skeletons and mummies endlessly. Once that was done, the rest was just mop-up work. Claw Viper Level Two was handled almost flawlessly, I don't think anyone was killed at all. Probably the biggest screwup was on my part, where I initially mis-identified Cy and Jaffa in our team thread. 
All in all, it was an amazing night. To go from such a hopeless situation, to one where we not only saved the level but went on to kick Fangskin's butt on the floor below it - well, it was immensely satisfying. The whole team played outstandingly well on this evening, without such great teamwork from everyone involved it would not have been possible. Now that this was behind us, nothing was going to stop the Rogues from fulfilling their mission of killing all three of the Prime Evils. 
