Fangskin was in their rear-view mirror, but the Rogues still had to get through quite a bit of Act 2 before they could meet up with Duriel and advance to the next area. The next session saw the Rogue team descend into the Palace dungeons:
What we found there was tons and tons of skeleton archers. I picked out one picture of a particularly nasty boss (Cursed plus some kind of aura) but we were fighting these guys constantly across all three palace levels. Svava switched to her shield setup for the blocking and concentrated on using Glacial Spike to freeze the archers for most of the evening. The other enemies (Blunderbores and Sand Raiders) were both Fire Immune, and took forever to kill. We made the discovery here that Sirian's Level 5 Frozen Orb (with a decent amount of Cold Mastery) was doing more damage to Fire Immune monsters than the attacks of all other Rogues put together! That just goes to show how much of a variant Rogue Revival truly is. 
Fire Eye guards the entrance to the Arcane Sanctuary portal as always. He refused to come out of that central room, but wow was he ever fast. When he moved away from the door, a couple Rogues went into the room to lure him back into shooting range. *Chop!* Before you could even blink, there were bodies on the ground. After that, we shot him down from long range and didn't try to go into the room again. 
It took roughly two hours to clear out the Palace, so we headed down into the Arcane Sanctuary to try and clear at least one of the four branches before wrapping things up for the evening. Unfortunately, we hit a ghost boss pack right away that made mincemeat of the Rogues and didn't even break a sweat. You can see the wreckage on the minimap:
Obviously we picked the wrong quadrant to enter first! Here, we have entered a different section to clear out some workable space with which to go back and fight the original boss, only to find yet another boss pack. Goat bosses weren't particularly difficult though, even though they were Fire Immune, simply because they could be chilled/frozen. If there was one lesson that the Viper Temple had taught us all, it was that Cold Immune foes are by far the most dangerous.
Here we've gone back and taken care of the ghost boss that caused so much trouble initially. Ghosts were a particularly difficult foe for several reasons. First of all, they could actually fly across the empty spaces of the Arcane Sanctuary, unlike the usually-helpless goats. More importantly, however, they were ethereal and therefore couldn't be chilled or frozen by cold, making them almost as bad as Cold Immune monsters (Frozen Orb did work well against them, however). Throughout the Arcane Sanctuary, we would routinely slaughter huge mobs of goats and vampires, only to flee for safety when more than 2 or 3 ghosts showed up.
On this first night, we killed six different boss packs and only barely cleared out two entrance ramps. Not exactly the greatest progress in the world... In the next session, we managed to clear out three of the four quadrants of the Sanctuary, with each branch taking roughly an hour to complete. The going was much easier, mostly because the Rogues didn't hit any boss packs until they had room to maneuver. Here was a typical battle, one of hundreds on that evening:
Freeze the goats, hit them with Frozen Orb, everyone else keeps firing away, all from a safe position where they can't reach us. We are all lined up in a neat little row there too; Sirian is the Rogue down on the separate floor shooting a Frozen Orb, then from left to right we have Jaffa (with crossbow), Dathon (with horned helmet), Cy (hidden behind the pillar, but you can see the Energy Shield dot), Erick (firing Glacial Spike), Svava (war hammer and bone shield), ME0003 (gold-colored armor), and Hawkmoon (with bow on the end). One other thing to point out - at some point during the night, Sirian made some kind of a comment about how useful it was to have the larger screen resolution size compared to the earlier Diablo days. My response was "larger screen size?" I had no clue that you could change to 800x600 resolution, so I made the swap and all of a sudden had a massively increased field of view. This may be also be a reason why Svava's death count fell dramatically after this point, simply because I had more reaction time to incoming enemies.
We cleared two quadrants and still hadn't found the Summoner yet. That was bad, because we were only going to have time for one more quadrant on that evening, and we didn't want to have to keep coming back to the Sanctuary to find the guy. We had already spent more than enough time in there! Fortunately, we did manage to pick the right quadrant and go after the old wizard:
Kind of a strange layout for the Summoner's location, I'd only seen this once before. He was basically a joke and was killed almost immediately; even in Hell the guy just doesn't have enough hit points to be dangerous. From there we wrapped up clearing the rest of that quadrant and called it a night.
We still had to return to the Arcane Sanctuary in the next session, since we had only cleared 3 of the 4 quadrants. Sirian suggested we clear a little working room in the teleporting section first, which turned out to be very important as we immediately ran into a ghost boss and took it out by retreating to the safe ground (see, we did learn from our first exerience there). The rest of the Arcane Sanctuary was routine, and I'll spare any more pictures from it. The Canyon of the Magi would prove to be tough, as always seems to happen on the higher difficulties. The waypoint was trapped by an Lightning Enchanted furry boss and his 10,000 minions, and for a moment it looked like we might lose the level. But we managed to re-establish the sitation from a portal at the top of the map, near Tomb #4. Here's the situation right as we begin from there:
There was, of course, another boss up there too, but this guy wasn't as dangerous as the other boss had been. Most important was the fact that there was some free space at the top of the map that gave room to maneuver, which was vitally necessary since these furries were Cold Immune and couldn't be slowed down. From the top of the map, we worked our way around the level in clockwise fashion and took out all six boss packs in the Canyon. After the initial flood of monters, it wasn't too dangerous (for Hell, at least). There was one Extra Fast kitty boss that moved faster than anything I'd ever seen before in Diablo though (too fast to get a picture, apparently!) We did finally make our way back to the waypoint and the original boss:
Stripped of his minions and with plenty of space to run, this guy was taken care of without much trouble. Despite the initially difficult situation, we had very low death numbers for the team and even had enough time to clear out a False Tomb before closing for the night. I can't stress how far the Rogues have come from our first efforts in Normal, it's really been impressive to watch.
The next target was the Tombs, and since the Rogues are doing a full-clear, that meant going through 5 False Tombs + 1 Kaa Tomb + the True Tomb. This could take a while! Erick blinked ahead and got us a portal in one of them without needing to clear any part of the Canyon again, which proved to be a massive time-saver. We had some difficulty getting started in this tomb due to all the enemies, but Sirian got us a safe portal location from which we could reset and begin clearing the level. Here it is:
More beetles; we ended up having lots and lots of them to go through, as well as endless seas of Unravellers/Burning Dead. Slow going, but between the freezing cold of Svava and Erick's Artemis_Red, we had less difficulty than we did in Nightmare. This tomb turned out to be Kaa's tomb, so it took about 2 hours to go through. The toughest foes were actually the ghosts (once again) who couldn't be frozen and shattered, and thus kept getting revived. We had to draw them away from the Unravllers by retreating, then go back and kill the big mummies seperately. Here is the big guy himself:
Kaa had a ton of boss abilities, but was not all that dangerous to kill. The Rogues stayed the heck away from him and shot him down from safe range. We still had time for another false tomb, so we started through another one, only to get confronted by multiple Gorebelly bosses in a sardine can. Sirian had said "anything except more Unravellers", then followed that up with "be careful what you wish for!" 
All told, we probably suffered more deaths here than in Kaa's tomb, since the Gorebellies couldn't be frozen and there wasn't much room to work with. After these last two sessions, we had Kaa's Tomb cleared and 2 Non-Kaa Tombs done, still leaving us with 3 more False Tombs to clear.
The next session was devoted to clearing out those last few Tombs. Erick again teleported ahead into one of the Tombs using his Fast-Cast gear, which saved us tons of time. The first two tombs took a little more than an hour apiece and were fairly routine, but the final one of the night had two different rooms that had Mummy Makers + Unravellers. Since the Rogues don't have enough firepower or defense to tank the mummy makers, the only way to clean out these rooms was to let the things wear themselves out. That takes... a LOOOOOONG time. The clock hit 11 (EST) and we were barely halfway through the tomb. A couple Rogues had to leave to get up for work the next day, but a few crazy Rogues continue on. Slog, slog, slog... Soon it's after midnight, but we're finally getting close to finishing. Finally, we managed to clear the tomb after roughly 4 hours and 20 minutes of playing. An exhausting marathon night, but the Rogues got it done. We fought a total of 20 bosses in the 3 tombs; in order to give a proper impression of what that was like, I made a compilation shot of their stats:
Those are the bosses from just THREE False Tombs! I can only imagine what things would be like in all seven of them. This session was indeed a marathon night, but we had to get through the False Tombs because the following session we needed to go after Duriel (since some Rogues were going away the next week). In any case, mission accomplished!
Having cleared out the requisite number of False Tombs, we were now able to assemble the team and go after Duriel. The one thing that stood out on this night was fabulous team play from all of the Rogues for the first couple hours. We had NO DEATHS in clearing about 75% of the tomb up to Duriel's chamber, despite hitting several different bosses. On the whole, however, it was a relatively easy draw. This was about the worst guy we saw before reaching Duriel:
Nonetheless, we handled the True Tomb quite smoothly and soon gathered in front of the entrance to Tal Rasha's Chamber. Here are the assembled Rogues:
Hmm, those nametags turned out pretty good, I'll have to add them again in the future when working on these reports. After waiting until everyone was ready, we headed down into the Chamber for some bug-squashing fun:
The goal was to have Duriel follow Sirian around endlessly, the same way that we had fought him the last time. Unfortunately, for whatever reason we weren't able to stick with that plan; I think one of the Rogues accidentally tried to melee Duriel, which broke his target lock on Sirian and caused him to start rampaging through the room. Several Rogues were killed before we sorted it out and got back to the preferred situation you can see here. Still, on the whole, Duriel proved not to be particularly difficult, and we killed him without too much trouble. After that, we went back and cleared out the remaining sections of the True Tomb and moved on to the next act!
With Act Two behind them, the Rogues were well on their way through Hell difficulty. Next up would be the steamy jungles of Kurast and a hot date with Mephisto at the end of it that Mr. Cold Shot wouldn't enjoy at all!
