Hell Act Four


Our previous sessions had taken the Rogues up through the first two areas of Act Four, leaving the City of the Damned up next. This area had not been unusually difficult in our Nightmare run, so I wasn't anticipating anything out of the ordinary. We were all in for a rude surprise. Our first attempt at the City was quickly hosed beyond repair - we completely lost the situation and almost everyone was killed (and lost their bodies). Ouch. Here was shot of us back in town from that point in time:

Nice to see that Rogue optimism in action. We tried to restore order from this point, but it just was impossible - too many monsters woken up at once - forcing a reroll of the map. Ouch. Only the second time we've had to do that (Pit Level Two in Hell Act One being the other). We started up a new game and returned to the City waypoint. This time, we had the good luck to draw a building next to the waypoint that the Rogues could teleport into and provide some shelter against the enemy mobs.

This spot would become known as "The Building" for the rest of the night. It consists of two rooms linked together, with the entrances to the south. Notice the waypoint just to the north - and that it's already swarmed with an Extra Fast Damned boss pack. I was indeed glad that the Rogues were on the other side of the barrier. Still, things hadn't really gone that badly yet. Those Damned were a threat that we could readily deal with, so long as we had room with which to fight them. The Rogues thus exited from the southern opening in the Building, and proceeded to try and lure the minions away from the boss one at a time. Before we could even get there though, we ran into the scourge of the evening: Stygian Hags.

It has taken the entire Rogue team fighting together just to bring down ONE of these enemies. Also notice how many pup corpses there are on the ground; these enemies could produce them at a ridiculous rate, an omen of things to come. Each Stygian Hag could easily take 5 minutes to kill. Oh, and that Damned boss pack is still up at the waypoint waiting for us. Now we did manage to kill that Damned boss and begin working our way east. The Rogues slowly began clearing some space around the building, but it was agonizingly slow, with progress frequently lost altogether with the appearance of another hag. Then disaster struck - a DOUBLE BOSS PACK of Stygian Hags, right on top of each other. We lost the WHOLE LEVEL. EVERYONE died. MANY TIMES.

The number of Stygian Dogs running around in the City of the Damned at this point was unbelievable. A double boss pack of hags meant a dozen of them clustered together, something that we could not possibly fight. After much, much dying, a safe portal was established at the top of the map, which allowed me to get this screenshot:

I've identified where the Building was located on the minimap; our current location was up at the top edge of the map. There is no safe ground anywhere in the City at this point. We ran into that double boss pack just to the east of the North Building, where there is a "square" architectural formation on the minimap. Shortly after this shot was taken, a horde of Stygian Dogs found us and swarmed over this portal, causing more deaths and forcing another retreat. The situation certainly appeared hopeless. This was worse than the Claw Viper Temple; here, we could kill Stygian Dogs all day and STILL make no progress as the mothers bred more endlessly. Just a horrible situation.

With that said, we weren't about to give up on the level yet. The Rogues are a stubborn lot, as you might imagine having read this far. Jaffa found a safe spot by teleporting across the abyss in the middle of the map, and we started fresh from his portal, many Rogues using secondary or alternate gear. Well, that worked OK until we hit our first mother, which killed everyone again and sent us scurrying back to town. At this point, my Internet connection dropped, and I therefore permanently lost 2 bodies on the ground (and about 20 million experience, ouch). By the time I made it back to the game, the Rogues had managed to deal with the latest problem and work their way back to the building where we started. That is when this next picture was taken:

The dotted line shows Jaffa's teleport path and the white "X" is where he set up his portal. From there, the Rogues worked their way around the corner of the hole in the middle of the map, past the South Building, and back to The Building again, the spot where Svava is standing at the moment. At this point, everything to the north and east of the Building is still completely unsafe, and we're having one HELL of a time just holding our ground. Just LOOK at all those corpses from Stygian Hags and their Dog pups. There's a big group of them at the top of the screen by the waypoint, if you look closely. Still tons of Rogue bodies on the ground too. But we were making some progress, however agonizingly slowly.

Once the Building itself was secure, the Rogues cautiously exited it and began working the ground around it to clear some more space. Just to the east of the Building, we ran into one of the two Hag bosses:

The battle has been joined! Hydras, Meteors, and the boss' Charged Bolts are flying everywhere. Cursed/Mana Burn certainly didn't make this an easy customer; the pups were almost impossible to take down when the Rogues themselves were Cursed. To see just how little progress we've made, that's The Building on the left side of the screen. Wow, the Rogues have gained a full 10 yards! It took a great deal of effort, but we did manage to kill this boss after a good 5-10 minutes spent fighting her. Whew! After this fight had taken place, I snapped a picture of our progress to date:

I've marked out the safe ground with a white dotted line. We're a full two hours into our gaming session at this point, and that's all the cleared area we have to show for it. Notice how everything outside that line is a sea of unrecoverable Rogue bodies; there are literally packs of Stygian Pups roaming the level in those areas gobbling up Rogues without breaking a sweat. North Building (on the right side of this screenshot) is NOT safe at this point, and there are multiple Hags inside it still pumping out more babies. We still don't even have the waypoint secured! The next task was to venture into North Building and eliminate the headaches caused by the mothers in there. That wasn't easy either, but we found the other Hag boss there:

DIE BITCH, DIE!

It was a sastifying moment indeed when we put this boss on ice. The amount of pain and suffering the Rogues had to go through to reach this point was pretty apalling. Just look at the army of dead pups that we had already killed just to reach the boss! With her out of the way, we had finally managed the worst of the double boss pack. That only took us, what, NINETY MINUTES or so to deal with.

That's not to say the Rogues were on easy street now, far from it. The next goal was to clear out the top edge of the map, and there were a number of Stygian Hags lurking there as well. We were forced to retreat back to The Building multiple times just to avoid being overrun. Here's the aftermath of one such gruesome battle:

The picture speaks for itself, I can't really put anything into words that would describe the situation as well. The Rogues killed hundreds of the pups on the night, possibly close to a thousand overall. There were so many pup bodies on the ground, that the game's framerate kept plunging into the toilet everytime we had to fight in situations like this. Amazing stuff to behold. Now for the progress screenshot:

By the time of this screenshot, the Rogues had cleared out everything between the two white lines. North Building is now clear, and the edges of the map have been secured as well. We are about to head south now to where Hawkmoon has a body on the ground still and proceed from there. At this point, the Rogues are roughly two and a half hours into the night's session, and we've cleared ONE EIGHTH of the map. Yes siree, we'll just clear out the rest of this level "real quick" in time for bed.

We head south next, trying to clear out the western edge of the map. For a change of pace, we run into non-Hag enemies (!) Damned and Abyss Knights each take roughly 1/10th the time that Hags do to be killed, so we were quite glad to see them. Even an Abyss Knight boss was easier than a regular Stygian Hag!

The building you see in that screenshot is South Building, so that should give you an idea of where we were on the minimap. This guy wasn't what you'd call "easy", but he was an order of magnitude easier to deal with than what the Rogues had already been through on the night, and he went down in short order. The southern part of the map continued to be relatively simple, with no more than a single Hag appearing at once, and progress was fairly rapid. We did run into another Damned boss there:

Extra Fast/Multiple Shots is nothing to sneeze at, but Dathon helped us out by laying down some Confuse charges on the minions, and between that, Jaffa's Hydras, and freezing power on hand, we dealt with the situation without much trouble.

Things had been proceeding a little "too smoothly" for awhile, so it was almost no surprise when the game threw another challenge our way in the form of yet another Stygian Hag boss. By this point, it was so late that much of the team had already had to leave for the night, cutting our offensive power badly. Without Dathon's Meteors and Jaffa's Hydras, the fight against the swarms of Stygian Dogs suddenly became much harder. We suffered a huge indignation as a single Hag MINION causes us to lose the entire western part of the map, and forces us to make a last-ditch stand just to survive. We spent AN ENTIRE HALF HOUR fighting a single minion's pups. ONE MINION! I am not making this up, we fought her for 30 minutes and, well, she won. Wow. Unbelievably brutal. We were WAY over the 3-hour session's length, but Sirian, Cy, ME0003, and myself kept playing. We could not let this enemy win, and we were going to full-clear this level come hell or high water. ME0003 finally discovered the best way to take out the Hags was to get up in their face and tank them; he did an outstanding job of doing this, and greatly sped up our progress:

GET HER, WAYNE!

Once this bad girl went down, we began to make some more progress again. Now that ME0003 had found the best way to take out the Hags, our progress sped up noticeably. As it turns out, fighting the Hags with bows is simply a losing proposition; the little Dogs simply get in the way of the arrows, giving the mothers time to spit even more of them out. But by swapping over to melee, we could force the Stygian Hags into their own melee attack, greatly cutting down on the number of pups produced. If it hadn't been for ME0003, we might still be in the City fighting those damned things.

With the Final Four of Sirian, Cy, ME0003, and I working together, we finally cleared out the eastern part of the map, which had a nasty firing range of Abyss Knights stacked together. All told, it took 5 hours (FIVE HOURS! for one area!) but it was done. City of the Damned full-cleared slightly before 1am EST. It was truly another one for the ages, something that I'll remember for a very, very long time.

There's the full map, the result of much hard work and effort. Next session we could proceed on to the River of Flame, and begin closing in on Diablo once and for all! (Almost all of my pictures are from early on in the night's fighting; Sirian, if you have more from the latter stages, feel free to send them to me and I'll add them into this writeup.)