The Rogues had managed to get all the way up to the Glacial Trail waypoint, but the Crystalline Passage still remained mostly uncleared, as well as the various sub-dungeons branching off from it. Clearly, there remained a great deal of work to be done. Our goal for the next session was to run the Frozen River and try to rescue Anya, getting that quest out of the way. Crystalline Passage was pretty routine, aside from some amazingly fast Infidels. Then we managed to make it to the Frozen River, and that's when the provervial doodoo hit the fan: Gloams.
More precisely, Cold Enchanted/Mana Burn/Fanaticism Aura boss pack of Gloams. This was a particularly bad combination for these enemies, as their lightning did a ton of damage (Fanaticism), completely drained the mana orb so that Rogues couldn't teleport away (Mana Burn), and also chilled the Rogues so that even running away was difficult (Cold Enchanted). This was the result of running into the boss in a situation where we had virtually no room to work with:
In my defense, those last two deaths were caused by me getting close enough to take the picture of the boss' stats that I pasted in the corner. (By the way, to read the D2 Message Log in the correct order, read from the bottom up to the top.) Now given enough space to work with, this would have been a more doable situation, but Sirian "accidentally" popped an evil urn right at the start of the level and unleased that monster who proceeded to slaughter everyone. But not Mr. Lightning Tank with his +20 Lightning Absorb, oh no! 
Anyway, the Rogues eventually managed to kill this boss, only to have the entire US West server crash and force us to start all over again. It's one of those situations where you don't know whether to laugh uproariously or bang your head against the keyboard. 
While making our way back through the Crystalline Passage to the Frozen River again (all this running around in there easily added up to a full clear), the Rogue group ran into this lovely corrupted rogue archer boss:
Multiple Shots and Fanaticism, with Cold Enchanted to boot? That's just peachy. It was quite a fight with the boss' minions just to get to the point that I could snap this screenshot. Once we made it to Frozen River run #2, the Rogues discovered that the monster draw had changed to include almost nothing but witches, just swarms and swarms of them. The witches were one of the worst monsters the Rogues fought in all of D2; they have a strong ranged attack with a huge amount of distance (they can fire off the screen and still see their target), they move erratically, and the witches have nasty curses as well. Not to mention that they are all either Fire or Cold Immune! Here's a shot of one of the many witch bosses on this run through the Frozen River:
Extra Strong witch made for a dangerous battle, no doubt about that. It was very tough going the entire trip through the River, made harder by the fact that the US West server was evidently overworked and began going through some very strange behavior. The game kept freezing up at regular intervals - so regular that Dathon started timing the server freezes and giving us warnings when the next one was about to occur! They were all roughly 2:15 apart and lasted for about 15 seconds, continuing as regular as clockwork for more than a half hour. Now the server freezes kept killing the Rogues, but it was very amusing. 
Despite this, um, "adversity", the Rogues made it to the end of the Frozen River:
Compared to the witches, Frozenstein was pathetically easy and was shot down in complete safety from across the river. None of his abilities did him any good from the position he found himself in. Since the server craziness was proving very disruptive, and the team was going to have to come back to this area anyway to catch Jaffa up on the quest, the Rogues called it a night with roughly a third of the Frozen River uncleared. We would return later to break more heads.
In the next session, the group started out from the Glacial Trail waypoint and full-cleared the area from there. The monster draw wasn't exactly "easy", but it could have been a lot harder. We found and cleared out the Drifter Cavern on the way there, which had a lot of bosses in it but turned out to be surprisingly doable. I took some pictures of the fighting, but nothing stood out enough to merit inclusion in the report (and I have WAY too many screenshots already); it was pretty routine. After full-clearing those areas, we grabbed the Frozen Tundra waypoint and cleared about half of that area before calling it a night. There were four bosses and a champ pack at the Tundra waypoint, and we had a devil of a time just clearing out some working room. Cy teleported far out of the screen to the north and set up a portal in "east bumblefuck" which got a laugh and was probably the highlight of the night. It's stuff like that which made Rogue Revival a lot of fun.
We spent the next two nights catching up Jaffa into Act Five; the reason why it took two nights is that our first run through the Chaos Sanctuary was aborted by a crash of US West when we had most of the area cleared. D'oh! The second night though things went as planned and we took down Diablo for the second time (the picture of Diablo dying posted previously is actually from that session, as Jaffa is in the picture!)
With everyone now caught up to Act Five, it was time to get Jaffa all the quests done so far in that particular realm. Killing Shenk was easy, and only took about 15 minutes. We spent a while clearing out some territory for the second quest, up to the first barb prison, then Sirian teleported ahead and freed the other two. Despite this, the quest failed to register for Jaffa; apparently that quest has been bugged since the D2X beta. Since Jaffa didn't really need the Tal/Ort/Ral runes, and since "15 barbs were freed" in the words of Sirian, we headed to the Crystalline Passage. There were all kinds of bosses there right at the waypoint; most notably, the Rogues had to kill this Cursed/Extra Fast/Extra Strong Invader:
He was blinking all over the place and one-hit killing everything in site. It took a real concerted effort from the Rogue team to first deal with his minions, then finally corner the boss and finish him off as shown. There were other nasty bosses as well, but that guy was the worst.
This witch boss was also a very bad customer. She's only barely in this screenshot because I fear getting any closer! Cursed/Extra Strong/Lightning Enchanted was serious trouble. Immune to Fire isn't helping things either. There are always a lot of boss fights in Hell difficulty, but some of the ones on this runthrough of the Crystalline Passage were particularly tough.
The Rogues had all kinds of problems getting started on the Frozen River, with many deaths involved, before Sirian finally found a safe place to set up. This was the little finger of land where we managed to find some safe ground:
The Rogues heroically huddle together for safety as Jaffa's hydras engage the enemies. Once the enemies that had been camping the stairs were taken out from across this river with bows, the River became much more playable. Having room to work with makes all the difference. The monster draw was Vipers/Yetis/Gloams, with Gloam lightning being by far the worst. Jaffa (with negative lightning resistance) was hitting the floor a LOT. The Frozen River was tough, but the Rogues eventually made it up to Frozenstein after much hard work to take him on a second time:
The hydras certainly add a lot more pyrotechnics to the screenshot! Frozenstein fared no better this time than before, as the Rogues teleported to safety across river segments and shot him down from there. All told, the Frozen River had been a bit easier this time, without endless witches and the attack of the crashing server.
With the Rogues now all caught up on quests, the team could venture further into Act Five, with Nihlathak's Temple next on the to-do list...
