Skelly the Summon-Only Necromancer:
Hell Difficulty Part Two

I cleared out the two underground floors of the Stony Tomb next and they were definitely harder than the surrounding desert. This was due in large part simply to the lack of space in the tight underground areas, perhaps demonstrated best upon Skelly's entry into the first floor where he found himself in a room with a double skeleton boss pack closing in from two directions at once. Skelly's own skeletons were able to meet that attack and turn it back, with enough foes dropping to provide replacement bodies along the way. The Stony Tomb isn't a particularly big dungeon and it took maybe 15 minutes to clear out both floors and reach Creeping Feature down at the bottom. He was Extra Strong / Cursed along with Cold Enchanted and Spectral Hit traits but still not very scary by virtue of being a mummy type opponent with zero movement speed.

Skelly flew through the next outdoor area in the Dry Hills, which had lots of leapers that fared poorly against his skeletal mages. I looked up the stats for the critters in the Dry Hills at the Amazon Basin and not a single one of the four potential monster types has max health over 4100 HP, sheesh. What a joke of an area. But then Skelly entered into the Halls of the Dead and the situation quickly became not-a-joke in a real hurry:

The Halls of the Dead is the first area that introduces greater mummies as a normal enemy. This picture above was taken right at the entry stairs on Halls of the Dead 1, and there was a double Hollow One boss pack here in the first room, one of them off to the south and then another one over to the west still hidden in darkness. All of the greater mummies appear with lots of skeleton minions for them to revive, skeletons known as Returned in this particular dungeon, making the Hollow Ones a sort of evil counterpart to Skelly's own skeleton setup. I soon discovered that the resurrection power on the greater mummies wasn't a big deal for Skelly since he could clean the corpses of the enemy undead by raising them as soon as they hit the ground. No, the problem was the innate healing possessed by the Hollow Ones who could restore the health of their Returned followers and thereby transform the greater mummies into an Act Two version of the Hierophants from Travincal.

See, one of the great weaknesses of the summoning Necromancer is that the character only has limited control over its followers. You can place the golem in strategic locations but everything else kind of does its own thing and even the golem frequently races off to hit whatever it feels like. When facing big mobs like the Returned skeletons above, Skelly's minions would inevitably spread their damage across a dozen different opponents at once rather than concentrating it on a single target. This was fine at first because inevitably some of the enemies would start to fall, however as the number of enemy skeletons shrunk, the Hollow Ones would begin to focus their healing on the handful of remaining targets. Once there were only one or two hostile skeletons remaining, the Hollow Ones would spam-heal them at a rate that often exceeded the damage output of Skelly's minions. Now that wasn't a big deal if there was only a single Hollow One present, but when a big room had five or six of them at once, the rate of healing could get to be ridiculous. There were multiple times where a single Returned skeleton was tanking Skelly's whole army and healing back to full every 1-2 seconds which quickly became a pain in the rear.

This was pretty annoying but it wasn't as if Skelly couldn't handle these fights. He definitely could, slowly cleaning up all of the corpses of the fallen so that they couldn't be revived, making progress one room and one Hollow One at a time. The real issue was the fact that these Hollow Ones were *EVERYWHERE* in the Halls of the Dead, packed into every single nook and cranny with their Returned skeletons in tow. For example, Halls of the Dead 1 had nothing but Hollow Ones/Returned and Decayed mummies present, no third monster type at all. This meant every single enemy had to be revived upon death because the mummies were also undead and subject to Hollow One control. The second floor was also mostly Hollow Ones/Returned and Decayed mummies along with a sprinkling of Desert Wing bats. Almost every single boss seemed to roll as a Hollow One by dumb luck which forced long, tedious clearing of each room. It grew exceedingly tiresome when every darned room on these floors would unleash waves of skeletons that Skelly had to fight through, over and over and over again.

Most of the fighting would be done at doorways like the one pictured above, with Skelly's force standing on one side and a horde of Returned skeletons on the other side. I could barely even tell what was happening most of the time due to the dozens of skeletons fighting on both sides, sitting around spam-clicking Raise Skeleton on top of the combat zone so that anything that died would be raised by Skelly and not the Hollow Ones. Often I could only tell that progress was being made when Skelly's mana orb decreased to indicate a successful skeleton summon. Skelly fought his way through innumerable versions of these doorway fights although the pictured one was the worst he encountered in the Halls of the Dead. That's because there were three Hollow One bosses in the next room, the pictured boss plus a Multishot / Teleportation / Holy Fire boss and a Cursed / Magic Resistant / Mana Burn boss to round out the trio. In situations like these, I often had to run through the carnage at the doorway into the next room, drop a town portal and then immediately return back through the portal, which would pull the whole skeleton army into the next room and avoid half of them getting stuck on the doorway. This was long, slow, grinding work even if Skelly did get some cool screenshots like this one:

At least my skeletons got to wear helmets! The third and final floor of the Halls of the Dead still had Hollow Ones and mummies as Skelly had rolled that pair of opponents every single time. There were also some spear cats on the bottom floor, however, and those sad things were so much weaker than the undead that Skelly had been facing that I could only laugh. The evil felines would die in mere seconds as opposed to the lengthy resurrection battles that Skelly was forced to engage in every time that he faced a Hollow One. The presence of the weak spear cats sped up the third floor by a good bit and all told it took about 75 minutes to clear out the three levels of the dungeon. (This was in comparison to maybe 10 minutes total for the outdoor Dry Hills which is about the same size as the whole underground region.) Bloodwitch didn't appear until the last room and she always has to be treated a bit carefully due to having an innate Extra Strong / Cursed trait pairing. She picked up Lightning Enchanted / Mana Burn this time around and never made it through the wall of melee skeletons.

This had been a long gaming session with Skelly raising more than a million gold along the way. I closed out the night by gambling for amulets with Elzix and this time Skelly finally hit on what he'd been looking for:

Excellent, only took something like 200-300 gambles for this to show up. I'd seen +2 or +3 skills to about a dozen other class skill trees before the Golemlord's amulet finally appeared. Just as had been the case with previous item discoveries bearing additional Necromancer +skills, this new amulet constituted a huge upgrade over the previous plain +1 Necromancer skills amulet by granting two more skill points in everything. Skelly now had two more points in Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery, taking both of them up to SLVL 32! He was only a single skill point away from getting a 13th melee skeleton for a baker's dozen though that would require finding a circlet with even more +skills. The melee skeletons were up to 360 damage per hit and topped 900 HP apiece. The ranged skeletons were slightly lower at SLVL 31 (since they received one fewer skill point from Skelly's unique wand) and were now noticeably less tanky with only 723 life and 630 Defense rating. Their damage output was likely similar to the melee skeletons though the in-game tooltips didn't list the exact numbers.

Perhaps the biggest beneficiary from this new amulet was Skelly's Fire Golem, however. The fiery creature now topped 3000 HP (thanks to double dipping on upgrades in both the Fire Golem skill itself along with Golem Mastery) while its melee strikes approached 1000 damage. Even its Holy Fire aura was hitting for well over 100 damage per tick now. Skelly was CLVL 76 at this point and I had just dropped my final skill point into Raise Skeletal Mage, with all three skeleton skills plus Fire Golem being fully maxed out with 20 skill points apiece. From this point forward, I would be skilling Golem Mastery for lack of better options which would add more total health to the golem. There was no point in dropping skill points into any of the other golems, even for their synergy benefits, and Summon Resist was already sitting at SLVL 1+9 which had hit the point of diminishing returns there. Another dozen or so skill points added to Golem Mastery should be enough to boost the Fire Golem up to 5000 or so health which seemed like the best way to improve Skelly's minion army out of the few remaining options.

There was a long break here in real-life terms, a period of about three months where I took a break from playing Skelly in early 2025. This was due partially to needing a break from Diablo 2 for a while, partially due to Civilization 7 releasing which ate up most of my gaming time for a few months. The fact that Civ7 was in pretty bad shape on release ending up helping out Skelly, heh. This is one of those times where my experience playing the game diverged significantly from the reader moving seemlessly through this report with no break. In any case, I picked up Skelly again and continued with the Lost Oasis which was fortunately an easy area to tackle. The outdoor desert areas are almost always low on danger and I used this region to start strengthening my Diablo 2 muscles which had atrophied a bit over the break. There were beetles, itchies, and maggots here which was about as unthreatening as I could hope to draw; Beetleburst greeted Skelly at the entrance and there was a triple boss pack at the bottom of the stairs between the upper and lower halves of the Oasis. Nothing too interesting or memorable to report though.

I wanted some more time to get used to playing Skelly again before tackling the Maggot Lair so it was on to the Lost City for the moment. There were leapers, zombies, and poison-tossing cats inhabiting the fallen buildings which all fell readily to the skeleton force. I ran into Dark Elder next to a Fire Tower and this was somewhat of an interesting tactical encounter since Skelly's minions were split across three different directions as monsters shambled through the holes in the building to the south. The zombies were all easy to defeat, and even the Fire Tower was much easier to smash as compared with Nightmare difficulty since Skelly's allies had gotten much stronger while the Fire Tower retained similar stats. Then it was down into the Ancient Tunnels which had mummies, invaders, and lightning-throwing enemy skeletons that looked identical to Skelly's own lightning mages. There were no dangerous fights or noteworthy item drops to report though I did manage to capture this cool zoomed-in picture of Skelly commanding his skeletons from right behind the front lines.

The Claw Viper Temple had an all-snakes draw for Skelly on the first floor which was a big relief for me. Guardian greater mummies and their skeleton minions can spawn in there and they would have required at least an hour of slogging through room after room to make progress. The Salamanders and Claw Vipers though, they had cold immunity and essentially noting else, leaving them extremely vulnerable to the Fire Golem, the melee skeletons, and 3/4ths of the skeleton mages. Even a Cursed / Extra Strong / Fire Enchanted snake boss who was lurking in the initial entrance room near the staircase didn't do anything to slow down Skelly's army. The rest of the main floor was mop-up work from there, worth good experience and not scary at all.

On the other hand, the tight spaces of Claw Viper 2 mean that it always has to be taken seriously. My plan was to creep along the top edge of the chamber and try to slip past whatever enemies might be up there without waking up Fangskin at the bottom of the altar. This plan failed immediately as Skelly simply had too many minions to avoid waking everything up from the outset. Skelly quickly found himself in a bad tactical position: half the army was engaging the Guardians and their skeletons to the north while the other half of the army faced off against Fangskin's boss mob to the south. The narrowness of the room architecture helped me here as only two or three snakes could attack at once and Fangskin had fortunately rolled two non-dangerous boss traits in Spectral Hit / Teleportation. That could have been Cursed / Fanaticism aura or something like that! In any case, Skelly worked to revive the enemy skeletons as they fell and slowly rolled back the northern front until his minions were on the Guardians themselves. They slew the three greater mummies up there, then the whole army pushed south where Fangy had been held in check the whole time. From there it was easy to advance up on the altar and clear the rest of the room. I was extremely impressed at how the skeletons had been able to tank against Fangskin for an extended period of time, killing enough snakes in the process to serve up replacement bodies for the ones that fell. I guess having SLVL 32 skeletons does make a difference.

I felt comfortable enough with Skelly at this point to return back to the Far Oasis and descend into the Maggot Lair. It's obvious why this is one of the worst places in the game for the summoning Necromancer, with absolutely no room for the skeletons to maneuver through those tunnels. Only two melee skeletons at a time could stand on the front lines to attack, and while the mages theoretically could all get into the fighting, in practice the first skeleton mage to spot an enemy would stop in place to throw its energy blasts. And then it would stay in that same spot, slowly continuing to attack, while the other eleven mages milled around behind it unable to get in range for their own spells. The only truly effective tool that Skelly had for the Maggot Lair was the Fire Golem which he could and did cast behind the monsters into places that the skeletons couldn't reach. Much of the time things looked like the screenshot above, with the golem punching one foe at a time and maybe getting help from a couple of skeletons, meanwhile 90% of the army was stuck doing nothing at all in the background. Thankfully nothing down here was Fire Immune which would have decreased the pace from slow to torturous.

There are five different monsters that can roll on the floors of the Maggot Lair: two types of maggots, two types of beetles, and the Black Locust bug swarm. Skelly wound up with an extremely beetle-heavy seies of floors as he found himself facing double beetles on all three levels of the Maggot Lair. That was probably a good thing because the beetles were relatively easy to defeat; they hit hard with their melee blows but their sparks were useless in these narrow hallways and they had no fire resistance at all to stop the golem. The first floor had bugs as the third monster type and they were even easier to kill, with a mere 1800 HP that collapsed instantly against any non-physical damage type. The second floor had a tiny number of Rock Worms mostly confined to a single room with a double boss pack, while the rest of the level was nothing but beetles everywhere. Then the final floor was the same story, double beetles plus one of the two maggot types, with the breeding maggots being more common here. I had a simple strategy for Coldworm: make use of the hundreds of tiny maggot corpses to move the whole skeleton army into her chamber, first raising a dozen melee skeletons followed by further raising all twelve mages. That allowed the whole army to fight together for a change and they quickly swarmed over everything in sight. All told, it took a little over an hour to full clear the Maggot Lair and I was more than pleased to be done in there.

Skelly continued into the Palace in the next session which can be one of the more dangerous parts of Act Two thanks to all of the skeleton archers that hang out down there. At least Skelly would have more protection than your typical character since there were so many of his minions for the enemies to target instead of the frail Necromancer himself. The Harem Level 2 was pretty straightforward, with the most interesting detail coming in the form of a rare Sorceress-only swirling crystal which had +2 sorcie skill levels on it along with several other goodies. It was almost but not quite as good as a standard Spirit runeword, heh, and not worth saving. All of the Palace levels share the same monster mix (aside from the elemental type of the skeleton mages changing) where Skelly found himself confronting lots of Blunderbores, Invaders, skeleton archers, and skeleton mages. These are floors with heavy fire resistance and fire immunities (every single opponent on Palace 2 was Fire Immune except the skeleton archers) which meant that the Fire Golem didn't do much other than stand around tanking.

The biggest fight took place on Palace 2 where Skelly found himself facing a huge group of skeleton archers behind the pictured horizontal prison wall. One of the bosses back there had the Cursed trait to dial up the physical damage taken by the whole skeleton army and there was a big pileup of melee opponents at the single doorway leading through the wall. Skelly's mages engaged in a firing war with the enemy skeleton archers with both of them shooting back and forth through the grated windows, and it took several minutes to cut through all of the Blunderbores blocking the doorway before the ranged opposition could be targeted. I think that Skelly cast the Fire Golem into that room six or seven times as it kept dying and then getting replaced. Eventually the melee foes were all dead and then Skelly's army could storm through the doorway and finally defeat the skeleton archers. While there were plenty of bosses elsewhere on these floors, none of them were especially dangerous and the clear pace remained healthy. Fire Eye only pulled Cold Enchanted / Spectral Hit for his extra abilities and fell quickly.

The Arcane Sanctuary was next and this isn't a great place for the summoning Necromancer either because the corridors are usually only wide enough for two skeletons at a time. They often get clogged up in the astral environment almost as badly as in the Maggot Lair. I headed off to the north quadrant first which had the distorted perspective formations, with Skelly fighting his way through the always-present Hell Clan goats, Ghoul Lord vampires, and Specters. I had only rounded the first curve when a pack of the ghosts came flying into view and they began chomping through some of the melee skeletons on the front line. That was definitely a boss pack but there was no need to worry, I would just step backwards to safety and... one of the vampire fire projectiles hit Skelly which triggered the "10% chance to cast Level 2 Bone Prison when struck" from his Arm of King Leoric wand. And that Bone Prison placed a wall *BEHIND* Skelly on the walkway which trapped him in place to prevent a retreat. I tried to click my way past the wall, found that I was unable to do so, then immediately opened a town portal to get out of there. But in the half second animation that opening the town portal required, the Specter clump flew right through the skeleton warriors and the Bone Prison wall in front of Skelly and:

Just like that Skelly was dead. I remember seeing his health orb go from full HP to 500-something for a split second before dropping to zero so apparently he was two-shotted by the ghost swarm, no time to drink a full rejuv potion. I was extremely annoyed at suffering this death because it was entirely caused by the stupid chance to cast a Bone Prison on Skelly's wand. Why couldn't there be some way to turn this off? It had gotten Skelly into trouble a number of times before and I had been fearing something like this might happen. The death was easily avoided and never would have happened if Skelly's own gear hadn't put him into an inescapable trap! The Spectres also proved to be an unusually dangerous opponent because they could fly over the gaps in the Arcane Sanctuary architecture and pass right through Skelly's minions without having to defeat them. On top of that, they will group up on top of one another to make it difficult to assess how many of them are present; I couldn't even get visibility on the boss traits to see what Skelly was facing aside from seeing the Fanaticism aura. Lots and lots of bad luck factors lining up here although I probably could have been faster to bail out of the town portal when the Bone Prison popped up out of nowhere.

I was really hoping that I could take Skelly through the full game deathless because the summoning Necromancer is one of the safest character builds in the whole game. And I narrowly failed to make it through Hell difficulty when Skulla died against the Ancients so this was supposed to be the redemption story for that earlier failure. Things don't always work out though and I always try to be honest when writing these reports. I'm sure that I could have avoided mentioning this death and no one would notice but then I'd only be lying to myself and what would be the point of that?

Fortunately I did not create Skelly as a Hardcore character so his journey could continue if I wanted, and I did plan to go on until I grew bored with the character. First I had to salvage the mess of a situation that he was in, starting with recovering his body to get his gear back. I went back to Act One to raise a new army, and yeesh, without all of those +skills items my Necromancer was a lot weaker! Instead of having a dozen melee skeletons with 907 HP dealing 360 damage per swing, Skelly was reduced down to eight skeletons with 560 HP dealing 171 damage - ouch! The difference in minion survivability and damage output was blatantly obvious and quite frankly this SLVL 20 skeleton army was immediately roasted when I brought them back into the Arcane Sancutary. Hmmmm, going to have to try something else then.

If direct frontal assault didn't work, Skelly would have to use his thinking cap instead. With no minions at all accompanying him, I had Skelly drop a town portal in place and then walk back towards the waypoint with the Spectres in tow. They chased him all the way there and Skelly bailed through the waypoint, followed by Skelly walking through Lut Gholein over to his portal and popping through that, which suddenly placed him behind the ghosts and left him with an open route back to his corpse. The ghosts followed him again and they nearly caught him because I forgot that he would be lacking his 30% faster run boots, whoops. There was just enough time to recover the body and then leap through yet another town portal to safety - fun with portals! Now Skelly could go back to Act One and recruit another skeleton army (with the Stony Field starting to get pretty empty by this point) and return to the Arcane Sancutary waypoint for a final time.

It was at this point that I finally managed to get a look at the traits on the Spectre boss. Errr, Spectre bosses since it turned out there were two of them, one with Fanaticism aura and another with Extra Strong trait. That would explain why Skelly's minions had died so fast and why his own health globe had disappeared in a split second, it was the 4x damage bonus from those two traits augmenting each other. The Spectres had been so jumbled together that I didn't even know that there were two bosses there. But with them strung out now and a wall of bone no longer blocking Skelly's retreat room, the pair was easily handled with no further fuss. There truly wasn't anything that scary about this boss pair and Skelly tackled dangers like this all the time without thinking about it. The whole issue had been his wand trapping him at exactly the wrong moment, argh!

I still had to clear the rest of the Arcane Santuary which took about 90 minutes to progress through the course of the remaining three quadrants. Most situations remained calm for Skelly though his progress was relatively slow since his minions kept getting stuck on the narrow walkways. Despite all of my best efforts, the same thing happened again where Skelly was trapped inside his own Bone Prison and this time I was able to capture a screenshot of the dilemma. I don't know what the Arm of King Leoric wand is supposed to be doing with this extra trait, surely it's not supposed to do that! Fortunately this time Skelly was trapped with a handful of normal enemies, not a Fanaticism / Extra Strong ghost boss pack, and I was able to wait out the timer until the Bone Prison disappeared (at the cost of 5 full rejuvs, yikes!) There were plenty of other bosses elsewhere in the Arcane Santuary with none of them rising to anywhere near the same level of danger. The Summoner was waiting at the end of the second quadrant where he managed to freeze a few of the skeletons with his Glacial Spikes... only to get mugged by the other 20 skeletons he missed, heh.

Skelly tackled the Canyon of the Magi in a new gaming session and it was a true breath of fresh air to be back in the open air again. Holy cow, the skeleton army could actually move! More than two or three of them could engage in combat against the monsters! The Canyon turned out to be full of beetles along with maggots and melee spear cats, about as tame of a setup as I was ever likely to encounter in this area. The Crushers (yetis) are the most dangerous foes in here since they get really fast in Hell difficulty and they were missing in action this time around. Skelly took his time and his minions were clearly enjoying themselves as they rolled over everything in sight. There was one notable item find: a small charm with 11% fire resistance and 3% faster movement speed, excellent! Those were outstanding stats for a small charm and this item bumped Skelly up to max fire resistance where he'd been just a bit short previously.

The Canyon of the Magi had only been the warmup, however. The real meat of this session was the Tombs of Tal Rasha with Skelly needing to explore all seven of them to lay claim to my standard full game clear. The True Tomb was located in slot #2 so I held off entering it for now and began working through the other six in clockwise fashion. Tomb #1 had Unravelers, mummies, and beetles for its monster mix which was a good introduction to dealing with the resurrections of the greater mummies once again. I had another close call when Skelly was once again trapped in his own Bone Prison but a trigger-finger full rejuv and a town portal that opened close enough to hop through was enough to get Skelly out of that jam. No pictures this time, I was too busy escaping!

Tomb #3 had vampires, ghosts, and beetles which was a great draw since it lacked any Unravelers. A Cursed / Extra Fast ghost boss was the scariest customer that Skelly had seen in a bit and gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to the similar customer that downed him in the Arcane Sanctuary. That ghost was zipping around at warp speed though it died equally quickly to the magic blasts of the skeleton mages. There was also a room with a double vampire boss pack where one of them had a Might aura and the carnage from that fight lasted for some time, lots of skeletons dying and being replaced. Even with Skelly's massive army wholly engaged in the fighting, it took a long time to drop multiple vampire bosses which had 10k health, heavy resistances, and innate lifesteal abilities. This tomb kept going and going which led to the realization that I'd found Kaa's Tomb, excellent news to draw a non-Unraveler setup for the longest False Tomb. I found Kaa himself near the end of the floor where his five boss traits weren't enough to save him from the wrath of Skelly's forces.

The fourth tomb at the top of the Canyon held ghosts, vampires, and gorebellies - the second tomb in a row with no Unravelers. Was Skelly going to keep dodging them in the remaining tombs as well? Notable fights included a long struggle with a gorebelly boss at the doorway to the treasure room because it was too dangerous to run into the room and pull in the skeleton army via town portal. That was a standard tactic that I pulled throughout the various tombs, running into a new room and going through a town portal, then immediately returning with army in tow. It was much, much faster than having the bulk of them stuck on the other side of a doorway twiddling their thumbs while a handful of the skeletons did the fighting. There was also a ghost boss + ghost champ pack with a Fanaticism aura that knocked the melee skeletons down to a count of 7 at one point before enough enemies fell and Skelly could replenish the ranks.

Tomb #5 brought back gorebellies, vampires, and Unravelers; I actually thought I had dodged the Unravelers since they weren't in the first two rooms only to have them show up shortly thereafter. The greater mummies slowed things down a lot, there was one room with a Multishot Unraveler boss with a mummy maker and it was impossible to make progress until the mummies stopped being generated. Skelly spent lots of time facing down gorebelly bosses and slowly chewing through burning dead. Everything undead had to be raised immediately to deny the possibility of Unraveler resurrection which dragged down Skelly's pace noticeable. In terms of item finds, Skelly turned up another excellent charm here: a grand charm with 38 life! (Also a useless 10-22 additional fire damage on melee attacks.) That was worth shuffling some charms around for a net gain of about 15 health. Skelly also found the unique tulwar Blade of Ali Baba here which is apparently a magic find item, not something that a summoning Necromancer would want.

The same long gaming session continued as Skelly descended into Tomb #6. This one had Unravelers and ghosts with no third monster type, ugh! Because there was no third opponent for the dungeon to roll, this false tomb was super heavy on Unravelers and their attendant Burning Dead. There was a nasty room with a Might aura Unraveler boss mixed in with Unraveler champs which forced retreat after retreat to pull the burning dead away from the entrance. Despite their huge numbers, Skelly's minions could not damage the enemy skeletons fast enough to out-race the healing they were getting from the Unravelers. Then there were more Unraveler champs mixed with a ghost boss that forced the drinking of a full rejuv when the ghosts got in a big hit on Skelly himself. There were about six Unraveler boss/champs and every last enemy inside was potentially resurrectable so this small tomb took forever to clear.

Tomb #7 had more Unravelers and beetles, once again with no third monster present. This was the first tomb with a trapped entrance, Unraveler champs and burning dead everywhere. It was another tomb where all the bosses rolled as Unravelers which was exactly as much fun as it sounds. I still don't understand why the greater mummies can both heal their skeletons and revive them after they die; surely one of those abilities would be sufficient? It was the healing that caused the most problems since Skelly could clean up Burning Dead bones whenever they hit the ground. A single enemy skeleton could often stand in a doorway and tank Skelly's ENTIRE army so long as one Unraveler was spam-healing it. The best solution was to cast the Fire Golem in the face of the Unraveler(s) which would then swap over to attacking the golem and therefore stop healing the Burning Dead. I was well over three hours into this gaming session by now and the need to clear so many rooms of Unravelers was getting beyond tiresome.

Finally it was time for the True Tomb and surely things had to be better, right? No such luck: the huge place was packing gorebellies and Unravelers (of course), with no third monster type again! It was horrible luck not only drawing Unravelers in the last three tombs, but not even having a third monster type in any of them to make the greater mummies even more omnipresent. I can't remember that happening in my many previous playthroughs of the Tombs, not having a pair of opponents in three straight tombs and rolling Unravelers in each of them. The gorebellies were also very tanky with 11,000 HP apiece though at least they couldn't be revived. There were lots of bosses packing the True Tomb and Skelly had no choice but to dig them out, room by room, one greater mummy defeated at a time. This took more than an hour and a half of real world time though I was certainly well practiced at dealing with the Unravelers and their blasted skeletons by now. I made sure to snap a picture of the fully revealed minimap and careful readers might have a sense for how long all of this took by examining the timestamps in the corner of these various screenshots.

That left Duriel as the final demon remaining in Act Two. This boss fight had gone well in Normal and Nightmare difficulties so I was hoping that the pattern would continue here in Hell; I did make sure to drop down to two poison skeleton mages since I knew their damage couldn't stack against Duriel. Skelly's army entered the small chamber and I immediately cast the Fire Golem on top of Duriel, who lasted for about five seconds before being chomped to death. That was honestly pretty good! I'd been expecting the golem to perish sooner than that. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to keep Duriel focused on the golem as he keep switching targets to hit the melee skeletons and smashed them one and two at a time. The melee skeletons were all slowed to a crawl by Duriel's Holy Freeze aura and they were doing little beyond serving as blocking dummies. It was the skeleton mages who needed to carry the damage load for this battle and thankfully they were absolutely up to this task. Most of them were smart enough to stay back out of the freezing aura where they kept applying chill and poison status to the big bug as they chipped away at Duriel's lifebar. One skeleton mage was dumb enough to move into close range where it was quickly exploded, however the other eleven stayed safe along with about half of the melee skeletons. I could see pretty early on that Skelly's army was going to survive long enough to drop the boss, and after about five minutes of combat, there were still 5 melee skeletons and 11 mages standing when Duriel expired.

Duriel dropped the Dark Adherent dusk shroud armor from the Disciple set (plus a Twisted Essence of Suffering that I didn't even know how to use). The set armor was something that looked like it would be solid on a mercenary though not something that Skelly himself would be wearing. Then I gambled over a million gold on circlets without turning up anything useful, oh well. There wasn't anything else to do with those funds after all. I was extremely glad to have Act Two in the rearview mirror after this marathon Diablo 2 session that had lasted for nearly five hours. I was still having enough fun with this character to want to continue onwards despite the death back in the Arcane Sanctuary; Skelly will return next for the jungles of Act Three.