Skelly the Summon-Only Necromancer:
Hell Difficulty Part Three

First up were the Kurast jungles, one of my least favorite parts of the game due to their tedious nature. There's little danger in the spacious outdoor jungles, with tons of room to maneuver and nothing particularly dangerous in terms of the monster mix, however they keep stretching out to an interminable length and it's very possible to go hours between waypoints popping up. I needed to set aside a chunk of two or three hours to play through these areas with a character like Skelly and that can be hard to find when sharing a house with young kids. The good news is that the low difficulty of the Spider Forest also made it a good place to get back in the habit of playing a character again, with Skelly's minions slicing their way through the opposition without breaking a sweat. I basically never had to worry about raising new skeletons against the crows and mosquitoes and thorned hulks that inhabited these swampy paths. Just stand back and let the minions do their thing, easy stuff for the moment.

I found the Spider Cavern in the first jungle alcove and things were definitely trickier down there. The cave was heavy on spiders with both Poison Spinners and Flame Spiders present, along with a double boss pack of spiders encountered shortly after coming down the stairs that posed the first real challenge for the skeleton army in this act. Those Poison Spinners inflict 5900 poison damage per bite (yes, really) over some ungodly long span of time and that was enough to drop a bunch of the skeletons once they started turning green. I had enough bodies to keep summoning replacements and avoid a real crisis but the melee skeleton count dropped as low as 8 at one point which was a real rarity for Skelly. Sszark had Stone Skin / Spectral Hit for his extra traits and therefore didn't pose too much of a threat. Then the Arachnid Lair was in the next jungle alcove and included Giant Lampreys in its monster draw for even more fun with poison. I was more than ready to be done with these areas after seeing so many skeletons wandering around with that green glow.

Unusually, there had been no fetishes of any kind present in the Spider Forest outside of the handful always located at the entrance to each alcove. Those festishes must have been hanging out in the Great Marsh as Skelly encountered big swarms of them there along with the one monster type that always feels the most out of place in this area, gloams. I don't really understand why this remote jungle region would have invisible lightning spirits floating around but apparently that's how things shook out. The gloams could shoot past Skelly's front line and deal some nasty damage even with his lightning resistance maxed out, though fortunately they were very fast to die and the skeletons always seemed to be able to see them even when they were hidden from Skelly himself. After spending about 45 minutes of real-world time clearing out the whole Marsh, it was on to the Flayer Jungle where Skelly faced almost entirely flayers and soul killers with a few occasional frogs thrown in. The skeletons were perfect at handling these kind of threats, as they do very well against lots of small and weak targets, making this another easy area to pass through.

The first alcove in the Flayer Jungle held the tribal village with the Gidbinn pyre, and for the first time in literal years I received a ring from the Ormus quest reward worth keeping. Cold resistance happened to be one stat that I still didn't have maxed out on Skelly while additional mana would be useful given the cost of the Fire Golem and ticking health regeneration is always helpful. Now the ring that Skelly had to remove to put on this new ring also had extra mana on it so this turned out to be a net slight decrease, from 470 to 460 max mana, but it would have been much worse given a ring that solely had additional cold resistance on it. Skelly had most of the gear that he needed by now and I was down to pretty minor optimizations; he also did turn up a jewel with +19 life that I might socket into his wand if I couldn't find anything better by Act Five.

The second jungle alcove held the entrance to the Flayer Dungeon which meant that I basically had to clear it out now or else walk a looooong way at the start of the next session. The main enemy type that I wanted to avoid was the undead exploding dolls, and fortunately they failed to appear on any of the three levels of the Flayer Dungeon. There were lots and lots of flayers and soul killers though which made this dungeon feel a lot like the forest trails outside. The second floor held the ugly hairball pictured above: a double boss pack with one of them having Cursed trait and the other boss packing a Might aura. That combination made for something like 5 times normal physical damage received and required extreme care. Thankfully Skelly encountered this dangerous situation in a narrow corridor where it was easy to stay behind the melee skeletons and there were plenty of corpses for replacement warriors. This was one time where Skelly was raising a bunch of new melee skeletons since the poor fellows on the front line kept getting smashed into pieces.

The remainder of the Flayer Dungeon was uneventful as I made my way down to the bottom and retrieved Khalim's latest body part. Then I still had to proceed through more of the Flayer Jungle until finally finding the wapoint in the final jungle alcove something like 90 minutes after finding the previous one at the start of the Great Marsh, sheesh! All that remained was to gamble circlets using the million gold that Skelly had acquired over the course of this gaming session, only to find...

Oh my goodness, I actually found the Golemlord's Circlet! This was the exact item that I'd been trying to find ever since turning up the equivalent Golemlord's Amulet back in the last act, having gone through at least a hundred gambles if not double that. And there's no guarantee of hitting these items while running a pure character; some of you might remember that Corvus the Ravenlord searched and searched forever without ever finding a circlet with the equivalent Druid summoning bonus. In any case, this was a replacement for Skelly's venerable Lore helmet and therefore added another +2 to all of his summoning skills. That meant another two points for the skeleton abilities themselves, plus more Skeleton Mastery, plus more stuff for the golem, plus more Summon Resist, and so on. Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery were both now sitting at SLVL 34! While that might not be a big deal for those who twink and trade gear endlessly, I think this was the highest that I'd ever gotten a skill in Diablo 2. The melee skeletons were now close to 1000 HP each and dealt over 400 damage per attack with the mages doing an equivalent amount from their unlisted abilities. Skelly did lose some lightning resistance from dropping Lore but I could socket in an Ort rune to fill that gap. I just had to finish clearing the Kurast jungles first since popping back to Nightmare difficulty would reroll a new map and I emphatically did not want that to happen right now.

This was a great break of luck, not only because it made Skelly stronger, but also since it helped revive my interest in the character. I was kind of forcing myself to play Skelly because I don't like to leave projects unfinished, only to stumble across this awesome circlet and gain a renewed motivation to keep going. Would the skeletons be strong enough to survive against some of the upcoming story-based bosses after being juiced up with all of these skill points? I was curious to find out.

When I resumed the next gaming session with Skelly, it did feel as though his minions had gotten noticeably stronger. The skeletal warriors were dealing an additional 50 damage per swing while packing another 60 HP apiece, the Fire Golem had finally topped 1000 damage per hit, and best of all there was now a baker's dozen of both the melee and ranged skeletons. It was honestly wild watching 26 skeletons racing around after the Necromancer on screen, with enough minions in tow that Skelly would have needed multiple NCOs to manage them all if this were a real military. The first destination was the Swampy Pit which I had left unfinished during the previous gaming session. Once again there were no undead soul killers to be found here, with a bunch of zombies showing up for the first time along with more fetishes and bats. Skelly had a couple of lively fights without anything too noteworthy taking place. There wasn't much more of the jungles remaining afterwards as the Flayer Jungle waypoint had been located as close as possible to the Kurast entrance. The newly buffed skeleton army tested itself against Stormtree at the gates to the ruined city, and despite the shambling creature drawing Extra Strong as a boss trait, the skeletons were up to the task. Stormtree and his mob downed two of them during the fighting but supplied replacement bodies as they themselves fell in turn. That was a great sign if the skeletal warriors could stand up to a boss like this without experiencing any real issues.

The outdoor Kurast areas are another easy portion of the gameplay and Skelly breezed through Lower Kurast at a fast pace. There were no Zakarumites present on this occasion and the vultures, leapers, and Doom Apes really didn't put up any kind of a fight. The Kurast Bazaar had more easy foes whenever the bug demons appeared, including one amusing moment when the clouds of bugs spawned on top of a platform where Skelly's ranged skeletons shot them down at their leisure. There were Sexton healers in this area for the first time though, enemies which required a bit more work as they kept spam-healng their followers. I was pleased to see that the skeleton army largely out-damaged the pace of their healing, unless multiple Sextons were healing a single zealot together. Skelly was usually able to place the Fire Golem in the face of the healers to give them something more urgent to worry about while his skeletons did the dirty work of cutting down the zealot mobs.

I tackled the first two Kurast temples next to get the Kurast Bazaar completely over and done with. The Disused Fane had a quiet entrance area before the action picked up at this dual doorway. There were spiders and Wailing Beasts behind both of the entryways and the room to the southwest ended up being completely packed with monsters to the point where nothing could even move in there. Skelly had to deal with the annoyance of his army being divided in two directions along with the nasty poison attack on the Spider Maguses. Those darned things bite for 18,000 poison damage (!!!) which was a death sentence even for the poison-resistant minions that Skelly was leading. It also meant an instant return back to town to cleanse the stuff if Skelly himself would happen to get bitten. I had to go back to town several times and even return to Act One for some more skeleton replacements before clearing out both of these rooms. At least the rest of the Disused Fane was quiet and the danger level had been low, even if the annoyance factor had been high.

There was a vampire boss right at the entrance of the infamous Ruined Temple though that was probably a good thing as it removed one boss pack before Skelly had to deal with the rest of the small dungeon. Skelly's minions cut down the vampires as I noted that he had drawn the right-facing "T" formation this time. That setup tends to be pretty defensive in nature and I was able to lure out Sarina and her crew for a battle near the doorway to the central room:

Sarina's corrupted rogues were pretty fragile and died quickly to the skeleton force. What made this setup trickier was the presence of two additional bosses in the main room of the Ruined Temple, with a spider boss and another vampire boss lurking back in there. The spider boss came out together with Sarina and turned out to be Stone Skin and Magic Resistant: Physical Immune and Fire Immune which were Skelly's two major damage types. The stupid thing ended up tanking in the doorway for Sarina and it took several minutes to damage it enough to get it to flee. Then Skelly was able to slay Sarina herself, followed by running deeper into the dungeon where he could open a town portal and then pop back through the portal again to pull his full army into the central space. Those spiders and their 18,000 damage poison bites had me returning back to town several more times to clear the green stuff as the skeleton army finally murdered the remaining vampires and spiders with great prejudice. All told, this was a good result for the Ruined Temple as Skelly avoided any real dangers while completing the quest for 5 more stat points dumped into Vitality.

I wrapped up this gaming session by clearing out the always-tedious Kurast Sewers. This was the first time that Skelly saw the undead exploding dolls in Act Three; they didn't end up being much of a problem though as Skelly had such a massive number of minions to hide behind. The skeletal warriors didn't seem to care about the damage from the dolls and easily tanked this latest threat. The other monsters in the Sewers were mosquitoes and bats as I drew a break by not having to face Horadrim Ancients and resurrect all of their undead minions. It still took quite a while to full clear both floors but this would have been much longer if those greater mummies had been present.

Then I popped back into Normal difficulty and used my saved socket quest to add two sockets to that Golemlord's Circlet now that Skelly wouldn't be losing any progress from rolling a new map. I dropped Tal and Io runes into the circlet for 30% poison resistance and another 10 Vitality. That was the best that I could do with the runes and jewels that I had on hand with this character, even if it might look like a ridiculous result to those players who do endless runs for high-end loot. The Tal rune had enough resistance on hand to max out Skelly's poison resistance and then I'd be able to max out his lightning resist as well with the final socket quest plus the Act V resist scroll. There really wasn't much need for more items at this point and I could focus on the business of making it through the remaining threats without dying.

Upper Kurast was heavier on the corrupted temple denizens, with both Zealots and Cantor/Faithful pairings. Fortunately the Cantors seemed to limit their healing to their own minions rather than adding the Zealots into the mix as well. Skelly ran into a group of three Cantor bosses encountered one after another along the western edge of this area as he worked his way north, none of them rising to the level of serious danger though. What was dangerous was the stupid 10% chance to cast Bone Prison when struck on Skelly's unique wand which nearly got him killed again. I was clearing out the northeast corner of Upper Kurast when the idiotic thing triggered again, trapping a Zealot inside the Bone Prison with Skelly:

I tried to open a town portal to escape only to discover that there wasn't enough room, which is why the screen was displaying those "Impossible" messages above. Skelly had no choice but to sit there and let the Zealot beat on him until the Bone Prison timed out, and while he was getting hit that only triggered even more Bone Prisons from his wand, argh! I had to drink three full rejuvs before the enemy finally died to skeleton mage bolts and this easily could have resulted in another death if that had been a boss instead of a normal enemy in there with Skelly. Seriously, was there any way to get rid of this unwanted Bone Prison trigger on Skelly's wand? Too big this wasn't Diablo 3 where I could have rerolled it into a different affix.

The remaining four Kurast Temples were next on the agenda, some of the most dangerous places in the whole game and the spot where my Hydra sorcie Lernie had met her demise. I started with the Forgotten Temple which was heavy on Serpent Magus snakes. Those things have a lot of resistances but failed to bring much in the way of fire protection while also having low HP totals. The skeleton army ate them up without any problems, killing a pair of snake bosses before advancing into the final room where there was a corrupted rogue boss lurking. The Forgotten Reliquary was full of Wailing Beasts instead, including two immediate bosses that tried to flank the skeleton army out of two separate doorways as Skelly entered the opening room. Even though both of them had the Extra Strong trait, neither of them were able to make much headway against the melee skeletons who were truly tanky at this point against most threats. Skelly's followers defeated first one boss, then the other, and the remainder of the temple was uneventful.

Both of the remaining two temples on the Kurast Causeway had stairs traps at the entrance, though neither of them was as bad as they could have been. The Ruined Fane had beetle champs that came scampering over to greet Skelly right in the first room, only to run into the brick wall of 13 melee skeletons and make no further progress towards the Necromancer himself. The Disused Reliquary was even busier with corrupted rogue archer champs, an archer boss, plus a bat boss all in the first room. This would have been really nasty for a solo character who would have been swarmed under so many foes attacking at once; by contrast, Skelly was hanging out with the roster of an entire baseball team which provided ample protection. All of these opponents were frail and died quickly to skeleton swords and mage fireballs which removed the danger in short order. The Summoning Necromancer is one of the safest possible builds to take through these cramped conditions and I was relieved that Skelly did indeed clear all six of the Kurast Temples with flying colors.

I stopped there for the day with the intention of doing the rest of Act Three from Travincal to Mephisto in the next session. When I resumed from the Upper Kurast waypoint, Skelly found that this time the Kurast Causeway had a group of four Hierophant champions hanging out right in between the two temples. Those things were incredibly annoying as they spammed their heals on their minions as well as on each other; their Blizzard spells weren't especially dangerous, Skelly simply couldn't make any progress due to the heal-fest taking place. I had to retreat back into Upper Kurast several times to draw their melee Zealots out of healing range and down them in small groups, then finally rushed back into the middle of the Hierophants themselves and managed to overwhelm the healers before they could restore themselves. This was much more work than I expected for the tiny Causeway and it foreshadowed the battle that was waiting for me in Travincal.

Normally Travincal is one of my absolute favorite parts of D2's gameplay due to the run-and-gun nature of the action in the temple city. Not this time though, as Skelly found that he had drawn almost entirely Hierophant/Zealot pairs with hardly any vampires at all, including every boss seemingly rolling as one of those dreaded healers. The Hierophants liked to camp out on top of the high ground across the various architectural features and even the whole skeleton army attacking a single target together had difficulty overcoming their spammed heals. Getting all of the skeletons to focus one Zealot was nearly impossible, of course, and more frequently they would be split up hitting four or five targets at once which provided ample time for Hierophant healing antics. I had no choice but to pull retreating maneuvers over and over again, trying to pull the Zealots away from their protectors, which was *MUCH* harder to do with 26 skeletons in tow than when playing an individual character. It didn't help either that the Zealots liked to flee when they dropped low on health, racing back to their Hierophants to be topped off on health and return to the fight again. I have 25 years of experience playing Diablo 2 by now so I knew how to pick apart the monsters and defeat them in bits and pieces, but it was a real slog of the sort that Skelly hadn't experienced since the Tombs of Tal Rasha.

After some 30 minutes of slowly clearing out one Hierophant after another, Skelly was left with only the central building remaining. I wanted to pull out the Council members individually but of course that was impossible with all of those skeletons running around and stirring up chaos. Geleb came out first with two Council minions in tow and it took about four different retreat attempts before I was finally able to get them away from the central building. I couldn't seem to isolate the three of them from one another (thanks skeletons!) and they kept healing each other whenever anyone dropped low. Eventually, after having returned to Act One a couple times for fresh skeleton recruits, something seemed to bug out in their AI routines as they stopped healing one another. That allowed the skeleton army to drop Geleb followed by his two minions; at least the boss had rolled the non-scary Mana Burn and Stone Skin for his extra traits.

Toorc was next and once again I had to play the retreating song-and-dance to try and isolate him from more Council minions. Skelly lost the better part of another skeleton army in the process of doing this, with me opting to bail out while he still had half a dozen melee skeletons remaining to make the fresh recruiting effort easier. After five minutes of dancing around, I was able to corner him on the south side of one of the pools and burst the boss down, followed by getting another Council minion. Ismail was the last member of Black Council remaining and I was glad to leave him for last when I saw that he had rolled a Fanaticism aura to go along with his innate Extra Fast / Cursed pairing. That was a very dangerous combo but the extra speed may have interfered with his AI routine as well since Ismail didn't bother using his heals. Either that or Ismail and his two minions were too busy fighting against the melee skeletons in their faces since they all dropped with much less fuss than their predecessors. Whew, clearing out Travincal had been a real pain this time around. The skeletons did more than enough damage to kill everyone, they simply didn't focus individual targets as well as I would have liked.

Skelly still had to make his way through the three floors of the Durance of Hate, especially that second floor which balloons to gargantuan proportions in Nightmare and Hell difficulties. The main enemy type to watch out for in the Durance is the undead dolls, which can spawn on both of the first two floors along with mummies, vampires, and Maulers. The game will always pick three of those four monsters and usually the player has to hope that the dolls will be absent. Well, Skelly rolled the exploding dolls for the first floor and in fact quickly ran into a double boss pack of them:

Thankfully they were encountered on the other side of this narrow doorway. Skelly had absolutely no desire to be over there, thank you very much. It took several minutes for the skeleton army to carve its way through all of those exploding dolls in the double boss pack and the rest of Durance 1 didn't have anything else remotely as frightening. Durance 2 had Maulers, vampires, and more of the exploding dolls spread across its vast expanses. This would have been an issue for many of my other characters but it wasn't too bad for Skelly since he was about as safe against their death explosions as any character could be. The undead dolls also had the lowest health and fewest resistances of any of the monster types which helped speed up the full clear pace a bit. There was an initial Mauler boss near the stairs after starting Durance 2, followed by a double vampire boss pack that dropped enough Meteor spells to force a retreat back to Act One for more skeletons. The melee skeletons seemed to be able to survive the Meteors without too much trouble but the skeleton mages really struggled when hit by the higher fire damage from the two vampire bosses. Then the rest of Durance 2 had only a few more bosses after that initial trio, with very long stretches of nothing but normal opponents across the giant stage. It took me about an hour to complete all of Durance 2 which is pretty fast for a variant character of mine; here's the standard screenshot showing the fully revealed minimap. Durance 2 was so large that big chunks of it couldn't even fit on the minimap.

Durance 3 opened with a series of Blood Lord vampires hugging the bottom edge of the entry area. Skelly's minions were happy to cut them down and there was even a vampire boss hanging out with them; removing one of the floor's bosses that easily was a nice break of luck. Bremm Sparkfist was waiting just on the other side of the main doorway and came running out with two Council minions at his heels. He had Cold Enchanted and Spectral Hit as his extra traits along with a Holy Shock aura, all of which could have been a lot worse. This was another case of the Council members doing minimal healing and Bremm went down without much fuss. I always tackle Maffer next on the western side of the floor; he had about four or five vampires hanging out with him, which the skeletons took out first followed by the boss. Wyand was the last Council member remaining and I hoped that things would go as smoothly against him, only to find that there was a vampire boss along with its minions in the eastern chamber. That wouldn't have posed a problem except that a couple of the skeletons had teleported across the central fire pit (this happens all the time when the game tries to catch the skeleton minions up with the Necromancer) and woke up Mephisto in the process, argh!

The Lord of Hatred cast one of his Blizzard spells and, unlike the innumerable Blizzards that the Hierophants had cast earlier, this one absolutely decimated Skelly's army. I don't know what kind of damage bonus that thing had against skeleton minions but anything caught inside its radius crumbled into bones in a flash. I had to go back to Act One for more skeletons yet again, then continue the process of fighting the remaining vampires and Wyand before Mephisto made his way over from the central platform. The final vampires were nearly dead when Mephisto made his first appearance on screen, at which time he launched another Blizzard and wiped out half of Skelly's army again. I had to go back and raise more skeletons from fallens and goats in Act One, then when Skelly popped out of his return town portal his fresh new army was smmashed yet AGAIN by another Blizzard! Sheesh, how many times was Mephisto going to use that spell?! Finally I was able to bring another collection of skeletons back into Durance 3 and get them into range of Mephisto without Blizzard hitting them... and then they proceeded to kick his demon ass, heh. Seriously, Mephisto did absolutely nothing other than emit poison gas and swing feebly at the melee skeletons surrounding him. His entire lifebar drained away in less than a minute and he didn't kill so much as a single skeleton before perishing. Something was really wacky about his Blizzard spell because in every other respect Mephisto was a complete joke.

I started my next gaming session in Act Four with the hopes of completing the whole act in a pair of sessions. While it wasn't too difficult getting the initial skeleton army recruited each time that I booted up Diablo 2, it also took enough time that I tried to minimize how long Skelly was spending in the Cold Plains and Stony Field rounding up enough bodies for the full 26 minions. Upon descending the staircase into the Outer Steppes, Skelly found himself immediately confronted by a Venom Lord boss who had Cursed / Extra Strong / Lightning Enchanted traits, fun stuff for the first 1% of the area. Skelly was actually helped here by the presence of Flesh Spawners and their pups which provided essentially limitless bodies to restock the skeleton ranks. Some of the skeletal warriors and a bunch of the skeletal mages were smashed to pieces but there were always plenty of corpses available to replace them. Of course, the downside was the need to carve a path through all of the Flesh Beasts that those spawners kept producing:

The second boss of the Outer Steppes was a Flesh Spawner, and then Skelly faced a double boss pack with a Flesh Spawner along with a Corpulent hanging out together. Shortly thereafter, he ran into this hairball which proved to be a TRIPLE boss pack of three Flesh Spawners: Teleportation / Cold Enchanted / Lightning Enchanted, Extra Fast / Magic Resistant / Stone Skin, and Spectal Hit / Extra Fast / Holy Fire aura. That trio had nearly 20 minions between them and the ground was piled knee-deep with corpses before the fighting was concluded. This wasn't especially dangerous since Skelly's minions were well suited to hold the line against all of the spawning pups, and there was again absolutely no shortage of corpses for replacement minions, however it did take some time to defeat so many of these opponents. All told, Skelly faced seven bosses in the first 10-15% of the Outer Steppes, and I believe ten of them in total across the whole area. He rolled Flesh Spawners for 7 of the 10 bosses so there was no lack of practice on the part of the skeleton army at dealing with this kind of threat.

The Plains of Despair dropped the Venom Lords, which I was happy to see, replacing them with the similiar but less dangerous Doom Knights along with the even easier Strangler finger mages. Unfortunately the third monster type was Stygian Hags which meant two areas in a row dealing with the breeding demons, yuck. In practice, this played out very similarly to the Outer Steppes and Skelly made steady progress, never needing to return to an earlier act for more minions due to the plentitude of corpses everywhere. I found Izual a short distance away from the entrance and, unlike what I remembered from the lower difficulties, he wasn't tanky at all and died in about 30 seconds. Seriously, the skeleton army absolutely pasted the poor guy and he put up less of a fight than any of the near-dozen Spawner bosses that Skelly had defeated thus far. After the whole Plains were clear, the next challenge was finding a way into the City of the Damned:

There was a Pit Lord boss camping out right at the entrance along with a bunch of normal Pit Lords and some random corpse spitters, with the press of bodies and the narrow nature of the staircase leading down from the Plains of Despair causing a real traffic jam. I had to retreat back up the stairs and pull some Pit Lords back after Skelly to clear out enough space to make it through the entrance; the skeleton army had more than enough damage to kill these opponents, there just wasn't enough space for all of them to fit through that small gate! Once Skelly could collect his full army and get them into the City proper, he found that the third enemy type was the ranged Abyss Knights who were effectively an enemy version of Skelly's skeleton mages. At least there were no Flesh Spawners to worry about in this area and that helped speed up the full clear pace. I think it took me about 15 minutes to unclog the entrance and then about 25 minutes to clear the entire rest of the City of the Damned, with the skeleton army making good progress whenever Skelly could get all of them into the fighting simultaneously.

I had placed the two free skill points from Izual into Golem Mastery and Skelly hit Level 82 shortly thereafter to effectively add triple skill points into that category. Skelly had essentially maxed out everything truly important by now and Golem Mastery was the only place that offered a small amount of extra utility: more health for the Fire Golem along with very slightly more movement speed on the thing (um, yay?) You would think that Golem Mastery would increase golem damage but nope, only more health and movement speed. With that said, Skelly's SLVL 31 Fire Golem with a bunch of points in Golem Mastery had reached an absurd 5115 HP total that also absorbed 94% of incoming fire damage, making the big flaming thing very difficult indeed to kill. I rarely had to recast the golem which was good since it required a whopping 290 mana to place the thing. That's by far the highest mana cost I've ever had on a skill in Diablo 2 and Skelly basically had to drink a fresh mana potion for every recasting of the golem. There was one other tidbit worth mentioning in the City: Skelly found a skill shrine for its temporary +2 to all skills. This was enough to take his Raise Skeleton skill to SLVL 36 for a 14th melee skeleton, which I had to screenshot even though it only lasted for a few minutes before the shrine timed out. I would need double Um runes for a Bone runeword armor to reach the same skill level sans a shrine and that clearly wasn't going to happen in the short time remaining for this character.

The River of Flame has some of the widest variation in monster types in the whole game (especially outside of the Act Five guest monsters), with seven different opponents that can be drawn in a multitude of different combinations. Skelly found himself facing Pit Lords, Stranglers, and Abyss Knights in a preview of the Chaos Sanctuary that always holds the same three types of enemy. I was mostly glad to dodge more of the breeding demons and the maggots that can also appear on the River; it's always a tedious slog when both of them are present. The skeleton army made surprisingly good progress as cutting its way through these enemies and I quickly found the side path that led over to the Hellforge. Hephasto rolled Extra Fast trait along with a Might aura (!) and yet he still didn't put up much of a fight. I think it helped that Skelly's skeletons encountered him along with a bunch of finger mages, the weakest monster in this part of the game by a wide margin. Those things are supposed to be scary for spellcasters and they just... aren't. The skeletal warriors had no trouble tanking Hephasto and surrounded the forge demon to prevent him from running around with his extra speed until the big guy dropped.

The Hellforge quest reward dropped an Ist rune, wow! I'm not sure if I've ever seen that one before and it's the second-highest rune that can drop from the quest reward (with Gul being the top rune). I checked the list of potential runewords and discovered that Ist is most commonly used for a Delirium helmet, which is something that I probably would have made for its +2 to all skills if Skelly hadn't already found an even better Golemlord's Circlet. I saved the thing in stash for potential use on another character down the road.

The Chaos Sanctuary always has the same three opponents: Venom Lords, Storm Casters, and Doom/Oblivion Knight pairs. This was the first time that Skelly had run into the Oblivion Knights on Hell difficulty and they were as much of a pain as ever, hitting the skeleton army with Amplify Damage or Decripify curses, the latter of which virtually nullified the damage from the melee skeletons. Even their Lower Resistance curse could be pretty nasty as I discovered that the skeletal mages would collapse immediately when hit with any elemental damage once that thing was running. Nevertheless, progress was quite steady and I didn't find Skelly needing to retreat back into Act One for more replacement skeletons. The Venom Lords were extremely tanky and took a while to kill but didn't have much success in killing Skelly's minions while the Doom Knights and especially the Storm Casters fell quickly without doing much. While there were a number of bosses scattered throughout the Chaos Sancutary, Skelly never ran into a pair of them together to create a real hairball situation. The toughest fighting took place by the two blood pools near the entrance and that was only because the skinny passageways on each side didn't have enough room for all of the skeletons to get into action together.

Once the whole place was cleared out, it was time to confront the seal bosses. I started out with De Seis since Skelly was at the back of the Sancutary and discovered that he had the Extra Strong / Extra Fast / Fanaticism aura combo which is nothing to mess around with, made even worse when De Seis added Amplify Damage curse on top of those other bonuses. The melee skeletons took a real beating here and I had to recast the golem three different times to keep replacing it from the pounding that those Doom Knight minions were dishing out. There were just enough bodies available here to restock the melee skeletons before moving on to the Infector. I had deliberately not returned to town so that there would be more corpses on the ground and Skelly made ample use of them during this fight. To my delight, I found that the skeletons were able to hold the line even against the double sized pack of Venom Lord minions brought by the Infector. I kept raising more skeletons to replace the ones that dropped and never had to move from the position pictured above: these SLVL 34 melee skeletons were indeed strong enough to stand there and hold against the Hell difficulty Infector. I couldn't have been happier with my boys!

Then the Vizier died in like 20 seconds, what a joke of a boss for anyone who has damage that isn't restricted solely to fire and lightning elements.

The big question though was how would the skeleton army fare against Diablo himself. I was hoping that they could deal a good portion of Big D's healthbar before Skelly was left with only the Fire Golem remaining. Diablo opened up with his Fire Nova and it was a good sign that the flames didn't immediately wipe out all of the skeletal mages. The warriors and the golem were up in his face tanking while most of the skeletal mages managed to find safe spots around the edges of the pentagram. I had pretty good luck at getting Diablo to focus on the Fire Golem which was actually tanky enough to survive a couple of hits before needing to be resummoned. The golem's interaction with Diablo's spell effects were also rather odd: it could survive the Fire Nova and the Lightning Breath of Doom without issue (the latter because it was in the safe spot right next to Diablo's mouth) but any casting of the River of Flame would wipe the golem instantly, just like Mephisto's Blizzard spell. It really makes you wonder how this stuff is programmed into Diablo 2's ancient coding given that some of the boss abilities clearly function much differently from the others.

Anyway, Diablo was smashing plenty of golems but his healthbar was dropping rapidly and Skelly still had most of his minions intact. There were nine mages and all thirteen of the skeletal warriors still alive when Diablo's life reached the halfway point. I had the Fire Golem positioned below Diablo, diverting his attention while most of the skeletons were slashing at the boss from behind him where they were safe from his big spell effects. Three more golems perished along with a couple more mages but the clock had struck midnight for Diablo:

What a smashing success! The Lord of Terror was defeated solely by Skelly's minions in less than two minutes and with the bulk of the skeleton army intact. It was a validation of the character build that I'd envisioned back before starting and I honestly hadn't known if I would ever reach this point; I kept expecting the skeleton minions to fall off and they simply hadn't thanks to all of those extra skill points. Diablo dropped a couple of useless rares along with the pictured Wolfhowl, the unique Fury Visor. That's the item that allows a Barbarian to turn into a Werewolf and looks like it could be fun to use. The biggest issue was the Level 79 requirement which essentially ruled it out in terms of building a solo character around it; I would be nearly finished with the whole game before the item unlocked for use. Well you never know and D2R grants a gigantic shared stash so I tossed it into storage.

One act left to go, hopefully Act Five will run as smoothly as these two acts.