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Skelly had one final act to complete before he could lay his minions to rest for good. Unfortunately Act Five is one of the longest parts of the game if the player is full clearing everything, and I remained deeply concerned about some of the final challenges waiting at the end of the icy plains ahead. Skelly began with the siege on Harrogath where the Bloody Foothills had an unusual monster combination. There were no melee opponents at all this time, with this area instead having nothing but Burning Dead skeleton archers and slingers, an all-ranged draw for once. In theory this should have been relatively easy and sure enough Skelly's own minions smashed apart the enemy skeletons and spear cats without much difficulty. The problem here was that the spears tossed by the slingers passed right through Skelly's minions, gaining this weird piercing property that they usually don't have. I guess that they gained this property by virtue of being guest monsters?
In any case, it made the slingers vastly more dangerous as the friendly skeleton horde couldn't protect Skelly himself from those incoming projectiles. I could dodge the spears when there were a handful of the slingers to worry about, however it became much harder when bosses or champion packs popped up. Sometimes there were as many as two dozen slingers packed together and the gameplay began to resemble one of those bullet hell games. It was basically impossible to avoid taking hits while clearing out those nests of hostile fire and Skelly spent this whole area guzzling down red potions. There was a Might aura boss at one point who forced Skelly to drink a full rejuv when he was pincushioned with a bunch of spears. Dac Farren at the midpoint and Shenk at the end were both much easier than the slinger barrage that Skelly faced throughout the rest of the foothills.
I was hoping that the Frigid Highlands would move away from the all-ranged opposition, and while this place did drop the skeleton archers, it continued to have the slingers back again. They were joined by imps and corrupted rogue spearwomen who were both a lot less dangerous. As I've written in a bunch of other reports, the imps are basically a joke with their tiny health amounts and minimal fire element damage that can be easily resisted. Those things can be annoying with their teleportation but they're never much of a threat. Skelley's minions carved a path forward past all of these threats without much trouble and even the slingers were less of a problem since the Frigid Highlands lacked all of the platforms for them to hide behind that had been everywhere back in the foothills. What was a problem was the introduction of the barricades and fortification towers that Skelly's minions absolutely loved to hack apart. There was no easy way to get the skeletons to stop hitting the stupid walls and in a number of places I was forced to wait for them to finish tearing down the fortifications before it was safe to move onwards. I didn't really want to move on to the next mob of enemies while 80% of the skeletons were still happily bashing away against a tower.
There are some nasty monsters that can appear down in the Act Four subdungeons and I try to approach them cautiously since it can be difficult to establish a foothold. Abbadon didn't turn out to be too scary this time around as it featured large numbers of witches and those melee Baal minions that always seem to be cannon fodder. While it looked really cool when a big gathering of them lined up opposite from Skelly's own force, like two armies clashing together from opposing sides of a battlefield, nothing in here was particularly dangerous for Skelly. I crossed over into the Arreat Plateau and immediately found the entrance to the Pit of Acheron so it was right back to the River of Flame tileset again. This subdungeon had Maulers, Salamanders with their fire element Bone Spears, and then Burning Dead Mages to emphasize the fire theme even more. These enemy skeletons were a sorry imitation of Skelly's mighty followers and he rolled through them without issue. These two subdungeons certainly could have been a lot worse.
Outside on the Arreat Plateau, Skelly found himself facing more imps, more skeleton mages... and slingers yet again, oh come on! While they weren't *THAT* bad, especially not in the relatively open spaces of the Plateau, I was starting to get really tired of the things and the way that Skelly kept taking unavoidable damage from their unending volleys of piercing spears. The dull brown color of the Foothills/Highlands/Plateau terrain set also made it particularly tough to see the spears while there were a dozen other things taking place on screen at the same time. I was getting tired enough that I decided to stop for the night when Skelly found the waypoint about halfway through this area. When the next session started up, Skelly found that he was now facing Carvers and their shamans back from Act One... along with slingers yet again! For the FOURTH time in a row! 
That was downright incredible given how many monster options there are here in Act Five with all of the guest opponents showing up. Anyway, Skelly full cleared the remainder of the area while still dodging those blasted spears. He had to raise all of the carvers to prevent their shamans from doing the same in non-skeleton form but that was easily accomplished by this character build.
There were lots of Ghosts and Claw Vipers lurking in the Crystalline Passage with Infidels from Act Two randomly back as the third enemy. This was another easy monster draw and I continued to be fortunate at avoiding the minotaurs that could have appeared in several different places. I knew that the skeleton army would have to confront them eventually and I was content to delay that moment for as long as possible. The Frozen River leaned into the "cold" theme of Act Five with yetis and frozen horrors plus witches for a ranged headache. Skelly's toughest fight here was near the entrance as there was a yeti boss situated at the very first bridge that had to be confronted with no room for retreat. As they had done for practically the whole game, the melee skeletons met this challenge head-on and held the line with the yetis dropping before they did. The rest of the place was routine, with Anya's quest reward scroll taking Skelly up to max resistances in every category:
On that note, I had also used Skelly's final socket quest to stick a jewel into his wand that added more health and cold resistance. Then he found a Grand Charm with +40 life on it which was the maximum that Skelly could have rolled. (Technically Grand Charms can have up to +45 HP on them but the 41-45 health bonus doesn't start appearing until CLVL 91.) I did some minor reshuffling of his setup since a couple of the smaller charms were no longer needed with Anya's reward scroll, ending up with the character stats pictured above. 1233 HP on a spellcasting class like the Necromancer was a fantastic result that I only managed to achieve thanks to having health bonuses from a bunch of unusual places like his Bloodfist gloves. The two diamonds socketed into Skelly's shield along with his Smoke runeword armor gave him enough resistances that I'd been able to take luxuries elsewhere with his character build. And no Spirit runewords at all this game, yay!
This gaming session still had more of the ice caverns to slog through, continuing with the Glacial Trail. There were more of the frozen horrors and cold-tossing enemy skeleton mages here, along with a new opponent in the Rot Walker prowling dead. Diablo 2 seemed determined to throw inferior versions of various skeletons against Skelly's army and they were once again found wanting. I took the time to raise all of the walking skeletons as minions to ensure that they wouldn't get back up a second time even if this was a mana intensive process. And Skelly's mana costs were no joke: even the melee skeletons cost 39 mana per summon for Skelly which would run him out in a real hurry if he needed to summon all 13 of them at once. Then the Drifter Cavern subdungeon was full of witches and Infidels, opponents that were fairly straightforward to defeat. The witches were at their worst when they would drop Amplify Damage curse on top of Skelly's minions and I noticed the skeleton mages in particular dying much more often when it was in place. I carefully cleared the whole outside edge of the Drifter Cavern before crossing onto the central platform which helped defang any potential dangers that might have been lurking in there. All in all, it was a successful and largely stress-free series of areas to complete.
The Summoning Necromancer is probably the character best suited in the whole game for dealing with the entrance to Nihlathak's Temple. Passing through the red portal dumps the player into a small area with a bunch of prowling dead skeletons on the ground that quickly wake up and start attacking. However, Skelly could simply raise those bodies as his own minions before they activated! I didn't even bother to start with his usual recruiting trip into Act One, instead raising the initial army right there outside Nihlathak's fortress. I think that Skelly managed to collect about 10 melee skeletons before they started standing up - too bad that I hadn't emphasized fast cast gear for his build, heh. The rest of the enemy skeletons provided bodies for the remainder of Skelly's crew and Pindleskin wasn't much more than a bellhop placed in the doorway to offer a friendly greeting before entering the temple proper.
There's a wide range of different enemies that can appear on the floors of Nihlathak's Temple, with as many as 10 different possibilities in the Halls of Anguish alone. This time Skelly found himself counting his blessings as he faced Temple Guard baboons, poison-throwing Horror mages, and Tomb Creeper leapers. This was a shockingly easy set of monsters and I couldn't believe my good fortune. It took barely 20 minutes to full clear the whole floor and the skeleton army was hardly even scratched. Could this good luck continue?
Ummm... no, no it could not continue. 
Skelly descended the staircase into the Halls of Pain and I felt my heart sink as I realized what he was up against: Zealot/Hierophant pairs, Grotesques and their endless young, plus Blood Maggots and their eggs full of more maggots. I don't think that I could have possibly gotten a worse collection of opponents than this and I knew within seconds that it was going to take the rest of the evening to make it through the whole floor. The screenshot above should make the headaches obvious, just masses and masses of hostile monsters to cut through. The skeleton army was perfectly capable of handling these threats and there was a truly endless amount of corpses ready for replacement skeletons thanks to the Grotesques and the maggots. Unfortunately Skelly's forces lacked any area-of-effect damage (beyond the truly weak Holy Fire aura on the Fire Golem) which meant that it simply took ages to make any progress. The skeletons had to kill every maggot, every flesh pup, one at a time before closing onto the breeders to make any progress forward. It was a true recipe for tedium.
As if the spawning monsters weren't bad enough, then there were the Zealots and Hierophants to worry about as well. The Zealots would have been easy to kill on their own if they hadn't gone running away for Hierophant healing whenever they started to drop low. The Hierophants themselves lurked far in the background where it was impossible to target them, spamming their healing while dropping Blizzard spells on top of Skelly's forces. There was no way to get the skeleton army to focus its damage on one target at a time, which meant that they were wasting lots of their efforts hitting Zealots and bugs and flesh pups without making any real progress at pushing forwards. The only way to advance was to kill vast numbers of the maggots and flesh pups until finally cutting a path to their breeders, downing the ones responsible for all of the little critters, and only then having few enough targets to focus fire the Zealots followed by getting the Hierophant masterminds in the back. Doing this one or two times was annoying enough, but Skelly had to repeat the process dozens of times as he cleared his way across the floor. This was brutal enough that I might have rerolled a new map if I found the wapoint quickly; since Skelly didn't stumble across it until 70% of the Halls of Pain were already finished, I bit the bullet and finished up with the rest for the full clear. All told, it took 90 minutes to complete this single floor - what a contrast from the previous area!
The Halls of Vaught is a smaller floor and it thankfully lacked any more of the breeding enemies. There were ghosts and skeleton archers and more of the prowling dead to be found here in another undead-heavy area. I encountered Nihlathak down the third quadrant that Skelly explored:
The plan here was simple: stay as far away from Nihlathak and let the skeletons take the hit from any of his Corpse Explosions. The traitor had surrounded himself with a thick crowd of those Slayer minions that he likes to detonate and of course Nihlathak will keep summoning more of them throughout the battle. Skelly's army could take care of itself and I wasn't worried about them, what concerned me was Nihlathak blowing up one of his minions and then instantly detonating the corpse that it produced as well. I was spam-casting the Raise Skeleton skill with the intention of raising any hostile bodies as soon as they hit the floor and this seemed to be working well as the skeletons steadily cut a path closer to the boss. Despite all of my care, somehow Nihlathak managed to get one Corpse Explosion spell off that tagged Skelly in the blast radius. I saw 500-something HP displayed on the health orb in the instant before drinking a full rejuv and the boss was unable to get off another such spell before the skeleton army swarmed him under. Sheesh! That was roughly 700 damage dealt by a single Corpse Explosion despite Skelly having maxed fire resistance and I never even saw the body that produced the hit. This is a really unfair setup and it came close to killing Skelly despite him having all of the tools needed to defang its threats.
The plan for the next session was to tackle everything up to the Ancients. Skelly started out by crossing the Frozen Tundra which is typically the last easy area in Act Five before the threats start ramping up in earnest. There were vultures and imps and more skeleton mages that happened to be wielding lightning this time around, all told about as easy as Skelly was ever going to encounter. I think that his minions spent more time attacking the barricades than they did hitting the monsters. The Infernal Pit was slightly more difficult with prowling dead and blowdart fetishes along with fire-breathing Salamanders back for a second time. The only real issue was making sure not to take too many shots from the ranged enemies while the skeletons were cutting apart the walking undead, and of course Skelly had to raise all of the prowling dead just to be on the safe side. Compared to what could have been in this area though, it was easy stuff.
Then Skelly entered the Ancient's Way and the minotaurs finally showed up:
Somehow he had dodged them the whole act thus far and now the big boys were making their belated entrance. As I've written a bunch of times, the minotaurs were overtuned by the developers for no clear reason. These things have high health, fast speed, insane resistances, and one of the highest damaging attacks in the whole game when they go into their Frenzy ability. These Hell Lord minotaurs could deal nearly 200 (base) damage per attack and combined that with 15,000 HP and the following resistances: 75% physical, 50% fire, 100% lightning, and 75% cold. (I guess they have no poison resistance at all so hooray for that.) Either this was a developer oversight or someone was obsessed with ancient Crete because the minotaurs are ridiculously stronger than everything else in this act. Skelly was facing the Hell difficulty version of these enemies for the first time and happily I discovered that the melee skeletons could in fact hold against them. Or at least they could hold the line against the normal minotaurs without falling; minotaurs juiced up with extra boss abilities were another story as the pictured Cursed boss began smashing them to bits. I had to pull a retreating maneuever and recruit some additional skeletons back in Act One to make it past this customer. Then later there was an Extra Fast / Extra Strong minotaur boss who was roughly as tough to defeat. The Cursed trait on the first minotaur seemed to be slightly worse from what I could tell. There were technically two other monster types present in the Ancient's Way but they were both irrelevant: it was the struggle against the minotaurs that defined this area. Skelly never had a truly deadly close call but it required some real work to clear the floor.
That left me with the Icy Cellar subdungeon and the warning sirens immediately went off upon entering:
The Icy Cellar and the Drifter Cavern are both nasty places since they combine tiny spaces with lots of potential bosses. On this occasion, Skelly had only just come down the staircase when he ran into a minotaur champ pack backed up by a witch boss. The minotaurs were already bad customers on their own, I did not need them getting the extra stats from champion status and then combining that together with the witches dropping Amplify Damage curse on top of Skelly's whole army! Remember, that's the entry staircase right there: I had no room to go anywhere except deeper into the level where more enemies would wake up and start attacking. The skeleton force still put up a tough fight and managed to kill a decent number of witches and I think one minotaur champ before the melee skeletons were about to be wiped out and I escaped from a town portal. Skelly rounded up a new set of skeletons in Act One and came back for a second round, this time taking out the remainder of the minotaur champs and securing the northeast corner of the floor. I edged my way to the west around the outer edge and found the witch boss lurking there; she was Extra Fast / Extra Strong / Teleportation and had blinked out of danger several times before now meeting her demise.
That gave me enough space to feel confident that Skelly wouldn't lose complete control of this floor and have to try it again in a new gaming session. I kept moving slowly around the outer edge in counterclockwise fashion, all the while getting harassed by more witches who continued to fire their blood stars from the central platform. There was a second champion pack of minotaurs in the middle of the icy chamber who came running out when Skelly passed by, and I lost most of another army in cutting down there numbers which forced a second retreat to Act One for more skeletons. Dang those minotaurs were tough! Against most everything else Skelly rarely lost the melee skeletons and in many gaming sessions I never needed to go back to the Cold Plains for more bodies. There was another witch boss and a further set of witch champs before Skelly was able to clear out the central platform; the third monster type had been Gloombats though I barely saw any of them. It was a relief to reach Snapchip Shatter and claim the gold chest to be done with this deathtrap for good.
I wanted to close out this night's work with the Ancients, probably the single scariest challenge for this whole variant. The gimmick for the Ancients is that the player cannot leave the little arena where the combat takes place; any escape through town portal will reset the fight and force it to begin again. As the Icy Cellar had just demonstrated, that was a problem for Skelly's summoning build: if he lost all of his minions, he wouldn't be able to raise any more of them. And while he would always have the Fire Golem on hand, Talic spawns as Fire Immune while both Madawc and Korlic are highly fire resistant. Not to mention, the Fire Golem would cost nearly 300 mana per summon which would take a looooong time to replace if I ran out of mana potions. I had actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether I might need to use Iron Golem to make it past this challenge before giving it up as too impractical, not after the massive nerf that Iron Golem inexplicably received in D2R. It was absolutely critical that the skeleton army defeat at least Talic before expiring, in case that I needed to fall back on the Fire Golem for the rest of the fight. If things really went badly, I might be stuck having to use Blood Golem which would deal all of 100 damage per successful hit against bosses with 115,000 HP apiece. This was largely going to come down to a stat check: was the skeleton army strong enough to beat the Ancients? Or was the whole variant going to collapse right here?
The fight began and one of the Ancients rolled Cursed trait, so I bailed out of town portal to reset the fight. I learned my lesson with poor Skulla's death: get out of there if the Ancients have Cursed or Might/Fanaticism auras. Things looked better on the second try with none of the truly scary boss affixes, with the one exception of Korlic rolling Fire Enchanted to make him Fire Immune as well. That would be disastrous if Skelly was left with nothing but the Fire Golem but I resolved to let the fight play out on its own for a bit and see what happened before reseting again. Skelly's minions split their damage across the Ancients as expected, with about half of them attacking Korlic and another half attacking Madawc - along with one cold mage shooting at the Cold Immune Madawc. Oh well, at least the other 25 skeletons were being useful.
I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting from this boss fight but what I got surely wasn't what I envisioned. The three Ancients stood in place attacking the skeleton minions. And then they stood in place. And then they stood in place some more, still using their basic attacks against the skeletons who were quite content to hit them back without moving. And that's literally all that happened for long minutes on end, the Ancients auto attacking and the skeletons doing the same thing. It was downright comical to watch, with Skelly not moving or casting spells or doing anything at all. I shuffled Skelly's feet after a couple of minutes and that induced Madawc to run over to the left but otherwise nothing changed. And here's the kicker: the skeletons WERE NOT DYING!!! 
Something about the skeletons caused the Ancients to use only their basic attacks instead of their respective abilities and apparently their damage wasn't high enough to overcome the natural monster regen on the skeletons. One unlucky skeleton mage must have been caught in the wrong place because Skelly's count dropped to 12, otherwise though they all kept on fighting without issue. Madawc dropped first, then Talic, and finally Korlic was the only one left standing. The whole thing took about six minutes and that skeleton mage was the only casualty, with Skelly never so much as casting a spell or drinking a single red or blue potion. He barely even moved throughout the whole fight! I'm not exactly sure how the bards would turn the story of this battle into an epic song but I was overjoyed to be past the single scariest obstacle of this variant run.
I planned to finish the rest of the act in one final gaming session dedicated to the Worldstone Keep. Clearing the Ancients meant that the worst part of this final sequence was over right? Well...
The first floor of the Worldstone Keep had other plans. Skelly was confronted with Flesh Spawners and Zealot/Hierophant pairs yet again, the unhappy return of these jerks from the Halls of Pain, with witches thrown in as the third enemy type. Those witches were quite a bit worse than the maggots back in Nihlathak's Temple because they had the habit of casting Amplify Damage and putting Skelly's whole army under Cursed status, while the Flesh Spawners kept breeding their pups and the Hierophants kept spamming their endless heals. This was ugly stuff and Skelly's army took a real pounding, just about the only time that had happened in Hell difficulty not involving minotaurs. Progress was slow and generally required hacking through the Flesh Spawners first while picking off any witches that strayed too close to the skeletons, then only scoring kills against the Zealots when the ranks of everything else had been thinned out to allow for more focused targeting. The Hierophants were always the last to die and often ran away to cast their spells from behind the ranks of the next group of monsters. Just look at the carnage left behind by a typical combat:
The remains of Flesh Pups lay scattered everywhere along with a handful of witch and Zealot remains. You can practically see where the melee skeletons formed a wall over on the left side of that picture based on their bony leftovers before they slowly pushed forward through rivers of blood. I had to raise a lot of skeletons here, both melee and ranged skeletons, as the pounding that they took was relentless. The one saving grace was the fact that the Worldstone Keep levels are relatively small, not even half the size of the main two floors in Nihlathak's Temple. Even so, it took close to an hour to finish up with this first floor before clearing out everything. Hopefully that was the last time that Skelly would have to see any more Hierophants.
Worldstone 2 proved to be much easier, thank goodness, featuring lots of the melee Baal minions along with Black Souls (gloams) and Horadrim Ancient greater mummies. The big mummies always look weird without having their usual skeleton minions and they were primarily dangerous here by virtue of having a strong poison breath attack that kept dropping Skelly's minions. I also had to raise all of the Black Souls whenever they died since they're technically considered undead and could have been revived by the greater mummies. Worldstone 3 was much more dangerous with Doom Knight / Oblivion Knight pairs along with Death Lord minotaurs. Those things were the biggest threat whenever they appeared and Skelly had one army smashed apart against one of their boss packs that required a retreat to the Stony Field for more skeletons. The Oblivion Knights could also employ Amplify Damage curse and that was really vicious when they broke it out while Skelly's forces were tangling with minotaurs. I avoided any close calls on this floor but it definitely kept me on my toes waiting for disaster to strike.
Towards the end of Worldstone 3, Skelly saw a gold-colored sword dropped and identified it as Flamebellow, the unique Balrog Blade. This thing had +3 to fire skills on it along with a truly insane +12 to the Sorceress' Inferno skill. That was probably included mostly for flavor purposes and not intended for actual use, with this elite weapon having a big damage modifier along with extra on-hit fire damage, but then again... could I use this for an Inferno-based Sorcie build? A socketed Hel rune would get the Strength requirement down to roughly the same amount needed for a Spirit runeword on a Monarch shield and the weapon even came with its own Strength and Vitality boosters. I ran the math on this weapon and it seemed very possible to get Inferno up to roughly SLVL 40 where a dedicated build would be dealing something like 7000 fire damage per second. You know, I've never had any skill reach Level 40 before... hmmm... dang it Diablo 2, stop giving me ideas for more character builds! 
I've been playing this game for 25 years and it still has me itching to come back for new setups. Well maybe, we'll see; I'm definitely taking a break from D2 for a bit after wrapping up with Skelly.
The Throne of Destruction was heavy on vampires and something called Assailants, which is a type of Invader/Infidel that I think can only be found here. The vampires didn't have quite enough damage with their Meteor spells to overcome the monster regen on Skelly's minions which made them pretty toothless overall. I cleared out the side wings as always for safety's sake with this being a friendly draw that lacked the really scary stuff like more minotaurs or exploding undead dolls. When it came to the boss rush in front of Baal's throne, Skelly found that his skeleton minions were able to stand and fight against almost everything that the Lord of Destruction could throw at them. Colenzo and Achmel were relatively straightforward since Skelly could deny their resurrection powers by raising all of their minions as his own skeletons. The poison damage from Achmel dropped a lot of his skeletons but the undead opposition provided bodies to replace them. I thought that I'd have to pull big retreat moves for Bartuc and Ventar, only to discover that no, the melee skeletons were tough enough to stand in place without dying. Even a Cursed boss trait on Bartuc wasn't enough to swing the math of these encounters. Both times, Skelly lost some of his melee skeletons during the fighting only to replace them from the bodies of the boss pack as they died in turn. I think that Skelly's minions were just barely strong enough to hold off these opponents and something like SLVL 32 skeletal warriors instead of Skelly's SLVL 34 versions might not have been sufficient.
Lister was a different story though, particularly because he rolled a Might aura for this fight that had to have increased his physical damage by something like 200%. (At least Teleportation and Spectral Hit were mostly useless on the other boss abilities.) The skeleton army tackled them head-on, however this time I could see right away that it wasn't going to be enough. The melee skeletons were simply dropping too fast and Skelly was out of corpses to replace them on this bottom dungeon floor. I tried to stick in the fight long enough to slay a single minion, only to have to retreat out of a town portal after the final melee skeleton fell. After recruiting a fresh skeleton force in Act One, Skelly was back again and tried to separate Lister from his minions with some footwork. Unfortunately that was really tough to accomplish with two baker's dozens of skeletons in tow, and the best that I could do was pull Lister and about four other minions away from another three of their brethren. This time I was able to get Lister and another minion low, only to have the skeletons keep changing targets and fail to finish off anything before Skelly had to pull out yet again. Argh, this was getting frustrating! A third skeleton army came back and this time they were able to focus down Lister first, thus removing the Might aura from the battlefield. After that, it was vastly easier to mop up the remaining Minions of Destruction and then go back for the three that had been separated from the rest of the group. Whew, I've had some tougher Lister fights but this was far from routine.
Skelly was nearly there now with only Baal left to defeat. I wasn't looking forward to this final boss though, as Baal has an absurd amount of health (493k) along with 50% resistance to everything. I was very worried that I was going to be stuck with just the Fire Golem on hand needing to deal hundreds of thousands of damage to wrap up the final quest. That was the real question: how much damage would the skeleton army be able to accomplish before they were all gone?
Baal's combat AI doesn't look anything like Diablo from back in Act Four as he doesn't make much of an attempt to confront the player directly. Instead he's more of a ranged mage, raising those Festering Appendages and teleporting around the room to cast his Frost Wave and infamous orange blast. Sometimes Baal just stands around doing nothing at all for lengthy periods of time and he wouldn't be much of an opponent if Blizzard hadn't given him such an incredible health pool. Anyway, Skelly and his followers entered the Worldstone Chamber and did their best to start hacking away at the boss. He kept running away and summoning the appendages, which the skeletons of course felt that they always had to kill, making this battle more tedious than it needed to be. A couple minutes passed and the skeletons were getting in some pretty good hits; the mages started dropping here and there as they were hit by random spell effects but the melee skeletons were all still intact. Those things were really tanky and the full 13 of them remained alive after five minutes of combat, with Baal's lifebar having dropped to the "L" on his name. This indicated that Skelly had made it about a third of the way through his health and things were looking quite solid thus far.
Then Baal summoned his clone and suddenly the whole situation changed. The melee skeletons that had been shrugging off the damage of a single Baal, with their health regen apparently high enough to overcome the demon's attacks, suddenly started collapsing in droves while taking double the previous damage. It was remarkable how that small change completely flipped the math of the whole encounter. Skelly watched helplessly as one skeleton after another crumbled to pieces; one last brave skeleton lasted nearly two minutes by himself before finally succumbing to his injuries. During this time Baal's healthbar had barely moved at all, advancing just a sliver towards the next "A" in his name:
That left just Skelly and the Fire Golem, as I had feared would be the case from the beginning. And as helpful as the golem had been throughout Skelly's journey, it became immediately clear that this was not the right tool for the challenge at hand. The Fire Golem could hit for about 1000 damage per attack, however that damage was cut in half against Baal's fire resistance, plus it required landing a melee attack in the first place. The golem spent lots of time going after the Festering Appendages, or the Baal clone, and even when I could get the golem to hit the right target, Baal would simply blink away after a few seconds. The situation wasn't particularly dangerous - Baal had basically no chance to actually kill Skelly - but the boss didn't seem like he wanted to fight at all, just run away constantly and keep wasting Skelly's time. It was as if Baal was trying to defeat me, the player, by instilling a sense of helplessness that I could ever get through his 400,000+ health. And it was honestly kind of working as Baal was barely taking any damage at all, with most of what little damage was taking place coming from the golem's Holy Fire aura ticking for barely 100 damage every few seconds. It looked like I might be here for well over an hour and the real-world clock was already approaching midnight. What a stupid final boss; come fight me, you coward! 
Using the Fire Golem alone simply was not working. In desperation, I reasoned that my last remaining option was to try and recruit a fresh skeleton army in Act One and hope that I could make it back to the Worldstone Chamber before Baal healed to full health. Unfortunately I had already used up some of my best recruitment zones and had to scurry back to the Outer Cloiser this time, where blessedly there was a weak Razor Spine boss that the golem alone could kill; those things only have a base 2000 HP and no fire resistance at all. That secured the crucial initial 4-5 bodies for the first melee skeletons who then slaughtered a bunch of Devilkin to fill out the remaining ranks of the skeleton army. I sprinted back to the waypoint and through the previous town portal, hoping to make it back to Baal before his health could reset back to full. Was the effort in time?
YES!!! Baal had not healed, he remained in the same place as before with roughly 60% of his lifebar still intact. Even better, the Baal clone had vanished and he took his time about summoning a fresh one. The skeletons began a renewed assault and I smiled to myself knowing that the battle was already won. Now that I knew Baal would require at least five minutes of inactivity to heal back to full health, I didn't have to stick around to watch the whole army perish a second time. I could approach the whole boss fight in more relaxed fashion, dipping back to Act One whenever the army started to lose more than a handful of its ranks, never being gone for long enough that Baal could reset back to maximum HP. And with the whole skeleton crew having rejoined the battle, Baal's healthbar began to drop in rapid fashion once again. Excellent, excellent, keep the pressure on!
He went down to about the one-third mark before summoning the clone again, which was the signal for Skelly's minions to start dying in the same fashion seen before. I stuck around until most of the mages were dead and only 10 melee skeletons were left, then skipped out to refill the skeleton army once more. The clone had disappeared again when I returned with army #3 and by now the pattern was obvious: Baal couldn't do more than scratch Skelly's followers without having the clone present. He simply didn't have enough damage on his own. Baal didn't bring the clone back until he was down to his final 10% on the healthbar:
But it was too late now, too late for the Lord of Destruction. The Baal clone copies Baal's current lifebar which meant that it lasted all of 30 seconds before getting popped by the skeleton army, which then went right back to shredding the main demon again. I could feel that my skeletons were getting stronger as the fighting raged on while Baal was only growing weaker, more feeble. His one and only effective move was leaning on the stupid clone and that was no longer an option. Die you big jerk:
Game, set, and match. 
One unfortunate skeletal mage had died a minute earlier but otherwise everyone was still standing when Baal fell. (In army #3 at least, the first two armies hadn't done quite so well!) The whole thing had taken close to 40 minutes and I would have been there all night if I'd been forced to rely on golem alone to secure the kill.
And so ends the journey of Skelly, the summon-only Necromancer. This was a character build that I had wanted to test out for many years, always wondering if it was possible to make it through the whole game with literally nothing but the power of summons. I had the good fortune to use some excellent gear and I don't think this would have been possible without the Arm of King Leoric unique wand to beef up those skeletons to SLVL 34. Even the difference between SLVL 34 and something like SLVL 30 was quite large, and the poor SLVL 20 skeletons without benefit of any skill points wouldn't have been even remotely viable. Nevertheless, I wanted to see if this summon-only concept could be played from start to finish and it absoutely was the case. Skelly's only death was a really stupid one, getting stuck in his own unintended Bone Prison at the hands of Apparitions that could fly right through his minions, and outside of that case of freakishly back luck, he had rarely been in much danger. I really, really wish that I could have had a clean sheet with this character but I have to be honest with my reporting and Skelly didn't quite make it.
There's really nothing like leading an army of the dead and watching 13 mages hurling all those multicolored projectiles at once while another 13 melee skeletons race around stabbing things. I'm glad that I got to experience this gameplay and I hope you had fun reading along as well. Thanks as always!
