Tuesday, January 23, 2007

key running and finding the organs

For the past few days, diablo has all but slipped away from my life thanks to some girl trouble.
But between te last couple of days, Nihlathak rewarded me with a couple of keys on separate occasions, so I thought let's do the Summoner with the other runs.
So the past few games, I create the game with my summonancer and join it with my IK barb... similar to all my recent Baal runs.
Only this time, I quickly run the summoner in the Arcane Sanctuary for Hate keys. Having never found one, I was a bit sceptical of getting any. Also, it's annoying doing these runs because of all the mana sucking ghosts who are immune to physical damage. Doing them with my summonancer is slow going because the pathways are very narrow, and even terror does not help clear them up. So a couple of runs I ran with both my summonancer and IK barb, the barb clearing the pesky PIs once the necro amped them.
However I now just jump over the ghosts and refill mana whenever hit by the ghosts. Runs are surprisingly quick this way.
Also, my luck with the Summoner turned and he dropped 2 Hate keys in one game and another one in the right next one.
Now equipped with the keys, I created a game and permed it by doing runs for the Summoner, Pindle, Nihli and Baal. Then I created the 3 portals in the same game.
The first opened to the lost sands and Duriel. He was easy. Going in with BOed summons and then with my barb, I decrepified him and put in a clay golem, and WWed with my barb until he dropped. This whole thing took under a minute... sweet! Baal's eye dropped.
Next I opened the portal to the furnace. Reaching Izual took a bit of time, but was no trouble in the end. Izual himself was not much more of a big deal than Duriel. Drcrep and summons kept him slow and busy and my barb's WW cut him down in a minute or so. Mephisto's brain dropped.
Next on the cards was Lilith in the Matron`s den, and she's supposed to be the toughest. Once I'd opened the first 2 portals, I was committed, as the next game could open any one of the 3 portals! So I bit the bullet and opened the portal. In I went with my summoner and barb. Slowly taking down the archers who were spammming freezing arrows on my skellies and turning them into ice lollies. Fortunately there were no oblivion knights, and the combo of skellies, amp and CE worked a charm. Finally madame Lilith appeared. She was nasty from the word go. It was all I could do to control 2 characters at the same time, cursing her with life tap so my barb wouldn't die while WWing, from her nasty poison attack. Her health went down by 30% or so. By then , my summons started dying out and my barb was running out of potions, not leeching back quickly enough from his WWs. In the fracas that followed, my barb and necro died multiple times, lost all full rejuv potions and shitloads of cash and experience. But no dice with Lilith, she always recovered health too quickly for me to do any significant and lasting damage to her.
I also tried replacing my barb with my windy bowazon and hammerdin, but both perished very very quickly. I needed a build with Crushing Blow or Open Wounds.
So I swapped my barb's armour for a Toothrow Sharktooth Armour and brought him back. I chose this armour for the 40% open wounds property. However my resists plummeted and poison resist went in the red.
Tried the same combination again, this time with a barb who kept on going down to zero health much quicker and dying more frequently. The summons seemed to go down even quicker than before! However, this time, the OW kicked in once in a while and Lilith's health used to go down, but never enough to kill her before all my necro`s summons and barb`s potions were done for.
By this time, I was running out of areas of the game to replenish my skellies. Finally I nipped into WS2 and got me a few burning souls and viper magi to accompany the skellies from act 1.
Went back into the den and hit Lilith with all I had. I kept my necro out of range of Lilith`s poison spray while summons distracted her. Also created a portal close by. Barb nipped in while summoner spammed decrepify, WWed a few times until open wounds kicked in and health ran down, ran back out through the portal to get healed, nipped back in and repeated the WWs. The difference here was getting the high HP summons from WS2 (I recommend this from experience... get 10-20 fresh summons from WS2/WS3/Throne, buff them up with BO and get them into the den). Before long, the open wounds had Lilith`s life down to a manageable level and a few of the skellies were still around. After the last healing trip to town and one last WW, Lilith finally went to sleep yea!! Here's the screenshot. Good work... that gives me all body parts. I'll open Uber Tristram only once I build up my smiter with CB/OW.

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