Re: The Exposure Tournament
When Umbriel found
the smith, she told him he'd been a very bad boy, and that he should go stand in the corner and think about what he's done. He didn't want to, so she bent him over a couple of wine barrels and spanked him.
She then proceeded to find Andariel and spank her too. She was also very naughty, and didn't drop anything useful.
At the beginning of Act II, she decided to use her socket quest on a repeating crossbow of ilvl > 40, so it would get 5 sockets. Then she popped in 3 Eths and a PSkull, thinking to put another PSkull in as soon as she could get one. Eventually she ended up putting a Shael in the last slot, and was quite pleased with the speedup. The Eths turned her terrible AR into really good AR.
She had an NDE due to a
CE FE beetle, whose minions also had painful sparks. It was not the first time that beetles would shock her this act, although ironically it wasn't the lightning that was the problem. Her other resistances were low, so CE or FE beetles could be quite damaging. DTail has a 4 yard AoE, so she had to stop kicking very quickly if the sparks were actually damaging her (just lightning was not much damage, certainly not something her life leech and maybe a potion couldn't fix easily).
Ironically,
Wall of the Eyeless dropped in the maggot lair, just as she was cursing her lack of mana leech and MPK. Since she couldn't use it, she continued to curse, and funded the townsfolk's booming mana potion business.
She was a bit nervous before facing Fangskin, and it turned out to be with good reason. She was slaughtering her way around the altar, then got to Fangskin, and the sparks really hurt. She ran, picking off the rest of his minions as she went, but
she made it to the altar, where he couldn't get to her, and she decided to take a look at his mods.
Fangskin was CE, which explained the hurtiness. She used her crossbow as a crossbow, for once, and the envenomed bolts made short work of him from the safety of the altar.
After Fangskin, she decided to drop the /players setting down from 5 to 3.
She found a
Lem in the palace. No really scary moments, except for one, when she was trying to kill off too many things at once, had nearly run out of mana potions, and then Fire Eye and his minions came out of nowhere and made a real nuisance of themselves. After running off to town for a belt refill, he was easy, but like too many times in this act, her mana leech just wasn't enough, and she'd run out in the middle of a fight in which she was wiping the floor with everybody and have to run off with her tail between her legs again.
At some point after Fangskin and before the canyon of the magi, she took some time out and worked on her gear a bit, making some crafts and gambling, mostly to try to get her resistances up. It worked pretty well. Also, as she was trying to gamble a set of rare greaves so that she could up them to war boots, she gambled a set of magic war boots with 32 fire res and half freeze duration. That was better than her rare battle boots, so she decided not to up anything and just wear them.
She began the false tombs, and very soon after starting, she leveled up and finally put her first point in death sentry. She was very glad, too, as the highly fire resistant skeletons in the tombs being constantly revived by unravelers were a huge pain. Not only could she damage them with death sentries, she could also remove their corpses!
At this point, she started getting overconfident. The only thing that could slow her down was running out of mana, and it was only slowing her down. At this point, she should have said to herself, "wait a minute, you're getting overconfident, in hardcore, without a merc or a summon, and with a build that you know for a fact can die easily with no warning." But she didn't say that to herself. She said, "Hahahahaha! I have death sentry! I'm invincible! Eat exploding corpses, evil dead things!"
In the last false tomb, she came upon a room full of the burning dead and unravelers, so she dropped a couple of death sentries behind her and charged into the middle of the room, kicking things as she went. She killed a few, but there were more than she'd thought, and she'd thrown caution to the wind. Before she knew it, she was surrounded. OK, she thought, I'd better back off now. Panic had not yet set in.
DTail has a 4 yard radius of knockback, and when you can kick fast enough, you can sometimes get yourself out of being partly surrounded just by kicking things away from you. However, if something gets knocked back, but doesn't have room to move, it will just go into hit recovery where it is. She kicked. Kick kick kick. There were a lot of them, about 2 or 3 deep, in every direction. They weren't moving. She couldn't make a hole to run through. Unravelers in the shadows were shooting hurty unholy bolts at her, and she couldn't move to dodge. No way out. No way out. Panic set in.
She had entered the room with a full belt of potions, the first row reds, the middle two rows fat purples, the last row blues. At about this point she ran out of reds. Purple. Oh crap. Purple. Previously, she had just been opening her inventory and clicking her tome of town portal, and hadn't assigned a hotkey to it. She opened her inventory with one hand, and drank her belt with the other. She stopped kicking, so they were hurting her faster now. PurplePurplePurple. Her other hand found the tome and a portal opened. It was at least a yard away from her. I'll never make it, she thought, too far away. I'm dead. She tried anyway, hoping to touch the blue oval even with just her finger. PurpPurpPur--
She was in Lut Gholein, poisoned, and nearly dead. I was shaking. She ran to the townsflolk for healing, then looked at her belt.
It was completely empty. "Mental note: " she said to herself, "don't go back in that portal." She has a hotkey for town portal now.
She went back into that tomb via the waypoint, and cautiously, carefully cleared out the room she'd nearly died in. There were no further incidents of a life-threatening nature, but one of the skeletons that had been swarming her dropped a
Ko, almost as if the game were sorry for putting me through all that.
The game's newfound kindness didn't last long. Shortly after, it dropped a
Visceratuant to taunt me.
By the time she got to Duriel, she had almost, but not quite, leveled up. She had also found a couple of +life GCs, which she couldn't quite fit into her inventory for questing, since she needed a place to hold things to sell, but she did use for Duriel, giving her about 50 extra life. She
prepared to face Duriel, mostly by drinking a lot of thawing potions. He was a bit rough, in that he made her return to town for potions (via hotkey this time) several times, but there was no real danger. Unlike his usual miserly self,
Duriel dropped a Hawkmail! CBF! He also made her level up.
Overall, the act was quite good to her. She improved her resistances quite a bit, upgraded her boots by a bit, and got a Lem, a Ko, and a Hawkmail. She also escaped alive from the scariest NDE I've ever had.
Her skills are max DTail and Venom, 14 BoS, 1 DS, 2 Fireblast (the next point will go here for the extra shot on DS). Stats are Str: 165, Dex: 50, Vit: 140.
[highlight]Umbriel, assassin, level 59, Kurast Docks, 200 points[/highlight]