Gort resumed his journey hacking his way through his enemies with his trusty axe. He promptly hit lvl 18 and immediately assigned Concentrate to his LMB, never to look back. It means we have to do some mana guzzling when we are using our war cries, but it's worth it for the additional killing speed.
His first test with his new skill was The Smith. Battle Cry made him pretty harmless, and we manages to take him out without any issues. I haven't played many barbs in my day, but once thing I know for sure now is that they are absolutely awesome in the early game. We had zero issues on the way to Andy. Between Taunt, Howl, and Battle Cry there are rarely situations that feel like they are out of control. Couple that with fast killing speed and a decent life pool and it was a breeze. We made ourselves a new little toy for the Andy fight. If anyone is wondering whether 1% mana leech is enough to keep a skill with a mana cost of 2 going at this stage of the game, it isn't.
So we cleared out her level, and Gort went face to face with the Maiden of Anguish:
With Paige's help, and Battle Cry, the fight was easy and finished in under a minute. Her drop was filled with rares, though none were overly useful and they were all vendored but the ring, as we were pretty much out of stash space by this point (including both his teammates' stashes).
To remedy the space issue, Gort pressed onwards in search of the cube. The first order of business was to trade Paige out so she could stay with her sisters in the now-freed wilderness on Act 1. We hired Chalan, the Defiance Guard to help us on our journey. His style meshed more with Gort anyways, as he likes to get very personal with his victims.
First stop was the Stony Tomb, which we worked through and eventually got rid of that pest Creeping Feature. As you can see, Battle Cry was used again. It has become our go-to cry, we are liking it quite a bit. We were delighted to find out it even works on Sarcophagi!
We are letting Chalan get most of the kills for the extra MF as our plan is still to do single-pass with our three characters as far as it's feasible. Luckily Chalan is quite the warrior, and letting him do the killing hasn't slowed us down at all. We pressed onwards and FINALLY retrieved the cube. What a blessing it was to be able to cube everything and free up some space. This whole no extended stash thing is really interesting, and I'm really looking forward to (but kind of terrified of!) making some tough decisions later on about what to keep for our team. To give you an idea of what the space issue was looking like, here is the spillover of what we have so far.
This is what's left over with Gort's stash filled, and Tao and Sheela's stashes and inventories jammed completely full. So we cubed everything we could (gems, rings, ammys) and finally had some breathing room back! We also cubed some savage polearms and came up with this:
Not bad! Chalan isn't strong enough to use it yet, so he's using a plain Savage poleaxe (72% IIRC) for now, which works just fine. We had to test out his new stick, so we dropped down into the Sewers and disposed of Radament before taking a rest for now.
The S/U have been raining down on Gort like crazy. Nothing incredibly useful yet, but he's getting tempted to start moving up through the tiers soon. The only thing really holding him back is that we haven't found any super great rares yet, and we want to keep our MF fairly high (due to single- pass).
Finds:
- Our 3rd Cleglaws Shield
- Death's Sash
- Pluckeye
- Gorefoot
- Civerb's Ward
- Axe of Fechmar
Next up: Tao will start her quest!
[highlight]Gort the Conc. Barbarian with Chalan the Defiance Guard - lvl 23, Far Oasis next[/highlight]
[highlight]Tao the Hydra Sorceress - lvl 1, Rogue Encampment[/highlight]
[highlight]Sheela the TS/DTail Assassin - lvl 1, Rogue Encampment[/highlight]
His first test with his new skill was The Smith. Battle Cry made him pretty harmless, and we manages to take him out without any issues. I haven't played many barbs in my day, but once thing I know for sure now is that they are absolutely awesome in the early game. We had zero issues on the way to Andy. Between Taunt, Howl, and Battle Cry there are rarely situations that feel like they are out of control. Couple that with fast killing speed and a decent life pool and it was a breeze. We made ourselves a new little toy for the Andy fight. If anyone is wondering whether 1% mana leech is enough to keep a skill with a mana cost of 2 going at this stage of the game, it isn't.
So we cleared out her level, and Gort went face to face with the Maiden of Anguish:
With Paige's help, and Battle Cry, the fight was easy and finished in under a minute. Her drop was filled with rares, though none were overly useful and they were all vendored but the ring, as we were pretty much out of stash space by this point (including both his teammates' stashes).
To remedy the space issue, Gort pressed onwards in search of the cube. The first order of business was to trade Paige out so she could stay with her sisters in the now-freed wilderness on Act 1. We hired Chalan, the Defiance Guard to help us on our journey. His style meshed more with Gort anyways, as he likes to get very personal with his victims.
First stop was the Stony Tomb, which we worked through and eventually got rid of that pest Creeping Feature. As you can see, Battle Cry was used again. It has become our go-to cry, we are liking it quite a bit. We were delighted to find out it even works on Sarcophagi!
We are letting Chalan get most of the kills for the extra MF as our plan is still to do single-pass with our three characters as far as it's feasible. Luckily Chalan is quite the warrior, and letting him do the killing hasn't slowed us down at all. We pressed onwards and FINALLY retrieved the cube. What a blessing it was to be able to cube everything and free up some space. This whole no extended stash thing is really interesting, and I'm really looking forward to (but kind of terrified of!) making some tough decisions later on about what to keep for our team. To give you an idea of what the space issue was looking like, here is the spillover of what we have so far.
This is what's left over with Gort's stash filled, and Tao and Sheela's stashes and inventories jammed completely full. So we cubed everything we could (gems, rings, ammys) and finally had some breathing room back! We also cubed some savage polearms and came up with this:
Not bad! Chalan isn't strong enough to use it yet, so he's using a plain Savage poleaxe (72% IIRC) for now, which works just fine. We had to test out his new stick, so we dropped down into the Sewers and disposed of Radament before taking a rest for now.
The S/U have been raining down on Gort like crazy. Nothing incredibly useful yet, but he's getting tempted to start moving up through the tiers soon. The only thing really holding him back is that we haven't found any super great rares yet, and we want to keep our MF fairly high (due to single- pass).
Finds:
- Our 3rd Cleglaws Shield
- Death's Sash
- Pluckeye
- Gorefoot
- Civerb's Ward
- Axe of Fechmar
Next up: Tao will start her quest!
[highlight]Gort the Conc. Barbarian with Chalan the Defiance Guard - lvl 23, Far Oasis next[/highlight]
[highlight]Tao the Hydra Sorceress - lvl 1, Rogue Encampment[/highlight]
[highlight]Sheela the TS/DTail Assassin - lvl 1, Rogue Encampment[/highlight]