Re: A new tournament: "Make no bones about it"
Merlin, that is one sweet amulet. It's a game changer if you ask me. That teleport is a must-have for tough spots that you might find yourself in, such as surrounded by wraiths in the arcane sanctuary, or in the claw viper temple. The fact that it gives you so much more in addition makes it a wonderful tool. Put it to good use! For the weapon, I'd probably use the spineripper myself over the diggler, but against dangerous enemies you will likely be turning to Poison Nova anyway, right? You'll have to do that against skellies as it is, if you want to help the merc in those situations.
I've brought along some pictures to show some of the funny encounters of Moe recently. They might go back a couple of weeks, but are still interesting and show how completely different the playstyle is from many others in the game.
Staying clear of the skeletons.
Boss pack of wraiths at the
entrance to the Arcane Sanctuary. These were the guys that killed the IG and merc in under five seconds. I'd say there were probably 15 of them stacked together in this picture, but I could only tell when I came back and they'd spread out a bit. Here's a good shot of how the bad guys get
clumped up in the AS. They just kept coming and coming. Confuse is incredible for this. It'll be fast if I get that far in hell difficulty.
Whoa-stave! I'll load this beast up for some major IG helping. Slow, blind, freeze, OW, -def/hit. Everything a good IG needs. I'll even socket it and put in this sweet +30% Fire Resist jewel that dropped recently to make him more like Sparky against inferno monsters. I'll be able to get his fire resist into the 90s with that jewel.
In the flayer jungle I confused a group of flayers, and soon there were so many enemies on the screen that I had to run to two different places to capture and give a picture of what the carnage-scale was all about.
1. 2. When confuse had worn off (after most of them had been blown up properly with a level 22 CE, the game must have switched off their AI or something. The remaining 5 flayers just stood there rocking back and forth on their feet until Hazade chopped them into pieces. I've not seen anything like that happen before. There were literally dozens of critters dying in seconds. Beautiful!
Here is another
shot in the flayer jungle. It just isn't fair when they can't get across the bridge. Rest assured that mere seconds later they were all dead.
Snowclash
drop. Nothing fancy, but still a grail item for me.
Travincal's where I started last night (I ran to the WP without killing anything before) and the weak point of confuse is shown
here. I brought about a million zealots right to the WP and had to scramble a bit, having an NDE with a Heirophant blizzard along the way. I wasn't quick on the rejuv potion for sure. Need to be better about that. Just look at that carnage though. Probably the bloodiest I've ever seen the Travincal WP.
One of the council dropped
Lycander's Flank. Useless for this tournament but still a grail item for me. The Durance of Hate was not hard. I used Confuse more sparingly than usual because I knew there were corridors and rooms on my flank that I needed to stay quiet until ready to be dealt with. I dropped to /P3 for level 3 in case the same thing happened as it did last time with Wyand and Meph in the same room. I did not use confuse until I stirred up some blood lords during the fight with Meph (who I kept decrepified and helped against the Blood Lords once or twice).
Mephisto's quest drop was pretty good. The gauntlets were a grail item also. In the Durance I also found an ethereal Bec with 3os, so the merc's weapon got over twice as damaging, going from an ethereal halberd to an ethereal bec-de-corbin. Overall so far so good. I'll probably run two more times because it wasn't hard at /P3 (except for the conviction aura on one of the council members who tag teamed with a blood lord pack).
Code:
Make no bones about it
Forum Name Character Name Level Waypoint/Location Best Drop
sveinbjorn Elric 22 Far Oasis Tal Rune
Bali DrGuillotin 16 Dark Woods Ith Rune
Merlin Skellophobic ?? NM Stony Fields Spineripper
TheReadMenace Spineless_Toxin 6 Cold Plains Chipped Sapphire
Serdash SneezyBones 44 Crystal Passage Sander's Paragon
DarkStarHero Ironist 16 Inner Cloister Rixot's Keen
Chaogasm Stumpy_McStump 32 Act 4 Sander's Wand
OldSoldier Moe 62 NM-Pand Fort Langer Briser
[highlight]Moe, Rusty, and Hazade, level 62 Golemancer, Pandemonium Fortress[/highlight]
What are the odds for a daggermancer to land his first exceptional unique as a poignard? Well, pretty low imho. It wasn't a high end roll (218% enh. dam out of 200-240), but the +1 to necro levels and the prevent mosnter heal are helpful.