- Jun 22, 2003
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Guardian Jill, v1.10-1.11 Mastery Sorceress
In September 2004, Uzziah kicked off a rather wacky tourney called Mastery Sorc Tourney. I eventually entered, but not for any prizes. My goal was not to beat NM at the lowest level but to play a single pass full clear on the highest comfortable players setting, like I usually do.
I chose a Blessed Aim merc, mostly so my character would be able to hit things without needing much help from gear. Since some decent base AR would be helpful, I went for max blocking. Seemed like the logical thing to do.
After I beat NM, Jill was put on hold for several years because I was tired of her at the time and I had more interesting characters to play. A couple of years ago, I took a completely skill-less Assassin (paired with an Act I merc) all the way to an Act III Hell temple, so I figured this challenge can´t be harder than that. Stonger merc and better merc-helper skills, and the character also has ways to do some decent damage by herself. Time to move on with this!
In Normal and Nightmare, I was forbidden to use an ATMA stash because of tourney rules. Since I could not save them for massive rerolling of merc weapons later, I used up my chipped and mid-sized gems to reroll orbs as I progressed through the game. This rerolling gave me my two main weapons already in Normal:
Jill's Garnet Sacred Globe
One-Hand Damage: 3 to 8
Durability: 23 of 30
(Sorceress Only)
Required Level: 18
Orb Class - Fast Attack Speed
Item Version: 1.10 Expansion
Item Level: 25
Fingerprint: 0xcec6f9cd
+9 to Life
+15 to Mana
Fire Resist +27%
Adds 1-6 fire damage
+2 to Glacial Spike (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Teleport (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Shiver Armor (Sorceress Only)
Socketed (1: 1 used)
Jill's Sapphire Sacred Globe of the Sentinel
One-Hand Damage: 3 to 8
Durability: 30 of 30
(Sorceress Only)
Required Level: 18
Orb Class - Fast Attack Speed
Item Version: 1.10 Expansion
Item Level: 25
Fingerprint: 0xd860a0a
+9 to Mana
Magic Damage Reduced by 2
Cold Resist +37%
+1 to Shiver Armor (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Static Field (Sorceress Only)
Socketed (2: 0 used)
Chippie-rerolling produces ilvl 25 weapons. These have base tier of level 18 skills, which is great, because the two level 18 skills in the first orb were exactly the ones I wanted on an orb. I was very happy to roll this orb. Shiver Armor was icing, and it even has a useful affix!
It´s socketed with a Jacinth Jewel of Passion. That was a spur-of-the-moment decision because I was annoyed by running out of mana so often. (Also remember that I couldn´t save all my potentially useful jewels either - they competed for limited space with runes and such throughout Normal and NM.) Later on, I could probably have replaced it with something better, but I just forgot to...
When I picked up this character again, I brought her from 1.10 to 1.11. That meant less danger in melee against FE bosses, and the addition of those seven class-oriented runewords. Still no RWM, though.
Progress up to Hell Harrogath can be followed in the tourney thread. An important find was a Lum rune in Tal´s third tomb so I could upgrade Pierre Tombale Couant to elite. Not only did Haseen now have a much better weapon, it also freed up my Lem rune. I had kept it around because of the prospect of making a 'Passion' weapon for the merc. Now that I had something that did even more damage, I made a 'Treachery' armor for Haseen. That is such an awesome fighter-merc armor with the huge IAS, the Fade (providing both fat resists, 15% PDR and curse time reduction) and the Venom.
The last act went something like this:
I met those ultra powerful Horror Archers in Abbadon. Many ouch!-moments for the merc, and a bunch of merc deaths, especially to a Might + Multishot boss pack of them.
Glacial Trail was pretty hard for us, because it had PI Frenzytaurs. I had to use the FW staff and have Haseen drink lots of lots of potions, including a large number of purples. The Champ pack that guarded the Drifter Cavern entrace were Frenzytaurs. Ouch.
Drifter Cavern was nothing special, but the next ice lake area had a very dangerous boss. Thankfully, I had secured enough space so I could do this. BURN!
Nihlathak´s floor had Tomb Vipers (the Champ pack was also Vipers), but it took a while before I encounted any (just archers and spiders early on). I avoided many merc deaths with clever Teleport use. I think he only died once.
Jill used Corpse Explosion from a 'Black' Flail to deprive Nilly of exploding fodder, and a few times the explosion even damaged to slimy Necromancer himself.
Teleport separation on the Summit worked very well. CE something Korlic and Madawc (with wimpy mods) were defeated. For some reason, they took very little damage from Haseen´s stabs, and when Jill tried a few swings with the 'Black' weapon, very little happened.
I had seen Talic before so I knew he was Stone Skin + Cursed. That didn´t look like fun for Haseen, since his leeching would be much smaller than normally. I figured that if he is going to have a chance to at least somewhat be able hold the line, I need to get Talic into a position where he won´t whirl. I needed two tries (the second time, he whirled at us when we were Amped!) and then I managed to arrange this situation. Only occasional potion use was needed now. I know he has at least 50% physical resist, but it still took a curiosly long time... Thank goodness for the Venom!
WSK 1 had vampires and spawners. Against the first vampire boss pack, when I saw how very little Haseen could damage them per hit, I finally realized my mistake: I must have typed in /players 8 when I started this game! I mean, this is standard procedure for most of my D2 sessions. I must have not really been awake when I started off today! Switched to /p1 but the mistake had been done for the monsters that had already spawned.
(Jeebers, this means I killed Ancients on /p8. That´s a first on Hell...) :crazyeyes:
What a slog this floor was. Must have taken me over two hours. Two vampire boss packs and FIVE spawner boss packs (only three of the spawner bosses had /p8 amount of life, though).
Much easier for the rest of the WSK. Wussy final floor with Pit Lords, Dark Lords and OB/Doom Knights.
Lusting for grailers, I cranked it up /p3 for the Baal fight. Static to half at first, of course. Then, whenever Haseen could stay alive long enough for Blessed Aim to activate, Jill gave Baal some 'Black' treatment. "Have at it, you ugly slime!"
(No, I have no idea why it looks like Jill has borrowed Katra Solopuro's hairdo.)
When Black no longer was effective and Haseen just couldn´t stay alive for long, Jill got into some elemental fighting, too.
The drop had 4 uniques. Never seen that before. I thought for sure such a high-end elite would be a grailer, but looking through my spreadsheet I could see that it actually wasn´t.
"Cow level shouldn´t be so bad", I thought. GSpike makes for awesome crowd control there. But I was being an idiot (just like with the players setting earlier). Red portal was completely out in open space. First couple of cows were killed easily, but then we happened to wake up many cows from two directions at once. Haseen got Cursed and before I could help him enough, he got killed. Yikes, I am also Amped, and here they come! I ran and teleported to a calm spot, hit my TP switch hotkey, and the TP "skill" didn´t get selected! What? OK, maybe I haven´t assigned the key correctly? After all, I pretty much always cast them from the book in inventory. OK, more cows, now I need to find an even calmer spot so I can have the time to open my inventory. EXTRA FAST bosspack here, too, OMG!
Crazy fleeing once again, where I several times was very close to getting hit. I found a calmer spot, opened inventory and THERE WAS NO BOOK! Crap, I had put it in the stash so it wouldn´t get pooled with the one I bought from Akara to create the portal. Me=idiot. (Anyone else who has done this mistake?)
Red portal, red portal, must get there! But there are only two cows here, so I´ll keep them frozen until my Amp has timed out. Now it was not only a matter of getting out, I also needed to make it in such a way that the portal wouldn´t be mobbed for our return.
I did just that, and upon return, I got really lucky and reached the small corral with only a couple of regular cows there. The northern end of this corral has a very nice bottleneck that we took advantage of until more space was secured. No problems from here. Sweet!
(stats follow in the next post)
In September 2004, Uzziah kicked off a rather wacky tourney called Mastery Sorc Tourney. I eventually entered, but not for any prizes. My goal was not to beat NM at the lowest level but to play a single pass full clear on the highest comfortable players setting, like I usually do.
I chose a Blessed Aim merc, mostly so my character would be able to hit things without needing much help from gear. Since some decent base AR would be helpful, I went for max blocking. Seemed like the logical thing to do.
After I beat NM, Jill was put on hold for several years because I was tired of her at the time and I had more interesting characters to play. A couple of years ago, I took a completely skill-less Assassin (paired with an Act I merc) all the way to an Act III Hell temple, so I figured this challenge can´t be harder than that. Stonger merc and better merc-helper skills, and the character also has ways to do some decent damage by herself. Time to move on with this!
In Normal and Nightmare, I was forbidden to use an ATMA stash because of tourney rules. Since I could not save them for massive rerolling of merc weapons later, I used up my chipped and mid-sized gems to reroll orbs as I progressed through the game. This rerolling gave me my two main weapons already in Normal:
Jill's Garnet Sacred Globe
One-Hand Damage: 3 to 8
Durability: 23 of 30
(Sorceress Only)
Required Level: 18
Orb Class - Fast Attack Speed
Item Version: 1.10 Expansion
Item Level: 25
Fingerprint: 0xcec6f9cd
+9 to Life
+15 to Mana
Fire Resist +27%
Adds 1-6 fire damage
+2 to Glacial Spike (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Teleport (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Shiver Armor (Sorceress Only)
Socketed (1: 1 used)
Jill's Sapphire Sacred Globe of the Sentinel
One-Hand Damage: 3 to 8
Durability: 30 of 30
(Sorceress Only)
Required Level: 18
Orb Class - Fast Attack Speed
Item Version: 1.10 Expansion
Item Level: 25
Fingerprint: 0xd860a0a
+9 to Mana
Magic Damage Reduced by 2
Cold Resist +37%
+1 to Shiver Armor (Sorceress Only)
+1 to Static Field (Sorceress Only)
Socketed (2: 0 used)
Chippie-rerolling produces ilvl 25 weapons. These have base tier of level 18 skills, which is great, because the two level 18 skills in the first orb were exactly the ones I wanted on an orb. I was very happy to roll this orb. Shiver Armor was icing, and it even has a useful affix!
It´s socketed with a Jacinth Jewel of Passion. That was a spur-of-the-moment decision because I was annoyed by running out of mana so often. (Also remember that I couldn´t save all my potentially useful jewels either - they competed for limited space with runes and such throughout Normal and NM.) Later on, I could probably have replaced it with something better, but I just forgot to...
When I picked up this character again, I brought her from 1.10 to 1.11. That meant less danger in melee against FE bosses, and the addition of those seven class-oriented runewords. Still no RWM, though.
Progress up to Hell Harrogath can be followed in the tourney thread. An important find was a Lum rune in Tal´s third tomb so I could upgrade Pierre Tombale Couant to elite. Not only did Haseen now have a much better weapon, it also freed up my Lem rune. I had kept it around because of the prospect of making a 'Passion' weapon for the merc. Now that I had something that did even more damage, I made a 'Treachery' armor for Haseen. That is such an awesome fighter-merc armor with the huge IAS, the Fade (providing both fat resists, 15% PDR and curse time reduction) and the Venom.
The last act went something like this:
I met those ultra powerful Horror Archers in Abbadon. Many ouch!-moments for the merc, and a bunch of merc deaths, especially to a Might + Multishot boss pack of them.
Glacial Trail was pretty hard for us, because it had PI Frenzytaurs. I had to use the FW staff and have Haseen drink lots of lots of potions, including a large number of purples. The Champ pack that guarded the Drifter Cavern entrace were Frenzytaurs. Ouch.
Drifter Cavern was nothing special, but the next ice lake area had a very dangerous boss. Thankfully, I had secured enough space so I could do this. BURN!
Nihlathak´s floor had Tomb Vipers (the Champ pack was also Vipers), but it took a while before I encounted any (just archers and spiders early on). I avoided many merc deaths with clever Teleport use. I think he only died once.
Jill used Corpse Explosion from a 'Black' Flail to deprive Nilly of exploding fodder, and a few times the explosion even damaged to slimy Necromancer himself.
Teleport separation on the Summit worked very well. CE something Korlic and Madawc (with wimpy mods) were defeated. For some reason, they took very little damage from Haseen´s stabs, and when Jill tried a few swings with the 'Black' weapon, very little happened.
I had seen Talic before so I knew he was Stone Skin + Cursed. That didn´t look like fun for Haseen, since his leeching would be much smaller than normally. I figured that if he is going to have a chance to at least somewhat be able hold the line, I need to get Talic into a position where he won´t whirl. I needed two tries (the second time, he whirled at us when we were Amped!) and then I managed to arrange this situation. Only occasional potion use was needed now. I know he has at least 50% physical resist, but it still took a curiosly long time... Thank goodness for the Venom!
WSK 1 had vampires and spawners. Against the first vampire boss pack, when I saw how very little Haseen could damage them per hit, I finally realized my mistake: I must have typed in /players 8 when I started this game! I mean, this is standard procedure for most of my D2 sessions. I must have not really been awake when I started off today! Switched to /p1 but the mistake had been done for the monsters that had already spawned.
(Jeebers, this means I killed Ancients on /p8. That´s a first on Hell...) :crazyeyes:
What a slog this floor was. Must have taken me over two hours. Two vampire boss packs and FIVE spawner boss packs (only three of the spawner bosses had /p8 amount of life, though).
Much easier for the rest of the WSK. Wussy final floor with Pit Lords, Dark Lords and OB/Doom Knights.
Lusting for grailers, I cranked it up /p3 for the Baal fight. Static to half at first, of course. Then, whenever Haseen could stay alive long enough for Blessed Aim to activate, Jill gave Baal some 'Black' treatment. "Have at it, you ugly slime!"
(No, I have no idea why it looks like Jill has borrowed Katra Solopuro's hairdo.)
When Black no longer was effective and Haseen just couldn´t stay alive for long, Jill got into some elemental fighting, too.
The drop had 4 uniques. Never seen that before. I thought for sure such a high-end elite would be a grailer, but looking through my spreadsheet I could see that it actually wasn´t.
"Cow level shouldn´t be so bad", I thought. GSpike makes for awesome crowd control there. But I was being an idiot (just like with the players setting earlier). Red portal was completely out in open space. First couple of cows were killed easily, but then we happened to wake up many cows from two directions at once. Haseen got Cursed and before I could help him enough, he got killed. Yikes, I am also Amped, and here they come! I ran and teleported to a calm spot, hit my TP switch hotkey, and the TP "skill" didn´t get selected! What? OK, maybe I haven´t assigned the key correctly? After all, I pretty much always cast them from the book in inventory. OK, more cows, now I need to find an even calmer spot so I can have the time to open my inventory. EXTRA FAST bosspack here, too, OMG!
Crazy fleeing once again, where I several times was very close to getting hit. I found a calmer spot, opened inventory and THERE WAS NO BOOK! Crap, I had put it in the stash so it wouldn´t get pooled with the one I bought from Akara to create the portal. Me=idiot. (Anyone else who has done this mistake?)
Red portal, red portal, must get there! But there are only two cows here, so I´ll keep them frozen until my Amp has timed out. Now it was not only a matter of getting out, I also needed to make it in such a way that the portal wouldn´t be mobbed for our return.
I did just that, and upon return, I got really lucky and reached the small corral with only a couple of regular cows there. The northern end of this corral has a very nice bottleneck that we took advantage of until more space was secured. No problems from here. Sweet!
(stats follow in the next post)
Last edited:
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