Re: Skunkbelly's Ultimate Tournament Challenge 2011
Offee the Trapper, her Shadow Warrior and companion Zanarhi entered the second level of Underground Passage. The two Fallen packs by the entrance were Cloaked, and soon fell to a barrage of Death Sentries. While fighting them, I noticed a Vile Hunter minion bouncing back and forth. OK, so a boss pack is close.
"Shouldn´t be too bad, we have taken many of them, and here is decent space to move around.", I thought. But these "ladies" were not to be taken lightly - Cursed Extra Strong! Shadow didn´t last two seconds, and I got out
just before Zanarhi suffered the same fate.
I tried to establish a controlled fighting situation, but I failed at this a couple of times. They were such fast and fierce swarmers, there was hardly
any time to lay traps. Zanarhi died twice. No matter what I did, we got Amped pretty much right away, every time. Fast Extra Strong minions are deadly when you´re Amped. The buggers are often poisonous, too...
We had also woken up two skeleton archers here that gave us a hard time every second they weren´t cloaked. Then I thought: "the bottom right passage usually just has some Fallen and maybe some other regular critters. Let´s try to portal park some of this mob there."
Yeah, right.
A Holy Freeze Extra Strong Stone Skin spitter pack filled the narrow passage completely! A panic TP got us out, but now this pack could see most of the starting room. Bad, bad, bad...
Several more failed attempts to kill stuff before needing to get back up the stairs. With more (and bulkier) Extra Strong monsters around, and HF slowing on top of everything else, this was a genuine furball now. At one time, I was Amped, had lost both companions, was HF slowed, chased by rogues, shot at by spitters and there were monsters blocking my way towards the stairs. I managed to circle them and get up. Phew! Not much actual damage taken, but this was very very close. Had only one of them hit me, Offee could well have been stunlocked and swarmed to death in about two seconds.
When I had licked my wounds and gotten my companions back, I made a run for it into the other passage (from where the rogues came from at the start). Shadow got swarmed and killed close to the stairs, but I managed to get both boss packs to lose track of me. Where I ended up, there was only a regular Vile Hunter pack and a skeleton archer. TP out, and we could finally begin to more calmly kill things in this place.
Then the rest of the act was easy. :jig:
This is really powerful build. A great advantage is that the sentries lets you dish out some major damage while you are moving. Fire Blast requires you to stand still, but this skill was still a pleasant surprise for me. I have always thought of it as being single target, but it actually has a decent radius. My earlier experiences with it also usually meant that I ran out of mana very soon. It´s quite a different thing when you can just keep thowing them all day...
I found an ethereal Stygian Pike in Tamoe Highlands. Interesting choice here: imbuing or using the socketing recipe for a (future) runeword. But I had no runes for a nice runeword, and The Pit was still left to play this session. I really wanted Zanarhi to have a decent weapon there. So I played the Barracks before The Pit, and Charsi came up with
this. Note that the ED roll is quite low, but the etherealness still makes the damage a large step up from the 'Strength' Partizan Zanarhi had used up to this point.
Gee, was I glad for that extra damage against grumpy
Seethe Venom here.
Pit level 2 was quite nasty with FOUR rogue boss packs (one with archers, three with meleers). Lots of CE, LE and Extra Strong but thankfully no Cursed or damage-boosting auras.
Base item grailer for me: Dream Spirit. Nice.
Against Andariel, I didn´t resurrect Zanarhi when he died, or bothered with Shadow summoning. I just kept recasting lightning traps as they started to get 'old' and ran laps around the blood pool.
The entire act (sans Countess and crew) full cleared on /players 5. :yes:
I bought three War Pikes from Fara and crafted them, but they were all total junk.
[Highlight]Offee the Trapper Assassin and Zanarhi the Holy Freeze guard, level 80, Lut Gholein, Hell[/highlight]
This far, I have treated potions and charms as belonging only to the character I am playing, but that I have the freedom to keep their surplus ones (to avoid cluttering up stash/inv) in an ATMA stash until it´s time to send the character, when I put all of those things back onto the character. The only items I´ve kept in 'my own tourney stash' are socketables and the two allowed 'special' items.
