Re: The Exposure Tournament
Plenty of progress to report today. If you'll recall, I'm playing with two characters right now, a poison Necromancer named Jimbo (lovingly so named after my sick son) and Ginger (so named because of her fiery nature like the character on Gilligan's Island).
I'll show you progress of Jimbo first, since he is farther along the journey. I believe when we last heard from Jimbo he was clearing his way through the Kurast jungles. Eventually he found his way to the sewers and found a nice
rune for his collection. That made a nice "Smoke" for his resists and FHR.
Here you can see Jimbo's fight with Mephisto, which was a lot of fun because of the lack of a tank. Jimbo alternated the curses between Decrepify and Lower Resist. No sweat but no drop worthy of mention.
Later on though,
Izual was kind enough to drop a decent MF belt. Probably won't get any use though.
His NM
Hellforge drop was nothing special, either. Par for the course for me.
Enroute to kill Diablo, Jimbo had to deal with this
Seal boss in his unusual manner of stabbing him to death with a Malice kris. Blinding his friends with a heavy dose of Dim Vision helps immensely there. I have a feeling that hell difficulty with the balrogs being poison immune will be a definite challenge.
Diablo's drop was also nothing special but that's probably because I had the players setting low (/P3 I think).
It was in act V that I started to have to bypass areas. For instance, two of the enemy types in Abaddon were
this and
that. No thanks! I really wouldn't have the patience to let a whole level bleed out. Maybe at /P1 where CE could help, but not here and now.
Later on in his travels he was able to score a nice
rune for his troubles. What do you think he could use it for? Hopefully not just cash.
This screenie shows how I approach some enemies when the brute force approach of LR+PN doesn't work very well due to the number and speed of the enemies.
Baal wasn't too hard, but I did take him at /P1. I have a feeling that hell difficulty will be hard unless I can find more target slow like a Blackbog's Sharp or Cleglaw's Pincers and pair that with Decrepify. He cloned himself several times.
After a rekit of his gear to maximize both fire and lightning resists, Jimbo forged ahead into Hell difficulty. Solely at /P1 so far, he's had an easier time of it than during many sections of /P8 NM. GO figure. He was able to piece together a nice White wand with +2 DV and +2 CE (shopped a long time ago) built in. It works well since I use both those skills heavily now.
Countess was not difficult.
Jimbo now sits at the Outer Cloister WP and at level 75, having completed all quests and touched all WP so far.
As for Ginger, she's starting this update near where Jimbo started: the kurast temples. One of them had a nice
stair trap with Wailing Beasts that will probably convince me to forego those during harder times.
In Travincal, she was able to pick up a nice rune
here, though I'd rather have a Lum. Beggers can't be choosers I suppose.
Mephisto's Durance was nice because there were no exploding dolls, which I think will be the end of ginger some day soon. The final level (I decided to leave it at /P8 because static field makes the boss fights shorter) was a great challenge, with blood lord boss packs
here,
here, and
here. There were at least 4 dozen of these things in this level.
Fortunately I didn't fight any during the frakas with
Mephisto. His
drop.
While Ginger's Blaze and Frozen Orb are powerful weapons of good,
some enemies are immune to both forms of attack and require
creative measures to prevail. Ginger, like Jimbo, has a Malice kris and she can assist the runeword's damage with a hefty dose of level 5 static field. He went down in just a couple of minutes once I separated him from his friends.
Hephasto was dangerous enough (with 26% LR) to stay away from, but he went down, and his
forge drop was as expected again.
She is currently at the River of Flame WP at level 66, having touched all WP and completed all quests, ready to take on Diablo.
Now I'd like to go through a primer of how Ginger likes to defeat her enemies by fire. She uses several techniques, demonstrated below:
The
figure eight is good for corraling disparate enemies. Once they are in the middle and bunched up, staying where the flames are thickest provides the best results.
The
blanket or carpet bombing approach is handy for enemies that tend to move erratically like ghouls. Making sure to touch the corners ensures that no matter where you stand and they flee, they'll get burned.
Duriel and Andariel fall easy prey to the
racetrack technique, which is easier than teleporting in confined spaces. You just have to be careful to stay in your own flames and not cut the corner or else the demon will step outside the conflagration.
The
Crazy Ivan is handy when you just need to put flames in their paths since they go down quickly once in them.
The
Izual shuffle is good when melee enemies chase you but are not fast enough to cause problems. Run to one end, teleport back, run away a bit more, teleport again. Eventually several layers of flames are built up and even high HP enemies like /P8 Izual go down in a flash.
That's all for now!
.
