Usain Bolter: Normal Difficulty

Level 6 brought the arrival of Holy Bolt and the beginning of the variant in earnest. The initial damage at SLVL 1 was 8-16 which was enough to slay any non-boss opponent in one or at most two castings for the moment. Usain was happy to find an enemy mix that had nothing but demon and undead opponents for the moment, with Holy Bolt working against everything that he came across in the Caves, Burial Grounds, Crypt, and Masoleum. The spell projectile traveled at a fast pace and seemed to have infinite range, functioning very similarly to Fire Bolt in most ways. The hit box was a bit narrow and it wasn't great against enemies that kept dodging around corners like Blood Raven, however for the most part Holy Bolt was an excellent tool even here at SLVL 1. It also had one aspect new to Diablo 2 Resurrected that vastly increased its potency:

Holy Bolt now pierces through its targets and continues onwards in a straight line to hit anything behind them. In that respect, it plays more like Molten Boulder than it does Fire Bolt. I quickly became used to this aspect of Holy Bolt and worked to set up the piercing shots, trying to get monsters to funnel into narrow choke points and then knock them down at once like bowling pins. Holy Bolt was particularly good at killing the fallen shamans: normally the fallen minions can block for them, but Holy Bolt would pierce right through and hit the shamans in the back at long range. The one thing that I didn't like about Usain's setup was the fact that Paladin auras can apparently only be set to the right mouse button. I wanted to have his future Vigor aura on the left mouse button and then use the right mouse for casting Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer, only to discover that Diablo 2 doesn't allow it. Auras only on the right side. This was problematic because left clicks are used to move your character in Diablo 2, and by forcing Holy Bolt over to the same button, I was much more prone to making mistakes. I basically had to stop and hit the Shift key any time I wanted to cast a spell to ensure that Usain didn't scamper off in an unintended direction. I would get used to this with time but it was still a bit of a pain.

I was splitting Usain's stat points equally between Strength, Vitality, and Energy for the moment on each level up. Strength needed to reach 43 for a future Crystal Sword and it made sense to get up to around 40 quickly to unlock the use of more armor options. I planned to take Energy to 50 points and keep it there for Normal difficulty, then I could respec and move all of those points over to Vitality once the first Spirit runeword arrived sometime around early Nightmare. My experience has been that you need to drop at least some stat points into Energy if you're going to play a casting character or it simply takes way too long for the mana orb to fill. As usual, I didn't find much interesting in terms of gear at first, aside from two different gem shrines appearing in the Blood Moor that I planned to save until Flawed gems started appearing. I purchased a scepter with +2 to maximum damage on the first trip back to town and that was more than sufficient to kill things with melee attacks for the early stages of Act One.

The following areas passed by in a blur due to the ease with which Usain was handling them. Monsters in Act One Normal typically have less than 50 HP and a surprising number of them don't even have double digit health. Holy Bolt started out at 8-16 damage and continued gaining another 8 damage to both min and max values with each additional skill point, first to 16-24 at SLVL 2 and then 24-32 at SLVL 3 and so on. The skill quickly hit "one shot, one kill" status and stayed there for the remainder of the act. In fact, even bosses and champions were dying in a single casting of Holy Bolt since even the special monsters didn't have much health to work with yet. I also found that nearly everything in Act One proved to be either a demon or an undead foe of some kind, with only the brutes and the crows providing exceptions to that rule. For this reason, Treehead Woodfist was the only boss that required some effort due to the ineffectiveness of Holy Bolt which forced Usain to melee him to death. I had to drink some red potions for safety and I definitely was looking forward to the arrival of Blessed Hammer for these situations.

On and on went Usain, the fast pace of his clearing matching his sprinter namesake. I think that the clear pace seemed even faster to me by virtue of following in the wake of WillPower's glacially slow progress through Act Five Hell. Usain was blasting right through everything in his path, full clearing outdoor areas in as little as ten minutes and rarely taking any damage in the process. He had found a sash with +5 life regen and that alone was sufficient to keep the health orb topped off nearly all of the time. The arrival of CLVL 12 didn't change much about Usain's setup as I dropped a prerequisite point into Zeal and swapped his aura from Defiance over to Cleansing, otherwise nothing else was different as more skill points kept going into Holy Bolt. I planned to refresh the vendors until one of them offered a scepter with +3 to Holy Bolt but it turned out that wasn't even needed, Akara offered the exact item with no prompting on one of my trips back to town. It even had two sockets although I wasn't sure what to do with them; at the very least, this item would hold Usain until he could swap to a Spirit sword around the beginning of Nightmare.

Three more ranks of Holy Bolt had Usain cutting through the monsters even faster than before. There's really not much to be said about the rest of Act One, everything just... died in a single enchanted bolt of light. I couldn't even see what trait most bosses rolled because they were gone that fast; Extra Dead Enchanted as we used to say in our variant teams. The Smith fell in four shots, Pitspawn Fouldog died offscreen before I even knew it was there, Bone Ash was gone in two seconds - you get the idea. The only monsters that caused problems were the Arach spiders on Catacombs 2 because they were of course immune to Holy Bolt. Usain had to tank a champ pack of them while swinging away with Sacrifice and he fell under half health at one point. For everything else though, Holy Bolt at SLVL 11+3 was dealing 124-138 damage on a spammable spell with great range and piercing properties which was far more damage than Usain needed for the moment. I decided to hold Holy Bolt there and start saving skill points for Blessed Hammer and the other various prerequisites needed for this build since Blessed Hammer's base damage wasn't going to be too impressive at SLVL 1.

Andariel took six castings of Holy Bolt to die, that was it. She didn't have the courtesy to drop anything useful for Usain's troubles either, what a rude customer.

Act Two started out with the Sewers which were quite easy to complete by virtue of almost everything inside being undead. Radament's revival powers weren't too scary when every skeleton fell to a single Holy Bolt. Then it was out into the deserts and suddenly things became a lot harder for Usain. For the first time ever, all of the monsters in an area were immune to Holy Bolt: leapers, beetles, and spear cats were all various types of "animals", not undead or demons. This forced Usain to fall back on meleeing everything to death, with basic attack and a scepter with no damage modifiers on it because it was intended for casting Holy Bolt. That was a painful process to say the least, even in Normal difficulty, and the sparks that the beetles kept throwing out only made things worse. Their Charged Bolts don't have much effect by the time the player reaches Hell difficulty and when they'll likely have maxed lightning resistances, but here at the start of the game with only minimal lightning protection those things hurt. Usain was CLVL 17 for the duration of the Dry Hills and I was counting down the minutes until he reached the next level and finally unlocked Blessed Hammer.

The anticipated level up arrived in the Stony Tomb which was easier rather than harder as compared to the outdoor areas thanks to having lots of undead inside. Usain immediately dropped a skill point into Vengeance as a prerequisite skill, unlocked and switched over to Vigor for his aura on a permanent basis (currently worth 13% faster run/walk speed at SLVL 1), while also opening up Blessed Hammer for the first time. This is one of the most famous Paladin skills in Diablo 2 but I'd never actually used it before, having never created a Hammerdin across all of the various patches. Blessed Hammer throws out a spinning magical hammer that spirals outwards around the Paladin's position, starting directly to the left of the Paladin and moving in a clockwise direction in a tight spiral. I discovered right away that aiming the hammer projectile took some getting used to since it had such an unusual movement pattern. Blessed Hammer was great at hitting big crowds of opponents (and this is why it's always been so popular with the online farming masses), however it wasn't very good at landing on a single desired enemy. In fact, I found myself not liking this skill very much and greatly preferring the straight-line nature of Holy Bolt. To be fair, these were about the worst conditions possible for Blessed Hammer: only a single skill point invested and trying to hit leapers that raced around erratically. I'd have to keep investing more skill points and see how things developed.

Nevertheless, Blessed Hammer really wasn't much to write home about at SLVL 1 where it did a mere 12-16 damage. It was much more mana-intensive than Holy Bolt and I found Usain draining his mana orb constantly despite the 50 stat points that I had allocated to Energy. With practice, I did start to get better at hitting individual monsters with the hammer tosses. I discovered that Usain had to be standing very close to enemies to hit them with any regularity, much closer than I would have preferred in truth. If Usain positioned himself just to the right or just below a monster, the initial curving spiral of Blessed Hammer was essentially guaranteed to strike them. Anything beyond melee range was pretty much completely random though; the hammer might hit or it could easily pass to either side. For that matter, Blessed Hammer also vanished if it collided with any kind of terrain obstacle instead of passing through walls as I had been expecting. This once again meant that Usain had to stay at close range when using this skill even if I really would have liked to be further back.

The remaining outdoor portions of Act Two continued to be a training ground for me as I practiced the use of Blessed Hammer. Almost everything in the deserts was immune to Holy Bolt, with only the vultures and the zombies in the Lost City having the undead tag. In an extreme rarity, I found myself preferring the underground areas where Holy Bolt could rip through mummies and skeletons, such as in the Ancient Tunnels where Usain laid waste to all of the undead hanging out there. Things became trickier when I encountered mixed mobs of undead and animal foes such as in the Claw Viper Temple pictured above. Usain's standard practice was to use the range of Holy Bolt to take out the skeletons and hopefully the greater mummies lurking in the back, then swap over to Blessed Hammer to fight the snakes at closer range. This worked for the most part although I found that Usain was going through more red potions and blue potions than I would have expected, since he was both taking hits and needing more mana to keep casting. Hopefully this would get better as he added more mana from Spirit runewords and more skill points in Blessed Hammer.

Fangskin at the bottom of the Claw Viper Temple was nearly a disaster as the snake mob surrounded Usain and my attempt to run to safety was interpreted by the game as clicking on the snakes to keep casting Blessed Hammer. Argh, stupid movement and skill casting bound to the same left mouse button! Usain made it out of there but had to drink two full rejuvs for safety, sheesh! I couldn't remember the last time that I had a fight require two of those things on Normal difficulty. Well, I suppose that's why I go to the trouble of collecting all those purples and Cubing them into full rejuvs - it's super important to have them there when you really need them.

After an uneventful Palace, Usain crossed through the portal on the bottom floor and discovered his paradise: the Arcane Sanctuary. Everything inside was either undead (the vampires and ghosts) or a demon (the goats), all of the narrow walkways set up perfect firing lines for Holy Bolt, and the various disconnected segments became target practice for my Paladin's preferred spell. Usain had an absolute field day here tearing through everything that he came across, and if I were going to grind levels for some reason with this character, this would have been the place to go. The only thing that wasn't vulnerable to Holy Bolt was the Summoner himself who fell quickly to Blessed Hammer once his surrounding monsters were gone. Usain also had the good fortune to find a Tal rune here and he had earlier picked up an Eth rune from the Countess. That meant a very early Stealth armor with 25% faster movement and faster cast along with some handy additional mana regeneration. With Vigor aura kicking in 13% faster movement and an early pair of boots with 10% faster run, Usain was already up to 48% faster movement and he was absolutely zipping along. What was this going to look like once I really started pumping Vigor and secured some 40% faster run footwear? Should be fun!

The Canyon of the Magi was the reverse, with nothing that Holy Bolt could hit, but by now Blessed Hammer was starting to become more of a real weapon in its own right. I had gotten it up to SLVL 5 where it was dealing about 60 damage per toss, still not as good as Holy Bolt but enough to be more practical. It even worked reasonably well against the Crushers who have high HP and 60% magic resistance even on Normal difficulty. The Tombs of Tal Rasha were much easier as everything inside other than the beetles could be hit by Holy Bolt. The Guardians were requiring two shots by now, along with some of the mummies and vampires, but this remained a total slaughter as the consecreated power of Holy Bolt destroyed evil at every turn. Usain did all six of the False Tombs in less than an hour, then had to go back to the Maggot Lair to get the Horadric Staff which took almost as long on its own. The beetles and maggots in the underground lair were all immune to Holy Bolt and the tunnels were often too narrow for Blessed Hammer to hit anything. I hope that Fist of the Heavens will be usable in there when Usain comes back in Nightmare because Blessed Hammer was nearly useless and he had to do way too much meleeing with basic attack.

I swapped Usain over to a plain 20% faster run set of boots for Duriel to reach 58% faster movement overall. As I hoped, this was enough speed to stay ahead of the big bug even with his Holy Freeze aura slowing things down. While Usain unavoidably took some damage from Duriel's charge attacks, otherwise I was able to keep my Paladin out of reach while spamming Holy Bolt over Usain's back shoulder. Not too bad all things considered for my least favorite boss fight in the game.

Act Three was relatively uninteresting overall. The fetishes and flayers were vulnerable to Holy Bolt by virtue of being demons, however almost everything else was classified as an animal of some kind and required Blessed Hammer. This was easy enough in the wide open outdoor areas while being a lot trickier in the underground areas and the confined houses of Kurast. The undead doll fetishes started showing up in the Flayer Dungeon and it was tough for Usain to avoid their death explosions since he had no minions to tank for him. At least they died to a single casting of Holy Bolt and their explosions didn't deal too much damage here in Normal difficulty. The cantor and hierophant healers were ineffective against Usain for the same reason, they simply didn't have enough health or healing power on this initial difficulty. Usain could always burst through them and their followers with spam-casted Blessed Hammers before they had a chance to get off their curative abilities.

This is also a really weird part of the game from a power curve perspective. When full-clearing under the standard Players 1 setting, the player gains about 16 levels in Act One Normal and another 8 levels in Act Two Normal. Then they only gain about three levels across all of Acts Three and Four combined before gaining another *TEN* levels in Act Five. You actually gain more levels in Hell difficulty when passing through these parts of the gameplay than in Normal! This is due to the awkward mashup of the original pre-expansion gameplay with the changes made in the Lord of Destruction expansion, as characters went from finishing Hell difficulty at roughly Level 50 to finishing it at Level 85. For Usain, it meant that he was gaining only the bare minimum of levels as he passed through Act Three, slowly continuing to pump Blessed Hammer while waiting for Level 30 to arrive. At least I did have some good luck in turning up useful items: the Ormus reward ring had 10% faster cast along with 10% fire resistance and some minor goodies, along with a useful Grand Charm with 17% more fire resistance and +3 to Strength.

The worst parts of the act were the Kurast Temples, as usual, including the brutal stairs trap pictured above. Very few of the enemies in these tiny deathtraps were susceptible to Holy Bolt and that meant trying to rely on Blessed Hammer in some truly cramped conditions. The hammers functioned much better against targets standing above Usain's position and often didn't work at all against foes standing below him as the hammers would crash uselessly into the walls without dealing damage. Hopefully Fist of the Heavens would be usable in these situations as it was already becoming impractical to keep falling back on melee attacks.

The Council proved to be quite easy since they were all demons and liked to walk in straight lines for shooting down with Holy Bolt. The Duarance levels were the same story as everything inside was either undead or a demon, turning the whole place into a Holy Bolt-fest. This was pretty easy and even fun to play out, thanks to Durance 2 not being gigantic for a change, despite the fact that Holy Bolt was starting to fall off in damage since I hadn't given it any skill points since the beginning of Act Two. It still carved right through the Council bosses and vampires down on the third basement floor though, and then remained the weapon of choice against Mephisto. His cold shot hit fairly hard at about 80 damage per shot despite Usain having a healthy amount of cold and lightning resistance. It took about two minutes of firing off Holy Bolts to get the kill against this boss.

As a contrast to Act Three, Act Four was almost entirely full of demon opposition, with only the leapers in the Outer Steppes failing to take damage from Usain's Holy Bolt. Venom Lords, Doom and Oblivion Knights, Corpulents, and every type of finger mage - they were all weak against Holy Bolt. Usain did have the good luck to avoid drawing any flesh spawners or the maggots that can appear on the River of Flame, with the little bugs classified as another type of animal. With Holy Bolt spammable against virtually everything, Usain was able to make great progress through Act Four which I raced through in a single session that took about 90 minutes in total. The one roadblock to the fast clear pace was Izual, of all enemies, who was surprisingly not considered a demon and had to be slowly whittled down with Blessed Hammer. Izual had 30% magic resistance (unlike everything else which had none) and a very beefy 12,000 HP for Normal difficulty which required an awful lot of hammer casts to take down.

The Chaos Sanctuary was particularly fun since it always has the same three enemies (Venom Lords, Doom/Oblivion Knights, and Storm Casters) which would always be vulnerable to Holy Bolt. It was now taking two or three castings of the spell to defeat these monsters, no doubt due to the fact that Usain hadn't dropped a single skill point into Holy Bolt for ages now, but the damage was still more than enough to plow right through the opposition. I absolutely loved seeing a big mob of Venom Lords bunch up in the corridors of the Chaos Sanctuary and then blast right through them all with a few bolts of glowing holy energy. None of the seal bosses caused any problems, not even the Infector and his pack of Venom Lords which Usain handled by stutter-stepping backwards while firing off Holy Bolts at the pursuing mob. It helped here that Usain was already an extremely fast character with 59% faster run speed (!) from his boots and Stealth runeword and Vigor aura.

For Diablo, Usain took most of his damage while I was trying to line up the best-looking screenshots rather than simply dodge the incoming Lightning Breath of Doom. Once I had snapped a few pictures and started taking the battle a bit more seriously, I didn't run into any serious danger afterwards, just some minor chip damage from the occasional fire or lightning strike. It took a few minutes to chew through Diablo's 13k health bar with Holy Bolt still dealing a little over 100 damage per shot but at least Big Red has no magic resistance in Normal difficulty. I think this fight will actually get easier on some of the repeat playthroughs because Usain will have much, much more damage on his Holy Bolt skill (something like 25-30x the current damage!) while Diablo's health tops out around 100k even in Hell difficulty.

Usain continued onwards into the dreariness of Act Five where I was a bit surprised to discover just how few of the enemies were susceptible to Holy Bolt. The Enslaved monster type pictured above is not classified as a demon, nor are the underground tentacle enemies that they tend to appear with, nor are the Crusher Beasts or any of the yetis or ice monsters in the underground caves. The only things that were considered demons were the various imps, who all died in a single casting of Holy Bolt, and oddly the overseer monsters like Shenk who can turn the Enslaved into exploding suicide creatures. Why they were demons but their associated minions were not didn't make much sense to me. This meant a whole lot of Blessed Hammer usage again which worked well enough in the open areas but had problems in cramped spaces or when breaking through the fortification walls. Even though I was getting better at employing the weird spiral pattern of the hammers, it could be tough to get the things to hit the little doors or cracks in the walls to break through, much less fight moving enemies in those spaces.

With no guest monsters from earlier acts here in Normal difficulty, the Act Four subdungeons like Abbadon and the Pit of Acheron were guaranteed to be packing minotaurs. These were by far the most dangerous opponents that Usain encountered and of course they weren't demons either which meant that he had to use Blessed Hammer once again. My only option was to run backwards while tossing out Blessed Hammers and hoping that the minotaurs would run into them, which doesn't sound like a good plan and wasn't one in practice. Even here in Normal, Usain was nearly killed by two different minotaur bosses that each dropped him below 100 HP, though that was my fault because I was insisting on drinking red potions instead of an emergency full rejuv. There simply wasn't a good solution for dealing with those blasted minotaurs and I did not look forward to seeing them again on future difficulties.

Level 30 opened up access to Fist of the Heavens for the first time, the final skill to complete Usain's bag of tricks. Fist of the Heavens was a targeted ability that required something to click on (unlike Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer which could both be cast into empty space), and which delivered a strike from above that dealt a mixture of magic and lightning damage. This was a really handy skill for dealing Usain's only source of non-magical damage as well as being something that always hit the target. I found myself using it to break down some of the doors in the various barricades after trying and failing to get Blessed Hammer to hit the stupid things while standing right next to them. There was one big downsides though: the mana cost was much greater than Usain's other two skills. Holy Bolt cost a mere 3 mana per casting and Blessed Hammer had a base cost of 7 mana (both went up a bit with more skill points invested) while Fist of the Heavens was locked permanently at 25 mana cost. That was honestly too much to be practical at this stage of the game where Usain only had a little over 100 mana in his orb and so therefore I used Fist of the Heavens quite sparingly for the remainder of Normal difficulty.

For the moment, Fist of the Heavens was therefore more noteworthy for its synergy effect on the Holy Bolt skill. This one is a real whopper too: 50% higher (base) damage in Holy Bolt for every point invested in Fist of the Heavens! I placed two skill points into Fist of the Heavens and that doubled the damage from Holy Bolt, going from 124-138 at SLVL 11+3 to 248-276 with the new synergy in place. Usain also had the good fortune to start seeing a few more undead and demon opponents as he progressed through Act Five, with the prowling dead seemingly everywhere for a while and then the various witches also all getting tagged as demons. However, as much fun as it would have been to keep pumping up the damage of Holy Bolt to crazy numbers, I stopped after putting those first two points into Fist of the Heavens and went back to skilling Blessed Hammer instead. Usain didn't need more overkill damage from Holy Bolt, what he really needed was better performance from Blessed Hammer for all of those occasions where Holy Bolt was ineffective. This had been the main story of the run thus far, always getting stuck in the various places where Holy Bolt wouldn't work.

I was mostly concerned about two upcoming bosses where Usain would be forced to rely on Blessed Hammer: Nihlathak and the Ancients. Neither of these foes are considered to be undead or demons which ruled out continued use of Holy Bolt. Thus I spent the back half of Act Five continuing to level Blessed Hammer in the hopes of making these fights a tad easier. One small thing that helped was making a Lore helmet, which I could have done even earlier since Usain had seen two different Sol runes drop already (no Thuls or Amns but two Sols, go figure). That added another skill point to everything and boosted Blessed Hammer's damage up close to the 200 mark. Usain used the skill quite a bit in Nihlathak's temple as well, with Holy Bolt cutting through the various prowling undead but the hammer needed for most everything else. Nihlathak himself was a messy fight since Usain had to run in to toss the hammers at close range, which inevitably meant getting hit with Corpse Explosion repeatedly. It worked but only because this was Normal difficulty; I have to do better here when Usain comes back. I think that I'll try using Fist of the Heavens at long range to avoid stepping on the bodies, the skill should be a high enough skill level by then to do real damage.

By contrast, the Ancients were a total cinch for Usain. This battle was my top fear and I littered the arena with roughly two dozen red and blue potions on the ground, plus an inventory filled up with another 20 potions in reserve. None of this was necessary as the Ancients were torn apart by Blessed Hammer in just a minute or two of action. The barbarians always chase your character in mindless fashion and this was enough to run them into Blessed Hammer over and over again. The open space on the central platform was a particularly good place to fight them as there was enough room to avoid the hammers crashing into any terrain obstacles. Usain only took damage when I grew overzealous with his castings and remained locked in place still throwing more hammers as Talic spun onto him. After the exhasting 45 minute fight that I had against the Ancients with WillPower, this was a real breath of fresh air.

The Worldstone Keep was quite easy overall as there were lots of imps and witches present along with those useless Putrid Defilers that never seem to do anything. The only threat was the minotaurs down on Worldstone 3 and, believe it or not, I was actually getting pretty good at killing them with Blessed Hammers by now. The trick is that the minotaurs can hit your character at two-tile range where the hammers will *NOT* hit them in return; the only options are using hit-and-run tactics or standing right next to them at bear hug range where the hammers will land successfully. This felt counterintuitive but it did work in practice. The Throne of Destruction was a total blast once Usain reached the ending boss rush, as all five of the bosses and all of their minions were weak against Holy Bolt. I'd been dropping more skill points into Fist of the Heavens for the Holy Bolt synergy after making it past the Ancients and by now the damage for Holy Bolt had topped 400 per casting. This was in Normal difficulty against opponents with zero magic resistance so poor saps like Achmel and Bartuc were absolutely mowed down by spam-casted Holy Bolts. Even Lister only lasted for a matter of seconds before collapsing into ash. This must be what it feels like to have ultra-top end gear, heh.

Baal was a total joke for Usain's setup. I had my Paladin stay at extreme range and continued spam-casting Holy Bolt as pictued above. Baal shuffled and teleported around a bit, tossed out his orange blast at a distance much too far away to do anything, and then expired after about a minute. He never even summoned his clone! I can only conclude that Holy Bolt works really, really well against this particular enemy. Thus Normal difficulty came to a close, with everything full-cleared and no deaths on Usain's part. He did have a couple of close calls but that was largely due to my own carelessness and I felt that I had a good feel for the character build by this point. With Normal difficulty in the rear view mirror, the tutorial portion of the gameplay was coming to a close and the real game could get started.

Oh yeah, and guess where Blessed Hammer's area-of-effect properties work really, really well? MOOOOOOOOOOOOO!