Usain Bolter: Nightmare Difficulty Part One

In terms of equipment, I was most hoping to upgrade Usain's amulet slot which had a paltry 5% resist all because I hadn't been able to find anything better thus far. It was already possible to hit +1 Paladin skills from gambles and I thought I'd save up until CLVL 40 when +2 to Paladin Combat skills would become an option, then start trying to hit one of those two affixes. I could also stand to improve on his boots, belt, and rings which should all be possible to do in time with more gambles. My biggest concern though was Usain's weapon slot: after finding lots of Crystal Swords throughout the first three acts, they had completely dried up in Act Four and Five. An exceptional Dimensional Blade appeared, and two Crystal Swords that already had sockets (two and three sockets on the pair), but no normal white Crystal Swords showed up. This was a real problem because Usain was about to hit the point where Crystal Swords would get 6 sockets from a socket quest result, not the 4 sockets that he needed to make a Spirit runeword. And it had to be a Crystal Sword, no other item type would do for this particular runeword. Unless he could turn up this exact sword type in the next few areas, I'd have to resort to a fallback plan for the weapon slot.

The monsters in the early stages of Act One Nightmare were no match for Usain's growing mastery over the Holy Bolt skill. The Quill Rats in the Blood Moor were animals and required Blessed Hammer, however aside from them Usain had an extended sequence of facing nothing but undead and demon opposition for long areas on end. Holy Bolt absolutely decimated everything that Usain encountered during this span, not least because I placed a couple more skill points into Fist of the Heavens to take its damage up above 500 per shot. That turns out to be an awful lot of damage for a skill with no cooldown, excellent range, and piercing properties which laid waste to fallens, skeletons, and corrupted rogues of all kinds. Most of the enemies in Act One Nightmare have somewhere in the range of 200-800 health and absolutely none of them have any magic resistance, turning everything into one-shot or two-shot kills. Even the fallen shamans died in a single Holy Bolt which made it trivially easy to stop them from resurrecting their minions. This was smooth walking on easy street and none of the various bosses that popped up were worth mentioning.

Since the monsters weren't putting up any kind of a fight yet, this was a good moment to discuss how I was allocating Usain's various skill points. Both of his main damaging skills (Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer) had synergies attached to them, and I was trying to assign the new skill points from each level up to either the base skill or a synergy skill, whatever would result in the most damage added. This was tricky to manage because synergy skills only function based on actual skill points dropped into them, not +skills gear, but Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer did benefit from the Lore helmet that Usain was wearing. The math was complicated enough that it was easier for me to rely on an online Diablo 2 skill calculator where I could check what would result in more damage: taking Blessed Hammer from SLVL 14 to 15 or its Vigor synergy from SLVL 5 to 6. In this case it was the Vigor synergy: directly skilling Blessed Hammer increased damage from 217-224 to 234-241, but skilling Vigor increased the damage from 217-224 to 235-242. Plus skilling Vigor also increased Usain's movement speed to make him even faster!

I was continuing to put more skill points into Blessed Hammer since Holy Bolt was annihilating everything so easily and it didn't need more overkill damage. Holy Bolt remained the order of the day as Usain did not face a single non-demon / non-undead opponent all the way up until facing Treehead Woodfist in the Dark Wood. (And Treehead's always-present mob was the only such group in the Dark Wood, everything else was carvers and skeletons and corrupted rogues.) I had enough practice by now that Treehead's brutes fell quickly to Blessed Hammer and without putting Usain in any danger. I also had the good luck to see a normal Crystal Sword finally appear in the Cold Plains which dropped at the appropriate item level to yield 4 sockets from the socket quest reward. Now Usain just had to turn up the appropriate runes to make the Spirit runeword; he had everything except the Thul rune saved up which was stubbornly refusing to appear. I hoped that the Countess might help in this regard but she only gave Usain Tir and Ral runes, not exactly what I was looking for.

Usain full cleared up to the Outer Cloister by which time another Ort rune had dropped which gave me four of them, enough to Cube up into a Thul rune with an extra Ort to spare. This was a good moment to pop back to Normal difficulty, cash in the socket quest reward on that Crystal Sword, and finally make the Spirit runeword:

This was the result, with Usain losing a skill point in Holy Bolt but gaining two skill points in everything else, 31% faster cast rate, 55% faster hit recovery, 22 Vitality = 66 more HP for a Paladin, 95 more mana, and some minor magic absorb. As I've said many times before, this runeword is MUCH too powerful for casting characters as it gives them basically everything that they could possibly want from common runes and a very minimal stat point investment (only requiring 43 Strength). If this didn't exist, I would have to think carefully about how many points to put into Energy to ensure that Usain didn't run out of mana when casting Blessed Hammer and Fist of the Heavens. With Spirit, however, it was easy to skate by with no investment into Energy at all while dumping everything into Vitality aside from the most minimal points into Strength. In fact, the picture here reflects Usain's stats after I used my first respec to remove everything from Energy that I needed for the pre-Spirit portion of the gameplay and shuffle it over to Vitality instead. He lost 30 points of Energy but still had his mana pool increase by about 50% while health ballooned from 650 HP to 850 HP. Plus Usain gained 30% faster cast and tons of faster hit recovery too! Have I mentioned how busted this runeword is?!

The other big item find in Act One was a Heraldric Shield (one of the Paladin-only shields) with a base 20% resist all. That was an innate property on a white non-magical item, mind you, which meant that the shield could still be socketed and turned into a Spirit runeword later, while still requiring a paltry 40 Strength instead of the 150 points which would be needed for a non-Paladin character to make a Spirit shield. This item was so good that I didn't want to take the risk of rolling something other than the maximum four sockets so I set it aside for a long time until it could get the Nightmare socket quest reward. Usain was also waiting for the arrival of CLVL 53 when he'd be able to make the Principle runeword for his armor using that donated Gul rune, and then he'd have to see if he could gamble some more +skills stuff for his amulet and circlet slots.

With his new Spirit sword in hand, the remainder of Act One simply flew past for Usain. I dropped the next skill point into Holy Bolt to get it back to the same 500ish damage per shot as before, then continued carving a path of destruction through the poor unfortunate monsters that came into contact with Usain. Everything that wasn't a boss died in two shots and everything continued to be some type of demon or undead creature. There were a couple of yetis in the Outer Cloister and some Arach spiders down on Catacombs 2, but aside from them the only things that required Blessed Hammer were the Gargoyle Traps that infrequently popped up by the stairs. The Smith rolled Cursed to go along with his innate Extra Strong trait, fortunately he wasn't fast enough to reach Usain though. Nothing else even rose to the level of being a threat as the Holy Bolt-fest rolled onwards.

Andariel was the same story, with Usain pulling her back to the blood pool and then shooting her down at max range over the course of about one minute of combat. She was unable to land any of her Poison Nova abilities because Usain was well back from her position and Holy Bolt continued to do excellent work in taking down this latest act end boss. Thus Act One was a complete cakewalk from start to finish as something like 95% of the opposition had been vulnerable to Holy Bolt. I knew things were going to be tougher in Act Two which has a lot more "animals" in its monster mix which was why I had been continuing to pump more skill points into Blessed Hammer. My one regret was spending about 1.5 million gold on amulet gambles without turning up +1 Paladin skills thus far. Usain had hit +1 skills for 4 of the 7 classes in Diablo 2, and gotten Necromancer +skills more than once, but without hitting his own class thus far.

Act Two began much the way that Act One had ended, with masses of undead skeletons packing the three floors of the Sewers. Holy Bolt continued shredding everything in sight and Usain simply raced through this area. The only non-undead opponents in here were Sand Raiders who didn't even appear on two out of the three levels, easy stuff. Radament's resurrection abilities didn't help much when every Burning Dead skeleton was dying in two hits of Holy Bolt. Then it was time to head out into the deserts:

These had been surprisingly tough areas back in Normal difficulty since Holy Bolt was useless against most of the desert critters and Blessed Hammer was only just unlocking at SLVL 1. Usain actually had had to melee his way through the Rocky Waste since he didn't even hit Level 18 until after it was cleared. Here on the second pass through the game, however, it was a completely different story. Blessed Hammer was now dealing approximately 400-450 damage per casting as opposed to Normal difficulty's 12-16 damage, and while monster health was also vastly higher in Nightmare, it wasn't 35 times higher. Add in a much larger mana pool to avoid running out of spellcasting power plus my own immensely greater familiarity with how Blessed Hammer operated as a skill, and well, it wasn't even a comparison. Blessed Hammer absolutely crushed the various beetles and leapers and spear cats that made up the population of these regions, tearing through them like a skill on a mission. Usain's Blessed Hammer tactics had been forged when fighting minotaurs back in Act Five; he could deal with the far-less dangerous AI attack patterns of these desert opponents just fine.

When it was time to venture back underground into the Stony Tomb and the Halls of the Dead, Usain once again swapped back to Holy Bolt as his primary weapon to meet the undead threats down there. The Stony Tomb was another case of lawnmower mode cutting down all comers, but the Halls of the Dead dialed up the challenge level a bit by introducing greater mummies for the first time. They had enough health to require about four shots of Holy Bolt to down and naturally they would keep reviving the other undead until defeated. This still wasn't much to worry about for Usain since Holy Bolt would pierce through the various skeletons and mummies to hit the Hollow Ones in the back, however it would be a different story entirely in Hell difficulty where all of the greater mummies would be Magic Immune. Fist of the Heavens would work against them, of course, but I thought that I would probably need some additional assistance given just how cramped the tombs can get on the top difficulty. More on this later if Usain makes it back to Act Two again in Hell difficulty.

There was one truly amazing find in the Halls of the Dead: a superior version of a Paladin-only Heraldric Shield that had 29% resist all! That was on a white non-magical item which meant that Usain could use his upcoming Nightmare socket quest on the thing and get four sockets to make his Spirit runeword. This was even better than the previous Paladin shield with 20% resist all that I'd been holding in stash so I made the swap and continued to hold for Act Five. This would make it easier to maintain high resistances on Usain without needing to get them from the boots slot (where I wanted to get 40% faster run) or the amulet/helmet slots (where I continued to look for more +skills gear).

One place that I did not enjoy visiting while trekking across the deserts was the Maggot Lair. The cramped spaces were horribly unsuited for Usain's skill set, with the maggots and beetles inside all immune to Holy Bolt while Blessed Hammer had about the most useless trajectory possible for the tunnels. It was a real shame that Holy Bolt didn't work here as the straight corridors would have been perfect for the skill. Instead, Usain was forced to make clumsy use of Blessed Hammer which could just barely hit a single target at a time if Usain was directly next to them. Not six inches away, mind you, Usain literally had to be hugging them for the stupid skill to hit. I even found myself using Fist of the Heavens a fair bit because it could actually hit something more than a nose's length away even if it did cost a huge amount of mana for each cast. Ironically, Coldworm was probably the easiest opponent in the whole Maggot Lair since she had a large room where Blessed Hammer could be used to good effect and never tried to move out of the way once the hammers were flying.

The next foes of note for Usain were the Claw Vipers and Salamanders in the Claw Viper Temple. This time Usain did not have an all-snakes monster mix, as there were greater mummies and their skeletons mixed into the temple as well, which forced a lot of swapping between Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer. I found the Claw Vipers to be easier opponents this time around for Usain, mostly thanks to having dozens of additional skill points invested into Blessed Hammer, but the snakes were still problematic to deal with in a way that I hadn't expected. Eventually I figured it out: Blessed Hammer is a skill that requires precise positioning to be most effect. Oh sure, the player can throw a dozen hammers into the air willy-nilly and they're guaranteed to hit something, but that's the most wasteful and lowest-skill way to make use of the thing. The efficient way to employ Blessed Hammer requires the player to position themselves slightly below or to the immediate right of the intended target, which causes the initial arc of the hammer to smack into their foe on the first rotation. That was hard to pull off with the vipers as they kept charging forward and disrupting Usain's careful movements in a way that could be dangerous. The snakes were all dying in three or four hammer hits so there wasn't too much cause for concern yet but I did wonder what this would look like when the enemies were juiced up with extra stats in Hell difficulty.

I hadn't been happy with my Fangskin fight in Normal difficulty and resolved to do better with Usain here in Nightmare. I carefully lured out a couple of Claw Vipers on the north side of the small floor (no greater mummies this time around, only snakes) until running into enemies with the minion tag. I had Usain advance far enough to wake up Fangy, then turned and raced around to the south side of the platform, which had been emptied out of opponents, and up onto the central altar. Once Usain was there, he could hurl Blessed Hammers and kill everything in perfect safety. Nice and smoothly done if I do say so.

The Palace floors have a mixture of undead and non-undead opponents that can be found there and I was hoping for lots of skeletons on this pass through with Usain. That didn't really happen though as instead the place was crawling with Invaders and Dune Beasts on nearly every level, forcing more Blessed Hammer usage. Nothing too serious popped up across these four floors, just smacking a lot of creatures with the rotating hammers at close range and shooting down the handful of skeleton archers/mages with Holy Bolt when they appeared. Then it was on to the Arcane Sanctuary which remained a paradise for Usain's character build. There are always the same three enemy types in the Sanctuary (goats, vampires, and ghosts) and Holy Bolt worked magnificently against all of them. Usain was ripping through them at breakneck pace as the piercing nature of the Holy Bolts was a perfect fit for the narrow walkways in this distorted realm. The only foe in the entire place who required Blessed Hammer was the Summoner himself, who Usain didn't encounter until the final quadrant and who collapsed after three or four hammer tosses. If only every area could be this easy!

Usain reached CLVL 51 while rampaging through the Arcane Sanctuary and that was noteworthy because it was when boots with 40% faster run speed (the maximum possible amount) become available as a guaranteed modifier on gambles. I had saved up a whole bunch of gold and burned through about 800,000 of it while gambling with Elzix. I was hoping to get Boots of Acceleration with that 40% faster movement along with some kind of useful prefix; I was able to turn up several Boots of Acceleration across all those gambles but sadly without anything else useful attached in the prefix slot. I swapped over to one of those boots for now while holding onto another pair with 30% faster run and a big boost to cold resistance which Usain would probably have to use for Hell difficulty. But for the moment, he still had his Stealth armor with 25% faster run, plus the new Boots of Acceleration, plus his Vigor aura for a grand total of:

104% faster movement speed! Note that the stat screen only counts faster movement from gear, not the Vigor aura, so the 39% faster run from the Paladin aura has to be added separately to the 65% increased speed from equipment. This was the fastest that any of my Diablo 2 characters has ever been and by a wide margin. Usain was RIDICULOUSLY fast with all of this stuff stacked together, with his walking speed comparable to the running speed on some of my other characters who were weighed down with heavy armor and who didn't have anything better than 20% faster movement. I've mentioned this before but I often thought that he was running when in fact Usain was still in walking mode, he was going that darned fast. It was particularly fun to use the zoom-in feature unique to Diablo 2 Resurrected and watch Usain sprint through areas that had already been cleared out of monsters. This kind of movement speed boost was addicting and it was going to be tough to go back to other characters after this.

Faster walk/run is a mechanic that does suffer from diminishing returns in Diablo 2 although it's not as bad as the attack speed / casting speed frame rates which have very specific breakpoints that players want to target. Here's the official formula courtesy of the Amazon Basin: Effective Faster Run/Walk = [ (150 * FR/W) / (150 + FR/W) ]. The numerator in this equation uses multiplication while the denominator uses addition, which has the net effect of causing higher amounts of faster movement to gradually lose their effectiveness. Here's the table as translated into actual in-game values:

Note that at first the faster movement from equipment and the actual movement rate parallel one another, then eventually it starts taking more and more boosts to this stat to get an actual movement rate increase, capping out with an asymptote as the graph approaches its ultimate limit of 150. For the case of Usain, his movement rate increase of 104% was translating into an effective increase of 61% faster movement than an unequipped character and that was freaking fast indeed. Most of my characters wind up with somewhere between 20-30% faster movement after taking into effect their armor penalty which is something like roughly 20% faster effective movement. Usain had about triple that bonus and it was very, very noticeable to someone who's been playing this game for 25 years. He really didn't need this much additional speed and I surely could have gotten something more practical on his boots than 40% faster movement but all of this was definitely a whole lot of fun.

In terms of Usain's quest, next up was the Canyon of the Magi where he had the good fortune to avoid drawing any of the annoying maggots that can spawn there. Instead the Canyon had lots of beetles and two different types of spear cats, with the ranged version of the cats taking a little more effort to kill with Blessed Hammer because they kept running away instead of closing to melee range. There was enough space here that Usain wasn't threatened as he was able to clear out a good portion of the Canyon before any true mobs of enemies showed up. That brought him to the Tombs of Tal Rasha where Holy Bolt once again worked its magic. The only monsters in the Tombs that Holy Bolt couldn't be used on were the beetles and Usain drew them in the first two Tombs, then not at all in the remaining five. This was the rare situation where I was hoping to get Unravelers and their skeleton minions because they were quite easy to shoot down with Holy Bolt. At least here in Nightmare difficulty, anyway; the greater mummies will all be Magic Immune in Hell and I'll have to break out some alternate tactics to make progress then.

For the moment though, the various Tombs were a total cinch for Usain. Holy Bolt was a bit like taking a flamethrower to the mummies and skeletons that packed the Tombs, burning right through anything that it touched with extreme prejudice. The underground rooms were often so packed with undead opponents that Usain would simply stand in the door for 15 or 20 seconds at a time, holding down the left mouse button to cast Holy Bolts as fast as he could get them out (and that was pretty fast with Spirit and Stealth runewords working together for 60% faster cast). Unravelers were always the priority targets with Holy Bolts going right through everything in their way to smash into the greater mummies in the back. I could even cast the Holy Bolts through beetles to focus the Unravelers; the beetles would take no damage but they couldn't block the bolts from passing through to hit the real targets in the back. Usain practically speed-ran his way through the Tombs and cleared all seven of them in a little over an hour; I think that WillPower just went off into a corner and broke down crying after needing multiple hours to clear individual Tombs.

Fast clearing pace meant fast experience gains as well, with Usain reaching CLVL 53 towards the end of the False Tombs. This allowed him to equip the Principle runeword that I'd made some time earlier using the donated Gul rune from my previous Paladin (with my last two characters *BOTH* getting Gul runes from the Hell difficulty Hellforge quest). Principle had the very rare property of granting +2 to Paladin skills in the chest armor slot (where +skills normally don't appear) along with an excellent boost of 131 HP and a decent increase to fire resistance. Those two additional skill points boosted the damage of Holt Bolt over 1000 per cast, not bad for a spammable skill with piercing properties. I'd been dropping some more skill points into Holy Bolt since the end of Act Two was full of monsters where it would be effective, now I planned to go back to skilling Blessed Hammer for Act Three. The only downside was losing the 25% faster movement speed from Usain's previous Stealth armor, knocking him down to "only" 80% faster run/walk. Shortly thereafter, I did find a Grand Charm with 7% faster movement speed though, yay! It was sheer idiocy to keep that in inventory over something that granted health or resistances but of course I held onto it anyway. Gotta go fast!!!

All kidding aside, there actually are a few places where moving really really fast genuinely helps out, and Duriel is one of those times. I found that Usain's 87% theoretical / 55% actual faster movement speed meant that he could stay ahead of Duriel even while chilled from the demon's Unholy Freeze aura. I kept Usain toggled in running mode and kept firing Holy Bolts at the big bug, hitting and running back and forth across the little boss chamber. As in Normal difficulty, Duriel was able to get in the occasional charge attack but otherwise was largely impotent, unable to get close enough to hit Usain before he would scamper away to safety. I continued shooting off Holy Bolts, drank one red potion towards the end of the fight, and otherwise that was it. Usain handled this threat with flying colors.

Act Three and the back half of Nightmare dificulty will be next, stay tuned!