Usain Bolter: Hell Difficulty Part Three

Fortunately the jungles made for a nice and easy reintroduction to this character after that pause of a few weeks. These areas might be long and tedious but they don't present much in the way of danger, with lots of space to run around and essentially infinite retreat room if things ever go south. The Spider Forest turned out to have only a scattering of festishes, instead being packed full of Cloud Stalker crows and Sucker mosquitoes. While these are typically some of the least dangerous monster types in the whole game, I would have preferred seeing more fetishes here since Holy Bolt worked on them and it didn't work on the crows and mosquitoes. The Cloud Stalkers especially had an erratic movement pattern and a small hit box which made tagging them with Blessed Hammers a bit of a pain. Things were still easy overall except for the one moment when a Cloud Stalker boss rolled Extra Strong / Fanaticism aura traits and had Usain skipping backwards to safety at breakneck speed. Every enemy can be dangerous in Hell difficulty and I made sure to avoid doing anything too stupid.

The first alcove in the Spider Forest was empty and that meant that the next two would hold the Arachnid Lair and the Spider Cavern. Both of these underground areas were packed full of Poison Spinners and Flame Spiders, with the Arachnid Lair having bat Fiends as the third enemy type while the Spider Cavern rolled Giant Lamprey maggots instead. It was the Poison Spinners who caused the most problems for Usain, thanks to their melee bites inflicting an incredible 5956 poison damage, and no, that's no a typo. The poison damage gets dealt over an extremely long period of time but every single attack reapplies the poison to start the ticking counter all over again. The net result was that Usain was poisoned for essentially the entire duration of these two areas, and that introduced some real danger as his health orb was constantly draining away in the background even though I kept drinking a steady supply of red potions. Usain had no choice but to return to town frequently, both to clear the poison and to restock on red healing potions.

Although these places might not have been as tight as the Maggot Lair, they weren't exactly spacious either and it could be tricky getting started in each of them. Both caves had six or seven bosses apiece and I had to drink some full rejuvs while clearing out the initial spider bosses when there was no retreat room available. (Thankfully rejuvs drop all the time in Hell difficulty to restock the supply of purple potions.) It was easier going once there was some space to maneuver but I really did have to watch Usain's life orb closely because I couldn't rely on drinking red potions for health restoration while being perpetually poisoned. I always make sure to clear out the east side of these caves first and save the southwest corner for last since that's where Sszark always appears. Old Buy-A-Vowel rolled a not particularly dangerous Teleportation / Stone Skin combination to go with his always-present Cursed / Extra Strong combo; I still made sure to kite the spider boss in a circle to keep it from hitting Usain. That boss trait combo can easily deal 400-500 damage per hit and I was content to keep running away and throwing out Blessed Hammers until the bug went squish.

Next up was the Great Marsh which had no fetishes present at all, instead it was full of Bramble Hulks and Drowned Carcass zombies plus a handful of Bog Creatures here and there. The Bramble Hulks were probably about as common as the zombies but it felt like there were more of them because the undead died so quickly to Holy Bolt while the tree monsters took about a dozen Blessed Hammers apiece. Usain also seemed to roll an unusually high concentration of Bramble Hulk bosses, including one point where he faced four of them in a row in quick succession. The big things were slow enough that it was easy to hold them a distance while tossing an unending stream of hammers for them to walk into. The toughest boss was probably a Bramble Hulk with Extra Fast trait simply because it could move quickly enough to stay with Usain to some extent.

There are no underground areas in the Great Marsh, thank goodness, so it was straight into the Flayer Jungle from there, all of this having been played in a single session. I was hoping to find the Flayer Jungle waypoint quickly so that I could lock in my progress for the day; this was not to be, however, as the waypoint didn't appear until the final jungle alcove and Usain had to clear most of the Flayer Jungle before finding it. This time the monster mix was full of fetishes and flayers, which amusingly made things easier for Usain since he could Holy Bolt everything to death. There were a metric ton of the little things running around and I was extremely glad for the piercing properties of Holy Bolt once again. Usain also came across two valuable set items here, though neither one of them something he could use: Bul-Kathos' Sacred Charge and Tal Rasha's Lidless Eye. I doubt that I'll ever find the six pieces needed for the full Tal Rasha's set but I stashed it in the shared inventory for a potential future Sorcie.

Usain found the Flayer Dungeon before making it to the Flayer Jungle waypoint, which meant that I had to clear out the place right away or else wade back through vast stretches of jungle in a later session. The Flayer Dungeon and Swampy Pit are dangerous only because there's the potential for undead dolls to appear inside on the lower levels. This time around, they were happily absent in the Flayer Dungeon and Usain only had to contend with non-undead flayers, soul killers, and Gloombats. There were some Cursed bosses in here and nothing is ever truly easy in Hell difficulty but it was all well within the capabilities of what Usain could handle. Endugu had the incredibly defensive trait combo of Magic Resistant / Fire Enchanted / Spectral Hit / Stone Skin... none of which did him any good because Holy Bolt still ripped him to shreds.

The Flayer Dungeon may have lacked the exploding dolls but Usain wasn't quite so lucky in the Swampy Pit. The annoying buggers were present on both of the first two floors of the Pit and they were vastly more dangerous than the mummies, zombies, and Gloams that also inhabited the place. Swampy Pit 1 wasn't too bad as there weren't any boss versions of the undead dolls, then Swampy Pit 2 had several of them to dial up the challenge level higher. This was another time where Usain's amazing speed really did come in handy; he could employ Sirian's old Tempting Fate tactic to dodge their initial melee swings, then sprint backwards and toss off a Holy Bolt as soon as he was out of exploding range. The Holy Bolts did enough damage to put the little dolls in hit recovery mode and stagger them for a split second, enough time to fire off more Holy Bolts and get the kill. I was able to avoid most of the dolls exploding on top of Usain, helped as well by the straight corridors that predominated in the Swampy Pit.

Stormtree at the entrance to Kurast had a Fanaticism aura in addition to his innate Extra Fast trait which had this group of Thorned Hulks racing along the jungle pathways. The battle tactics were the same as usual here, kite backwards while throwing out a cloud of Blessed Hammers, however the whole situation was pretty dangerous thanks to all that movement speed on the enemies. Usain had to flip over to running as opposed to his usual walking to stay ahead of these things. He also turned up another Grand Charm here with 7% faster run and 28% poison resistance, not bad at all even if I really would have preferred anything other than poison in terms of the resistance roll. Since I was saving all charms with movement speed on them by variant rule, Usain had to drop a charm with about 38 HP on it which really wasn't worth the swap. Gotta go fast though and all that!

The above-ground portions of Kurast are always easy to complete, at least as long as you aren't playing an ubervariant like WillPower's build. Usain ran across zealots, leapers, and lots of Doom Apes in Lower Kurast which were all pretty tame foes. The zealots and the Doom Apes would sometimes run away when they dropped low on health which was annoying if not particularly scary. The Kurast Bazaar required more work on my part since it kept the Zakarumite zealots while mixing in Sexton/Faithful pairs where the evil priests could heal their companions. I had estimated that Blessed Hammer's 1350 damage per cast would be enough to slay the zealots through Sexton healing, at least while spam-casting the ability, and fortunately this did prove to be true in practice. One of the many giant problems with my former character WillPower was that he couldn't speed up the casting of his ability, with all of the Paladin auras always ticking on that two-second interval. Usain had no such restrictions and his double Spirit runewords gave him enough fast casting power to hurl out the Blessed Hammers in rapid fashion, before Sexton healing could stabilize their minions. The west side of the map had one tricky fight where there was a double Sexton boss pack next to a Zakarumite boss pack, however Usain had plenty of space and I strung out these encounters to kill the various threats in isolation. Not too bad all things considered.

Unfortunately, now Usain had to start tackling some of the worst areas in the whole game: the dreaded six Kurast Temples. These are tiny areas packed full of monsters, often with brutal stairs traps present right at the entrances, and with half of them holding the potential to roll Wailing Beasts who would be Magic Immune to both Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer. First up was the Disued Fane where there was a moderately difficult stairs trap at the entrance: two Spider Magus champs along with two Night Lord vampire champs. This wouldn't have been so bad if Usain had any room at all to operate, however space was a luxury that he didn't have as I was afraid any movement into an adjoining room would only wake up more monsters. As a result, I had to fight these four champs right there by the staircase, first bursting down a vampire champ with a flurry of Holy Bolts and then standing and tanking the spider champs to ensure that they were hit with Blessed Hammers. I had no choice but to drink a full rejuv here for safety as Usain could not kite the spiders backwards for lack of space. Sometimes you just have to stand there and tank the monster attacks to avoid waking up anything else.

Afterwards, the rest of the Disused Fane wasn't too bad. There were indeed Wailing Beasts here but none of them rolled as bosses or champs and Usain had cleared out at least a few small rooms before they appeared. I was able to hit them with Usain's rarely-used Prevent Monster Heal javelins and then spam-cast Fist of the Heavens to chip down their health bars. At least the Wailing Beasts don't have any lightning resistance, thank goodness. Next I sent Usain into the famous Ruined Temple where he drew the left-facing "T" formation. I checked both side wings and found them empty, then began tiptoeing into the main room to the southwest. Sarina came roaring out right away, drawn to Usain by the long range of Holy Bolt, and she had the Cursed trait and a Conviction aura to go along with her Extra Fast / Spectral Hit combo. Now that might have sounded incredibly dangerous - and to some extent it was! - but Sarina was a demon and for the millionth time Holy Bolt proved to be an incredible weapon. Sarina and her whole mob fell like wheat before the scythe and she never managed to get close enough to hit Usain as he conducted a fighting retreat backwards into the left side of the "T".

It was a good thing that Sarina went down so easily because it turned out that she wasn't the main threat in the Ruined Temple:

No sooner had the corrupted rogue boss fell before this Wailing Beast boss came trotting out on her heels. This boss didn't have the scariest traits as it rolled Cold Enchanted / Holy Shock aura / Mana Burn, and yet the thing was a major source of danger nonetheless by virtue of being a Wailing Beast. With Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer off the table, it would have been really easy for the Wailing Beast minions to surround Usain in a corner and either kill him or force me to Save and Exit by bailing out of the game. I responded by ducking into the side corridor at the top of the temple as soon as I spotted the Wailing Beasts and then slowly began luring out the minions in isolation. I was able to pull out three of them one at a time for disposal: bring them back into the left side of the "T", tag them with Prevent Monster Heal, then run in circles firing Fist of the Heavens until they died. The screenshot above shows just how tiny this little side room was and Usain could not go anywhere else for fear of waking up more enemies. The brute/yeti monster type also doubles its speed when it drops below half health so things only got more dangerous as Usain started damaging these things, sheesh.

Anyway, I successfully pulled out and killed three minions before attracting the attention of the boss and another minion. I carefully slew the minion using the same tactics, then repeated the process with the boss itself. The Mana Burn trait on these things forced Usain to drink a lot of blue potions, not least because it was completely impossible to avoid taking at least a few hits in these close corners. Once the boss was gone, I was able to draw out the handful of remaining minions... only to find that there was ANOTHER Wailing Beast boss with nearly identical traits right behind the first one! Thank goodness I was able to face them one at a time because having double of these threats in Usain's face would have been completely impossible. I used both sides of the "T" to kite this second mob of Wailing Beasts while casting Fist of the Heavens over and over again, all of which was extremely mana intensive but it did work. All told, there were close to 20 Wailing Beasts in the main room of the Ruined Temple that had to be cleared out before Usain could lay claim to Lam Esem's tome. This was some of the toughest work that I'd done with Usain thus far and I was incredibly glad to have the first two Kurast Temples finished.

I started my next D2 session by venturing down into the Kurast Sewers. Usain discovered that he was up against more mosquitoes, mummies, and Horror / Horadrim Ancient pairs which forced the use of Redemption aura once again. This was the best possible draw that Usain could have rolled since it meant no Undead Soul Killers and their explosions to worry about. Most of the Sewers were quite routine as everything except the mosquitoes were undead and could be cut down with Holy Bolts. I was amused that a single melee bite from the mosquitoes could drain all of Usain stamina even though he had something like 4000 points when running his SLVL 28 Vigor aura. Everything was nice and easy until running up against Icehawk Riftwing who drew Extra Strong / Extra Fast as his extra boss traits and came exceedingly close to killing Usain. I wasn't taking this opponent seriously enough and the bat mob surrounded Usain in a flash; I saw 50-something HP on Usain's life orb in the split second before drinking a full rejuv and getting the heck out of there! After that, I wised up and worked to split the bats apart and slay them in isolation without any more close calls, whew. Usain's journey would have been over here if he'd had 1700 HP instead of 1776 HP - nearly killed by freaking Icehawk Riftwing, what the heck!

Upper Kurast on the other side of the Sewers didn't have any Cantors to provide healing, instead featuring a whole lot of zealots that lacked their protectors along with vultures and more thorned hulks. Usain was used to fighting the two animal monster types by now and neither of them had much success at getting close enough to Usain to deal damage. The zealots were a bit trickier because they liked to run away when they dropped low on health, forcing Usain to chase them down to complete the kill. I had been able to knock out the last remaining health on Zakarumites back in the Kurast Bazaar using Fist of the Heavens, however that didn't work here because these zealots were all Lightning Immune. I relied instead on getting them to run into dead-end portions of Upper Kurast's architecture where they could be polished off with plain old Blessed Hammers. Not too bad all things considered even if a couple of the zealot bosses had Cursed trait to spice things up.

OK, deep breath time: Usain was left with the four remaining Kurast Temples. The Forgotten Temple didn't have anything waiting at the stairs and proved to be quiet overall, only a single beetle boss and some corrupted rogue champs to be found lurking in one of the back corners. If only they all could be so easy to complete! The Forgotten Reliquary had spiders crowding the entryway:

There were about half a dozen of them just waiting to get their pincers on Usain, fortunately there weren't any bosses present though. The big enemy character models worked in Usain's favor here as only a pair of the spiders had enough room to bite him at once and a plethora of Blessed Hammers soon cut them all down to size. The rest of the Forgotten Reliquary was pretty easy, with some Wailing Beasts showing up in time but not until Usain had a good bit of room to move around and with none of them popping up as a boss. I felt a lot better after clearing this out because it was the last Kurast Temple where Wailing Beasts could appear; they had been in all three places where it was possible to spawn, though thankfully only as bosses in the Ruined Temple and never spawning directly on the stairs.

The Kurast Causeway had an easily-defeated Temple Guard boss despite its tiny size, notable because this is the only place where Temple Guards can show up as enemies outside of Act Five. That left two more of the Kurast Temples yet to be cleared, and the Ruined Fane threw Usain directly into the fire:

The staircase here was badly, badly trapped with half a dozen beetles right in Usain's face along with two different clumps of rogue archers shooting at him from either side. None of these enemies were bosses, thank goodness, but this was almost as bad as it could have been otherwise. I fired off Holy Bolts in a frenzy to eliminate the archers first while trying to dodge around the beetles, then swapped over to Blessed Hammer even as more beetles continued piling into the entry room from the left side. After a madcap 30 seconds of fighting, Usain was still standing and everything else was dead, albeit at the cost of five full rejuvs consumed. They had been absolutely necessary though as Usain had no room to retreat to safety, all he could do was tank hits while frantically outputting as much DPS as possible. This is why I always save up about 20 full rejuvs in stash though, you never know when they'll be absolutely necessary.

The rest of the Ruined Fane was no picnic either as Usain had to contend with a difficult Cold Enchanted / Stone Skin / Magic Resistant bat boss which moved around in such a skittery fashion that I felt it was worthwhile to tag it with Prevent Monster Heal. Then there was an Extra Fast / Physical Immune beetle boss in one of the back rooms that I was extremely glad didn't spawn in the entry area before Usain had some space to operate. The final Kurast Temple was the Disused Reliquary, and while there was nothing lurking on the stairs this time, the very first room next to the entrance had an Extra Fast / Extra Strong beetle boss along with its minions that forced the drinking of two more full rejuvs. I had to be liberal here with the potion usage, there was no chance to kite an Extra Fast beetle in that little underground space and red potions wouldn't have worked fast enough to keep Usain safe. That was the last real threat in the Disused Reliquary and Usain could finally start to relax a bit. I had been lucky to see barely any Serpent Magus snakes which can roll in three of the six temples and have 70% magic resistance; they had only shown up once and never as bosses or champs. All in all, this was an extraordinarily scary portion of the game to pass through but it could have been a lot worse for Usain.

It was a relief after that to start a new session in the friendlier confines of Travincal. In contrast to the hellscape that had been Willpower's journey through the temple city, Usain had little difficulty fighting past the Hierophant/Zealot pairs that seemed to be everywhere. He could pull the zealots back away from their healers and then burst them down with repeated Blessed Hammer casts; quite often the zealots would try to run away only to get smacked in the face by an outwardly-spiraling hammer from an earlier throw and drop dead before they could escape. The Night Lord vampires were even easier to kill thanks to their weakness to Holy Bolt, even if their pyrotechnics displays looked amazing from a visual perspective. Usain cleared out the whole area for safety's sake before engaging the Council members, none of which put up much of a fight thanks to their demon status. It was a whole lot of shooting off Holy Bolts and then jogging away to fire more Holy Bolts when the things got close. I mean, Ismail's Extra Fast / Cursed / Extra Strong combo would have been nasty if he'd ever managed to get close enough to hit Usain, but this was another one of those situations where there was lots of room to run and speed really did prove deadly.

The entire Durance of Hate has enemies that fall into the demon or undead categories, making the whole place a festival for Holy Bolt. There are four monsters that appear on the first two floors and the game will randomly pick three of them for each level: Cadaver mummies, Dark Lord vampires, Maulers, and Undead Stygian Dolls. The exploding dolls are always the most dangerous foe and they didn't show up on the smaller first floor, which instead featured a lot of Mauler bosses. I was hoping they wouldn't appear on the vastly larger second floor as well but had no such luck: the vampires disappeared and were replaced by the chittering little things. This meant that I had to be more careful with Usain, slowly walking forward into each new room where the much faster movement speed of the undead dolls would always cause them to race out ahead of the other two monster types. The best aspect of the Durance was its relatively open nature, with the huge expanses of Durance 2 meaning that Usain always had lots of retreat room on hand. I was able to hit and run against the undead dolls and stay out of most of the death explosions; there were a couple of moments where I had to avoid killing the dolls because there were too many of them next to Usain but I managed well enough. All in all, this wasn't too dangerous as long as I was careful about entering each new room. Usain's speedy clear nature meant that the whole of Durance 2 took a little over half an hour to complete - an absolute sprint compared to some of my variant builds.

There were surprisingly few of the Blood Lord vampires in the entry area down on Durance 3, only a pair of them lurking in one of the corners. Sometimes there's a full boss group of vampires waiting but not this time; maybe the game was aware of how thoroughly Usain was annihilating the undead. Bremm had a Holy Freeze aura and drew Extra Strong as one of his extra traits which meant that he packed a real punch and could slow Usain's foot speed to get close enough to land some blows. I foolishly let Usain get cornered and tanked a couple of hits before wising up and blasting him away at range. Maffer raced out of his room over on the left hand side and was zipping around with his Extra Fast trait. He didn't seem to want to close into melee range with Usain though for some reason and Holy Bolts did him in at a distance. There was a vampire boss that had to be cleared in Maffer's room and then Wyand was just sad with one of the most toothless boss trait combos possible: Mana Burn / Teleportation / Lightning Enchanted / Magic Resistant. That wasn't going to do much against Usain.

As for Mephisto, he does have 50% magic resistance and about 94k health but that's still less than the 75% resistance that the Prime Evil has against every other elemental damage type. Mephisto is a ranged spellcaster and the demon liked to stay at a distance throwing out Charged Bolts and Lightnings and his infamous cold shot. This was never going to do much against Usain who had maxed lightning resistance and way too much health for those spells to cause much danger. Even eating the cold shot only inflicted about 200-300 damage which wasn't exactly scary. Meanwhile, Usain was spam-casting his Holy Bolts which still did close to 1500 damage through that magic resistance and cut down Mephisto's healthbar in a hurry. This whole fight lasted less than two minutes by the in-game clock and the random Undead Stygian Doll boss on the previous floor had been more dangerous. Mephisto didn't drop anything interesting in terms of loot, but earlier in the Sewers Usain had found the unique cryptic sword Frostwind, notable for having +11 (!) to the Arctic Blast Druid skill. Should I run an Arctic Blast Druid down the road someday, which could probably get the skill to SLVL 40 using this item? Maaaaaaybe....

Act Four is of course the shortest act by a wide margin in Diablo 2, short enough to combine together with Act Three in this report. It can be a brutally difficult act for many variant builds despite that small size, especially characters who mostly rely on fire element damage, with lots of tough monster types and heavy resistances on almost everything. None of that was true for Usain, however, who found the demon-heavy outdoor areas to be a garden paradise. He avoided drawing leapers in the Outer Steppes which meant a completely Holy Boltable group of opponents, instead getting the Chaos Sanctuary preview of Venom Lords, Doom Knights, and Doom Caster finger mages. Everything wilted to the power of Holy Bolt, literally everything. The pictured Cursed / Might aura Venom Lord boss would have sent WillPower running away screaming in terror but Usain barely even noticed it. Holy Bolt, Holy Bolt, Holy Bolt with maybe a few steps backwards and everything died. Then the Plains of Despair had a nearly-identical monster mix with Corpulents swapped in place of the Doom Casters and the other two enemies staying the same. This was harder by the slimmest of margins, if only because Corpulents were tankier than the finger mages. Izual required a brief swap over to Blessed Hammer and drinking a few red potions but otherwise wasn't much of a speed bump. I placed the two extra skill points into Holy Bolt, raising it to SLVL 17+8, with the hopes of maxing it out entirely before reaching the end of the journey.

The City of the Damned was legitimately tougher as the opposition was changed to Dark Familiar bats, Stygian Hags and their pups, and then finally more Corpulents to chew up the many bodies left behind by the breeders. Holy Bolt continued to work like a charm against the Stygian Hags and I was incredibly pleased to see how quickly it mowed them down. I still have nightmares about facing those things with some of my weaker variant setups like the Rogue Revival team. The hardest enemies proved to be the bats once again, especially a Cursed / Extra Fast boss which forced a full rejuv use at one point. Holy Bolt couldn't be employed against them and the bats had a small hit box plus erratic movement which made tagging them with Blessed Hammer quite difficult. They also liked to run away at low health which made finishing them off rather tough; I also saw them fly right through solid walls a bunch of times in their retreat animation which was surely some kind of a bug. All of this was still readily doable because of the open spaces in the City but the inability to Holy Bolt everything meant that this area took almost as long as the Outer Steppes and Plains of Despair combined.

Usain was flying through these areas so fast that I continued directly onwards into the River of Flame next. The lava sea had another beautiful group of monsters for Usain to fight, Urdars and Maw Fiends and Abyss Knights, all of them gloriously vulnerable to Holy Bolt. I had a blast shooting it out with the Abyss Knights and their multicolored projectiles, with one bridge crossing having a thick nest of them guarding the other side who had to be dug out with repeated Holy Bolt casts. Hephasto had a Holy Freeze aura and Fire Enchanted / Stone Skin as his bonus traits which were pretty tame options; I'm always glad when he avoids rolling stuff that adds to his direct damage. The Hellforge quest reward was a Fal rune which would have been nice for a Lionheart if Usain needed something like that. One thing that did drop was the unique Giant Sword Kinemil's Awl which has +6 to Holy Fire on it - where was that for WillPower?! It was useless now though since I certainly wasn't about to create a second character based around Holy Fire aura. Once again this was an easy area to complete and Usain raced his way through the whole River in about 20 minutes of real world time.

The Chaos Sancutary was more of the same, it always has the same three enemies present and all of them were susceptible to Holy Bolt. Venom Lords, Storm Casters, and Doom/Oblivion Knights are tough customers for a lot of variant builds but certainly not for this one. It's been a very long time since I had a character lay waste to the Chaos Sancutary as thoroughly as Usain did on this trip, clearing out the whole place along with the seal bosses in about 15 minutes. De Seis and his melee minions were never fast enough to close with Usain despite their Fanaticism aura while the Vizier and his Storm Casters were kind enough to line up in a perfect row for Holy Bolting. The Infector was the only foe that required a bit more effort, as I bailed out of a town portal after popping the seal and came back via the River of Flame waypoint rather than trying to fight a dozen Extra Fast Venom Lords in a tiny corner of the Sancutary. Was it really this easy to complete Act Four in Hell difficulty?

The answer to that was yes, yes it was. Diablo spawned on the central pentagram while I had Usain positioned off to the southwest as usual, my favorite place to fight the big guy since there's a lot of space there before reaching the first lava pool. Diablo was slow to leave the pentagram this time and Usain's Holy Bolts were tearing him a new one from a long way away. I could barely even see the boss but I knew those Holy Bolts were hitting because Diablo's life bar kept dropping. It turns out that Diablo has no magic resistance at all, causing him to take the full 3200 damage per Holy Bolt and even his 114,000 HP total wasn't going to last long against that kind of punishment. According to the in-game clock, Diablo made it to one minute but didn't make it two minutes elapsed before he was collapsing onto the floor of the dark cathedral. Good grief, Holy Bolt is pretty darn strong with this many skill points invested!

Act Four was therefore really easy for Usain, as I had suspected it would be. I hadn't expected to run the whole act in one setting but things played out that way with a mere two hours invested from start to finish. I had been very confident that Usain would make it to Act Five as soon as he cleared the final Kurast Temple and it seemed like he would get his chance to complete the game deathless. There was only one more act to go before he could finish his three dot quest; could I make it the rest of the way without screwing up and dying? I would soon find out.