Usain Bolter: Hell Difficulty Part Four

The back end of the Foothills did have Shenk and his various minions present. As in the previous difficulties, Shenk and the other overseer-type monsters were demons who could be killed with Holy Bolt but his Enslaved minions were not demons and forced more Blessed Hammer castings. The Enslaved monster type is one of the most basic in the whole game, a melee opponent who can't do anything other than walk up to the player and slash at them, and therefore I wasn't too concerned whenever they popped up. This is the monster type of Eldritch who always lurks right beyond the waypoint at the start of the Frigid Highlands; Eldritch was Lightning Enchanted and Spectral Hit in addition to his always-present Extra Fast, and Usain didn't have issues with him thanks to having the cleared out Bloody Foothills to retreat back into. So far things had been nice and straightforward.

The entrance to the Abaddon subdungeon was within sight of the waypoint and therefore I decided to tackle it before the Frigid Highlands. Usain found himself facing an all-ranged set of opponents inside: more Demon Imps, Hell Witches, and Horror Archers. These three enemies were all either demons or undead and thus Usain could fire back at them exclusively with Holy Bolt, turning the whole River of Flame minidungeon into a shooting gallery. The imps were completely irrelevant and the witches barely more so, with the latter registering only because they could cast Amplify Damage and put Usain into Cursed mode where he took doubled physical damage. It was the Horror Archers who caused all the problems, however, as they were once again bugged and inflicted an absurd amount of poison damage with their arrows. Some readers might remember that I experienced this with WillPower: the skeleton archers are supposed to deal 30 poison damage on their shots but instead dish out some ridiculous total that drains away close to 100 damage per second. Usain had 80% poison resistance so it wasn't quite as bad as what WillPower experienced but I still had to scurry back to town frequently to clear the poison. (This time I was also wise enough to bring some Antidote potions back with me.)

The big difference from WillPower's tortured run through Abaddon was the fact that Usain could actually fight back, not simply stand around waiting for the Paladin elemental auras to do their thing. The skeleton archers were naturally undead and thus Holy Bolt could tear right through them, downing the animated bodies in about three shots apiece. This massively sped up the process of fighting through Abaddon and turned a potential quagmire into a rather leisurely stroll. If anyone needed more evidence that Usain had a fairly strong build relative to my other variant characters, here was more proof.

Back out in the Frigid Highlands, Usain found himself facing an uneventful group of monsters. There were more pathetically easy Demon Imps along with lots of Death Brawlers (one of the underground tentacle enemies) and Slayers, another type of the Enslaved monsters, with their overseers. While I would have preferred getting more demon/undead types where Holy Bolt could be used, the Death Brawlers and Slayers were about the easiest entries that Usain could get in the Blessed Hammer category. The Highlands is one of the largest outdoors areas in the game and this place stretched on and on; I've written a couple times before about how the developers clearly didn't expect players to explore the whole thing. It only became interesting at the very conclusion where Eyeback rolled the absurd boss combination pictured above: Extra Strong / Extra Fast / Might aura / Cursed. I think that that's literally the most dangerous boss trait combo in the whole game as it results in something like 8x normal damage with the boss moving at double normal speed. The saving grace here was that Eyeback's monster type is not very aggressive and his base damage is low for Hell difficulty; I retreated back to a safe distance as soon as I spotted the boss traits and then downed Eyeback at range in safety. Usain only took a single hit and never took a second one after the Cursed status had been applied. Very, very dangerous stuff - do not screw up here!

The Arreat Plateau at the top of the staircase looked very similar to the previous area. The imps were gone to be replaced with skeleton mages that were equally frail, the Slayers were replaced by another monster of the same family that functioned essentially identically, and then the Death Brawlers dropped out in favor of Blood Bringers which were a type of siege beast. Those things were legitimately dangerous, unlike everything else that Usain had been fighting in the outdoor areas, especially when bosses appeared:

These Blood Bringers were much, much tankier than everything else with 22,000 base health as compared with a mere 5000-6000 on the Enslaved monsters and a laughable 3000 on the imps. These siege beasts were also not classified as demons or undead which forced the use of Blessed Hammer, and they hit really hard to boot! They had a base 167 physical damage and that was multiplied by any of the various boss traits that boost damage like the Might aura boss pictued above. A single hit from that thing was dealing about 500 damage and draining Usain's entire mana orb thanks to the Mana Burn trait. The siege beasts furthermore have an innate stomp attack that deals 100-150 damage and cannot be dodged; it always auto-hits the player and it's one of my least favorite enemy abilities in the whole game. These things were dangerous enough that I took the time to hit them with Prevent Monster Heal so that Usain could stay at max range tossing hammers while chipping down their healthbars. The Blood Bringers could still use a charge attack to close the distance that hit Usain a number of times, and there was one encounter with four champs grouped together that forced me to drink a full rejuv out of safety. I really don't understand how the game can have joke monsters like the imps running around with vastly more dangerous enemies like these; it makes a mockery of the concept of balance.

The Pit of Acheron proved to be much easier than its connected outdoor region. The Pit was another all-demon setup with Maw Fiends, Maulers, and Hell Temptress witches, meaning of course that it was another all-Holy Boltable area. After having to use so much Blessed Hammer in the Frigid Highlands and Arreat Plateau, it was a pleasure to be back in a place where Holy Bolt was the only weapon that Usain needed. There was one spot where an Extra Fast Maw Fiend boss managed to scamper close enough to get some bites on Usain, otherwise he eliminated everything at range in almost complete safety. More areas like this one, please.

I picked up the next session from the Arreat Plateau waypoint, only needing to clear out the final 10-15% of the area before moving on. This brought Usain to the first of the underground ice caverns, the Crystalline Passage, where he was immediately confronted by the Snow Drifter boss pack pictured above. The staircase entering the cave was visible at the top of that picture to provide a sense for how little space Usain had available to deal with this boss. I had my Paladin pull the group back towards the top of the screen, then flipped on the run toggle and dashed around the beasts to the right, just barely making it around them to continue tossing more Blessed Hammers from the other side. I had to circle around the mob of yetis twice more before they were all defeated, though it did become easier with each new rotation as some of the big furries started to drop. At least these were Snow Drifters and not minotaurs which can appear in this area.

The rest of the Crystalline Passage wasn't as stressful, not after Usain could actually get down the stupid staircase! There were also corrupted rogue archers in here back from Act One along with some undead Ghosts. Those insubstantial things were utterly irrelevant despite their 50% magic resistance because of their low health totals and tendency to stack up on top of one another for easy Holy Bolt disposal. There were more Snow Drifters than anything else in this cave and they required the most effort to defeat since their animal classification ruled out Holy Bolt. Usain ventured into the Frozen River next which was packed with ranged attackers. This was the nastiest boss encountered shortly after descending the stairs:

That was a Multishot Might aura witch boss and don't forget that this monster type can also apply Cursed status with their Amplify Damage ability, argh! At least the base physical damage from their blood stars is quite low (the Amazon Basin says they only deal 66 damage per shot) and the projectiles are slow-moving enough to be fairly easy to dodge. These witches also had 66% magic resistance which made them feel a lot tankier against Holy Bolt despite having a low health total. The other monsters in here were melee corrupted rogues and cold shot skeleton mages, both of whom died incredibly fast to Holy Bolt. Thus the Frozen River mostly consisted of a shooting gallery against various witches, with each of them taking about 5-6 shots of Holy Bolt to down as Usain weaved in between their attacks. None of this was too dangerous once Usain had the initial entry region cleared out for some retreat room. Frozenstein and his minions were the only yetis in the whole area, and I was quite glad of that since the beast rolled Extra Fast as one of his traits and the associated mob of furry white creatures were zipping around after Usain. I had to retreat back a quarter of the way through the Frozen River to kite all of them to death and it was touch and go for a minute or two before the Blessed Hammers were able to do their thing. (I couldn't even get a good screenshot because I had to concentrate on the fight.)

The Glacial Trail was next and by now I was starting to get pretty tired of all the various ice caves. I wish that Act Five would mix up the terrain types a bit more; there's such a long sequence of outdoors tundra, then a whole bunch of ice caves, and the one main side area (Nihlathak's Temple) is even less fun to pass through. Anyway, the Glacial Trail had more Wraiths and Snow Drifters back again as a normal enemy, plus the addition of Pit Vipers from Act Two. The Serpent Maguses in the Kurast Temples might have had 70% magic resistance but this brand of snakes had absolutely none which made them prime targets for Blessed Hammer. Usain didn't find himself having much trouble even when this boss rolled another Might aura, probably because I was such a veteran of Blessed Hammer usage by now. Keep retreating backwards into open space, let the monsters charge forward into the swirling hammers, and stay safe to fight another day. Blessed Hammer would never deal as much damage or be as reliable as Holy Bolt but it certainly had served Usain well as his alternate ability.

I finished up this gaming session by tackling the attached subdungeon of the Drifter Cavern. This is always a dangerous place to visit due to its tiny size and the presence of a whole bunch of bosses that can spawn right on top of the entrance. This time the Drifter Cavern didn't have a trapped entry, thank goodness, instead rolling a monster mix that was heavy on Abominable yetis. I think Usain fought three separate bosses of that type along with a full champion pack, fortunately not until after clearing out a circular area in the middle of the room where he could kite them in circles. There was even a well there for handy health/mana restoration in the middle of some of these fights. There were also more witches in the cavern along with ligtning-shooting Afflicted but both enemy types were demons who could be dealt with via good old Holy Bolt. The end result was a relatively tame Drifter Cavern that lacked any truly scary moments.

Usain therefore had everything cleared up through the Glacial Trail, almost half of Act Five, in a mere two sessions. He was living up to his speedy reputation by continuing to fly through the game. As I've said before, I think he felt even faster to me because I had recently played WillPower prior to this who took an absurdly long time to clear out every area. Mowing down everything with Holy Bolt was even more fun given that additional context.

I really dislike Nihlathak's Temple and I can see why so many players opt to skip it entirely. The enemies on the bottom floors have a great deal of randomness in terms of what can spawn, Nihlathak himself is a brutally unfair opponent with his Corpse Explosions, and the reward for completing this dangerous and optional portion of the game is a grand total of nothing beyond "personalization" of an item, hooray. One thing that I did discover with Usain was that Redemption aura completely destroyed the walking undead that lurk at the outskirts of the temple. Redemption will remove their bodies even before they stand up for the first time, thus clearing out most of the entrance before Usain even had to fight anything. I didn't feel bad about this either as the two dozen walking skeletons are a nasty trap fight where the player has little room to operate. Pindleskin died to Holy Bolt in mere seconds before I could even spot what his boss traits had been; the narrow entrance hallway to the temple was perfecting for shooting down him and his crew.

As I said above, there's a ton of variation in terms of what can appear in the Halls of Anguish, I think ten different monsters in all, and many of the random combinations can be extremely difficult to clear. Usain wound up getting one of the tamer mixes this time with poison-tossing skeleton mages, swarms of Flayers (without their shamans), and then Temple Guards as a final melee foe. These were all easy to handle and I was happy that Usain didn't draw Night Lord minotaurs with their high health totals, heavy magic resistance, and deadly Frenzy blows. The Halls of Anguish is a large area and it took some time to clear the whole place out, using a mixture of Holy Bolt on the ranged enemies and Blessed Hammer on the Temple Guards. Aside from being poisoned a lot, this whole area was easy.

Things were a lot harder one floor down on the Halls of Pain and the culprit was an enemy that I never would have expected to cause real problems. This floor had more blowdart Flayers along with Guardian greater mummies who didn't bring undead minions along to revive. Both of these ranged enemies were easy prey for Holy Bolt and died quickly whenever Usain encountered them. Instead, the big danger on this floor was the lowly Razor Spines, an upgraded version of the quill rats from the Blood Moor in Act One, who liked to clump together in big packs and pepper Usain with their spines. I had remembered these things from Act One and planned to tackle them through the use of Fist of the Heavens at long range... only to find that these Razor Spines were all Lightning Immune, argh. With them also not being undead or demons, that meant Usain had no choice but to bulldoze through them with Blessed Hammer at close range, eating their quills the whole time. That was OK against the normal version of these things, much harder against the three or four Razor Spine boss packs that appeared throughout the stage. I thought initially that I might have to grab the waypoint and reroll a different map before gritting my teeth and grinding out the full clear. Usain drank a lot of red potions here - like, a *LOT* of red potions. I also had to use some full rejuvs against a couple of the bosses, like the Cursed boss and the Fanaticism aura one, because Usain could not get close enough to down them with hammers without taking advantage of the instant full HP refill. I was able to get the whole place finished but it was tough work, much harder than the typical speedy clears that Usain had been managing.

The bottom floor Halls of Vaught was extremely heavy on poison damage, with poison Bone Spear snakes plus Arach spiders and then Hell Temptress witches who were the only opponent that didn't inflict some kind of poison. This was doable now that the buggy poison Bone Spears have been fixed in D2R though it still was anything but routine; while the witches died quickly to Holy Bolt, the Tomb Vipers took more work and then the Arachs in particular required a whole lot of Blessed Hammers at close range before they would collapse. I worked through the first three quadrants and failed to find Nihlathak in any of them before eventually spotting him in the final back corner:

The traitor drew irrelevant Fire Enchanted / Stone Skin traits which was a nice break instead of something dangerous like Cursed or an aura for his minions. I swapped Usain over to Redemption aura to clean up the bodies of his minions as they hit the ground, though the blood splatters near Usain in the screenshot above are a testament to the fact that Nihlathak still got off a bunch of his Corpse Explosions anyway. There's really no way to prevent this: he creates a minion out of thin air, it transforms into a suicide minion and explodes, then Nihlathak instantly detonates the resulting corpse before the player can do anything about it. Fun stuff. Those Corpse Explosions were hitting for roughly 300-400 damage which was fortunately survivable for Usain as long as he didn't get hit by multiple explosions at once. For safety's sake I was relying on Fist of the Heavens again since it allowed Usain to avoid getting close to Nihlathak where his summons can appear out of nowhere. This slowed things down a bit but I still think it was the right call. I played things nice and secure without ever getting into true danger and gratefully finished up with this pointless quest line.

The only other thing worth mentioning from Nihlathak's Temple was an unusually lucky run of unique item drops. Pindleskin actually dropped Bul Kathos' Tribal Guardian, the companion weapon to the Sacred Charge that I had found back in Act Three. I had sold the earlier weapon because I never play Barbarians and I didn't think I'd ever find the other set weapon, much less have them both appear virtually back-to-back like this! Whoops. Well, I was never going to play a Barbarian using those weapons anyway and the latest set item got sold as well. Then the unique rune staff the Skull Collector dropped in the Halls of Pain which would be a really cool staff weapon for a Sorceress if the Spirit runeword didn't outclass it in every conceivable way. I guess it does have magic find on it though surely the people who care about that stuff can run better options on their endless treasure hunts. Finally, I actually had one of my crafted amulets come up usable: check out this result! I'd been rolling Blood Amulets throughout the game and this was about the eighth time that I'd tried the recipe. Usain not only maintained his current +1 Paladin skills but also hit 9% faster run/walk along with some minor life and fire resistances. His current +1 Paladin skills amulet was probably still better because it had more resists on it, however of course I had to swap over to this one for the 9% faster movement. Gotta go faaaaaaaast!

Usain was getting close now to the final major challenges in Act Five, the Ancients followed by the concluding boss rush gauntlet. The Frozen Tundra usually provides a bit of a break between Nihlathak's Temple and the upcoming trials to follow, with this being a fairly easy outdoor area with lots of open space. Usain found himself facing skeleton archers, skeleton mages, and Carrion Bird vultures which was a rather tame group of opponents. There were a couple of places that had really big mobs of skeletons hurling their various projectiles at Usain but he had already faced innumerable situations that were far tougher than this. The Infernal Pit subdungeon appeared very close to the entrance to the Frozen Tundra, this time hosting huge numbers of Fire Boars and their attached Overseers along with Night Lord vampires and fire element Bone Spear-tossing Salamanders. The fire projectiles on the Salamanders always look really weird and their charge ability hit hard enough to watch them carefully. Still, none of these monster types were a true threat and Usain cleared out the minidungeon without issues, followed by a long slog through the large, uneventful Frozen Tundra.

Then it was back into the ice caverns one final time in the Ancient's Way. There were ice-throwing skeletal mages here together with lightning-spitting Abominables, and then a new enemy that I hadn't seen yet in Act Five with Carvers and their shamans. Everything here was weak against Holy Bolt and Usain's damage output was high enough by now that he didn't have to worry too much about the carvers getting revived. These Act Five versions of the carvers actually had 75% magic resistance... but only 2300 HP apiece on the little shrimps such that they were still dying in two to three shots of Holy Bolt. I did most of the Ancients Way with Usain's usual Vigor aura, trying not to employ Redemption, then eventually had to swap over to the glowing red aura because the shamans were simply reviving too many carvers when I came up against a boss pack. While Usain could have skipped Redemption aura completely and still cleared out everything, at some point it just got tedious killing and re-killing the carvers endlessly while their shamans hid around corners where Usain couldn't reach them.

The plan was to finish with the Icy Cellar subdungeon and wrap up this gaming session before tackling the Ancients to the end of the game in one last evening. And the Icy Cellar started out well enough, with a non-trapped staircase followed by Gloams and Pit Vipers hanging around in the center of the small cavern. Usain killed a sequence of Gloam champions at range with Holy Bolt, followed by a viper boss that lacked anything too dangerous in terms of traits. I had cleared out the central part of the room when Usain drifted a bit further over to the right and this horde came rushing out:

Hell Lord minotaurs, oh great. Usain had been lucky not to encounter minotaurs up to this point in time; while they had roughly 1 in 8 odds to roll as opponents, there had been something like half a dozen different areas where they could have appeared thus far. Usain was definitely due for minotaurs to appear. He had killed one singlar minotaur a minute or two earlier in the Icy Cellar, visible on the ground in that screenshot, and then nothing else until this boss pack came roaring into view. The good news was that Usain had already cleared the open central portion of the Cellar; this would have been a completely impossible situation without some retreat room to kite and fight the bull-headed beasts. The bad news was that Blessed Hammer didn't seem to be doing much of anything to the mob of oncoming attackers. I raced backwards to the top of the cavern where the things trapped Usain against the wall and barely bailed out of a town portal in time.

This was an exceedingly dangerous situation that clearly was going to require a lot of work. I made sure to return via the Ancients Way waypoint - not back through that town portal which would have meant certain death! - and tried once again to get the minotaur group to follow behind Usain while he threw out Blessed Hammers behind him. I tried this for another minute or two with absolutely no success. The creatures simply did not take damage from Blessed Hammer in any kind of consistent fashion and their ticking HP regen wiped away the minor pinpricks that Usain was able to deal. Stymied here for the moment, I lured the group to the north side of the cavern and once again escaped through a town portal. Time to try a new strategy:

If Blessed Hammer couldn't get the job done naturally, Usain had to fall back on his rarely-used Prevent Monster Heal javelins, always the tool of the weakest variant builds. I carefully managed to lure one minotaur minion back to this cramped space right next to the entry staircase. There was a convenient skill shrine here that even boosted the damage of Blessed Hammer up to about 1500 per cast and Holy Bolt up to the pictured damage at SLVL 29 - I sure wish that Holy Bolt had worked on the minotaurs! Now Usain could take the time to tag the minotaur with PMH to stop its regeneration and then slowly kill the thing with Blessed Hammer.

I want to stress that this was still very difficult, even against a solitary minotaur minion! Hell Lord minotaurs have absolutely absurd stats in Hell difficulty: 16,000 health on average, 108 base physical damage plus another 48 fire damage and 48 lightning damage, then some of the most insane resistances in the whole game: 50% fire and magic resistance, 75% physical and cold and poison resistance, along with 100% lightning resistance to be outright immune. Yes, this blocked Fist of the Heavens as a possibility though I doubt it would have been too useful here. Then the minotaurs have their Frenzy ability: as soon as they land a single attack, they will go into Frenzy mode which functions just like the Barbarian skill, hitting twice at boosted damage and attack rating. One of those double hits in Frenzy mode could easily deal 700-800 damage to Usain and that was without this boss even having offensive traits! Frenzy also boosts movement speed and I swear that the minotaurs equalled Usain's own ridiculous speed once they activated Frenzy. Their range was also much further than the animation suggested, with the minotaurs able to hit Usain even when he wasn't close to them visually.

Long story short: these minotaurs were incredibly tanky, could not even be damaged without hitting them with Prevent Monster Heal, attacked for insane damage, and moved just as fast as my Vigor Paladin who had something like 120% movement speed on his build. I really do not understand what the developers were thinking when creating this monster type. Why is this one enemy vastly more dangerous than everything else, to the point where it's like something from Dark Souls was dropped into an entirely different genre of game. What in the world is up with these things?!

Anyway, I realized that Usain had to play extremely defensively even when he was facing a single minotaur. First he had to apply Prevent Monster Heal which was its own struggle since any hit taken from the beasts would chill him via their Cold Enchanted boss trait and drop his attack speed to nil. Once he had the PMH tag, I would throw out Blessed Hammers at a distance while kiting the minotaur in circles. Each hammer had its damage cut in half and was hitting for about 700 damage, therefore requiring something like 30 hammers to get a kill against the boosted health totals of the minions even without them regenerating. I had to stop all attempts to throw hammers if Usain took a hit, as it was simply too dangerous to take any offensive action while the minotaur was in Frenzy mode. He had to run in circles for 20 seconds after every hit until Frenzy timed out, then I could go back to using Blessed Hammer again whenever it was safe. The best opportunities came when a minotaur would swing and miss, thus granting a few seconds for Blessed Hammer usage, though inevitably sometimes Usain wouldn't be far enough distant and take hits which forced another retreat session until Frenzy timed out again. I found myself having to drink a full inventory's worth of red and blue potions to kill a single minotaur minion in this fashion - have I adequately conveyed how painful this process was yet?

Slow as it was, it did work though. First one minotaur minion fell, then I lured a second one back to the entrance and repeated the process. Then a third, then a fourth. I was starting to get a bit faster as I repeated the process, learning exactly how far away Usain could stand in safety and when he had enough time to slip in a few Blessed Hammer casts without taking a hit. The fifth minotaur pulled back was the boss who wasn't really any tougher than his minion buddies, only having a bit more health to work through. It was a good thing that the Lightning Enchanted sparks were irrelevant by this stage of the game, though the chilling effect from Cold Enchanted had been quite dangerous and the Mana Burn had drained Usain's mana orb instantly from any hit taken. Eventually the boss dropped followed by two more minions taken out one at a time, and Usain finally had this boss defeated. He literally killed the earlier Gloam boss in ten seconds, then needed half an hour for this minotaur. Diablo 2, a very balanced game!

There was still the remainder of the Icy Cellar to finish, of course. The bottom side of the map had one more normal minotaur which Usain was able to slay right out in the central portion of the map, though it did require another Prevent Monster Heal application to stop the enemy HP regen. The Icy Cellar always has the same map layout with a narrow corridor that runs along the north edge of the cave and leads to the gold chest in the southeast corner. There were more snakes and Gloams up there, followed by a champ pack of those blasted minotaurs again. This time though Usain was able to use the terrain to his advantage: by racing around this corner, he was able to get the minotaurs stuck at the edge of the frozen water where Blessed Hammer juuuuust barely reached them at the extreme outer edge of their spiral pattern. I lured four separate minotaur champs to this spot one at a time and killed them in turn, each of them requiring about two full mana orbs worth of Blessed Hammers to drop. I had to hit each one with Prevent Monster Heal before starting the Blessed Hammers, and one of them dodged 65 javelins in a row before Usain finally landed a hit. RNG at its finest, heh. After that Snapchip Shatter was a complete joke as he was too slow to ever reach Usain while eating facefulls of Blessed Hammers. I took a screenshot of the fully cleared Icy Cellar's minimap just to prove that Usain had finished this place; D2R's timestamps in the corner indicate that Usain spent a good 40 minutes in this tiny area. Good grief!

When returning back for what would hopefully be the final gaming session with Usain, I started out at the Ancients Way waypoint and turned the first corner to run into a champ pack of minotaurs. No thanks! I certainly wasn't going to fight through that after having already full cleared the Ancients Way in the previous session. I saved and exited Diablo 2, then relogged again and came back to find them replaced by quill rats, skeleton mages, and more carvers with their shamans. These were vastly easier opponents and Usain quickly made his way up to the Arreat Summit where the Ancients awaited:

The Ancients are typically one of the toughest obstacles in the whole game, both due to their own high damage output along with the whole "cannot portal back to town" gimmick. However, Usain had cleaned house with these guys on both of the lower difficulties and he seemed to have a character build that worked well against them, even with Holy Bolt not being usable. I made sure to prep the Arreat Summit with about a dozen red and blue potions apiece, then clicked on the central statue to get started. A quick scan of the boss traits on the three Barbarians revealed nothing that would have forced a reset (any of Cursed / Might / Fanaticism auras) although Talic and Korlic did both have Extra Strong trait which demanded some additional care. The battle tactics here were as simple as always: keep moving and throwing out Blessed Hammers, never standing in one place for long, always kiting the three Barbarians using Usain's incredible speed. The Ancients all have heavy resistances except in the magic resistance category where they all have zero percent protection - ha! That sped things up considerably as the Blessed Hammers were hitting for their full 1500 damage. This turned into a very routine fight of Blessed Hammer after Blessed Hammer, taking about seven minutes in total by the in-game clock to wear down the three enemies. No close calls, nothing terribly dangerous, nice and routine. Excellent.

The bonus experience from completing the Ancients raised Usain to CLVL 84 where he placed his final skill point of the game into Holy Bolt, maxing it out at SLVL 20+8. I never did manage to gamble an amulet or circlet with +2 or +3 Paladin Combat skills, however Holy Bolt was still doing more than enough damage at its final total of 3498-3938. Most of the potential enemies inside the Worldstone Keep would also be demons or undead, with my one fear being that the minotaurs would show up again on the lower floors. They were absent from Worldstone 1 as Usain was faced with Vile Witches, Soul Killer fetishes, and then those Fetid Defiler monsters that the game seems to treat as serious opponents while actually being more like a clown show. This floor was heavy on ranged opponents but Holy Bolt was the strongest projectile of all as it easily ripped apart everything in its path.

Worldstone 2 does not have minotaurs as a possible enemy so Usain could relax and know that at a minimum he would have his progress secured up to the last waypoint. Instead this floor had Steel Scarab beetles, Black Soul gloams, and poison-throwing skeleton mages. I'd say that this was a slightly harder enemy group because it had both ranged and melee foes, with the beetles racing forward to get in Usain's face where he had to break out Blessed Hammer once again. With a healthy amount of space for fighting though, this wasn't terribly scary and Usin avoided facing anything worth mentioning. I held my breath for Worldstone 3 and was delighted to find that Usain had dodged minotaurs again. Worldstone 3 wasn't sending its finest troops on this occasion as Usain fought the rather pathetic assortment of Horror Mages, Storm Caster finger mages, and Rancid Defilers. Even juicing them up with a Fanaticism aura did little to inspire fear on Usain's part. This was the weakest collection of opponents that Usain had faced in some time and he powered through the whole floor in a matter of minutes.

My last great concern was Death Lord minotaurs appearing in a stairs trap at the entrance to the Throne of Destruction. That can happen and it's torpedoed more than one of my games in the past. No such opposition was waiting at the stairs, fortunately, and instead the Throne of Destruction had Pit Lord demons from Act Four, more gloams, and one last group of witches. These weren't exactly easy foes and I had to exercise some caution but it could have been infinitely worse for Usain. I took the time to clear out the side wings and then headed off to deal with the main boss rush. All five of the bosses were vulnerable to Holy Bolt as they were all demons (plus Achmel who was undead). There were no special tactics or grand strategy here on the part of Usain, just a whole lot of Holy Bolts casted into the heart of each boss grouping. Colenzo died almost instantly while Achmel required a little assistance from Redemption aura to clean up the skeleton corpses as they fell. The final three bosses all chase aggressively after the player so Usain found himself kiting backwards against Bartuc, then Ventar, then Lister. None of them lasted for long, not even Lister, with all of them falling before they could force Usain back through the gates into the Throne of Destruction maze. Holy Bolts, and more Holy Bolts, and even more Holy Bolts after that were sufficient to reduce all of these demons into piles of ash.

Baal was waiting in the Worldstone Chamber as the last remaining enemy in the game. He's infamous for having a truly absurd amount of health at 493k HP along with a further 50% resistance to everything... everything that is except the magic damage type, whoops. This was music to Usain's ears as Baal was prime Holy Bolt bait as he had no protection at all and took the full damage from each shot. Baal doesn't like to get close to the player and generally contents himself by staying at range shooting off his cold wave and "orange" projectile. Since Holy Bolt also has great range, Usain was perfectly happy to follow this arrangement as well, staying at medium distance outside of the orange blast radius while spam-casting Holy Bolts. Baal summoned his clone right away which I simply ignored, staying on the real target while continuing to unload more and more Holy Bolts. In contrast to the ages that I spent here with weaker variant setups like WillPower, Usain sped right though the boss fight. I had to go back to town once for a red/blue potion refill and the whole thing was done in about four minutes:

Yes, the fight that took 61 minutes for WillPower was over in a mere 4 minutes for Usain. What can I say, he was a real speedster! That was all she wrote for Baal who had definitely not been a worthy ending opponent. That random minotaur boss in the Icy Cellar was the real final boss of the game as it had taken far more skill and determination to find a way to kill the thing with Blessed Hammer. I could have continued on and done the Secret Cow Level without too much trouble (as Blessed Hammer is really good for that setup) but there didn't seem to be much of a point. This variant was well and truly complete, no need to drag it out further.

Here's a compilation screenshot showing the final numbers for Usain Bolter. He was unable to get beyond +8 to skills with his gear setup though that had clearly been more than enough in terms of the damage on Holy Bolt. That damage comparison on the left hopefully shows why Holy Bolt was so much better than Blessed Hammer and Fist of the Heavens; I had even sunk a lot more skill points into the Blessed Hammer synergies and it still didn't come remotely close to equalling Holy Bolt. Usain's final health and resistance totals were excellent for this character and then all that Vitality pumping along with Vigor aura took Usain up to a truly absurd 4886 Stamina, heh. I don't think I've even cracked 1000 points of Stamina before with any other characters. In terms of movement speed, Usain ended up with +76% faster run/walk from his items and then another 45% from Vigor aura for a grand total of 121% (which translates into an actual 66% faster movement speed above the default D2 character movement). He could go even higher by swapping back in his Stealth armor from the early game (25%) along with a circlet that I gambled with another 30% faster movement for an even crazier total of 175% listed faster movement speed / 80% actual faster movement. That's surely the fastest of any character I've ever created or will create in this game, very much living up to Usain's namesake.

Usain made it completely through all three difficulties, every area full cleared, all monsters slain, zero deaths incurred. Once again you'll have to take my word for it although this was certainly a more powerful character than some of the other variants that I've done. I created Usain to test out the power of the revamped Holy Bolt skill and wow, did Holy Bolt ever deliver! Anything at all which could be hit by the skill was annihilated by it, with literally all of the challenge in the variant coming against the non-demon / non-undead opponents. I thought that Holy Bolt would be an effective skill going into this variant and it still exceeded all of my expectations. If it could hit more than 50% of the enemies in the game it would be unbelievably overpowered.

There's only one thing left to do: post a video link showcasing Usain's crazy movement speed in real time! Thanks as always for reading along with my silly solo characters.