Usain Bolter: Introduction

As with so many of these other recent characters of mine, Patch 2.4 of Diablo 2 Resurrected made major changes to the Holy Bolt skill, to the point where it looked like it would be viable to design a character around it. This patch made the giant change of allowing Holy Bolt to work against demons as well as undead, greatly expanding the range of possible opponents where it would function. Demons and undead together comprise about half of Diablo 2's monster gallery, including all five of the act-end bosses (which are all demons) to provide an actual weapon for use against them. The patch also increased Holy Bolt's damage significantly, by a base 50% at all ranks, and caused the bolts to pierce through enemies to give them a minor area of effect property. The one downside is that the patch removed a synergy with Blessed Hammer but the base damage increase more than made up for this. Holy Bolt still has a synergy with Fist of the Heavens and it's a truly massive one at 50% more (base) damage per synergy point invested. With Holy Bolt hitting for about 210 damage at SLVL 20, and increasing to about 300 damage at SLVL 26, you can imagine that ballooning the base damage value by 50 x 20 = 1000% adds up in a hurry. Playing around with a D2 skill calculator online suggested that it would be pretty easy to get Holy Bolt's damage up to about 3000 per shot and that's definitely enough to deal with Hell difficulty, especially for a spammable ability with piercing properties.

Holy Bolt also has the unusual aspect of dealing magic damage. This is the rarest type of damage in Diablo 2 and can only be found on a handful of other skills, most notably the Necromancer's various Bone spells like Bone Spear and Bone Spirit. Because the damage type is so rare, there are very few monsters that have much in the way of magic resistance and almost none at all that are outright Magic Immune. The greater mummies in Act Two are about the only ones in the whole game to have this property along with I think one or two types of zombies. Therefore Holy Bolt not only will deal excellent damage in its own right, it will feel even better than normal because my Paladin won't have to be dealing with the endless resistances and immunities that typically plague Hell difficulty. (I'm not sure if most players are even aware that the non-immune opponents are typically packing 30-50% resistance to everything on the top difficulty level; the monsters that lack any resistance at all to an element always die so fast in comparison.)

There's only one big drawback to Holy Bolt: it still doesn't work against non-undead and non-demon monster types! These are mostly the enemies classified as "animals" like bats and spiders and vultures and whatnot, though there's also another enemy type named "constructs" which pop up at times. Anyway, my character will therefore need another skill for these situations and the obvious choice to use is Blessed Hammer. Although it no longer has a synergy shared with Holy Bolt, Blessed Hammer still deals 50% additional damage to undead monsters and uses the same rare magic damage type. Blessed Hammer is not variant material at all, of course, with Hammerdins being one of the most popular Paladin builds for literal decades at this point. I plan to use Holy Bolt as the main damage source and only fall back on Blessed Hammer for the non-undead and non-demon opponents. Then for anything outright Magic Immune, Fist of the Heavens includes some solid if not great lightning element damage to power through those unusual situations. These will therefore be the three skills employed by this character: mostly Holy Bolt with a fair amount of Blessed Hammer and occasional Fist of the Heavens usage. Fist of the Heavens even has Holy Boly as a synergy skill for more internal connection on this build.

As far as Blessed Hammer goes, it has two synergies of its own: Blessed Aim and Vigor, with each synergy point adding 14% to the (base) damage of the skill. Blessed Aim wouldn't be useful for this character outside of the synergy aspect, however Vigor was an aura skill that I'd never used before and wanted to test out. Vigor adds movement speed to all allies, and while this has sometimes seen some use for things like the speedrunning community, it's fair to say that Vigor tends to take a back seat to offensive auras like Fanaticism and defensive auras like Salvation. I would be pumping Vigor to the maximum SLVL 20 in this game though, in order to make use of the Blessed Hammer synergy, and for that reason I might as well run the aura in the process as well. Vigor has severely diminishing returns but when maxed it should result in roughly 40-45% additional movement speed, and although movement speed in Diablo 2 is also a mechanic with diminishing returns, that should still have this character moving really, really fast. I'm hoping to get some 40% faster run boost and then find some of those charms with movement speed on them to reach 100% faster movement speed which I think would be a lot of fun.

Therefore we have a Paladin character who runs incredibly fast and is based around the use of the Holy Bolt skill. Say hello to Usain Bolter:

The character build for Usain should once again be relatively simple. He shouldn't need anything more than the minimal 43 Strength for a Crystal Sword since the Spirit runeword out-performs all other caster options in the weapon slot to such a ridiculous extent, and then Paladins can make use of 4 socket shields without having to take 150+ Strength for a Monarch option to get another Spirit runeword in the shield slot. For armor, I intend to take that second Gul rune that WillPower turned up and make another Principle runeword for another +2 Paladin skills, once again making an exception to my rule of characters turning up their own equipment. I have that very rare rune sitting and Principle is the perfect runeword for this character, I might as well use it. Hopefully I can find more stuff with +skills in the amulet or helmet (circlet) slots but at minimum it should be possible to get a generic Paladin +1 skills on an amulet and a Lore helmet of some kind. That's +8 to all skills and that should be more than sufficient. None of this stuff requires more points of Strength or Dexterity and double Spirits will provide all the mana and faster cast that a casting character would ever need. This should allow virtually everything to get dumped into Vitality as usual - more health is always a good thing.

As usual for my characters, I intend to do a single pass through the game while full clearing each area one time through. I'll have to make use of what I find along the way without repeating areas or trading/twinking/sharing gear (outside of that one Gul rune). I've always felt that Diablo 2 is much more interesting when each character has to come up with their own stuff rather than pooling it all together and god-moding new characters past every challenge. I'll also be able to play in offline Single Player mode which should reduce issues that can pop up from lag and disconnects when running online characters on the Blizzard servers. I still don't trust Diablo 2 Resurrected enough to create a Hardcore character but I'll do my best to clear the whole game deathless and let readers know if I fall short of that goal (as I've done with several previous characters). I'm going to try to complete the whole game without a mercenary this time though I reserve the right to change my mind if things look impossible otherwise in Hell difficulty. No one to tank for him and Holy Bolt as the featured skill - sounds like a fun journey!