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Corvus started out his journey in the same way as pretty much any other Druid, clubbing fallens and zombies to death in the Blood Moor until he hit CLVL 2 and could place his first skill point into Raven. At that point I switched his left mouse click over to the inactive "Throw" and resolved to rely on the damage from summons for the rest of his days. The first thing that I noticed when making use of Raven was the sound effect: the birds make a little "caw" noise every single time that they attack. I don't mean some of the time, I mean EVERY single time, for every bird. Now as someone who's played various different kinds of summoning Druids before, I was used to having ravens operating in the background without really doing much of anything. It was quite different this time around with the ravens being an actual legitimate source of damage, flying down out of the sky to peck the monsters to death. Between the sound effects and the ravens going on a mass killing spree, the whole thing was downright hilarious to watch. 
Raven as a skill was a bit like Charged Bolt in the sense that it scaled up exponentially during the first few levels. SLVL 1 grants a single raven that only deals 2-4 damage, however the next few skill points keep adding more birds until SLVL 5 grants five ravens that each deal 6-12 damage. Further skill points after that never increase beyond the base five ravens but the damage did keep climbing at a healthy rate, more than keeping pace with the rate of monster health scaling. The range on Raven is also quite good and the birds can even hit monsters off the screen. This can be a problem sometimes: the birds would fly off to attack targets in the distance only to have a new customer wander into view and start bashing on Corvus at close range. When this happened, I had to either run in circles until the ravens came back or recast the ability, summoning a new bird at Corvus' position. It was good to get some practice in how the skill worked at an early date while the danger was low.
One of the biggest problems with the Raven skill is that the birds can't be controlled directly, no way to tell them to prioritize certain targets. This was an issue when dealing with the shamans throughout Act One since Corvus had no cold damage or other means of cleaning up enemy corpses from the field. I found that the best option was to cast the Raven skill directly on top of a shaman's head which worked decently well at getting the summoned bird to focus on the correct target. It wasn't guaranteed though and sometimes they still flew off in random directions due to their internal birdbrained logic. Fortunately the ravens were dealing excellent damage at this early point in the gameplay and one-shotting pretty much everything in sight. Shamans were a lot easier to handle when a single pecking attack was enough to crumple them into the dirt.
Raven is a really unique skill in a lot of ways and it doesn't behave like any of the other summoning skills across Diablo 2. The ravens don't have hit points and can't be targeted by monsters in any way thus making them completely immortal until they reach their designated number of "hits" and disappear. And yet the ravens are still present on the map and their positioning does matter; it's not the case that monsters just take random damage for happening to be in the area around the Druid, the ravens do make an actual attack based on their location. Amusingly, I found that the ravens can get stuck on terrain since they don't really fly in the air. It was pretty funny watching them get stuck inside the little houses in Act One and on other terrain obstacles. The ravens also tend to cluster on top of one another in a group and focus a single target; this is usually a good thing since focus firing helps eliminate individual threats. They were proving to be much better at killing bosses than I had anticipated thanks to this clustering property.
With Corvus dumping each new skill point into a CLVL 1 skill, the ravens crushed everything in sight and Act One just flew by. One of the few challenges was that it was difficult to see the ravens in underground areas, they looked like bats and could sometimes blend in with the background doodads of the landscape. Corvus did need to know where his ravens were located so that he could position around them and it didn't help that there were actual bats as a background feature in many of these underground regions. Overall though Act One Normal was shockingly easy, the ravens tearing right through the mobs of fallen enemies even without any way to clean up their corpses. The big question was how long until the skill fell off? Clearly I'd have to make it a lot further before that happened.
I had two major item finds that both appeared on the tiny Catacombs 4 floor. The first item was Crushflange, the unique mace, which appeared from one of the fallen enemies in front of the blood pool. Crushflange's damage modifiers were irrelevant for Corvus but the weapon had a nice bonus of +15 Strength and a whopping 50% fire resistance, enough to bring that resistance up to max value from virtually nothing beforehand. I was highly unlikely to do better in the weapon slot for a character that didn't attack until finding +skills gear later on, and indeed Corvus would continue to equip Crushflange right up until the end of Normal difficulty.
The other item find was even more significant: a Hawk Helm dropped from Andariel herself that had +3 to Raven as one of its modifiers! I'd been crossing my fingers that I would be able to find a Druid pelt with +3 to Raven on it and Corvus was lucky enough to hit the jackpot here. Druid pelts can't be gambled or bought which meant that I was limited to what appeared in monster drops along the way. (Of course there was always the possibility of getting +3 Druid summoning skills from a circlet later but that wouldn't be possible until CLVL 60 and hitting that exact modifier on a circlet would be difficult indeed.) Instead, Corvus already had +3 to his core skill as early as CLVL 17 and the item even had +3 to Spirit Wolf as well for the minimal occasions where he might need to break out the cold damage wolves. This was just as good as having +3 to all Druid summoning skills because skill synergies only work off actual skill points invested, not +skills gear. Furthermore, CLVL 1 skills won't even appear on items as an option once hitting CLVL 25 which meant that time was running out for Corvus to find these items with Raven +skills at all. The only possible way that Corvus could have done better would have been to roll these same skill bonuses on a non-magical (white) item, as then I could have added two sockets and turned it into a Lore helm for another +1 skills. I certainly wasn't complaining though: this was an incredible find and it would mean that I could completely skip gambling circlets to focus on gambling amulets instead.
The outdoor deserts of Act Two tend to be some of the easiest parts of the game and three additional levels of the Raven skill only made things that much easier. I found that the birds were still one-shotting everything on the sandy dunes and the wide open spaces made it virtually impossible for Corvus to get swarmed. One thing that I should mention is that each additional skill level in the Raven skill adds another "hit" that the birds will do before they disappear. Corvus had enough skill points invested by now that the ravens were each dealing about 30 hits before vanishing. This meant that I rarely had to recast the skill and the ravens themselves never timed out and could never die from monster attacks. They just kind of... stayed up there indefinitely until reaching their hit limit which was really odd. Raven was therefore one of the most mana-friendly skills in the whole game (never costing more than 6 mana per raven) and Corvus was perfectly fine without needing to invest any stat points into Energy.
Eventually Corvus had to venture into the various tombs of Act Two where things were a bit trickier. The greater mummies and their resurrections were basically the same as the shamans in Act One, cast the Raven skill directly on top of them to get the birds to focus the key targets and otherwise use foot speed to stay ahead of the shambling mob. I spent a lot of time walking with Corvus, carefully manuevering around slower undead minions while the ravens went after the greater mummies to shut down their resurrections. This would have been a good place for the standard Stealth armor to provide a bit more movement speed but Corvus wasn't having too much luck in terms of runes and still lacked the Eth that he needed to piece it together. Pure characters sometimes wind up with holes in their setup from even basic stuff that stubbornly refuses to drop.
Corvus finished maxing out the Raven skill at SLVL 20+3 when he was making his way through the last floor of the Maggot Lair. The base damage of the skill was 103-127 and then I'd earlier placed a single skill point in Summon Spirit Wolf to have them on hand in case a boss happened to roll with physical immunity, thus adding another 12% additional damage to reach the pictured 115-142. As I mentioned on the intro page for Corvus, more +skills gear would be extremely important so that he could further add to the base damage of the Raven skill and then get multiplied by all those upcoming skill synergy percentage bonuses. The Maggot Lair itself was annoying as usual without being terribly dangerous since only one opponent could attack Corvus at a time. He continued onwards from there into the Lost Oasis and the Claw Viper Temple where the snakes weren't fast enough to pose a real threat yet. Fangskin spawned up on top of the central platform where the ravens easily pecked him and his mob to death.
The ravens proved to be legitimately good at hitting targets in the Palace cellars. Corvus could open a door and peek inside for a second, letting the birds fly in to start killing things, then duck back around a corner to safety while they did their work off screen. I could hear monsters collapsing in their death animations while hanging out in comfort; it was good to know the Corvus didn't need line-of-sight for his summons to continue operating. The vampires in the Arcane Sanctuary were the first monsters that didn't routinely die in one hit, instead taking two swipes from the ravens. The clear pace remained very fast as the ravens were a bit like a rolling ball of destruction advancing across the landscape. It continued to be weird how they rarely needed to be recast and clearly existed on the screen (thus getting stuck on terrain obstacles) but couldn't be targeted or damaged by monsters in any way. The teleporting quarter of the Arcane Sanctuary was particularly easy as the ravens could fly across the gaps in the architecture to hit monsters on the other side, and the Summoner barely lasted long enough for me to get a screenshot before collapsing to the flock of birds.
The various Tombs wound up being more tedious than truly dangerous. Corvus drew greater mummies and their skeletons in five of the seven tombs, including both Kaa's Tomb and the True Tomb. I used the same tactics as before and continued to make good progress with minimal danger, just a lot of walking (not running) in circles as the Burning Dead slowly chased Corvus while the ravens whittled down the minions. I had to pull the skeletons back out of resurrection range before being able to close with Kaa and eliminate the big mummy. Interestingly, there was one Apparition boss in a different False Tomb which rolled Stone Skin trait and thus a physical immunity which Corvus had to use his Spirit Wolf skill to defeat. Then afterwards I used the "unsummon" command for the first time ever to remove the three ghostly wolves to keep the variant intact. I had never unsummoned anything with the direct command before in more than two decades of playing this game and felt bad for the poor spirit wolves afterwards. They just wanted to help out Corvus! Not allowed by variant rule though.
The Spirit Wolves briefly popped up again versus Duriel where they served as blocking dummies for this unfair battle. The Ravens tore Duriel to pieces in short order and the demon was only able to kill one of the three wolves before expiring. Nice and easy, I was glad that Corvus wasn't the one tanking Duriel's damage though. I still lacked a Stealth runeword as of the end of Act Two, Corvus had all of the early runes up to Ral except that he still lacked that single Eth to make the runeword. Nothing else of notice had dropped in the back end of the act and Duriel's uberdrop had been completely lackluster.
On it was into the jungles of Act Three where the enemy Cloud Stalkers in the Spider Forest were hard to tell apart from Corvus' own ravens. Can you spot the difference in the picture above? The ravens were the birds in dark gray coloring while the Cloud Stalkers were the ones in dark blue. These are some of the easiest opponents in Diablo 2 but it was annoying to have the monsters looking so similar to Corvus' own summons. One thing I discovered over time was that the Raven skill worked much better against large, slow-moving targets. The birds do have to make an actual attack (they have a huge Attack Rating boost and normally will hit but the damage is not automatic) and they visibily struggled with large crowds of the little fetishes. The ravens liked to circle above the head of their target and then wheel down to attack, something that fared much worse against speedy buggers that dashed out of the way. Corvus had to walk around in circles over and over again while the ravens kept missing the little flayers and fetishes. By contrast, the thorned hulks were a complete joke as the ravens landed their attacks with ease against their slow, shambling forms. I never thought that the speed of the enemies would prove to be such a notable factor for the Raven skill but it most definitely was.
Corvus found three Gem Shrines along his path and thus had a Perfect Diamond as early as the Spider Forest. I stuck thus into a 3 socket Large shield since 19% resist all was better than anything else I'd managed to find. He also finally turned up an Eth rune in the Flayer Dungeon which allowed me to make a belated Steath runeword, and then I picked up an amazing Ormus reward ring with 10% faster cast and double lightning/poison resistances. Along with a gambled pair of boots that came with 10% faster run speed and 25% cold resistance, I was feeling better about the gear situation. The extra foot speed (going from 0% up to 35% faster movement in one go) was a major help when kiting around mobs.
Somewhat to my surprise, the ravens were still one-shotting everything throughout Act Three. The toughest opponents remained fast monsters with the undead exploding dolls being particularly annoying. At least the ravens were good at hitting monsters across river segments and across the water in the Kurast Sewers. I was also sometimes able to create tactical situations like the one pictured above, with Corvus himself standing safely inside one of the buildings in Kurast while the ravens attacked enemies around the outside of the structure's walls. While I'm not sure that this made logical sense from a perspective point of view, Corvus was happy to let the birds do their thing while he remained protected.
The dreaded Kurast Temples were mostly pretty tame this time around, with the exception of the very first one. Sarina and her mob in the Ruined Fane were genuinely dangerous, they were so fast that the ravens couldn't keep up with their movement and Corvus had nothing whatsoever to block for him. I was walking in circles in the tiny cramped underground spaces and drinking potions while waiting for the dang birds to kill the monsters. I didn't need to drink any full rejuvs but this was not fun at all; no pictures to share since I was concentrating on careful pathing and not dying. If I ever thought that Corvus could try Hell difficulty with these variant rules, this experience rudely disabused that notion. Nightmare will be tough enough, thank you! (The game is vastly harder with no minions and no mercenary to tank.)
It was hard to get pictures of the Council members in Travnical because they kept dying instantly to grouped ravens. I know I mentioned this before but the damage output when all five ravens clustered together and attacked the same target was genuinely impressive. They were getting close to 200 damage per hit and with all five ravens focusing on the same enemy, well, that was an awful lot of damage for Normal difficulty. The first two floors of the Durance both had exploding undead dolls but at least Durance 2 wasn't obnoxiously large here on Normal difficulty. All of the Council members fell immediately to the birds down on Durance 3 and Mephisto only lasted for a couple of seconds longer before the birds pecked him to death. Does anyone else think that Mephisto and his Black Council maybe came up a bit short of their fearsome reputation - beaten so easily by a guy wearing a hawk helmet with a bunch of kooky birds? 
Upon entering Act Four, I was amused to see how the ravens insisted on killing every Trapped Soul tied to a pillar. Summons are always like that in Diablo 2 but somehow it was funnier when it was a group of flying birds doing the mauling of those hapless souls. The ravens continued to perform really well in Act Four, staying grouped together and instantly killing even beefy targets like venom lords and doom knights. These monsters with their slower movement speeds and big character models were ideal targets for the ravens. For once Izual was harder than the run of the mill monsters, not dangerous but definitely annoying. He had enough health that it took some time for the ravens to wear him down and the demon was running around tossing out Frost Novas the whole time. Corvus had to drink a few red potions to heal up from the chip damage he took along the way; I still needed to improve his cold resistance which was his weakest of the four types.
By way of contrast, the River of Flame had maggots and stygian hags which took ages to plow through. The ravens truly do struggle against swarms of weak opponents (since they clump up so much against the same target), exactly the opposite of what I would have expected going into this variant where I thought they would perform beautifully against the small critters. Hephasto went down easily despite rolling a Fanaticism aura simply because the ravens were better able to target his fat character model. (The Hellforge yielded a Tal rune as its big reward, blah.) Otherwise the River of Flame was a real slog and it took noticeably longer than the previous three regions of the act. At least I did find one real keeper Grand Charm along the way: 13 life and 20% lightning resistance, very nice!
Things became much easier in the Chaos Sanctuary where the big venom lords and doom knights were cannon fodder for the ravens. It was like a series of fireworks going off watching their various death explosions cascading one after another. There was basically nothing the oblivion knights could do to Corvus since he just stood around watching the birds do their thing, no curses that had much effect on my taciturn Druid. Once the rest of the Sanctuary was clear, I focused on taking down the seal bosses one at a time. De Seis and the Vizier did basically nothing and were stabbed by bird beaks until they croaked. For the Infector, I was able to peel off a series of his Extra Fast minions by hiding around a corner of the Sanctuary architecture and letting the ravens pick them off one at a time. Corvus didn't even need to pull a retreating maneuver as he was able to get the boss down to a handful of his remaining minions before engaging in full.
And Diablo was... not a threat. Corvus walked around in circles avoiding his attacks as the birds pecked him to death. Nice and easy and even relaxing.
Most of the monsters in Act Five were easily handled by the ravens, opponents like imps and witches falling rapidly to their attacks while most of the melee monsters were too slow to catch Corvus. The great exception was the minotaurs, by far the most dangerous enemies thanks to their fast movement speed, high damage, and long reach with their Frenzy blows. Even here on Normal difficulty, they could take big chunks out of Corvus' lifebar and he had absolutely nothing to block for him. At least they avoided spawning in tight quarters and I usually had lots of room to maneuver when they appeared. Wherever possible, I tried to fight enemies across rivers or fire pits or cliffside barriers as pictured above, places where the ravens could fly across to nail the monsters without Corvus himself being targeted. The various fortifications in the outdoor areas and ice rivers in the cave sections created more of these opportunities than I might have suspected. All foes other than the minotaurs were basically roadkill and only when they showed up did I have to start approaching the situation more carefully.
I was keeping an eye out throughout the act for a Crystal Sword to drop to use for a future Spirit runeword, as this is the portion of the game where the item will always roll with exactly 4 sockets if used for the Larzuk quest reward. Eventually one showed up on the Glacial Trail and I set it aside in stash until Corvus could find the Thul and Amn runes that it would require. I did go ahead and make the Ancient's Pledge runeword (the famous Ral-Ort-Tal shield option) since it would make for a better shield than the 1 Diamond 19% resist all item that Corvus had been building. Eventually I'd get the other two Perfect Diamonds but Ancient's Pledge would suffice for now. Along with the Anya quest reward, this was enough to take all resistances up to the max for the remainder of Normal difficulty.
I've mentioned this before in other character reports but Act Five is really tedious until adding the guest monsters in Nightmare and Hell difficulties. There isn't enough variation in the default monsters and few of them have interesting abilities, with the (overpowered) minotaurs having the only truly dangerous move with their Frenzy attack. The outdoor areas of Act Five are also way too long, with the developers evidently expecting players to skip through to the end quickly, and everything shares the same dull color palette of browns, grays, and whites. Could we have some kind of color anywhere in the whole act?! Making matters worse, I was saving up gold for Corvus because he'd have the option to gamble +2 Druid summoning as an item modifier upon reaching CLVL 40 and there was no reason to spend gold while pushing towards that mark. Thus Corvus wasn't changing up his equipment or rolling for new potential items, just slogging through repetive mountain caves and the floors of Nihlathak's dull temple. I was more than ready for this to be over and Nightmare difficulty to begin.
I was snapped out of my sleepwalking trance when one of the monsters in the Frozen Tundra dropped the unique scale mail, Hawkmail. Although the 81% additional Defense rating on the item was effectively pointless, everything else here was potentially interesting for Corvus. 15% cold resistance and +15% maximum cold resistance (up from the normal 75% cap to a total of 90%) along with the always-useful Cannot Be Frozen property made this item into a potential keeper. The comparison was against the default Stealth runeword armor that basically every caster character uses in the early portions of Diablo 2 and Corvus' very unique setup meant that he didn't need a lot of the stuff on the usual runeword. Faster cast and more mana regeneration weren't needed given how Corvus almost never needed to renew his raven summons in battle, and there would be more than enough faster hit recovery from the Spirit runeword that I was planning to make for the weapon slot. I was really only losing some faster movement and poison resistance by making the trade, and Corvus was able to gamble a pair of boots with 20% faster run and 38% poison resistance to plug that weakness. Besides, could I really pass up the opportunity for my summoning Druid to use a unique armor named Hawkmail? This was about as good or better as compared to the Stealth runeword and a lot more fun to try out.
Hawkmail also gave Corvus a bright green color for his character model which stood out like a sore thumb against the white background of the Ancients Way and the Arreat Summit. I wasn't exactly sure what to make of the battle against the Ancients and did my best to wing it (heh):
The birds turned out to have very different interactions against each of the three legendary Barbarians. Madawc locked himself in place to throw his axes and thus the ravens targeted him first, eliminating this opponent in short order. Korlic and Talic kept moving around and becoming untargetable while using their abilities and as a result the ravens had more difficulty getting in hits against them. After walking around for a bit, I realized that I had to bait out Korlic's Leap Strike into a place where he would get nailed by the ravens upon landing, after which they would hit with their attacks more reliably and chip down his health bar. Talic was by far the hardest enemy of the three since he kept Whirlwinding everywhere and the ravens weren't smart enough to anticipate where he was going to be, instead launching attacks at where the spin started and missing everything with their downward strikes. I had to use Corvus himself to do more tempting fate by baiting Talic into using his melee attack which opened up a window for the birds to land their pecking blows. I also flubbed this a couple times and ate a full Whirlwind once or twice which did about 200 damage, ouch! Eventually Talic fell as well and without any true danger scares which would have forced the drinking of full rejuv potions.
The Worldstone Keep floors were uneventful on this pass through the dungeon, each of them having only their default complement of opponents instead of any of the random guest monsters. There were Death Lord minotaurs on the third floor which Corvus had to step carefully around given their nasty melee swings, otherwise nothing notable. After a modest stairs trap at the entrance to the Throne of Destruction, Corvus and his avian companions cut their way through the first few ranks of the ending boss rush. Colenzo and Achmel fell immediately without having time for their resurrecting shenanigans, and Corvus was able to lure out individual minions from both Bartuc and Ventar to cut down the ranks of their mobs. Lister was the only boss that gave me trouble as his whole pack chased Corvus out of the throne room, all the way back to the corner of the floor where Corvus had to double back and run past them. I was able to pull off the usual tricks here, separating the group with footwork to kill the minions in one and twos before going back to polish off Lister himself. Much of the problem here was caused by Lister's ridiculous MLVL 58 which caused many more of the raven attacks to miss than normal due to the disparity between monster level and character level. I wasn't looking forward to seeing this customer again on the next difficulty level.
Baal was the final remaining opponent as always and proved to be pretty similar to Diablo from the previous act. The ravens liked to go after his Festering Appendages when they spawned and I couldn't do anything to stop them from attacking the clone Baal when it appeared (which they pecked to death in short order). Fortunately, Corvus found that he was well equipped to defend against Baal's attacks thanks to his shiny new Hawkmail armor. The unique item kept Corvus from being frozen and its boost to 90% cold resistance pretty much neutered all of Baal's projectiles (a good portion of his damage is cold element in nature). Combine that with the fact that Baal's AI routine tends to be defensive in nature, rarely rushing up to get in the face of the player, and this was a routine encounter. I drank a couple of red potions while waiting for the ravens to do their thing; game, set, and match:
Too bad all of the items that Baal dropped were total junk, oh well. There was also a new message that I'd never seen before from defeating Baal: terrorized game creation unlocked on this difficulty. I guess that was a reference to the terror zones added in Patch 2.5 for Diablo 2 Resurrected, perhaps down the road I'll explore that concept but not with a heavily restricted variant character like Corvus. The sundering charms can't even be used until CLVL 75 and I doubted I would make it that far with Corvus.
Anyway, Corvus full cleared Normal difficulty from start to finish with no areas skipped, no deaths incurred, and all monsters slain. Raven proved to be a legitimately strong option for the initial difficulty and I never really ran into any trouble along the way. I was looking forward to facing more serious tests in Nightmare difficulty and see how much longer the Raven skill would hold up as monster health and difficulty continued to climb higher and higher with each new area. I wish that the Raven skill had had these damage numbers back when we ran the Low Rent Legion team as a Raven-based character absolutely would have been viable for that group. Ah well, maybe if we ever try that variant again down the road!
