Corvus: Hell Difficulty Part One

Of course, not only is monster health much higher in Hell difficulty, monster damage is also much worse as well. Based on my experience in playing through Nightmare, I didn't think it was viable for Corvus to make it through Hell with no protection whatsoever. Unless you're playing some kind of Barbarian or Werebear Druid ubertank, you really need something to tank for your character in Hell because monster damage is just so much higher. It's not really the normal monsters that are so bad, it's the endless bosses lurking around every corner who have three different affixes. That means far more opponents sporting Extra Strong trait, more enemies with the Cursed ability, more Multishot archers and Fanaticism auras and so on. How could Corvus ever survive if he rolled those combos in places like the Kurast Temples or the Icy Cellar? No, he needed something to help keep him alive against the threats that would be coming his way. Finally, throw in the fact that tons of enemies would be Physical Immune and thus invincible against the ravens, and it was clear that Corvus would need more than the Raven skill if he was going to attempt this challenge.

Thus the one addition to the previous rules: Corvus could now use the Spirit Wolf skill in addition to the Raven skill. The spirit wolves would be able to serve as the blocking dummies that Corvus needed to maintain space between himself and the monsters he'd be facing. The Spirit Wolf skill allows for up to five of them to be summoned at once and they would be quite tanky at 900+ HP apiece. The wolves also now deal cold element damage after a change in the 2.4 Patch for D2R which was exactly what I needed for this variant to work. There are very few enemies that have immunity to both cold and physical damage, most likely just random bosses who would roll Stone Skin or Cold Enchanted traits. I could either portal park them or find some way to down them with another form of elemental damage. The spirit wolves would be tanky while not dealing much damage themselves; note that their 211-222 cold damage was far inferior to what the ravens were dishing out. That was actually a good thing since I wanted the focus to remain on the ravens as the main damage source for Corvus. Note that I would still not be hiring a mercenary companion for Corvus, it was going to be nothing but ravens and spirit wolves for this variant. Remember that I even had that Hawk Helm from back in Normal difficulty with +3 to both the Raven and Spirit Wolf skills - it was almost as if the game had been preparing me for this from the beginning.

Corvus therefore headed off into the Blood Moor with his new lupine companions in tow. One thing that always jumps out at me when returning to Hell difficulty is how many more bosses and champ packs there are as compared with the lower difficulties. The Blood Moor has zero bosses on Normal difficulty, for example, then scales up to 7-9 bosses in Hell. This is true pretty much everywhere throughout the game and Corvus couldn't make it more than a stone's throw from the Rogue Encampment before he was fighting one boss after another. The individual enemies were also MUCH tankier than they had been in Nightmare where the ravens had been able to down almost everything in short order. As a quick comparison, your basic zombies have 669 HP and zero physical resistance in Nightmare... only to jump up to 5242 HP and 50% physical resistance in Hell. Yeesh! It took maybe five to ten seconds with the whole raven flock pecking away to kill a single zombie. That was an adjustment that was going to take some time getting used to.

The other monsters weren't as bad, fortunately, as the zombies turned out to be much tankier than their companions. Fallens and quill rats still died rapidly when the ravens focused them in combat. I made sure to practice casting the spirit wolves in front of Corvus whenever the enemies tried to focus him with their attacks. There was one quill rat boss that had Stone Skin and Cold Enchanted traits which gave it an immunity to both physical and cold damage, hmmm. Corvus killed all its minions and left it parked in a corner of the Blood Moor for now while I thought about potential ways to defeat the thing. In the Den of Evil, Corvus came up against fallen shamans for the first time who were handled in pretty much the same way that I'd done things in the past: try to lead the resurrectables away from the shamans and then cast the Raven skill on their heads to focus them down. It was very nice having cold element damage on hand from the spirit wolves since at least some of the bodies would shatter on death and remove corpses. In a worst case scenario, I could keep re-killing the fallens over and over again until their bodies all disappeared and make progress that way.

Corpsefire was Extra Strong and Extra Fast (along with his always-present Spectral Hit), with enough damage that his zombie boss pack was killing the spirit wolves every few seconds. I realized right away that Corvus needed to use his ravens to focus individual zombies rather than letting the birds inefficiently spread out their damage on everything at once. I started casting the Raven skill right on top of an individual zombie minion, then moved on to another minion once it was dead, and so on until only the boss was left. This was absolutely not a case of Corvus just standing in place and watching his minions do everything, I was doing a lot of casting to place the ravens exactly where I wanted them and refreshing the spirit wolves as they died. In fact, this was starting to turn into a somewhat mana-hungry setup despite the insanely cheap cost of Raven as a skill. I was hunting for an elite Monarch shield so that Corvus could make a second Spirit runeword and it would be helpful for the additional 100 mana as well as the obvious +2 skills.

The Caves were right by the entrance to the Cold Plains and as a result I wound up doing the underground area first. The story of the Caves was archer bosses, lots and lots of rogue archer bosses. There was a Physical Immune melee skeleton boss near the opening to the Caves and fortunately Corvus was able to fight that off before hitting the double archer boss pack around the next corner. One of them was Cursed and the spirit wolves took a terrible pounding against her arrows; I was able to defeat that boss and head back to town to clear the Curse, then return and snap this screenshot against the second archer boss with Extra Strong trait. Fortunately the rogue archers were pretty fragile as opponents, with only 15% physical resistance in comparison to the 50% resistance that most of the melee enemies were sporting. Let me tell you, it was really noticeable which monsters had that resistance and which ones didn't. Coldcrow was a lot less intimidating when she was about the fifth archer boss that I'd come across in the Caves and only had Magic Resistant / Lightning Enchanted for her traits.

Outside on the Cold Plains, Corvus drew mostly melee corrupted rogues along with oodles of fallens and their shamans. This wasn't too bad and the big fallen camp went better than I was expecting, lots of casting the ravens against the shamans to target them quickly while repositioning the spirit wolves to keep Corvus safe. I tried to get a screenshot of Bishibosh and he died too quickly from massed ravens, it turned out that this wasn't a character who had any issues with his fire immunity. Once the Cold Plains were finished, I moved on to Blood Raven:

Her zombie minions were not a joke here in Hell difficulty and they were so tanky that it would have taken forever to kill them. Corvus had to focus on Blood Raven herself which was made problematic by her refusal to stand still. Her arrow attacks were irrelevant but the corrupted rogue absolutely would not stay in one place for any length of time, instead racing around like some kind of speed freak. All that I could do was keep casting the Raven skill right on top of her position over and over again to ensure that the birds would keep their focus on Blood Raven. Too bad she was immune to their blind effect by virtue of being a boss. I also had to keep refreshing the spirit wolves as they died against the zombies and the whole thing was a pretty lively fight. The ravens finally finished off their similarly-named opponent and the undead collapsed back into the earth.

Yet another two-handed unique weapon had appeared back in the Cold Plains, this one being Spellsteel the unique beared axe. It had a whole bunch of spell charges for various different skills on it and I thought that this might be my answer to foes who were sporting dual immunities to physical and cold damage. Time to test things out on that quill rat parked back in the Blood Moor:

This was a cute idea but sadly lacking in practice. SLVL 12 Firestorm did all of 51-59 fire damage which was nothing short of laughable here in Hell. Even with 60 charges it was clear that this wasn't going to be anywhere near enough to defeat this quill rat boss, and if it wasn't sufficient to kill a poor little quill rat in the Blood Moor, it certainly wasn't going to work against anything else. I went back to town and sold Spellsteel (after spending 130k in gold to replenish the spell charges earlier, argh!) then decided to hire one of the Rogue mercenaries named Fiona. She had the Fire Arrow and Exploding Arrow abilities for fire element damage and the latter skill was enough to blast through this quill rat boss even without any equipment. Of course I didn't actually want to play the game with a Rogue mercenary so I immediately killed off poor Fiona afterwards. I decided that I'd bring her out in isolated cases when these Physical Immune / Cold Immune enemies appeared and then retire her immediately afterwards. Better than leaving these monsters alive certainly.

I ran an hourlong session afterwards just to clear the Crypt and Mausoleum which are both much larger in Hell than in the lower difficulties. Corvus had to defeat Blood Raven again (for some reason I had forgotten that she respawns in each new session) and then work his way through these two subterranean areas. The Crypt and Mausoleum are unusual areas since they have only two monsters that appear with no variation: melee skeletons and zombies, never anything else. This makes these areas some of the least-dangerous parts of the game anywhere as all foes are always slow-moving melee types. The skeletons and zombies do have an unusually high monster level (MLVL 85 in the Mausoleum compared to everything at MLVL 68 in the Stony Field) but these were still easy areas. Aside from me forgetting that I was on weapon tab 2 anyway, thus forcing me to do both areas without Corvus' normal Spirit sword in hand, whoops. There were a lot of Physical Immune bosses in these areas (whenever Stone Skin trait appeared) and it took me about an hour to grind through both regions. Not the most interesting places.

Act One is among my favorite parts of Diablo 2 and I've always enjoyed the impression of traveling through the countryside before venturing down into the Rogue stronghold. It's all an illusion of background wallpaper, of course, but I still find it to be fun. With that said, there's not always a lot of variation in the monster mix in some of these outdoor areas and on this occasion Corvus kept hitting the same opponents over and over again. His trip was heavy on zombies, skeletons, and fallens/carvers as he made his way through the Stony Field and then the Underground Passage. These were pretty straightforward opponents and I avoided any true hairball situations along the way. Even a skeleton archer showing up with the exceedingly dangerous Cursed / Multishot combo wasn't cause for alarm as I was fast on the spellcasting to keep summoning more spirit wolves as the initial ones fell to arrows.

The Dark Wood on the other side was once again crawling with carvers and skeleton archers, with a reappearance of quill rats for the last monster type. I still hadn't seen any goats or brutes or crows at all in this session. The bosses kept appearing as skeleton archers over and over again in this outdoors region, fortunately in a place where there was lots of room to step out of the way of the enemy shots. Everything was going routinely until Corvus came across Treehead Woodfist at the Tree of Inifuss:

Oh I see, *NOW* the brute monsters were finally showing up! Extra Fast / Extra Strong / Cursed was extremely dangerous as a combo and doubly so when Treehead managed to slip past the line of spirit wolves and run in to start smacking Corvus around. Brutes do about 100 base damage in Hell difficulty and then that was multiplied four times over by the Extra Strong / Cursed combo - ouch! I had to gulp down a full rejuv potion and scramble to recast some fresh spirit wolves in the face of the boss before they finally managed to distract him. This was a good example of how a moderately tough boss can suddenly become a grave threat with the addition of two extra boss abilities on the highest difficulty. At least I was able to face Treehead and his group in isolation instead of being part of a larger hairball.

Tristram was next on the agenda and it went as well as could be expected for Corvus. I made sure to clear the small town in counterclockwise fashion, defeating a pair of skeleton archer bosses along the northern side where the monastery from the original game was located. Griswold was encountered by himself, unusual for poor Gris, and drew the not-dangerous Extra Fast / Mana Burn combo. The fight that forced the most effort on my part was a separate Cursed goat boss at the south end of Tristram faced along with a bunch of carvers and their shamans. I wasn't paying enough attention and a random carver slipped up to Corvus and got in several Cursed hits before I managed to draw back and summon some spirit wolves to down the little thing. The Cain reward ring was thoroughly useless.

The Black Marsh proved to be completely uneventful but the Forgotten Tower was very much not the case. Corvus entered the first floor and was immediate set upon by a stairs trap with a Ghost boss pack:

I couldn't see the traits on the boss at first although I knew it had to be Cursed since the red aura popped up immediately. There were more devilkin and corrupted rogue archers at the stairs and I could tell right away that this was too many monsters to make a stand at the entrance. I had to send Corvus running deeper into the level in blind fashion and I stupidly didn't pause for a moment to cast spirit wolves out in front of his advance forward. Instead, I walked through that door to the right and directly into the path of a group of corrupted rogue champs, argh! They started blasting away at Corvus and I was saved only by my instinct to drink a full rejuv instantly while heading even deeper into the level. I went through three full rejuvs before I could manage to turn another corner, open a town portal, and get the heck out of there to safety. Yeesh, I know that the Forgotten Tower often has stairs traps but I hadn't been expecting that much opposition 0.1 seconds after I entered the place!

Corvus was able to return via the waypoint and come back down the initial stairs which had been cleared out somewhat thanks to his earlier scamper deeper into the level. I was able to eliminate the devilkin and rogue archers next to the staircase before engaging with the Ghost boss and its Cursed aura. I discovered right away that the Physical Immune property on these enemies made them a real pain for Corvus to defeat. The ravens really were dealing the bulk of his damage and it wasn't pretty when Corvus was forced to rely on the spirit wolves alone. Because the wolves took up actual physical space on the map (unlike the ravens), it was also harder to get them to focus on a single target and of course the ghosts all clumped up on top of one another since they were ethereal in nature. I wasn't entirely sure that the spirit wolves had enough damage to overcome the natural monster HP regen on Hell difficulty before finally realizing that yes, they were indeed getting the job done... slowly. It took about five minutes to defeat this boss and then Corvus was able to take out the rogue archer champs a few rooms further ahead to gain control of the floor at last.

None of the other floors in the Forgotten Tower were as bad as that initial entrance, with either no stairs traps or very modest stairs traps on the other levels. There were plenty of other bosses and it was always the ghosts that caused the most issues for Corvus. Even the normal ghosts were pretty annoying because they took so much longer to kill than any of the other monster types. By way of contrast, it was amusing to see the devilkin spawn bosses on a regular basis, as even a Fanaticism / Extra Strong devilkin still didn't pose much of a threat. The ravens chopped that thing down to an even smaller size in mere seconds. Rogue archers are often a deadly threat in these areas however Corvus didn't seem to run into many bosses or champs of that enemy type. Down on the bottom floor, Corvus cleared out all of the side wings and was able to draw out the Countess' attendant minions before engaging with the boss herself. This is one of the best places in the game to find high tier rune drops and Corvus was rewarded for his efforts with... two Tal runes. So much for his slim hopes of finding an Um or Mal rune! I guess it was going to be the Hellforge quest or nothing for that longshot hope.

The Hole had a couple of interesting boss scrapes, with Corvus facing a Holy Freeze aura devilkin boss at the same time as a separate rogue archer boss group. The Cannot Be Frozen property on his armor did not stop the Holy Freeze aura from chilling his movement which is a weird way for this item to work. (I did know about this since Cannot Be Frozen gear never works against Duriel's Holy Freeze aura.) At another point a Conviction aura boss made a huge carver camp more interesting than it had any right being. The Tamoe Highland had lots of skeleton archers, skeleton mages, and melee rogues which made for a pretty easy area. With lots of room to maneuver and nothing presenting a true threat, Corvus was able to work his way through the region without needing to sweat.

The last big danger for Act One was The Pit Level 2, a tiny underground space where there's always at least three bosses in Hell difficulty and absolutely no margin for error. I've had several variant teams suffer a total wipe down there dating back to the original Rogue Revival group. Corvus entered the small area and immediately ran into a Cursed melee skeleton boss:

Fortunately Spectral Hit and Fire Enchanted weren't too bad for the other boss properties. Corvus threw up his spirit wolf offensive line and I began focusing down the skeleton minions one at a time by mass-casting the Raven skill on their individual heads. Corvus had to kill this foe quickly before too many other monsters on the floor woke up. Once the skeletons were all down, I popped back to town to clear the Cursed status and edged over to the right where there was another Cursed / Fanaticism aura devilkin boss. Corvus deployed spirit wolves at the stairs leading down to the lower tiers of the Pit while his ravens chewed through this second boss (thankfully just a devilkin instead of something more dangerous), then cleared the Cursed status a second time in town. I was able to eliminate devilkin shamans on the lower floors by targeting them with ravens while slowly tiptoeing towards the bottom of the map. There was a final melee rogue boss down there near the gold treasure chest which Corvus was able to kill in isolation to secure the level. This whole endeavor was handled perfectly if I do say so myself, surgically removing the shamans with casts of the Raven skill while using the spirit wolves to block all of the nasty melee threats. A piece of advice for readers mulling over potential Hardcore characters: don't hestiate to use town portals to remove Cursed status either, I made certain that Corvus got rid of that thing the instant that the bosses inflicting it were finished.

Corvus found a couple more unique items while making his way through these parts of Act One, including Silkweave the unique mesh boots and Butcher's Pupil the unique cleaver. None of these were useful for his build though and they had to be sold. I had continued to spend millions of gold gambling amulets for Corvus and he kept finding +skills results for everything except the Druid summoning that he needed. He had turned up +2 Necromancer summoning, +2 Necromancer summoning again, +3 Necromancer summoning, +2 Druid shapeshifting, +3 Druid elemental skills, and a dozen other skill trees from various classes. Basically everything possible except the one Druid skill tree that he needed. It had to appear at some point, right?

The remainder of Act One is usually a good bit easier after completing the twin challenges of the Forgotten Tower and The Pit Level 2. Corvus found himself facing mostly skeleton archers of some kind in the Barracks and the three floors of the Jail, one boss pack after another of skeleton archers. As I noted back in Nightmare difficulty, the ravens handle stationary targets very well and here in Hell difficulty I also had the spirit wolves on hand to absorb most of the incoming arrows. No longer did Corvus have to run around like a maniac as his ravens tore through one archer after another. I did have to keep recasting the Raven skill to ensure that the birds were focus firing each target which was becoming second nature to me by now. There was one dangerous moment in the Barracks when the Smith appeared since he had drawn the Extra Strong / Cursed combo for 4x normal damage. I was very glad to have the wolves tanking those blows instead of Corvus himself. The Barracks also had a truly bizarre layout that looped around past the entrance to the Outer Cloister and almost hooked back up with the Tamoe Highlands. I've never seen this before and it was another case where the scenery made absolutely no sense from a perspective standpoint - weird!

Outside of all those skeleton archers, Corvus was also hitting a decent number of the little dark ones. It was always funny to see one of them rolling boss traits without a shaman present to resurrect them; this kept the overall danger level low. The most annoying enemies were wraiths which popped up as Physical Immune on the one floor of the Jail where Corvus ran into them. His progress always came to a grinding halt whenever he had to slow down and rely on the spirit wolves to kill these non-corporeal foes. Pitspawn Fouldog on Jail 2 rolled Magic Resistant and Teleportation for his extra boss abilities which meant that he wasn't much of a concern.

This wraith boss was lurking right at the entrance to the Cathedral and took some time to defeat thanks to its Physical Immune property. The spirit wolves were not dealing enough damage to overcome monster HP regen in the initial clash, largely because they were all hitting different targets and spreading out their damage willy-nilly. I had to pull a retreating maneuver back to the waypoint which split off about half of the wraith minions, defeat them in isolation, then come back for the boss itself which took another 2-3 minutes of grinding away. I continued to hope for some more +skills items to appear so that the spirit wolves could increase their cold damage for use against these Physical Immune targets. The dark one shamans in the Cathedral itself took some more work to clear and I had to drink a full rejuv potion at one point when Corvus was swarmed. At least they were faster to die once I was able to get the ravens focused on them.

There were plenty more shamans on the three floors of the Catacombs but Corvus also had plenty of experience at dealing with them by this point and I managed to avoid any major errors. I had gotten very good at mass casting the ravens on top of the shamans while using the spirit wolves to protect my Druid's position. The other monster type that I kept seeing was zombies (technically Ghouls) which appeared on both Cats 2 and Cats 3. The zombies have enough innate physical resistance that the Stone Skin trait created an immunity whenever appeared on a boss, which happened several times on these floors. The Physical Immune zombies weren't as bad as the ghosts from earlier because they didn't clump up on top of one another and only the boss would be immune to the ravens, not the minions as well. These were straightforward floors without anything major popping up.

Corvus started out on Catacombs 4 by having to deal with an Afflicted (lightning ball shooting monsters) boss in the big room next to the blood pool along with all of the dark ones and their shamans which are always present. Once that mess was sorted out, he opened the big doors and creeped forward, hoping to eliminate more of the normal enemies before engaging with Andariel. That didn't quite work out and the ravens were still working their way through the health of a series of zombies with the big demon came racing out. I pulled the animal menagerie back into the room with the blood pool for safety and then began the process of chopping away at Andy's lifebar. She has 60,000 HP on Hell difficulty which didn't sound so bad... but also 66% physical resistance which greatly reduced the damage that the ravens were dealing. Too bad Corvus lacked fire element damage to hit Andariel's well-known weakness. She was relying on her poison spray which did some kind of crazy 1000+ damage to anything that it hit and the spirit wolves were dropping like flies as they were repeatedly hit by that poison attack. However, Andariel could never get close to Corvus because she was stuck on the spirit wolves indefinitely, with Corvus constantly summoning more of them as the previous ones fell. I went through three blue potions to restore mana before Andy finally bit the dust. She only managed to poison Corvus once, at the very end of the fight when I thought she was dead and started moving into closer range. All of the item drops from Andariel were sadly useless and another gambling session failed to turn up +skills for Druid summoning on an amulet. Ah well, better luck in Act Two.

This page was originally going to include the next act until the report became so long that I had to split it up into two parts. Corvus continues his journey on the next page.