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I started out Act Two with the Sewers which were predictably crawling with Burning Dead skeletons around every corner. There were few of the other monster types present on the first two floors, only melee skeletons and ranged archer skeletons infesting the place. Seemingly all of the bosses were different types of burning dead as well and it could get pretty lively when they showed up with dangerous traits like the pictured Cursed. I was relieved to find that the ravens were able to kill the skeletons at a reasonably fast pace, knowing that they would soon be mixed in with greater mummies who could resurrect them. The skeletons didn't have enough physical resistance for the Stone Skin trait to create a physical immunity which was also a relief. I think the toughest single fight took place on Sewers 2 where Corvus encountered double archer boss packs clumped together with melee skeletons to block for them. This wasn't exactly fun to deal with but it certainly could have been worse.
The one interesting item to appear here was Earthshaker, the unique battle hammer, which had +3 to Druid elemental skills on it. Once again this felt like a near miss - why did I keep getting items with bonuses to everything except the Druid summoning tree?! I'm not entirely sure if it would have been worth equipping this item over the Spirit sword that Corvus was using given that none of the other modifiers were useful for a casting character but the bonus going to the wrong type of Druid skill made it an academic exercise.
Sewers 3 was routine as I steadily cleared out everything except the final alcove holding the gold chest and Radament. It's easy to tell where this is because the Horror skeletons that pop out when the player gets close don't match the Burning Dead everywhere else in the Sewers. Corvus lured back the wave of undead in the hopes of slaying them outside of resurrection range, then dashed forward to deal with Radament once the coast was clear. The first greater mummy of the game turned out to have drawn an unfortunate boss combo:
Stone Skin created a physical immunity while Cold Enchanted was enough to turn him cold immune as well - uh oh. Radament was completely invulnerable to the ravens and the spirit wolves which meant that I'd need to fall back on Rogue hireling Fiona to get the kill. This turned out to be a disaster in practice; while Fiona may have been able to kill the Physical Immune / Cold Immune quill rat boss in the Blood Moor just fine, Radament was a different story entirely. This boss has 59,500 HP in Hell difficulty and Fiona was plinking him with her Exploding Shot for double digit damage at a time. I made sure to tag Radament with Prevent Monster Heal to shut down health regeneration and it still didn't matter, that HP bar wasn't moving at all. I had to go back to town and do a quick shopping trip for bows with elemental damage on them, finding something that had 1-15 lightning damage on it. This was enough to start making tiny, incremental progress against Radament at a rate reminscent of the old Rogue Revival team. Meanwhile, Radament kept trying to resurrect his minions the whole time and was a general pain in the butt. The spirit wolves kept him locked in melee attack for most of the time but I could never prevent the odd skeleton from getting revived here and there. Long story short, it took almost 20 minutes of Fiona firing her arrows before Radament was finally defeated. Good lord! 
This was an absolute disaster and it was now clear that a Rogue hireling with no weapon at all wasn't going to cut it for dealing with Physical Immune / Cold Immune bosses. I spent about half an hour refreshing the merchants in town before finding a bow that looked acceptable, one with 1-144 lightning damage as a modifier. I'd keep an eye out for better ranged weapons with more elemental damage; I could always shove a bunch of perfect gems into a bow if I could find one with five or six sockets. Poor Fiona had to be killed off afterwards as always and I'd have to wait for the next PI / CI boss to see if these upgrades would be enough to make a difference.
At least the outdoor areas in the deserts were extremely easy for Corvus. I don't think I've ever had a Hardcore character die in these regions since they're among the safest places in the game for an experienced player. Vultures, spear cats, and leapers were never going to kill Corvus with all of the space that I had available for movement. While the leapers were zipping around at warp speed here on Hell difficulty and the ravens had some difficulty targeting them, they don't swarm the player and it was pretty easy to avoid everything aside from occasional random swipes. By way of contrast, it was the underground portions of Act Two that dialed up the challenge level:
This was the mess that greeted Corvus immediately upon entering the Stony Tomb. I had drawn the tomb formation with a circle around the entrance (just to the left of the Druid's position in the above screenshot) with hallways running off to the north, west, and south. Corvus had taken only a handful of steps when a mass of enemies began racing towards him from the right. I recast the spirit wolves to put up a wall of protection and then started focusing down individual targets by spamming the ravens on top of their heads. The wolves did their best but there sheer weight of enemy numbers was so large that they started to be shoved backwards, individual wolves dying and then the replacement summon appearing a bit further back from the original. The ravens were killing and killing and killing even as Corvus was driven back towards the entrance. I went past the initial entrance and off into the northern hallway (which fortunately didn't have anything in it), drinking four different mana potions to keep casting and recasting before everything was defeated. It turned out that there had been a beetle boss, a skeleton mage boss, plus a skeleton mage champ pack all grouped together here right at the entrance. Thank goodness there are no greater mummies in the Stony Tomb to resurrect the skeletons as they fell or else I might have needed to bail from this fight completely. This was exactly why I had known ahead of time that Corvus would need the spirit wolves if he was going to try to clear Hell difficulty; the ravens alone never could have sufficed here and Corvus would have been swarmed under and killed by the massive mob of foes.
The rest of the Stony Tomb wasn't that bad, probably because I had already defeated most of the first floor's bosses already at the entry. Skeletons and beetles were on the easier side of opponents once Corvus had more than a closet in which to operate. Creeping Feature drew the Cursed trait to go along with his always-present Extra Strong but of course as a mummy he would never get close enough to hit Corvus unless I made a truly drastic mistake in positioning. Corvus also found Waterwalk, the unique sharkskin boots, on the second floor which was very interesting for having +57 life and +5% maximum fire resistance as modifiers (life normally can't appear on boots in Diablo 2). Unfortunately I couldn't wear it for the moment since Corvus needed the resistances on his current boots, however if I could find something like a Lum rune to make the Smoke runeword, it could be a possibility for down the road. I tossed Waterwalk in stash as a possible option for later.
The Halls of the Dead brought Hollow One greater mummies into the picture for the first time and made the situation noticeably harder for Corvus:
The three floors of the Halls of the Dead have a robust list of possible monsters that can appear, including two types of mummies, bats, and spear cats. That wasn't what Corvus encountered though as he instead drew endless hordes of Returned skeletons and Hollow One greater mummies, virtually nothing else on all three floors of the dungeon. Facing one encounter group wasn't so bad as Corvus could block the skeletons with his spirit wolves while the ravens were deployed to peck out the eyes of the greater mummies at a safe distance. No, the problems arose when Corvus came up against big mobs of skeletons (which were in seemingly every new room) and especially when the greater mummies showed up as bosses. Take this pictured situation: there was a huge group of melee skeletons blocking the path forward and Corvus couldn't make any progress until his ravens slowly wore down this greater mummy boss in the back. The darned thing had Stone Skin trait which took it up to something like 75% physical resistance and it just took ages to wear down the thing's healthbar. This was only half the problem though as there was a second Multishot greater mummy right behind the first one which was knocking down the spirit wolves left and right while continuing to revive the enemy skeletons as they fell. As if that wasn't enough, there was a third Hollow One boss right behind them in the same corridor, and then a FOURTH Hollow One boss behind the third one! 
I am not making that up, there were four of these bosses with their attendant skeleton minions in a hallway that Corvus could have run through in five seconds. It took more than 10 minutes of real world time to push past all of them, argh!
The rest of the Halls of the Dead weren't much better. Almost every boss rolled as a Hollow One and Corvus would inevitably have to pull the skeleton minions back away from the greater mummy before he could advance close enough to the big thing for safe disposal. Sometimes they had dangerous trait combos as well, like this Extra Strong / Might aura opponent who would be hitting for more than quadruple normal damage, fun times. I tried to eliminate the greater mummies first whenever possible but frequently it simply wasn't possible to do that without taking on an unacceptable amount of risk. There was one time where Corvus was caught out of position near a wall and I had to exit out of a town portal right before he was ripped to shreds. Thank goodness the cold damage from the spirit wolves was shattering some of the skeleton bodies and slowing down their resurrections; the blinding effect from the ravens was also helpful in this regard though of course it didn't work on Hollow One bosses or champs.
Anyway, this whole thing was a massive slog that kept me on my toes and tested my skills as a player. This variant might sound easy, "just stand behind the spirit wolves and let the ravens kill everything!" but in practice Corvus was keeping as busy as any other character I've ever played. I was constantly recasting the ravens to have them focus fire the targets that I wanted while simultaneously repositioning the spirit wolves to keep enemies off of Corvus himself and also sliding around to try and hit the greater mummies whenever they could be reached. Corvus was burning through mana potions in any big fight and I was longing for the +100 mana on a second Spirit runeword almost as much as the +2 skills. (Still needed to turn up the Monarch shield there which stubbornly refused to drop.) I've talked a lot over the years about how players can often get more depth from gameplay by taking options off the table and that was absolutely the case here with Corvus. He was limited to only two skills, Raven and Spirit Wolves, and yet each fight was a complex ordeal that required skillful management on my part. I really would have liked a bit more clear speed here though - I was running this D2 session late at night and thought the Halls of the Dead would take 20-30 minutes to complete. Instead, they took over an hour and it was closing in on midnight when Corvus defeated Bloodwitch at the end of the third floor. Could I maybe find a Monarch shield or gamble an amulet with +skills for Druid summoning to speed this up a little bit?
The following areas were noticeably easier for Corvus and his merry band of animals to pass through. The Far Oasis was heavy on beetles which the spirit wolves did a good job of blocking for the ravens to land kills. Even when Stone Skin trait popped up on bosses and created a physical immunity it wasn't enough to cause any real issues, not outside in the desert sands with plenty of space. Corvus also ran across Itchies for the first time (the cloud of bugs monsters) which are always Physical Immune on Hell difficulty. The spirit wolves seemed to handle them with ease, however, which was confusing to me until I looked up their stats at the Amazon Basin. It turns out that the Itchies had absolutely no cold resistance at all and thus collapsed right away while the ghosts back in Act One had 50% cold resistance. I could already see that this was going to be a real problem with the upcoming Spectres in the Arcane Sanctuary and Apparitions in the False Tombs - they are also Physical Immune and have heavy cold resistance to boot. I'd have to think about potential solutions to avoid spending an eternity in those places.
The Maggot Lair was also full of beetles and the occasional Black Locust swarm of bugs. Now that Corvus had his spirit wolves on hand, the enemies in the Maggot Lair didn't present much of a threat since they couldn't make it past the blocking minions. Everything in this dungeon is limited to melee attacks (aside from the very weak poison spray on the maggots) which kept Corvus quite safe as long as I didn't do anything too stupid. It was all very tedious though, the ravens eliminating one beetle at a time as they stood in a straight line like they were queuing for a new iPhone. There was one point where Corvus slowly killed a Cursed/Stone Skin beetle boss who was Physical Immune, then immediately had to defeat a second Cursed/Stone Skin beetle right behind the first one in the same narrow tunnel. Sometimes the boss affixes are less than perfectly random in D2 and the same combo keeps popping up repeatedly; this may or may not have been a case of that phenomenon.
Coldworm drew Cursed for one of her extra traits and that was enough to turn her chamber into a total mess of a fight. There were a whole bunch of beetles and itchies located in there mixed amongst the beetles and it was difficult to get the ravens to focus on any one target because everything was so packed together. I was only able to make progress by ignoring everything else and spam-casting the ravens on top of Coldworm herself to stop the breeding of more maggots. Then they could begin the task of methodically clearing out the immense number of bugs crawling all over the rest of the room while the spirit wolves continued to hold down the front lines. This lasted so long that I had to go back to town to get more mana potions which was a real rarity for Corvus. I zoomed in to get a picture of the disgusting aftermath of this confrontation which should give the reader an indication of how crowded the room had been. Corvus was waist-deep in bug goo by the time that he fished out the Staff of Kings.
The Lost City and Ancient Tunnels were both on the easy side as well, at least for Hell difficulty. There were lots of zombies shambling around in the Lost City which were simply not a dangerous enemy type no matter what boss abilities they might happen to roll. Slinger cats tossing poison gas potions hardly made things much scarier. This area had a couple of Fire Towers and unlike in Nightmare difficulty the ravens had no problem smashing them into rocks. For some reason the things have 90% physical resistance in Nightmare but only 40% physical resistance in Hell, go figure. (I legitimately wonder if that was a typo by a designer way back in the day.) The Ancient Tunnels were all melee monsters, zombies and mummies and invaders, which could be tricky when they showed up in large mobs but otherwise were pretty straightforward. Keep the wall of spirit wolves up and make sure to focus the ravens on one target at a time.
It was getting late at night again by the time that Corvus reached the Claw Viper Temple and I decided to poke inside and see what the monster draw looked like. The player can sometimes get greater mummies and their skeletons inside which I didn't want to see when I was already tired. Fortunately, the Claw Viper Temple was full of snakes (both Salamanders and Claw Vipers) with mummies showing up as the easy-to-kill third option. This was as good as I could possibly hope for and Corvus happily tore his way through these opponents. I'd noticed as far back as Normal difficulty that the snakes struggled to achieve much against the ravens and that still held true here on the top difficulty. Even when bosses showed up these enemies had no ability to get through the spirit wolves and were easy prey for the ravens. This was one of the fastest areas for Corvus to full clear in some time.
Down in the cramped spaces of Claw Viper 2, Corvus crept forward on the north side of the room and immediately found a greater mummy with skeleton minions in attendance. They were only normal enemies though, not bosses, and Corvus carefully defeated them without waking up anything else. I continued sliding around the top side of the room and drew out one snake for disposal before running into Fangskin near the back side of the central altar. Now normally Fangskin is more dangerous on lower difficulties than in Hell; by the time that the player has made it here on the top difficulty, they've already fought through five or six Claw Viper bosses and one more of them isn't that special. However, it's a bit of a different story when Fangskin draws the Cursed trait as the creature did here, urgh. I was very careful to keep summoning more spirit wolves as they were rapidly smashed into submission and rotated the ravens to focus each of Fangkin's minions down individually until only the boss was left. It all went perfectly without Corvus so much as being touched but only because I'd had so much prior experience in how to get the most out of his animal companions.
The Palace Cellar floors were next and I don't have too much to report from them. These areas are infamous for featuring lots of Horror skeleton archers and mages which I've noted on several previous occasions were foes that the ravens perform well against. Any stationary target was easy for the ravens to focus fire and swarm under with their diving attacks. Corvus could also send the ravens off to attack these enemies and then duck back to safety around corners while the birds kept right on smashing enemy skeletons into pulp. The melee enemies in the Palace were invaders, dune beasts, and blunderbores which all acted more or less the same in combat. None of them had immunities that Corvus cared about and the spirit wolves performed well in keeping them at a safe distance. The most noteworthy encounter was a double boss pack of dune beasts that left bodies sprawled everywhere without Corvus ever coming under serious attack. Fyre Eye had Lightning Enchanted and Teleportation as his extra boss traits which made for an easy opponent.
I knew that there would be trouble in the Arcane Sanctuary and it reared its head with the very first group of monsters in the initial quadrant. Corvus immediately found himself confronted with a Spectre boss and two of its ghostly minions that had tagged along. Spectres are Physical Immune in Hell difficulty as well as packing an unfortunate 70% cold resistance. This cut the cold damage on the spirit wolves from their default 288-303 down to 86-91 damage which was not enough to overcome default monster HP regen. Corvus tagged the boss with Prevent Monster Heal and sat back to wait for the wolves to wear down the boss, made significantly more difficult by the way that the ghost monsters always clump up on top of one another to make it hard to focus any one target. I timed the fight and it took six whole minutes to defeat this initial encounter with three Spectres - yikes! Granted that was against a boss but the Arcane Sanctuary always has the same three opponents (Hell Clan goats, Spectres, and Ghoul Lord vampires) with no variation possible. It was going to take forever to chew through the whole place with Corvus' default setup. Thus I made the decision to break out his seldom-used hireling for this area:
Fiona was my solution to Physical Immune / Cold Immune bosses and, well, the Spectres were very close to having those immunities as an innate part of their kit. Fiona had no armor and was equipped with a bow dealing a paltry 1-144 lightning damage per shot along with her innate Fire Arrow and Exploding Arrow skills. Her damage was downright pathetic but it was enough to tip the scales on monster HP regen and down the Spectres in something approaching routine order. Since the goats and vampires didn't pose any kind of a threat, Fiona's presence soon turned the Arcane Sanctuary into a routine area for Corvus and his animal crew. She gained eight levels over the course of full clearing the Sanctuary and I don't feel bad about breaking her out for this situation. While I'm pretty patient when it comes to these variants, I was not going to spend seven hours tediously clearing out one group of Spectres after another, monsters which presented zero danger and were simply invulnerable to physical/cold damage. Anyway, Corvus wound up facing six different bosses in the first quadrant he explored and then one or two others in all of the other quadrants combined. The Summoner was down the second path and died in hilariously short order to the ravens - he only has 14k health and zero physical resistance. I also captured this amusing screenshot when the ravens blinded one spectre out in the middle of empty space; they couldn't hurt the things but they could still blind them for the rogue mercenary to shoot down.
The Canyon of the Magi was all about dealing with maggots and the Crusher brutes as they made up nearly all of the enemies present in the outdoor area. Maggots were always annoying opponents for Corvus since it was difficult to stop them from hatching their eggs, not least because there were usually aggressive melee enemies like those crushers which had to be dealt with first. One maggot boss rolled the Teleportation trait and managed to blink away on low health and then burrow underground into the sands. I couldn't find the thing until it popped up later at full health in the middle of another pack of maggots. It actually teleported away a second time but Corvus had enough free space cleared out by now to follow the thing and finish it off for good. Like most of the above-ground deserts, the Canyon wasn't too bad and it merely took some time to go through all of the little bugs that kept hatching out of eggs.
Of course, now Corvus had to make his way through all six of the False Tombs followed by the True Tomb and that wasn't going to be easy. The True Tomb was the circle symbol located on the far left side of the Canyon at Tomb #1 and therefore I started out with the second dungeon entrance in Tomb #2:
This was my worst nightmare right in the first tomb, Apparitions along with greater mummies to resurrect them after they fell (beetles were the last opponent). This False Tomb was crawling with the apparitions right from the very start and never let up as Corvus fought his way through seven different bosses. Obviously I had no choice but to bring out Fiona to tackle these monsters (thanks to the ghostly things having 75% cold resistance to go along with their physical immunity) and with her help things were relatively smooth, better than I'd been expecting to be honest. I was able to pull big mobs back away from the unravelers over and over again to stop the undead enemies from coming back to life. I was very glad that this was a normal False Tomb instead of the True Tomb or Kaa's Tomb.
Tomb #3: This False Tomb dropped the apparitions in favor of gorebellies while keeping the mummies and the unravelers/burning dead skeletons. As a result, I was forced to kill off poor Fiona in the Dry Hills since she wasn't needed for this area. The Tomb turned out to be extremely heavy on mummies with nearly every boss spawning as one of the shambling undead. The toughest fight took place when there was a champ pack of unravelers in a large room and I had to pull all of the various monsters several rooms away out of resurrectable range before finally being able to down the tall things. I was kind of hoping that this would be Kaa's Tomb since it was very low on danger but it was simply another normal tomb.
Tomb #4: This one had nothing but vampires and more unraveler/burning dead skeleton pairs; I though that the Tombs always featured three monster types but I guess not. The first big room had a champ pack of unravelers along with a champ pack of vampires mixed together, with several of them rolling as Ghostly champs where their additional physical resistance caused particular annoyance. Later Corvus came across one of the rare triple element bosses (Fire/Lightning/Cold Enchanted) next to the gold treasure chest. This was another Tomb that wasn't especially difficult but it was tedious to clear out with yet another place packed full of burning dead and unravelers. I was really starting to get sick of them by now.
Tomb #5: For the fourth time in a row Corvus drew a False Tomb with burning dead/unravelers along with mummies and the dreaded apparitions. That was yet another False Tomb where everything was resurrectable; in fact, thus far I'd seen one instance of gorebellies and one instance of beetles with absolutely everything else popping up as some form of undead. Fortunately I was able to bring back Fiona to help with the apparitions and with her fire and lightning damage on hand this Tomb proceeded along at a fairly reasonable pace. I can't imagine how long it would have taken to clear out the Physical Immune targets without her help though. With only two False Tombs and the True Tomb yet to go, could I possibly get something that didn't have unravelers lurking behind every door?
Tomb #6 began with a Cursed beetle boss around the literal first corner of the entryway before Corvus had taken more than five steps forward. I made sure to keep refreshing the spirit wolves and took care of this ugly welcoming party before anything else in the level could wake up. That turned out to be exceedingly important because there was a double boss pack of gorebellies in the very next hallway before Corvus had reached a single room of the False Tomb:
While double gorebellies wouldn't have been too bad on their own, the situation was made much worse by the fact that they BOTH rolled Stone Skin trait and thus became Physical Immune. One of them was Extra Fast / Holy Freeze aura while the other one was Extra Fast / Spectral Hit - a lot of very fast monsters racing around in this group. Since gorebellies are always innately protected against cold damage, I had a pair of giant pinheads on my hands who were completely invincible against everything that Corvus could summon. Fortunately Fiona was still hanging around since she'd been needed in the prior False Tomb; I hadn't killed her off yet since I still hadn't gone more than 3% of the way into this new dungeon. I didn't even know what the third monster type would be yet! In any case, the spirit wolves were utterly useless for damage in this encounter and I deployed them purely as blocking dummies for Corvus and Fiona. The ravens were needed to chip away at all of the non-boss gorebellies who lacked that physical immunity which I carefully worked on for the next few minutes. Once the bosses were the only ones left, I pulled them back to the entry alcove where Fiona could slowly wear down their healthbars one at a time. This required tagging them with Prevent Monster Heal to overcome their natural HP regen and then maneuvering Fiona so that she wasn't stuck in the Holy Freeze aura of the one boss where her firing rate was slowed to a trickle. This was a really tough battle and especially because it was so close to the entrance with no room to retreat or manuever. Three bosses slain before I even made it to the first room, sheesh! At least I took out the Cursed beetle before tangling with the PI/CI duo.
Things didn't really get better from there as I soon discovered that Apparitions were indeed the third monster type which necessitated keeping Fiona around. Corvus soon came across an Extra Strong / Cursed gorebelly who demanded extreme caution, then later an Extra Fast / Cursed apparition boss who put the glowing red Amplify Damage mark above Corvus and his minions while they were in the middle of an intense combat with a Might aura beetle boss. The casualties among the spirit wolves were brutal in these encounters and it was imperative to keep them between Corvus and his enemies. This tomb just kept on going and going which meant that it had to be Kaa's Tomb. Eventually Corvus managed to track him down, with his full five boss affixes here on Hell difficulty, Kaa's arrival easy to note since his burning dead minions were the only skeletons in the whole area. I spent a full hour clearing out this tomb which was extended by the presence of this jerk in the very last room:
It was yet another gorebelly boss with the Stone Skin trait to create the double physical / cold immunities once more. Teleportation was pretty meaningless but the Magic Resistant trait gave this thing 75% resistance to both fire and lightning elements as well. Poor Fiona was barely tickling this boss with her damage while everything else in Corvus' crew was completely unable to deal damage at all. Now there was a tradeoff here: because the gorebelly had all defensive traits that meant that it posed zero threat to Corvus himself. It simply took forever to kill the stupid thing, a full 10 minutes on the clock (as it approached midnight local time!) even after I tagged the boss with Prevent Monster Heal. It dropped the unique tusk sword The Vile Husk as a souvenir afterwards which was unfortunately not something that Corvus could use.
I'd been hoping to finish up with all of Tal Rasha's Tombs this evening however the long excursion through Kaa's Tomb meant that I had to stop here for the night. I usually run a quick gambling trip at the end of each session, spending down to 500k gold in stash which I hold in reserve for emergency buys / mercenary resurrections, that sort of thing. This time I gambled from 1.2 million down to about 520k gold remaining on failed amulet purchases, and decided to hit the button one last time even though it meant dropping below 500k in stash. To my shock, I finally landed what I'd been looking for:
There it was, the Keeper's Amulet with +3 Druid summoning on it! 
I had been gambling nothing but amulets since Corvus hit CLVL 60 and probably invested close to 15 million gold before finally hitting. The net effect was to raise the Raven and Summon Spirit Wolf skills from SLVL 26 to SLVL 28 with significant increases to damage for both. I'll go into more detail on this at the start of the next page, this one has run on too long already and I want to finish covering the tail end of Act Two.
Tomb #7: The final False Tomb was tackled at the start of a new gaming session and that meant needing to pass through a Canyon of the Magi which was full of monsters once again. Even though I could skip the full clear and head directly to the remaining tombs, Corvus found himself running into a nasty TRIPLE boss pack of javelin-tossing cats. One of them had the Cursed ability to amplify the damage Corvus was taking and then another one was Multishot / Extra Strong which left the air filled with flying spears. I had to go back to town multiple times to keep clearing the curse while picking off the spear cats in small groups with hit and run tactics; a direct frontal assault here would have been suicidal. In the False Tomb itself, Corvus drew a minidungeon full of gorebellies and more burning dead / unraveler combos. All of the early bosses were gorebellies and then as the Tomb went on everything seemed to shift over to more unravelers, including a boss and a champ pack in the final corridor. Five out of the six False Tombs had been full of the greater mummies, argh.
I worked my way around the edge of the Canyon to the True Tomb in the first position on the far left. Corvus went down the stairs and immediately found himself up against another unraveller with its burning dead minions - that was six out of seven on the Tombs for the greater mummies, oh come on! Were there Apparitions present as well? Of course there were, resulting in three different tombs that gave me the worst possible monster combination. D2R was in a nasty mood here after finally giving me a break with that +3 Druid summoning amulet. 
It turned out that there was no third monster at all in the True Tomb unless you count the rare Mummy Sarcophaguses which occasionally appeared in some of the rooms to belch out more (resurrectable) mummies. Otherwise the True Tomb was wall-to-wall burning dead and apparitions as far as the eye could see. I knew how to handle these opponents: pull the burning dead back away from the unravelers and defeat them out of resurrection range, then return to deal with the greater mummies. It was just so incredibly tedious doing this over and over and over again throughout the vast expanses of the True Tomb. Every single time that Corvus opened a new door there would be a fresh flood of red skeletons and I'd have to pull back into the previous hallway once again.
And it's not as though these encounters were a walk in the park either. There was an unraveler champ pack mixed together with an unraveler boss near the entrance to the True Tomb that took a long time to sort out thanks to their skeleton minions packing the hallway practically cheek by jowl. Those stupid pillars in the big hallway blocked line of sight for Corvus and made it hard to cast his Raven spell effectively at distance, making it hard to focus down the greater mummies. Every new room with unravelers would immediately begin raising the bodies of the undead defeated in the previous room, forcing Corvus into reclearing the same monsters that he'd already finished off in the last fight. There was also always the potential to get cut off from the spirit wolf minions and swarmed by the skeleton hordes; I had to drink full rejuvs twice for safety and once had to bail out of a town portal to avoid getting trapped in a corner. I actually thought that I was handling the unravelers pretty well all thing considered, there were simply SO MANY of them everywhere throughout the tomb.
Finally it was all cleared after about 75 minutes of real world time, the last group of unravelers in the Orifice Chamber itself hunted down and slain. I hadn't found the entrance to Duriel's lair until the very end of the dungeon; I guess that I would have been full clearing even if the variant hadn't mandated it. Corvus went back to town to grab the Horadric Staff, opened up the door in the wall, and headed through to face the cheapest boss fight in the whole game:
Duriel hits incredibly hard in Hell difficulty (165 damage per swing) and has that nasty Holy Freeze aura to slow down melee attackers to a crawl. However, this is a cheap boss fight because it completely shuts down certain builds (a whole lot of melee stuff in particular) while posing no threat at all to other character setups. Corvus had the spirit wolves to tank for him which meant that my Druid calmly walked to the other side of the room, made sure that he had the spirit wolf hotkey ready to go to replace the creatures as they fell, and sat back to wait for the ravens to do their job. Duriel was killing a fresh spirit wolf every two or three swings of his big claws... but he was never going to be able to break free of their grasp no matter what he did. The ravens kept pecking away and weren't even slowed by his Holy Freeze aura since they didn't exist as targets on the map. It took about two minutes for Duriel to bite the dust with Corvus never taking a point of damage. Duriel even did me one other favor: he got in a couple swipes on Fiona and killed the rogue mercenary to spare me the trouble of having to remove her myself for the next act.
Two acts down, three more to go. Let's see how much further Corvus can make it without me screwing up and getting him killed.
