Our next session saw the introduction of our new team member Erick, playing as Artemis_Red. I rather like this picture from that first evening:
Pretty sure that's Cy there on the comment, and this picture always had me laughing. Erick took Ice Blast and Glacial Spike for Artemis_Red's abilities, and the extra freezing proved to be a massive, massive aid to the overall team effort. Large parts of Act 2 would have been all but unplayable without Erick's help (but more on that later). For now, we were simply happy to be back to a full 8-person team roster once again.
The Rogues are not a group to be deterred by failure, so sure enough our first task for the evening was to clear out the Pit Level Two again. (Baptism by fire for Erick? 
) This time the Outer Cloister wasn't nearly so bad, and we managed to reach the Pit's second level entrance in less than an hour. Here we go again - wish us luck! Believe me, the Rogues could always use some good fortune.
So far, so good. We've got our portals up, nothing too crazy has come into view yet, and a few monsters are approaching from off the right side of the screen. Dathon has some Meteors dropping for us, everyone else is firing away - good signs thus far.
This picture is from maybe 30 seconds later. Here they come! We had woken up a boss pack and still had no room to manuever; running in any direction will only wake up more monsters. It's just a skeleton, but Extra Strong/Holy Freeze Aura is nothing to sneeze at. We're in a very dangerous situation here; no way to retreat without losing the level. Sirian (Rogue with bone shield close to monsters) is barking out at the rest of us to hold our positions over the TeamSpeak server, and Svava wants nothing more than to hightail it out of there to a safer position! Cy (Energy Shield Rogue also close to the monsters) ends up saving our butts in a big way by tanking the monsters while the rest of us shoot them down from a safe distance. Cy would actually get killed in the process, but he bought the rest of us enough time to secure the level. Big thumbs-up are due for that performance! 
Another boss down in the Pit. By this point, most of the danger is past and the level is largely secure. The Devilkin were much easier to take out on this evening compared to the past with Erick's help freezing and then shattering their corpses. Other than the Devilkin, the level was mostly skeletons boss packs - NOT skeleton archers or corrupted rogue archers. That was probably the reason why we had an easier go of things on this night.
And here we're taking down the final skeleton boss in the Pit. It was almost routine after we got past the initial swarm. So part of the success was due to a fortunate draw, but we also had some good team play on this night. We may be getting the hang of this "Hell" thing after all!
From there the team moved on further into the Monastery, running into a number of nasty bosses but nothing too crazy that couldn't be handled. Here's one of the foes that did stand out a bit beyond some of the others, by virtue of being unusually dangerous.
It wasn't quite a party wipe, but we did lose more Rogues than we would have liked. It's that strange "cold lightning" interaction again caused by Cold Enchanted/Lightning Enchanted bosses taking place here. Svava was pretty well protected against elemental attacks at this point, having already made a "Smoke" runeword armor (+50% all resistances) but I know that a lot of the other Rogues were feeling a lack of resistances this early in Hell and suffered greatly in situations like this one. Poor Hawkmoon has gotten in close to the boss to tag him with a Prevent Monster Heal throwing axe, only to have this happen. And I would never presume to try and understand Cy's thought process here. 
This is another picture that has no real purpose, but it amused me so I threw it in here. This is right at the start of another night's session, coming down from the Catacombs waypoint. Sirian and I were waiting for the rest of the team to finish in town and come down as well... only they were nowhere to be found. (The irony, of course, is that Sirian usually spends far more time in town than anyone of the other Rogues!)
Another boss battle that deserves mention, mostly because this is more or less the ideal situation for the Rogues to find themselves in. This is a fairly dangerous Lightning Enchanted/Mana Burn Vampire boss, but we've got him pinned in a corner with Knockback bows and stunlocked so that he can't do anything. Getting the enemies into a corner spot like this is always the goal, although in practice it's usually difficult to pull off. Also note that one of the Rogues is using a special bow that fires magic arrows, although I can't remember who it was exactly.
Earlier in one of the other sections, I mentioned that if the Rogues ever ran into a Physical Immune/Fire Immune boss, they would be in real trouble since all of their damage gets done from either arrows or Enchant. Well, wouldn't you know it, we ran into our first such boss down on Catacombs 3:
"Grief Grumble" was a rather appropriate name, I thought. The surprising thing was that this boss wasn't all that difficult for the Rogues to kill off. Everyone swapped over to their magical attacks (except for Rogues with all-fire abilities, Jaffa and Dathon were basically out of luck) and managed to do a decent rate of damage. The truth is that so little of our damage actually comes from our bows, that adding Physical Immune on top of Fire Immune really did not have much of an effect. Grief Grumble was not much different than a Fire Immune boss with a lot of hit points. Chain Lightning and Frozen Orb proved to be most effective for taking him down, and the whole thing didn't really take much time at all.
Finally, the Rogues managed to reach Catacombs 4 and face Andariel. Jaffa's Hydras are really going after her here, and Andy's well-known weakness to fire certainly was an advantage for our Enchant bows. Nevertheless, Andariel does have a ton of hit points, so it still took quite some time to kill her off, and she managed to take down a fair number of Rogues in the process before we finally killed her over by the stairs. Good rittance.
With that last foe out of the way, we were finally out of Act One. By the calendar, it had taken an entire month to clear out the act, with two 3-hour sessions being played each week. At that rate, it would take forever to get to three dots, to say nothing of four. But the Rogues don't do anything fast, they just plug away until the job gets done, and so in that spirit, they headed on to brave the deserts of Act Two...
