Clearing the City of the Damned had been a grueling ordeal, but the Rogues fortunately were done with it now and would not have to return again. In our next session, we headed down the stairs into the River of Flame to face the denizens of Hell. It was refreshing to have a much easier go of things - no Stygian Hags! Instead, we had Blood Maggots (vastly easier!), Stranglers, and Pit Lords. In wake of what we had gone through in the City in the previous session, this was a cakewalk. Most notable section of the night was clearing out Maggot City - three bosses packed together plus Maggot Champs plus several regular Maggots. Here's what that looked like:
Lots of little bug bodies on the ground. Even more bodies than the pups from the City, but the maggots posed very little threat to the Rogues, and they had no resistance to either fire or cold. Between our meteors, hydras, and freezing power, they went down without much trouble. I cut-and-pasted the names of two of the maggot bosses into the above picture showing where we smacked down their little maggots; the following is a picture of what all the bosses looked like a little bit south of the above screen.
I cut-and-pasted the name of the third maggot boss into that picture to get his attributes. Notice that there are TWO Multiple Shot maggots in that picture, both firing at the same time. The one good thing is that if you have to face a multiple shot boss, a maggot one isn't all that bad! 
The River was generally non-threatening all evening long. There were some other boss packs, but nothing too dangerous. Nothing notable popped up until we reached the Hellforge and faced Hephasto:
Hephasto was Extra Fast (and I mean REALLY fast) so we took him back to the staircase and fought him there. He was shot down in relative safety from across the lava gap, BUT Hephasto did have teleport and managed to teleport right next to us once or twice by chance. In this picture, we were all on the stairs a second earlier, then Hephasto teleported onto the stairs and killed Jaffa while the rest of us popped across the gap to safety. Altogether a pretty easy battle, but he did get his licks in. The quest reward gems were useless, and I think we may have actually gotten an "El" rune drop, or something equally as worthless. Nothing to write home about in any case.
We cleared the River (and the River Maze) with enough time remaining to go into the Chaos Sanctuary, where we cleared all the way up to the pentagram. Fought a number of bosses, some of them pretty nasty, but generally routine stuff for the Rogue team. It was an easy night on the whole, low death counts for the whole team. To be honest, we probably needed a break like this after the City run in the previous session.
The next night saw our run after Diablo and his Chaos Sanctuary. We hadn't had time to finish it in the previous session, but this would be the "real deal" for the Rogues. Jaffa was away (and Erick had had to leave the team by this point), so we would eventually have to return, but this was still an important night for Rogue Revival. The River of Flame had several bosses, but anything without the mothers wasn't a huge chore to deal with. The Chaos Sanctuary was packed with enemies as usual; here's an example of one such battle that we had to deal with:
This is a big mob, but between freezing power and Dathon's Confuse charges, we are in pretty good shape here. The Venom Lords were generally not that dangerous, since they have no distance attack and a very slow attack swing speed (Tempting Fate, anyone?) They were Immune to Fire, but that just increased the length of time needed to kill them, not the difficulty. Abyss Knights were pretty similar to Venom Lords. Storm Casters were a bit more dangerous, but didn't have many hit points and were also vulnerable to both cold and fire. The Oblivion Knights were the only truly dangerous foes in the Chaos Sanctuary; well, them and any situation in which we woke up huge mobs at once. On at least one occasion Sirian deliberately woke up a mob just to make things more exciting for the rest of us. Uh, thanks. 
On several other occasions, it was not deliberate at all and we still found ourselves with more than we could handle! Fun stuff.
This is the tail end of a fight with an Oblivion Knight boss. We're at the very end of the Vizier's wing of the Sanctuary. This picture came out particularly well, showing off some of the Chain Lightning that the Rogues made use of against a Fire Immune/Cold Immune boss such as this. With his minions dead and backed into a corner, this guy was toast.
Combination shot showing two different Oblivion Knight tri-elemental bosses. The one on the left was fought up in De Seis' wing of the Sanctuary; the one on the right is clearly on the east edge of the pentagram. It could be coincidence that we saw two bosses of the same monster type with the same abilities in one area, but more probably this is another one of the wacky bugs in D2's monster generator that will never be addressed. I think there were six bosses total in the Sanctuary (not counting the seal bosses). We had our hands full clearing the area out, but the whole place was secured a little more than two hours into our session. That left the Seal Bosses to be fought.
Not being stupid, we brought the Infector back to the River of Flame and shot him down in safety from there. The guy is just too fast to deal with in the Sanctuary, and his minions refuse to leave his side (ruling out a divide and conquer strategy). This is Rogue Revival, after all, and the Rogues always enjoy a chance to use their bows as well.
After cleaning up the Infector minions who had been left behind in the dash to the River, the Rogues popped De Seis' seal next. De Seis was Extra Strong with a Fanaticism Aura (and he can Curse you too!) but we kept our distance and had relatively little trouble. This was one of those situations where melee was NOT a good idea, to put it lightly.
Neat picture showing a chilled Vizier and his minions charging after the Rogue team. As you might be able to tell from the fact that he was already half-dead at this point, the Vizier was simply not very dangerous, even with his Extra Strong ability, since like all the Storm Casters he lacked immunity to both Fire and Cold. The Vizier and his minions went down very quickly, and it was the easiest of the three seal fights by a pretty wide margin.
That only left one foe remaining in Act Four...
Here, Sirian is shooting a Frozen Orb up Diablo's tailpipe with ME0003, Hawkmoon, and I fire away from the bottom of the screen. Diablo is a lot tougher now than he was in some of the earlier versions (the original Elemental Strike Team took him down in like 20 seconds in Hell), but he still doesn't pose that much of a threat. The one unusual thing about this fight was that Dathon tried to help us out by hitting Diablo with some Lower Resist curses, causing Big D to completely ignore all of the other Rogues and go chasing Red_RidingHood all over the Sanctuary. He was pissed about being cursed, let me tell you! Of course poor Dathon had to deal with Diablo ignoring everyone else and targeting him almost exclusively during the fight. It would be interesting to know what kind of AI programming is at work behind the monster targeting in this game...
Anyway, it wasn't too long before Diablo croaked:
He tried to trap me in a Bone Prison again, but this time it actually showed up on my screen and I teleported out of it. The Rogues will be moving on to Act Five and a date with destiny. This fashion-conscious group just hopes they have something extra nice to wear when that day comes!
