Their journey having spanned countless miles and untold dangers, the Rogues had finally reached the Worldstone Keep itself and the last bastion of Hell. The epic quest was nearing its conclusion, but many dangers still remained to be braved in Baal's own fortress. The game was not about to let the Rogues reach their third dot without a fight, let me assure you! 
The exhausting battle with the Ancients was behind them and would not have to be faced again, but the Rogues had been unable to make any further progress from that point. Since they had not gotten even close to the Worldstone Keep Two waypoint in the previous session, the Rogues started out their next evening at the Ancient's Way location once again. We ran into quite a few bosses as we went along; the monster draw had a lot of Damned and Quill Rat monster types. Still, nothing too serious was encountered before we found the stairs and made it to the summit. Since the Ancients remained statues, the Rogues could head straight into the Worldstone Keep. Down on Worldstone Keep One, the Rogues took care not to wake up more monsters than they could handle. One step at a time, careful not to make any sudden moves... Then the floodgates burst open.
A huge mob of witches exploded out of nowhere, far more than the Rogues could handle. Notice how open the area around the stairs is, no architectural formations that the Rogues can use to their advantage. Witches are clearly one opponent, with Zealots/Hierophants another (note the blizzard spell); we didn't know who the third type would be at this point but things were already not good. This picture is taken about two seconds before the entire situation is shot to hell and the Rogues start dropping like flies. Virtually everyone goes down under the swarm of monsters, Svava manages to high-tail it out of there back up the stairs but now we're in deep trouble. Most of the Rogue bodies have been lost and the stairs is a total mess.
The team managed to get only one portal up away from the stairs; I can't remember whose portal it was, but I believe it was Cy's (please correct me if I'm wrong on this). From there, the banged-up Rogue team made their second attempt at the level, and also found out who the third monster type would be:
Flesh Spawners. With pumped-up Act Five stats, no less. 
Needless to say, this was about as bad a draw as we could possibly get in D2. Our two worst enemy types, in the same level, along with Zealot/Hierophants! Not to mention the fact that the Rogue team had no room to work with at all... Anyway, this portal was safe initially, but the commotion of trying to fight ONE Flesh Spawner quickly woke up more enemies, sending more Rogues to the ground and forcing the few survivors to teleport blindly in all directions hoping desperately to find the stairs down to Worldstone 2. I blinked Svava randomly further to the west, but ran into more enemies than I could deal with, got stunlocked, and, well...
It appears that a witch got in the killing blow, not that it really mattered. Just look at them crawling all over my corpse! Dealing with this kind of situation was clearly next to impossible. (By the way, the character portraits at the top are showing that at the time this picture was taken, every single Rogue other than Dathon was dead!) The combination of the long range shots of the witches + their curses + the unbelievably fast breeding of the Stygian Hags + lightning and blizzards from the Hierophants... this was basically unplayable. Even worse, all of the portals that the Rogues had set up were so hopelessly jammed with monsters that the Rogues couldn't even teleport away and set up new ones befoer they were stunlocked and killed. Look at this jammed portal:
Oh my, just look at that! 
Even Teleport can't get a Rogue out of that mess!
Now the Rogues probably should have rolled a new map to get a different and easier monster draw. After all, what we had was a hopeless situation. But the Rogues are a stubborn lot, and, well, we just don't know when to quit. Thus it was time for some "Suicide Bunny Tactics"! Now what in the world does this mean? The analogy is that if a large group of rabbits all run for it at once, the rabbit hunter won't be able to catch all of them and some will escape (as in the old saying, "if you chase after two rabbits you will catch none"). With all portals packed with enemies, the Rogues reverted to the Suicide Bunny Tactic of everyone jumping down the same portal at once (naked!) and teleporting randomly away, in the logic that they couldn't kill EVERYONE before someone got away. To our considerable delight, this actually worked and the team managed to get several new portals up! Success!
We soon found that many of the new portals led to dead ends, so a second iteration of the bunny strategy was carried out. This got the Rogues some new portals deeper into Worldstone One, and on the third attempt Svava managed to break free of the encircling mobs of enemies, teleporting a half-dozen hops into the blackness and into unexplored territory before she was horribly killed for the twentieth time or so on the night. The Rogues jumped my portal next, and on that try (I believe the fourth run of the bunny tactic overall), one bunny found its way to the carrot: Hawkmoon made it to the Worldstone Keep Two stairs. Long live the naked little bunnies!
That shot shows how against all odds the Rogues reached the Worldstone Keep Two stairs. Cy's initial portal was in the opposite direction from the stairs down (although of course we didn't know that at the time!) and so the team actually had further to go by moving in that direction first. It may be a little hard to see, but I illustrated Svava's rough path of teleportation using white arrows and marked the spot where I set up my portal. (The reason why it looks so drunk is that I was popping between gigantic swarms of monsters at every step!) Then Hawkmoon's path is marked out in gold and the location of the portals seen on the screen indicated as well (the actual location is way down in the corner of the minimap). I apologize if it's unclear, but that's the best way I could illustrate what happened.
What followed was a moment of high comedy. After all of this fantastic work to get a portal by the stairs, when everyone quit the game to get their bodies back, we failed to have someone stay in the game to hold a portal at the stairs! We lost our entire progress for the night! 
Either hilariously funny or "beat your head against the keyboard" time. Probably both. Now that we knew where the stairs were and had our gear back, however, I managed to teleport my way to them from the Ancients stairs and get a portal up for everyone else. How I managed to survive that still baffles me, but it was done and now the Rogues were ready to go on the next dungeon level.
With their bodies back again, the Rogues headed down to Worldstone Keep Two, where the monster draw was much more friendly. That doesn't mean it was easy (I seem to be saying this a lot), but Horadrim Ancients/Skeleton Mages/Gloams were simply not in the league of the first floor. Comparatively, it was easy. Plenty of bosses to deal with though, including this one right out of the gate:
Horadrim Ancient boss pack, with some nice Lightning effects from Cy and ME0003. Although there were many skeleton mages around, the Rogues had plenty of experience with corpse disposal tactics using their freezing power by now. The most troublesome opponents on this floor were not surprisingly the Gloams that continued to turn up.
That's a Gloam boss, although again it's hard to see. Cursed/Mana Burn/Extra Fast provides a very dangerous combination of abilities (Cursed Lightning really hurts a lot). It should also be noted that these things are considered undead (see the tag at the top?) and could thus be revived by the Horadrim Ancients. That was a pain in the butt, especially when fighting boss packs like this:
Many thanks to Dathon and his Confuse charges, so that the enemies were attacking each other here instead of attack the Rogues. The fighting on Worldstone Two was tough, no doubt about it, but infinitely easier than what we had seen on Worldstone One. The entire level was cleared and the waypoint found. Time to stop for the night, right?
No.
It is not time to stop for the night. There is some unfinished business on Worldstone One.
D2 has thrown its worst punch at the Rogues and the team has survived it. We are going to clear this level come hell or high water, and the very hordes of chaos shall not stand against us. Every last Flesh Spawner will be hunted down and killed, to the very last Flesh Pup. Here the Rogues are taking on the first of many Flesh Spawners, using Lightning and Dim Vision as their allies and relying on the only successful strategy against these things: get up in their faces and beat them to death before they can spawn more pups. Fighting them would always remaind a difficult and extremely dangerous task.
One of the bitches that tried her best to defeat the Rogues and made our lives miserable on the night. Note the carnage that accompanies each and every battle with the Flesh Spawners; there are also Zealot and witch corpses on the floor too. At the time this picture was taken, the Rogues had secured the first two rooms by the Worldstone Two stairs and were advancing back towards the middle of the level.
One of my favorite pictures in all of Rogue Revival, depicting the sheer chaos and difficulty of taking on the Flesh Spawners. Three of them have woken up at the same time, there are pups everywhere, Zealots running around, spell effects flying about, Dim Vision charges in use, six Rogues in the picture - all in all, it came out looking really good. Forget Baal; this night was the true test for Rogue Revival, and scenes like this showcase the experience better than anything I can describe ever could. It was two steps forward and one step back all night, but the fact that the Rogues were making any progress at all was nothing less than a miracle.
There were witches too down in Worldstone One, quite a lot of them in fact, as demonstrated by this champ picture. Flesh Spawners themselves were bad enough, but with witches providing artillery support and cursing the Rogues on top of that, the situation became unbelievably nasty. The two monster groups had to be fought seperately all night long, requiring much footwork and backtracking. Clearing out the witch bosses and champs was especially bad.
Finally, after enormous effort and long after midnight on the clock, the remaining Rogues who did not have to get up early the next morning spotted this sight:
It may not look like much, but that was the first time in almost four hours that the Rogues had seen the stairs up to the Ancients. Compare it to the first picture I posted if you like. We had had to retreat down an entire level to the next floor and return from there, but the Rogues were back. I still feel an enormous sense of achievement every time I see this simple picture. After all that crap, we made it back. There was still close to an hour's left of work remaining from this point, but the remaining Rogues slogged through the rest and achieved the full-clear of the level. Every single enemy on Worldstone Keep One was slain.
The Rogues finished up sometime around 1:15am EST (our sessions started at 8:00, by the way). The fighting had been so fierce that I had to sell some of my old perfect gems just to pay the repair costs on my equipment; Sirian had a repair bill of over 200,000 gold and used a runeword formula to repair his armor. It was a marathon from start to finish, but the team had come through with flying colors. First to get the unplayable draw, trapped so badly we couldn't even go down our own portals without dying, then to use the suicide team tactics to get some new portals up, then to finding the stairs down (and losing our portal there due to our own incompetence!), to clearing the entire second floor and then returning to the first floor where it took almost three hours of agonizingly slow one-monster-at-a-time advancement to finally clear out the entire map in an enormous dose of payback... it was a legendary night. No one who was there will forget this any time soon (poor Jaffa was away and had to miss it!) I couldn't have been prouder of the whole team from start to finish. 
