With that bloodbath behind them, the Rogues were down to their final session of the three-dot run, a single night's trek to search out and destroy Baal. The entire team was present for the last trip from the Worldstone Two waypoint to the Throne of Destruction and Baal. Worldstone Keep Two had Vipers/Fetishes/Hell Spawn, which was laughably easy compared to the monsters the previous night. The Rogues found the stairs down pretty fast and headed to Worldstone Keep Three. The monsters there were blowdart Fetishes/Stranglers/Abyss Knights/Oblivion Knights. Aside from the little guys, it could have been the Chaos Sanctuary! A bit strange. The first notable boss of the evening was Hawkmoon's evil twin, Moon Hawk!
No self-respecting Rogue would be caught looking like a Fetish, so of course he had to be killed. 
In the course of fighting this boss, the Rogues woke up some more Stranglers, and pretty soon we had a full-fledged triple boss pack battling against us, being fought in a sardine can of only two rooms. Oops, how did that happen?
I pasted the stats of the second boss in under the first one, to save the need for another screenshot. None of those bosses would have been too tough individually, but together the fight was elevated into "interesting" range. The Festishes also kept poisoning everyone with their blowdarts, so that forced frequent trips to town for healing and more potions, probably dragging out this battle longer than it would have been otherwise. The Rogues had plenty of practice at this sort of thing by now, of course, so with some effort the situation was cleared out. Zero percent chance the early Rogue team could have handled this - I took it as another sign of how improved the team had become that this level was never lost to the enemies even temporarily.
We found the stairs very quickly after that and headed down - the logic was the Rogues had already cleared more than enough of the Worldstone Keep (I think that was a fair assesment to make!). In the Throne of Destruction, there were Vipers/Witches/Gloams and quite a few bosses; I think 5 or 6 before we even reached Baal! This was the first one the Rogues ran into:
This snake was fought right by the stairs; they are just off to the west of this picture. He's also already chilled and Cursed everyone. Fortunately, these Vipers had no resistance to Fire, and Enchant damage from the Rogue bows dropped them in short order. (Just for good measure, Dathon took some of the minions out of the fight with Dim Vision. Thanks, buddy!)
This Cold Enchanted/Fanaticism Gloam boss was reminicent of one that caused us all kinds of problems in one of the caves of Act 5. Unlike that boss, however, this one was Stone Skin instead of Mana Burn, which let the Rogues pound him with their elemental skills (as seen above). Gloams are highly resistant to physical damage but not so much to elemental damage, so this boss actually died pretty quickly. As mentioned earlier, there were about six bosses in the Throne of Destruction, including a nasty witch one, but with some work they were all cleaned out and Rogue portals set up in all the corners in preparation for the battles against Baal's minions.
Colenzo had his minions shattered with ice and went down in very short order. He may have been Immune to Fire, but Dathon dropped the rest of his resistances with Lower Resist and the shaman didn't last very long by himself.
Achmel's skeleton mages all spawned as Cold Immune, so the Rogues had to lure them all away out of resurrection range before taking down that boss. This took a little while and was not the easiest task, but we managed it fairly well. The picture is from after that preparatory work took place and the Rogues had returned to take on the boss. Achmel was tagged with Lower Resist and then the team went to work with bows (and Frozen Orb as well). Seperated from his minions, he too wasn't much of a threat.
Bartuc and his minions came roaring out of the room by the Throne and took Jaffa down in the initial rush. The Rogues simply scattered, however, splitting up the minions and taking them out one at a time. Batuc was parked at one of the portals and disposed of by the entire team once his minions were all dead. By the way, the Aura was Holy Fire - if it had been Might, the fight would have been REAL interesting!
Ventaur was parked and his minions separated, but before we killed them Lister spawned in the throne room! So the Rogues had two groups of bosses running around at the same time (uh oh). Lister was parked at the stairs and we spent a long time cleaning out the two boss packs. Even with Dathon using Lower Resist charges non-stop, it still took forever to kill these monsters. Too bad Blizzard apparently never realized that adding more hit points does NOT make a monster harder - just drags the fights out that much longer. After twenty or so minutes of killing the Ventaur and Lister minions in extremely boring and non-threatening fights, the Rogues went back and finished off the parked Venom Lord boss shown above. He raged around a bit but did little real damage.
Ages ago when writing part of this story, I said that a Fire Immune/Physical Immune boss would have the Rogues fighting it for weeks. It appears that Fate has a sense of humor, for those were the very attributes that LISTER ended up having! 
What I had underestimated was just how little damage that the Rogues did actually came from their bows. Physical Immune bosses certainly took longer, but the Rogues could do almost as much damage by using their elemental spells, so Lister was in fact readily killable. It took a while (even with Lower Resist), but the Rogues kept running Lister in endless circles around the stairs and whittled him down to size with their spells. Maybe 5-10 minutes for the battle, so it wasn't too ridiculous, although certainly not speedy.
That just left Baal:
I'd like to say that the Baal fight was the triumphant conclusion to the Rogues' run through Hell, but that would be a lie. Baal can be summed up in one word: BORING! The clone was very quickly parked at a portal, and then we settled in to beating on the big guy for a solid 15-20 minutes before he finally went down. Oh - he wasn't hurting us, it just took that long to kill him. What a joke! I was watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals on TV and not even monitoring the fight, it took so long. Yes, the Rogues are fighting the final boss in D2 and I'm literally not even watching the computer screen, just clicking the mouse button over and over again. Baal has roughly 3.5 million hit points for a 7-person game in Hell, a good example of Blizzard overkill. "He has more hit points, that makes him hard!" 
The most satisfying moment of the evening was seeing that expression of pain on Baal's face as he dies. About time! The true victory of Rogue Revival was won in the previous session on Worldstone Keep One. This was just anti-climactic mop-up work.
We closed out the night by saying hi to Kasha and our sister Rogues in Act One:
And a final group picture of the 3-Dot Rogue Team, bows in hand by the Rogue Encampment Waypoint:
The Rogue journey began on October 4, 2004 and concluded its three-dot run on June 23, 2005. All told, Rogue Revival lasted for 36 weeks and ran 71 three-hour sessions. Aside from short breaks at Christmas and Easter, the team played twice a week every week with no interruptions. The nights that the full Rogue team was NOT assembled tended to be the exception; turnout was consistently high across the entire nine-month period. I snapped close to 1000 screenshots and ended up using about 270 of them when compiling these reports. From start to finish, Rogue Revival has been a blast to play, and I want to THANK everyone on the team for their vital contributions. 
The next page will have commentary from the individual Rogues with their thoughts and impressions of the experience.
