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Skelly ventured onwards into Act Three of Nightmare difficulty with a maxed-out Fire Golem and a skeleton army that was continuing to grow in size. The long jungle path leading to Kurast stretched out before him and it took me two sizable gaming sessions to full clear everything and make it through to the temple city on the other side. While the outdoor jungle areas tend to be rather tedious to play through, they're also low on the difficulty scale and it's been something like two decades since I can remember one of my characters actually dying in them. These were great areas for Skelly and his skeleton army, with the wide open spaces providing plenty of room for his skeletal warriors to swarm over his opponents. With eight of the bony swordsman in tow, there were more than enough skeletons to serve as offensive lineman and prevent the monsters from reaching Skelly himself, even when masses of fetishes and flayers showed up. These outdoor regions were easy to play through and once again I found that few of the skeletons were dying along the way; Skelly mostly had to stand around and look pretty while his minions did all the work.
The underground areas upped the challenge factor by a bit while still remaining relatively simple. The Spider Cavern and the Arachnid Lair were both full of spiders, obviously, and their poison attacks caused some problems for the Fire Golem. The Poison Spinner spiders hit for 2600 poison damage which would turn the golem green and slowly drain away its health until Skelly recast the thing. The skeletons themselves didn't seem too bothered by the poison which suggests to me that they must have at least some innate poison resistance even though I can't find any documentation to that effect online. Sszark drew Cold Enchanted for his extra trait and caused a more interesting tactical fight because his spiders came racing over from the left corner while Skelly was already fighting another Mana Burn / Fire Enchanted spider boss off to the right. This might have been a disaster in Hell difficulty but here in Nightmare the skeleton warriors calmly tanked both sides of the combat simultaneously while the skeleton mages and the golem cut down all of the arachnids.
The Swampy Pit and the Flayer Dungeon traded out all of the spiders for lots of little flayers and several different types of undead. The various mummies and gloams and fetishes weren't particularly dangerous, however the exploding undead dolls can appear here as well and they always require caution on the higher difficulties. Fortunately Skelly's summoning build was about the safest possible character setup with which to fight those things, with Skelly able to put more than a dozen skeletons in between himself and the doll explosions. The screenshot above was a perfect example: there was no way that that Extra Fast undead soul killer was ever going to reach Skelly through a wall of skeleton defenders. For whatever reason, the skeletons also didn't seem too bothered when the undead dolls exploded in the same fashion that I've noticed with other summoned pets and the hireable mercenaries. Something about how Diablo 2 is coded clearly causes their explosions to deal vastly more damage to the player than it does to the various minions. In any case, Skelly full cleared everything (including the pointless Swampy Pit) without running into any trouble.
Clearing these various areas yielded a decent amount of loot which Skelly hauled back to town for selling and then converted into more pulls of the gambling slot machine. I finally managed to turn up a decent pair of boots after roughly 100-150 total gambles: 20% faster run, 34% fire resistance, 17% lightning resistance, and some minor magic find. While it was certainly possible to do better, that was a vast improvement over the non-rare 20% faster run + 28% fire resistance boots that Skelly had been using previously for lack of anything better. Now I could swap back to gambling rings full time where Skelly continued to have terrible luck and still lacked rare items in all of his jewelry slots.
The outdoor portions of Kurast also tend to be some of the easiest parts of the act and Skelly didn't have any fights worth mentioning as he passed through. The vultures and leapers and thorned hulks all fell quickly and without fuss to the ranks of the skeleton army. The Sextons and Cantors with their healing were unable to restore the health of the Zealots fast enough to stop them from falling to the skeleton force. It was particularly satisfying to watch all of the Zealots go down and then a wave of undead wash over the enemy healers once they were isolated. I wasn't too worried about the Kurast Temples because I knew that Skelly's minions would surround and protect him as he ventured down into those tiny deathtraps. The Ruined Temple proved to be one of the easiest of the bunch, with hardly anything present down there at all. Sarina and her corrupted rogues were the only boss group present - I guess they were barely trying to defend Lam Esem's Tome? The best fight came in one of the two temples in Upper Kurast where there was a Cursed / Spectral Hit rogue boss fought alongside vampires dropping Meteor spells from the sky which together were enough to smash a few skeletons. All in all though, this was quite routine and Skelly cleared the temples without any serious danger.
Probably the most annoying part of this section of the gameplay was an absolutely massive Kurast Sewers, the largest size that it can possibly roll based on my experience down there. There were also Horadric Ancient greater mummies in there to revive the undead which dragged things out unnecessarily a bit. All that fighting did continue to level up Skelly at a healthy pace since Nightmare difficulty lacks the weird leveling curve of this part of Normal. With Fire Golem maxed out at SLVL 20+4, Skelly was free to return to improving his skeleton minions by splitting skill points across Raise Skeleton, Raise Skeletal Mage, and Skeleton Mastery. I decided to assign skill points in groups of three: first three skill points in Mastery, then three points in Raise Skeleton (enough to add another melee skeleton), then three points in Raise Skeletal Mage, followed by repeating the process again. This ensured that all of these skills continued improving at the same rate and took advantage of both the flat damage increases from Mastery along with the percentage-based increases from Raise Skeleton and Raise Skeletal Mage.
Travincal went smoothly for Skelly and the gang, better than I'd been expecting to be honest. They weren't bothered too much by the Meteor and Blizzard spells that kept raining down from the skies and the Zealots were taking too much damage to run away effectively. The Council members also went a bit better than Skelly's initial trip here in Normal difficulty as Geleb chased outside of the central room where he was surrounded and killed by the skeletons. Toorc made his stand right at the doorway which caused him to last a bit longer whereas Ismail never ventured outside of his spawning area next to the Compelling Orb. I doubt that having the addition of a ninth melee skeleton on hand made much of a difference here but you never know, it certainly couldn't have hurt.
Then it was down into the Durance which always has the same four monsters present, none of which were that scary for Skelly. Durance 1 was missing the mummies while having vampires, Maulers, and Undead Stygian Dolls. The biggest issue was having enough visibility to see the little dolls as they scampered around though once again having so many skeleton minions served to block nearly all of their death explosions from reaching Skelly. Durance 2 saw the undead dolls drop out of the monster mix with Cadaver mummies swapped in their place, which was probably the best setup that Skelly could have wanted even though it didn't make much of a difference either way. This floor was therefore not interesting or scary in any way, it simply stretched on and on and on as it always does in Nightmare and Hell. I full cleared it for the same of completeness while trying not to doze off.
Durance 3 lacked any Blood Lord vampires in the initial entry area, only to see Bremm come roaring out of the main doorway as soon as Skelly ventured nearby. Bremm had Magic Resistant as his extra trait and thankfully a weak Holy Fire for his innate aura so Skelly had a pretty good roll in terms of the boss abilities. I worried that Bremm's sparks and Hydras would tear right through the skeleton army... but they held up really well and tanked long enough for Bremm's minions to start dropping and provide some replacement bodies for the rest of the fight. That pattern was repeated against Maffer and Wyand as in both cases the remaining Council members were unable to kill more a single skeleton. I guess dropping all of those additional skill points into the three skeleton abilities had beefed them up a bit over the course of Act Three as they were quite sturdy against these threats. They could probably kill the various act end bosses as well if there was a sufficient supply of corpses on hand.
Mephisto was lurking in the back of the Durance where the skeleton army tackled him head-on. There's really nothing the player can do to stop the melee skeletons from rushing in whereas the skeleton mages managed to find individual firing lanes to toss out their colorful projectiles. I knew that the skeletal warriors would all die to the poison cloud that Mephisto emits against melee threats, and they did themselves proud by lasting for most of the fight in the face of that green goo. Mephisto was down to about 25% health remaining when the last of them perished, at which point I concentrated on keeping the demon distracted with more Fire Golems while the skeletal mages kept casting away. Seven of the eight mages were still standing when Mephisto dropped his soulstone, an excellent fight indeed.
There was a noticeable increase in the challenge posed by the enemies as Skelly began crossing the barren wastelands of Act Four. The monsters in this act didn't have drastically higher health or damage output, rather they featured heavy fire resistance pretty much across the board even here in Nightmare. Fire resistance was problematic for Skelly because all of the damage done by his Fire Golem was attuned to that element, not to mention that he always seemed to wind up with a good number of fire mages in the skeleton ranks. Skelly kept encountering Doom Knights in these areas which were completely Fire Immune and that was even worse from a damage perspective. I think the other two monsters in the Outer Steppes were Doom Casters (50% fire resistance) and Cliff Lurkers (80% fire resistance) which was getting a bit ridiculous. Skelly was hardly at a roadblock or anything like that, however he was definitely a bit slower in clearing these areas and I noticed that I had to raise replacement skeletons on a more regular basis. Hopefully this wasn't the beginning of a new trend.
On the positive side, the skeletons held up much better to Burning Soul lightning in the Plains of Despair than I'd been expecting. The skeletons would track down the invisible opponents with ease and sometimes those glass cannon enemies could die in a single attack from the Fire Golem. Izual's two additional skill points were enough to bring the skeletal mages up to SLVL 15+6 for a ninth mage and then it was time to go back to skilling Mastery again.
The other big discovery took place when Skelly kicked over a Trapped Soul and a Lum rune popped out! That was incredible news as Lum was my single most desired rune (within the realm of what could realistically drop) to unlock the Smoke runeword. Skelly's biggest crippling flaw was a lack of resistances from his jewelry slots and now he could make a runeword that granted 50% resist all in the armor slot, absolutely amazing. It might sound like I pulled this rune out of shared stash from another character because it fit Skelly's setup so perfectly, but I swear, this Lum rune really did drop naturally. I was halfway through the Plains of Despair at the time so I had to wait until reaching the next waypoint before I could save Skelly's progress and go back to Normal difficulty to shop the vendors for a 2 socket breastplate. Once that was done though, Skelly returned to Nightmare difficulty with the pictured armor and his resistances all maxed out at 75%. There was a slight tradeoff here, with Skelly losing some movement speed and faster casting (which was enough to be noticeable when raising minions) from his prior Stealth armor, but the Smoke runeword was nevertheless a big upgrade which would be even more vital in Hell difficulty.
As far as the remainder of Act Four, Stygian Hags appeared in the City of the Damned where they required a lot more work to kill than the Stranglers and Dark Familiar bats that made up the rest of the monster mix. The skeletons handled them well enough and Skelly would never have to worry about running out of corpses whenever they were present, however they required enough extra effort to defeat that I still preferred it when the breeding enemies failed to show up. Unfortunately Skelly drew them a second time on the River of Flame and there was one battle that had a Grotesque boss plus a Grotesque champ pack where the pup bodies piled up in heaps. Hephasto and the Hellforge were as close to the stairs as they can appear and thus cleared almost immediately at the start of the River, with some nearby Grotesques supplying plenty of fresh corpses for Skelly. The Hellforge quest dropped a Lem rune which is a really good roll for Nightmare difficulty, with only Pul and Um being higher runes that could appear on the tier list. I can't think of anything that Skelly would want to do with a Lem rune unless an Ist would somehow show up for a Delirium helmet but I stashed the rune away for safekeeping just in case.
The Chaos Sanctuary was the first place that Venom Lords appeared as Skelly had somehow dodged the balrog monster type up to this point. If Act Four had been a bit tougher than Act Three up to this point, then the Chaos Sanctuary was another big increase in difficulty thanks to the presence of those Venom Lords and the Oblivion Knights. This was immediately obvious at the entrance to the Sancutary where Skelly had a massive fight that consumed several minutes. There were half a dozen Oblivion Knights there plus a Venom Lord boss with the Cursed trait and Skelly simply could not get through the door. His minions slew demon after demon for minutes on end trying to clear a path forward. I had to go back to town three times for more mana potions as Skelly kept burning through his mana orb casting and recasting the Fire Golem. Eventually Skelly made it inside where the fighting still raged white hot across the length of the dark cathedral. The Venom Lords were insanely tanky and almost completely immune to both fire and poison damage while the Oblivion Knights kept hitting the skeleton army with Decripfy curse which slowed their attacks to a crawl while simultaneously halving their physical resistance. There was one huge fight to the north of the pentagram that forced Skelly to retreat back to Act One for more minions, the first time that had happened in ages. I did clear the whole Chaos Sancutary but it took half an hour and the process was anything but routine. These monsters were tough!
The Seal Bosses were probably easier than the routine denizens of the Chaos Sanctuary since there weren't as many of them encountered at a time. De Seis had Extra Fast trait to go with his innate Extra Strong / Fanaticism aura which could have been really nasty except that Skelly's army pinned all of the minions against a wall right as they spawned and removed their speed from the equation completely. The Vizier and the Storm Caster monster type more generally were a complete joke and I didn't even bother taking a picture of the boss. The Infector was fought under absolutely perfect conditions as pictured above: pinned in a corner, with all nine of the skeletal warriors forming a brick wall to protect the skeleton mages, and with tons of replacement bodies ready to go from an earlier fight. Skelly went through almost all of the corpses visible above in summoning replacement skeletons but the whole thing worked perfectly without the need for a retreat.
I knew that Diablo would be tough and I resolved to keep the skeletons alive for as long as possible before Skelly was inevitably left with just the golem for damage. I started the fight by casting the Fire Golem directly on top of Diablo when he spawned at the pentagram which helped to keep the big guy distracted for a few seconds. I figured that the skeleton warriors would bite the dust almost immediately, however to my surprise they held up better than the skeletal mages who started falling quickly. I think this is because the melee skeletons were close enough to be shielded from Diablo's various fiery abilities while the mages kept getting caught by the River of Flame and the Lightning Breath of Doom. The skeleton army held up reasonably well for the first few minutes until Skelly ran out of blue potions and had to portal back to town to get more. The return visit went less well as Diablo managed to wriggle free of where I'd been trapping him on the pentagram and then laid waste to more of the skeleton mages with his lightning breath. I'll have to try stacking mana potions here like I usually do for the Ancients to avoid having to return to town since that brief interruption was enough to shake Diablo free and cause havoc.
Thus the second half of the fight went a bit less cleanly for Skelly. The skeleton mages all died after about five minutes, at which time five melee skeletons were still alive, and then the skeletal warriors fell shortly thereafter. They had done their job though as Diablo's healthbar had dropped below the "D" to indicate that he had perhaps 15% of his health remaining. For the next few minutes, I watched Diablo engage in a boxing match with the Fire Golem, albeit an unfair one where one combatant could breath red lightning and annihilate his opponent at any time. Skelly kept bringing the golem back though and those fire punches did hurt when they landed, slowly but steadily cutting away at the demon's remaining life. After two more trips back to town for additional blue potions, Diablo finally collapsed with about ten minutes of elapsed time on the clock. I was satisfied overall with this performance even if there was still some room for improvement.
Skelly began Act Five in my next gaming session and, as expected, the difficulty level of the new act fell off a cliff. The Bloody Foothills were full of Enslaved melee demons along with spear-tossing cats which were little more than a joke after having to fight through all those Venom Lords and curse-wielding Oblivion Knights back in the Chaos Sanctuary. Skelly's minions quickly returned back to near-invincibility status where fifteen minutes could pass without a single skeleton dying and I was able to operate this character on cruise control. I was still having a blast, especially when the melee skeletons formed a perfect tank line for the mages to shoot behind as in the screenshot above, but this was easy mode where I didn't have to expend much effort. Then the Frigid Highlands were heavy on imps which were even easier for the skeletons to kill, if that was possible. The skeletal minions perfectly tracked them when they tried to teleport and their 700 HP total was laughably low for late Nightmare difficulty.
By far the most noteworthy event in these outdoor areas was a gold-colored ring popping out from one of the treasure chests. It turned out to be the unique ring Dwarf Star which I can't ever remember finding before although I've probably come across at at some point with one character or another. While the two stamina modifiers on Dwarf Star were useless, +40 life was excellent as the big HP modifiers can't roll on rings (+40 HP is the maximum possible that can be found on rings). 15% fire absorb combined with -15 magic damage also meant that Skelly would likely be able to stand in Fire Walls and Meteors without taking any damage at all, assuming he had 75% fire resistance. Even +100% extra gold was genuinely useful for generating more income for gambles, as getting 600-700 gold per drop instead of 300ish gold definitely added up over time. The one weakness on this unique ring was a lack of any resistances but I hoped that having the Smoke runeword's 50% resist all would compensate for that. Given how terrible Skelly's rings had been thus far, it was a no-brainer to replace his 25% fire resistance ring with this new addition.
The following Arreat Plateau had a fun guest monster in the form of carvers and their shamans back from Act One, looking very out of place on the frozen steppes of Act Five. Those carvers actually get a ton of elemental resistances when appearing as guest monsters but their base health was way too low for them to do much of anything and the skeleton army bowed them right over before racing on to their shamans. I noticed as well that Skelly's minions were doing a good job of smashing down the various Barricades and Towers that make up the fortification defenses of these outdoor areas. You can't stop the skeletons from running over to attack every wall so I was happy to see them knocking these things down in 15-20 seconds apiece. Might as well let the minions have their fun, heh. The Act Four subdungeons weren't particularly dangerous on this trip either, with Skelly's minions still surviving without any trouble against the balrogs and witches encountered down there. I kept expecting the skeletons to start falling off and it hadn't happened yet, probably because I was pumping more skill points into them with each new level.
The underground ice caverns had what should have been a scary monster mix: Claw Vipers with their Bone Spears operating behind the fearsome Blood Lord minotaurs. This was the true test of Skelly's army: could it stand up to the Frenzy blows of those minotaurs? The answer was clearly yes, at least here in Nightmare difficulty. The minotaurs would occasionally kill a skeleton if they could isolate one of them, however by and large things continued on as before with Skelly rarely needing to raise new followers. I suspect that having such strong skeletons kept them alive and that the minotaurs needed the additional damage and attack rating bonuses that they wouldn't get until Hell difficulty. The Amazon Basin says that the Blood Lord minotaurs only hit for about 60 damage per swing here which apparently wasn't high enough to pose a serious threat to the skeletal warriors.
The Glacial Trail had a fun new wrinkle:
Enemy skeleton clones! These Bone Warrior guest monsters literally used the identical graphics as Skelly's melee warriors to make them completely indistinguishable from one another. I tried zooming in to see if there were any small details separating them and nope, the visuals were exactly the same. Then it turned out that there were cold Bone Mages present in the Glacial Trail as well who were clones of Skelly's own cold mages! Fortunately these were both extremely easy opponents to kill and Skelly's minions dispatched them with haste whenever they appeared. It does feel like Diablo 2 should have some kind of visual indicator to tell them apart though, right? I guess your typical summoning Necromancer will have an Act Two mercenary with a Might aura present and the glowing aura under their feet helps sort out friends from foes.
In any case, the Crystalline Passage and Frozen River and Glacial Trail all passed by quickly in a single gaming session. I made sure to complete the Drifter Cavern at the same time and it could have been quite dangerous since Skelly rolled the map layout where the player enters the small cave in the dead center rather than getting the safer side entrance. But then the skeleton army smashed right through the witches and Frozen Terrors down there without breaking a sweat - all right then. Skelly was moving fast enough that I opted to continue onwards into Nihlathak's Temple in the same session, where Skelly amused himself by raising a bunch of the Prowling Dead bodies at the temple's entrance before they could stand up the first time. That's a fun trick that only the Necromancer can pull off though the Paladin can do something similar with Redemption aura.
The Halls of Anguish had the weird monster setup where Guardians were present but without any undead minions for them to revive, leaving the greater mummies looking oddly lonely with no minions attending them. There were also a lot of beetles and more Prowling Dead on these floors who were easy to kill and sped up the full clear pace of these dreary underground levels. While exploring the Halls of Pain, Skelly found a rare ring that was good enough for him to equip in the other slot: 10% faster cast, 47 mana, and 22 poison resistance with two other irrelevant affixes. That was hardly a dream item but it was a good fit for Skelly's current setup as poison resistance was the one category of the four where he was most lacking. Plus it was useful having additional mana given the extremely expensive cost of summoning the Fire Golem and having 10% faster cast to remove a frame animation certainly wouldn't hurt. Remember that Skelly wasn't using the Spirit runeword and had swapped out his Stealth armor for Smoke which meant that he had no faster cast at all on his build. Now I could swap over to gambling amulets full time in the hopes of upgrading from Skelly's plain +1 Necromancer skills amulet.
Then, halfway through the Halls of Pain, Skelly found a magical blue zombie head from a monster drop. I didn't think much of this because Skelly had seen literally hundreds of these things over the course of his journey, just making sure to identify it because I was playing a Necromancer character and you never know if there might be something good on there. Well, this time Skelly simply hit the jackpot:
Oh my god, a Golemlord's zombie head with +3 to Necromancer summoning skills!?! This was an absolute dream item for Skelly, the exact item that I most wanted for the shield slot if I could have drawn it up ahead of time. Skelly had still been using a zombie head from early Normal difficulty with +3 to Skeleton Mastery. This new item would maintain the +3 skill points in Mastery while gaining another three points in EVERY SINGLE summoning skill! That was three more points in both the melee skeletons and the skeleton mages, enough for an additional skeleton of both types, plus more points in Fire Golem, Golem Mastery, Summon Resist, and so on. I didn't even stop to think about this any further, I took the new item over to Larzuk and used the Nightmare socket quest on it, then added two Perfect Diamonds for 38% resist all. Combined with the Smoke runeword armor and the first two Malah resistance scrolls, Skelly was now completely offsetting the -100% resistance penalty that he was about to face in Hell difficulty. If anything, he now had more resistances than he needed and I resolved to try and swap out some resistance charms for +life charms if I could find more of them. Somehow after struggling for all of Normal and Nightmare difficulties with his resistances, Skelly was now close to 200% resist all before applying the difficulty penalties. (Plus he even had 15% fire absorb from that new unique ring!)
This meant that Skelly wouldn't need a Spirit runeword shield at all, thus avoiding the need to turn up a Monarch shield and assign 150+ points into Strength. You could actually make the case that Spirit would still be a worthwhile deal here since it provides faster cast, faster hit recovery, 22 Vitality, roughly 100 mana depending on the roll, and comparable resistances to lightning/cold/poison if not fire. But no, the health and mana would essentially break even from needing to add 125 more stat points into Strength (Skelly only had 30 Strength at the moment) and Skelly didn't need faster cast or much faster hit recovery since he so rarely took hits. And of course +3 Necromancer summoning on this zombie head was better than +2 all skills on a Spirit runeword since Skelly only used a single skill tree. The fact that Spirit was STILL almost equivalent to this insanely good item drop for Skelly should tell you something about how overpowered that runeword truly is. For once I'd be playing a casting character who could forgo Spirit in both weapon and shield slots while still coming out ahead.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Skelly had just gotten much, much stronger. I spliced together a before-and-after comparison showing how the stats of the skeletal warriors had gone up as they increased from SLVL 24 to SLVL 27. Everything went up across the board: average damage from 186 to 226, health from 537 to 582, and both attack rating and defensive rating ticking up as well. The skeletal mages increased by a similar amount (even though the in-game tooltip doesn't display their stats) while the Fire Golem saw an even larger benefit since it was double-dipping on increases to both its own skill and Golem Mastery. Skelly's golem now had a beefy 1600 HP and was hitting for more than 800 damage per attack. Skelly's minions had already been steamrolling through almost everything that they encountered in Act Five and now it was only going to get that much worse.
These extra stat points tipped the remaining fights in Nihlathak's Temple into comical territory. See, just looking at the stats on the skeletons doesn't tell the full story, any more than looking at the stats for the enemies on reference sites like the Amazon Basin gives a sense for how hard some areas can be. The numbers for a single one of Skelly's warriors might not look that impressive, just as seeing the stats for a single enemy minotaur don't look that scary. However, you almost never fight individual monsters in Diablo 2 because they come at you in groups, and that's what makes the opposition truly dangerous: when there are two dozen of them hitting at once as part of some massive boss pack. The same principle applied to Skelly's forces, however, now with 11 melee skeletons and 10 skeletal mages, as the unthinking enemies kept spreading out their damage and dividing it over many targets which diluted its impact. Skelly had so many minions by now that he out-numbered the monsters in almost every fight and flipped the math of these encounters in his favor. Sometimes there wasn't enough space for all of the skeletons to get into combat simultaneously, but whenever there was room, it tended to get ugly for the enemies in a hurry. Nihlathak was a prime example of this: Skelly's minions held the line against his demon brigade, slew them all, then raced in after the traitor himself. Even a Fanaticism aura wasn't enough to help Nihlathak and this little boss fight was over very quickly, with no danger for Skelly himself who was able to stay well out of Corpse Explosion range.
The final outdoor portion of Act Five followed Nihlathak's Temple where Skelly squared off against more imps and some skeleton archers in the Frozen Tundra. At least this group of skeletons had bows which made them a little bit easier to tell apart from Skelly's own minions while otherwise appearing identical. The Infernal Pit went by so fast that I didn't even take any screenshots, then the Ancients Way brought back the shambling undead along with Spike Fiends from Act One. These were not dangerous opponents as Skelly quickly cleared out this latest set of underground ice caverns. The Icy Cellar once again placed the stairs in the center of the small chamber where witches and Pit Vipers came racing in to confront Skelly's crew. I worked my way over to the left side of the room and then carefully cleared out the bottom platforms before moving to the top of the area. There were Gloams down there as well which lit up the frozen walls with their lightning spells but without doing much of anything to the skeleton army.
Still, all of these areas were effectively sideshows; I knew that Skelly had little chance of dying in them or even running into problematic fights. It was the Ancients that I worried about since Skelly could not leave their arena to collect more minions, thus forcing him to rely on his starting skeletons along with the Fire Golem for the whole encounter. I prepared with some extra potions ahead of time and then triggered the fight, immediately checking the boss traits on the three enemies. Korlic drew Magic Immune trait which created a fire immunity, which could be disastrous if Skelly was left with only the golem, but the other two drew pretty friendly traits (Talic = Spectral Hit, Madawc = Extra Fast) and I resolved to play this combat out to see how things went. The skeletons kind of lucked their way into excellent tactical positioning as Korlic and Madawc were swarmed by the central pillar while Talic got caught on two skeletons way off to the left and uselessly Whirlwinded on top of them. I kept waiting for the skeletons to die off, recasting the Fire Golem to focus on Madawc even as the thing kept running over to hit Fire Immune Korlic, d'oh!
But as it turned out, I didn't need to worry about this battle at all. I waited and waited and waited for the skeleton minions to die... and they just didn't. Their beefed up stats from all those extra skill points combined with their internal regeneration must have been enough to make them largely immune to the Ancients. Would you believe that NONE of them died, not even the skeletal warrior off by himself over by Talic? Ha, take that legendary warriors! Beaten by a bunch of moldy old skeletons. I can only hope things go this well in Hell difficulty.
The Worldstone Keep floors had the odd property of getting easier and easier as Skelly kept descending. The first floor was genuinely pretty tough with witches to drop their Amplify Damage curse on the whole army, vampires with their Meteors and Fire Walls, along with Hierophant/Zealot pairs with their healing and Blizzard spells. When Skelly ran into large mobs of the enemies, he actually had to raise more skeletons over and over again as the combination of all that magic damage and Amplify Damage put a hurting on the skeletons. I did test one thing: Skelly's gear setup of 75% fire resistance, 15% fire absorb, and -16 magic damage was enough to let him stand in vampire Fire Walls while taking no damage at all - ha! Skelly took very modest damage from their Meteor burn zones, about 2 damage per second, so he didn't have quite enough protection to nullify that. Anyway, then Worldstone 2 was quite a bit easier with Baal's Hell Spawn melee creatures along with Black Soul gloams, and then Worldstone 3 was easier yet with Storm Casters, those weak Rancid Defiler things, and more of Baal's sad melee minions that seem to be everywhere in Act Five. Was Baal trying to roll out the red carpet for Skelly as he ventured further into the Worldstone Keep?
By the way, an amulet dropped from one of the monsters and I nearly danced for joy at seeing +3 Summoning skills - but it was DRUID summoning, not Necromancer summoning, argh! Skelly would continue his amulet gambling ways for some time longer it seemed.
The Throne of Destruction had one of the nastiest random monster mixes I've ever seen down there: Death Lord minotaurs, Hell Witches with their curses, Pit Lords, and Oblivion Knights. That was kind of like all of the game's most dangerous monster types gathered together though Skelly's minions handled them without too much trouble. When it came to the boss rush at the Throne of Destruction itself, Skelly found that he was able to make use of the corpses from his earlier fighting and not have to retreat backwards, not into the maze tunnels or back to Act One for more minions. One boss after another, the skeleton army met the enemy charge and held the line until the mages and the golem could kill everything. If anything, I was slightly mispositioned here because the skeletons were close enough to be hit by Baal's Decrepify curse though that didn't seem to stop them from winning anyway. Even Lister was unable to break through the skeletal warriors, as he charged at them ineffectively until his own Minions of Destruction were slain and Lister was pinned against a wall to be hacked to death. This was actually easier than the same fight in Normal difficulty, though Lister has such insane stats in Normal difficulty that it wasn't too surprising.
I did not expect the skeletons to last too long against Baal, hoping that they'd be able to deal as much damage as possible before Skelly was reduced to solely the Fire Golem once more. Baal has 118,000 health and 50% resistance to all elements in Nightmare so I expected to be here for some time. The final boss of the game was hiding out on the central platform where the skeletons rushed him, often getting chilled by his Frost Wave or blasted with his infamous orange projectile. As I had just experienced against the Ancients, I was expecting the skeletons to fall quickly only to see that they, uh, didn't die? Well the skeleton mages started biting the dust after a couple of minutes but the skeletal warriors had higher health and higher defensive rating which allowed them to stick in the fight. Two minutes passed, three minutes passed, and all eleven skeletal warriors were still standing even as Baal's own healthbar dropped under half remaining.
Baal took a long time to summon his clone for whatever reason and that also helped speed things along. I was having success at using the Fire Golem to draw Baal's attention and here in Nightmare the thing could actually take a few hits before exploding, enough time for me to summon a replacement golem and keep Baal off the skeletons. Skelly's minions killed the clone two different times - I could keep the golem focused on the real one but not the skeletons themselves - and somehow the melee skeletons kept surviving. With five minutes having passed on the clock, I could see that Baal was about to bite the dust. Would he manage to kill even one of the skeletal warriors?
Nope! All eleven of them were still standing at the conclusion of the battle along with one fortunate mage who had somehow avoided the fate of his brethren. This exceeded my wildest expectations as I had never thought that the skeleton army would be sufficient to defeat both the Ancients and Baal while remaining largely intact. All of those extra skill points really did seem to make a difference; I guess having SLVL 27 Mastery and Raise Skeleton skills packed a real punch. I suspect that things won't be quite that easy in Hell difficulty but Skelly has every plan to continue onwards and find out for himself. Next up will be the top difficulty level which always dials up the challenge level to the highest degree. I didn't feel that I'd had to work very hard with Skelly thus far, hopefully Hell difficulty would provide a more suitable challenge. Onwards!