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Skelly began Hell difficulty at CLVL 67 with the various stats and skill levels pictured above. He had more or less steamrolled the first two difficulties while rarely encountering much trouble along the way, with the Chaos Sanctuary and Diablo causing the only few hiccups thus far. This was due at least in part to the presence of some truly excellent equipping for a summoning Necromancer build, starting with the Arm of King Leoric wand and all of its various skeleton-related skill points, but then continuing with the early drop of a Lum rune for a Smoke runeword armor followed by that amazing Golemlord zombie head with a further +3 to all Necromancer summoning skills. This was enough skill points to boost Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery to SLVL 27 and Raise Skeletal Mage to SLVL 24, all of them with more base skill points still to be assigned before they fully maxed out. By contrast, Fire Golem was already maxed out at the same SLVL 27 and would require more +skills items to be improved further though the golem packed quite a punch as it hit for more than 800 damage on average. The Fire Golem and the various skeletons had also seen another jump upwards in health upon entering Hell difficulty, with the golem going from about 1600 max HP to the displayed 2684 HP simply for upping the challenge rating.
I was quite happy with Skelly's other stats as well. I had never taken him beyond 30 Strength and now it seemed that there would be no need to do so, not with the Golemlord's zombie head taking the place of a potential Spirit shield. Back in Normal difficulty, I had assigned 70 stat points in Energy and it seemed prudent to keep them there given the incredible mana cost to summon the golem. Perhaps I'd respec some of that Energy into more Vitality later but for now I still felt that Skelly needed those points going to his mana orb. Overall health was OK but not great at 867 max HP and I was hoping to find some more charms to help out there as Skelly was over-capped on some of his resistances. That was largely due to having a Smoke runeword armor plus two socketed Perfect Diamonds in Skelly's shield, for a massive 88% resist all combined. This was a true luxury which was allowing me to run some unorthodox itemization elsewhere, like having a unique ring with +40 life and no resistances on it in one of the jewelry slots. My top focus at the moment was gambling amulets in the hopes of improving over Skelly's plain +1 Necromancer skills item.
So - time to begin the real game, Hell difficulty. If you've only read these reports and haven't played Diablo 2 for yourself, it's easy to underestimate just how big the jump upwards is in difficulty when moving from Nightmare to Hell. It's not so much that monster damage is significantly higher across the board, although that's certainly true, it's more the case that everything is so much harder to kill on the top difficulty. Monster health is vastly higher, almost every opponent has at least one damage immunity, resistances are MUCH higher across the board, including almost everything having at least some physical damage resistance, and monster regen is dialed up enough to become a real factor. I had experienced this in dramatic fashion when playing WillPower a while back, a character that raced through the first two difficulties without much trouble and then crashed headlong into a brick wall in Hell. The skeleton army had been tearing it up thus far, but how would these bony minions handle the obstacles posed by entering Hell for the first time?
The first challenge was simply getting started. Remember that Skelly had no direct damage skills or curses so in order for him to get bodies and raise minions he needed the Fire Golem to start killing things. I was able to find a group of quill rats near the Rogue Encampment and bash them with the golem for the first few corpses, then begin raising skeletal minions. That's when a fallen boss wandered into the picture and I had to deploy the golem aggressively to tank the boss while the five melee skeletons killed some of the minions, losing half their numbers in the process, before eventually turning and dealing with the boss. I was happy just to break even on skeleton count there and it took some time longer before the ranks of the melee skeletons were filled and Skelly could begin adding some of the mages. All told, it required about a quarter of the Blood Moor before Skelly had the full army of 21 skeletons present. Remember, this was the very first session of Hell difficulty so there was no place to retreat and raise more minions if things went badly - he had to make progress with this army right here, right now!
Once Skelly had the whole team up and running, things went back to pretty smooth sailing once again. Having nearly two dozen skeletons on hand was enough to overwhelm most of the non-boss enemies that Skelly came across, with the monsters usually trickling in four or five at a time only to be swarmed by the huge numbers of skeletons. Even when badly outnumbered, those enemies survived quite a bit longer than they had in Nightmare thanks to their higher health and stronger resistances. In particular, the fact that every Fallen and Fallen Shaman was Fire Immune made things a lot tougher for Skelly. I could cast the Fire Golem into the faces of the shamans... which would district them but dealt no damage since the Fire Golem was dealing fire damage. It was a far cry from tossing the golem at them and seeing the summoned beast smack them into the ground in a few hits. For particularly big fights against fallen camps, I found that it was easier to revive all the fallens as minions when they hit the ground to prevent their shamans from bringing them back to life. While this was slow and mana-intensive, it definitely worked and served to make faster progress against enemies like Bishibosh.
Two noteworthy items dropped while Skelly was clearing out the Den of Evil. The first of these was another Lem rune, Skelly's second Lem rune after getting his first from the Nightmare Hellforge quest. I didn't have a use for one of these runes, let alone two of them, though I saved it in stash again because why not. The second item drop was an old favorite unique item, Bloodfist, which appeared from one of the final monsters to be cleared out of the Den. I used to gamble Bloodfist back in pre-expansion Diablo 2 when uniques could actually be found that way and it was surprisingly a pretty good fit for Skelly's character. While the attack speed and damage modifiers were useless here, +40 life looked to be extremely useful. Health normally can't roll as an affix on gloves and I thought that the 30% faster hit recovery would be helpful as well since Skelly was completely lacking that stat on his current gear. The tradeoff was, again, no resistances on Bloodfist but Skelly was the rare character in a position to make that work. He dropped down to 70% fire resistance and 52% cold resistance upon making this swap which should be more than survivable.
Full clearing the Cold Plains was fairly uneventful since Skelly already had his complete army in place by the time that he arrived. The Cave was significantly harder though due to the presence of some nasty bosses. On Caves 1, Skelly was cruising along against the standard enemies until he reached a relatively open section which had pathways stretching off to the northwest, northeast, and southeast. The skeletons became entagled with an archer boss that had Extra Strong / Lightning Enchanted / Mana Burn traits, and while half the army was chasing after her, another Cursed / Fire Enchanted / Lightning Enchanted enemy skeleton boss came crashing in from one of the northern entrances. Skelly's army was getting pulled in three different directions at once and I could only deploy the Fire Golem to one of those fronts at a time. This was close to a total disaster as the skeleton army looked to be on the verge of getting wiped out on several occasions, salvaged largely because there was a well nearby that Skelly tapped into multiple times over the course of the fighting. There were also lots of monsters taking part in this battle and therefore providing lots of corpses for fresh recruits which proved just enough to hold out and turn the tides of combat.
I thought that would be the worst thing that the Caves had to offer, but no, Caves 2 had an even more dire situation! Immediately upon coming down the stairs, Skelly ran into an archer boss with a glowing red aura and my heart sank: Extra Strong / Cold Enchanted / Fanaticism aura, yikes! 
I hurled the Fire Golem into the middle of that group and winced as the golem's 2600 HP healthbar exploded in a matter of seconds. With repeated casts of the golem and a bunch of blue mana potions downed, I was able to push this archer boss back to the right... only to have a second Lightning Enchanted / Mana Burn / Magic Resistant archer boss flank in from the left hand side of this cramped area, argh! I was actually glad that there were fallens running around down here too because they were easier to kill and supplied more bodies for raising more skeletons. This was another frantic battle of raising more and more skeletons, with Skelly down to 6 warriors and 4 mages at his lowest point before stabilizing and bouncing back. Eventually the Fanaticism archer boss was cornered and eliminated, after which the fighting became much easier with that aura removed. Whew.
I decided to stop the first gaming session there before pushing onwards. Part of the reason why these fights had been so stressful was having NOWHERE to raise more minions if the army collapsed completely. It seemed prudent to have the Blood Moor and Cold Plains available for replacement minions before moving on to Blood Raven and the following Act One quests.
The next gaming session started out in the same fashion, with Skelly needing to take a few minutes to reassemble his army in the Blood Moor before he could continue onwards. I knew that rebuilding his army from scratch was always going to be a bit tricky for Skelly here in Hell difficulty though hopefully more levels and more +skills items would make it easier as he progressed further. Once the full set of 22 skeletons were reassembled, Skelly returned to the Cold Plains waypoint and fought his way over to the Burial Grounds. I made sure to clear the outside ring of monsters as always, then headed into the center to face Blood Raven. She has an awful lot of health on the top difficulty and raised a bunch of zombies to confront the skeleton ranks. The two front lines clashed and engaged in hand-to-hand combat for the new few minutes, with the zombies scoring quite a few kills against Skelly's minions while also providing corpses for their replacements. This could have gone on forever if Blood Raven didn't have a limit to the number of zombies she will raise... which fortunately she does have, as she ceases her summoning after calling forth about two dozen of them. Once all of the zombies were slain, the skeleton horde surrounded Blood Raven (quite literally as they trapped her against one of the gravestones) and slashed her to death with their superior numbers. This was an entertaining fight overall and not too challenging.
The Crypt and the Mausoleum were next, two underground areas that share the same monster mix and always have exactly two opponents: zombies and melee skeletons. This makes them easy areas to clear even if Hell difficulty balloons the size of both areas for no clear reason. Skelly's only issue was his minions getting stuck on the narrow doorways down there which wasn't exactly much of a problem. Bonebreaker was hanging out at the gold chest and caused the most interesting fight, largely because I stupidly walked Skelly into his room and then had to run in circles dodging enemy skeletons for the next minute while Skelly's own minions cut their way through the defenders at the doorway.
The path onwards through Act One led back outside and into the Stony Field which had more easy opponents waiting there, goats and crows and corrupted rogue archers. This area was heavy on bosses that rolled the Cursed affix and I was annoyed when Skelly clicked on a mana recharge shrine expecting to use it for some frequent golem recasting, only to have the Amplify Damage curse override the mana regeneration effect from the shrine. One of the archer bosses was Cursed / Multishot along with an irrelevant Teleport and Skelly was glad that he had the skeleton minions to tank those arrow blasts for him. Rakanishu also drew Cursed trait as one of his extra abilities though the little guy's health is so low (3400 HP) that he's not very dangerous regardless of his traits. I realized that the Stony Field would be a good place to come back later whenever Skelly needed to rebuild his army as none of the default monsters here were Fire Immune. Only the fallens and carvers have fire protection and they only spawn at the single big camp without appearing anywhere else throughout the area.
The Underground Passage had more carvers, corrupted rogues, and the Misshapen demons that shoot lightning projectiles. Skelly fought the usual bosses but without anything truly noteworthy popping up as I didn't end up taking a screenshot of any of his opposition. The toughest fight was probably at the entrance to Underground Passage 2 where there were multiple fallen shamans immediately upon coming down the stairs followed by a pair of bosses flanking in from the left hand side. That was tricky without being truly dangerous. The Dark Wood on the other side of the caves featured spiked fiends and more corrupted rogues... but mostly swarms and swarms of carvers everywhere. Skelly had no choice but to raise most of their bodies to prevent their shamans from raising them over and over again, with the fire immunity on all of the shrimps continuing to be annoying. Treehead Woodfist drew Stone Skin / Magic Resistant for his extra traits which made him rather tanky but not too dangerous.
Tristram had the usual four or five bosses packed into one of the game's smaller areas, with a skeleton archer boss plus skeleton champs up near the monastery and then another hairball on the west side of town. That was where Skelly encountered Griswold with the pictured traits along with an Extra Strong / Cold Enchanted / Lightning Enchanted skeleton archer boss who was right next to the corrupted blacksmith. Any fight against a boss with the Cursed trait always looked spectacular when playing Skelly, especially at night, as every single one of his minions picked up the burning Cursed icon as well. This situation looked like it could be tricky for the skeletons, however there were some bodies left over from the previous fight up to the north by Wirt's body and that was sufficient to provide replacement skeletons. Overall, I continued to find that the skeleton army was handling Hell difficulty quite well as Skelly still hadn't suffered a full army wipe yet. Getting started at the beginning of each new session took a few minutes and then once all 22 skeletons were in place they were confidently able to face almost anything with only a few losses here and there.
The Cain reward ring was junk, to no surprise, and by this point I doubted that Skelly was going to have much luck upgrading his rings. One of the monsters in Tristram dropped the unique battle staff known as The Salamander, unfortunately yet another case where the Spirit runeword makes a potentially cool unique item completely obsolete. I would love to build a fire Sorcie around this item but come on, double Spirit runewords in the sword and shield slots would outperform this thing by a gigantic margin so sadly it's just useless for anything other than true variant roleplaying. Skelly was continuing to gamble amulets and had gone through close to a hundred of them at this point without finding an upgrade over his current +1 Necromancer skills item. Hopefully at some point he'd be able to hit something better there, even if it was only +1 skills with some other affixes.
Skelly found nothing of interest in the Black Marsh aside from even more carvers and their shamans that he had to cut through. I opted to do the Countess quest next where all five of the tower cellar floors have the same monster mix: three out of the following four options, Devilkin, Ghosts, Blood Clan goats, and rogue Dark Archers. The rogue archers are usually the most dangerous of this bunch although the ghosts can be problematic for character builds that can't cut through their physical immunity. Skelly had no such issues with his mixed damage options and if anything the ghosts were probably the easiest foes along with the devilkin. Somewhat surprisingly, none of the five floors had stairs traps waiting upon entry - of course, the one character of mine who had tons of minions for safety was the one who DIDN'T get the stairs traps! Go figure. There were a lot of bosses across the tower and some lively fights but without anything too dangerous taking place. I think the most interesting tactical situation was the one pictured above, down on Tower Cellar 5 where enemies poured out of three different doorways and split up the skeleton force, requiring Skelly to move around the Fire Golem and raise replacement skeletons as the mages were left unprotected.
All of the Countess' minions raced out of her room which allowed Skelly to slay them in the outside corridor in complete safety. She was left utterly alone in the final room with the chest where the skeletons slashed her to pieces with gleeful abandon. The rune drop from the Countess was double Shael runes which might be useful for another character but not this one, oh well. I was starting to get pretty tired of these same enemies while clearing out the Hole which had more carvers and more corrupted rogue archers yet again. At least there were some of the big furry Brutes to spice things up a little bit. There was a good test of skeleton tankiness here when a Cursed brute boss went up against the melee skeletons, only for Skelly's minions to succeed in holding the line until the enemies started dropping. Once again, all those bonus skill points seemed to be making a difference as Skelly reached SLVL 20+10 Skeleton Mastery while clearing out this latest set of caves. That was the final point allowable in Skeleton Mastery and now Skelly could place his half dozen remaining points in Raise Skeleton and Raise Skeleton Mage before fully maxing out all of his core skills.
Skelly ran into an unusual situation at the entrance to the Tamoe Highland. As pictured above, a group of Dark Stalker corrupted rogues raced towards Skelly and coincidentally clashed with the skeleton army directly at the stone walls marking the entrance to this new area. Although this was nothing but pure chance, it certainly looked as if the enemies were forming a defensive line to keep out Skelly's minions and the screenshot came out looking so cool that I had to include it. Elsewhere in the Highland, Skelly ran into skeleton archers and Thorned Beast quill rats, nothing too terribly scary even when one of those hostile skeleton archer bosses popped up sporting a Might aura. I opted to push on from there into the Outer Cloister where there were a whole bunch of devilkin and their shamans running around. I thought that the devilkin shamans didn't appear for the first time until the Barracks? Apparently not, the Amazon Basin confirmed that their shamans can start appearing in the Outer Cloister, I think they simply don't roll there very often. In any case, Skelly locked down his progress at the waypoint and then backtracked to tackle the Pit.
The first floor of the Pit is pretty much like all of the other indoor "cave" areas in Act One and rarely has much cause for concern. Skelly and his army made their way through without having any memorable fights along the way, although I was able to get a zoomed in shot of the skeletons battling their way through a series of devilkin champs that looked pretty amazing. Skelly had fought against so many fallens / carvers / devilkin and their shamans by now that he had the playbook down pat: a slow advance forwards while raising the bodies of everything that hit the floor. This was heavy on the mana consumption but saved time as compared with letting the shamans get their resurrections off while also being safer as well. Soon enough the whole first floor was cleared and Skelly was confronted with the most dangerous part of Act One: the Pit Level 2.
The Pit 2 always has 2-3 bosses present in Hell difficulty while cramming them into one of the smallest sardine cans in the entire game. Skelly and his crew entered via the only staircase and immediately saw the Cursed effect trigger, never a good sign in any large encounter. It turned out that the culprit was this corrupted rogue boss with Cursed / Mana Burn / Blessed Aim aura traits and I was really glad that the boss hadn't rolled Might or Fanaticism on that aura instead. While Skelly had his hands full with this boss, another devilkin boss appeared further down the same staircase on the left hand side, ack! Thankfully this devilkin boss had some of the saddest traits possible: Stone Skin / Mana Burn / Spectral Hit which literally might be the three weakest boss traits in Diablo 2. There were still close to three dozen monsters running around on screen though and that Cursed trait made this fight a lot harder than it otherwise would have been. Skelly was spam-casting the Fire Golem into the hottest parts of the fighting to tank for the skeletal warriors and I was raising every devilkin as soon as it perished to deny their shamans the opportunity for resurrection. Those corpses were needed too as the melee skeletons took a pounding here though there were just barely enough enemy bodies on hand to keep resupplying the ranks of the skeletons as they fell. Eventually the enemies were all dead and Skelly made his way down the steps to the basement floor of the Pit 2, where he found another Cursed / Mana Burn / Stone Skin corrupted rogue boss that proved to be easier to defeat thanks to having more space on hand to work with. All in all, this went about as smoothly as I could have hoped though it could have been a lot more dicey if these bosses had rolled tougher traits.
The next few areas were pretty uneventful as Skelly passed through with his skeleton buddies. There were lots of devilkin and their shamans in the Barracks though Skelly was used to handling that monster type by now. There was one goat boss that rolled Extra Strong / Fanaticism aura which dealt some serious damage and then the Smith rolled Extra Strong / Fire Enchanted / Teleportation which was less scary than what that random boss had been packing. I returned the Horadric Malus for another Imbue that I'd probably never remember to use. The three Jail floors never have shamans present and the trio failed to result in any bosses of interest, with Pitspawn Fouldog having Cursed / Extra Fast and Fire / Cold Enchanted traits when encountered within his boxed cage. Pitspawn only stood out in my memory because I had to take something like eight screenshots before I finally captured his traits successfully; the blasted thing kept stepping out of the way whenever I hit the PrintScreen key.
The Cathedral entrance was weirdly deserted, with no monsters rushing out to greet Skelly at the doors. Normally the interior of that place is packed but Skelly had to advance all the way to the central altar before running into Bone Ash and another two bosses clustered tightly nearby. Down in the Catacombs were a bunch more Dark Ones and their shamans which Skelly continued to handle by raising all of their various minions, something that had become old hat by now. The biggest fight was the pictured one above on Cats 2 where this Tainted boss was encountered along with a Cursed shaman boss that required me to resurrect everything for safety. I really though that the melee skeletons would crumble against that kind of pressure, facing a double boss pack with the enemy Cursed effect in place, however they still continued to hold the line with only minimal casualties. As I've written a bunch of times now, I was prepared for the skeletons to fall apart and they just... didn't. Bless all of those extra skill points!
Against Andariel on the bottom floor, I followed my usual tactic of staying on Cats 4 without returning to town to keep as many bodies on the ground as possible for replacement skeletons. Unfortunately the melee skeletons can't be controlled particularly well by the player and they still ran off to wake up Andariel while Skelly was still dealing with some of the zombies and dark ones in the final back room:
Andariel's poison is strong enough to lay waste to anything that it hits though fortunately she had that enormous weakness to fire damage that the Fire Golem could exploit. A couple of the melee skeletons died right away to her poison and then I was able to tie her up on the golem, repeatedly casting it on that tile to the right of the big demon as pictured above. Andariel was happy to take the bait and breathed poison on the golem repeatedly, which dropped the fire creature rapidly while preserving the rest of the skeleton crew. This was a fast battle and she lasted only a minute on the in-game clock, falling with 6 melee and 10 ranged skeletons still remaining. That was about as easy as I could have hoped.
All told, this was an excellent Act One and a smooth introduction to Hell difficulty for Skelly. I found myself getting used to the pace of the top difficulty once again and the skeleton army remained sturdy enough to hold its own against all sorts of threats, failing to suffer even a single wipeout across the act. While he wasn't able to gamble any major upgrades to his equipment, Skelly seeed to have enough upgrades and +skill points on hand to deal with the current threats that he was facing. Onwards to Act Two!
