Part Two: Spinning A Larger Web

Spyderman made it through Act One without too much in the way of serious difficulty, outside of his one careless death before unlocking all of his skills. I had been pleased overall with how well the Corpse Spiders skill held up against a variety of different challenges. As long as Spyderman was able to get his hands on a solid weapon to keep up his DPS rating, the spider jars were able to handle the monsters reasonably well, albeit with some slow going at times. Spyderman had finished Act One at level 37 and he hadn't even reached the next character level before a new legendary weapon dropped for him:

The Pig Sticker was a major upgrade to his damage output, largely due to its very fast attack speed property of 1.5 attacks per second. The inherent attack speed on each weapon generally isn't something that the player has to watch all that closely, since the overall weapon DPS rating (the big number at the top) includes both base damage and attack speed in assessing the total resulting damage. However, it did make a difference in terms of the casting animation of the Corpse Spiders skill, with the throwing motion of the jar noticeably faster when using weapons with a faster attack speed. For this reason I generally preferred weapons with a faster attack speed over slower ones since they provided more opportunities to hit-and-run against enemies. But most of the time you don't have much of a choice other than to use the best weapon possible from a damage perspective, since it's so important for all of the various skills. The Pig Sticker is an unusual legendary item in the sense that its unique property ("Squeal!") creates a sound effect and nothing else. This is not a legendary item that can be salvaged for Kanai's Cube in the lategame. Spyderman made use of it as the best option available right now.

A short time later, Spyderman picked up another extremely valuable legendary item in the form of the Sash of Knives belt. In addition to the usual large boosts to Intelligence and Vitality, the Sash of Knives had the unique property of adding an additional attack, throwing a knife that dealt 576% weapon damage on every auto attack. The knives flew out in a straight line and auto-targeted monsters, creating this weird effect whereby Spyderman would be throwing his Corpse Spiders in one direction and then the knives would suddenly fly off in the opposite direction as a new critter wandered into view. This was honestly pretty insane and Spyderman started mowing down his opponents in steamroller fashion, just crushing them left and right. It was a sign of how powerful the legendary properties with unique properties can be, and lategame builds stack a bunch of these extra abilities onto every piece of gear. Just having a single such unique property had dropped the challenge level considerably for Spyderman. I ended up increasing the difficulty level from Expert to Master, the next step up and the highest non-Torment difficulty level, solely as a result of finding this legendary belt.

The spider attacks were dealing a little bit under 2000 damage apiece prior to the discovery of the Sash of Knives belt. The image of the Dervish Lord above was snapped at the tail end of a battle, with the elite Hexed into a helpless pig and assailed by spiders on all sides. The fight was a lot livelier before all of the other cultists were downed. If you're curious about why the elite had been turned into a pig instead of a chicken, that was due to one of the new runes unlocked for the Hex skill (Jinx) which caused hexed enemies to take 15% additional damage while also turning them from avians into swine. The later runes for the Hex skill all dealt direct damage in some way and that was forbidden by variant rule, therefore it would be the Jinx rune used by Spyderman. The 15% additional damage certainly helped speed up his killing pace.

After this point there's a long gap in the images of Spyderman that I have saved on my computer. I didn't lose the screenshots or anything like that, I simply didn't take any from character level 39 to character level 51. I think that this was largely due to the areas that Spyderman was passing through at the time, the desert wastes of Act II. This is by far my least favorite act in Diablo 3, a lazy rehashing of the same act from Diablo 2. Seriously, the places visited and story beats are almost a carbon copy from the previous game. The player travels to a desert city in the far east (Lut Gholein/Caldeum) and explores through a series of outdoor desert regions and underground sewers before eventually visiting an oasis (Far Oasis/Dahlgur Oasis), an ancient temple (Claw Viper Temple/Ancient Path), the weirdly distorted realm of a mad sorcerer (Arcane Sanctuary/Archives of Zoltun Kulle), and then the act concludes by fighting one of the Lesser Prime Evils (Duriel/Belial). It doesn't help either that the visuals in Act II are uninteresting as well, yellow-brown sand dunes or brown sewers for the most part. Ugh. Slogging through these areas was a chore and the lack of screenshots taken while playing indicated that I was running Spyderman on autopilot.

My images pick back up again near the end of Act II with Spyderman at character level 51. Note that I had turned the difficulty level up to Master, which resulted in the enemies having 60% more health and dealing 45% more damage as compared to the Expert setting. The Corpse Spiders were dealing roughly 6500 damage per attack at this point, with critical hits dealing about 50% more damage and jumping up to the 9000-10,000 range. (The yellow text indicates a critical hit as compared to the white coloring of a normal hit. Critical hits start out at +50% damage over a normal hit and can increase greatly from there; I'll talk more about crits as they become more relevant later on.) Here on Master difficulty all of the elites were showing up with three boss affixes, and this particular customer had rolled the Juggernaut + Frozen Pulse + Arcane Enchanted combination. Juggernaut is a boss affix that increases their resistance to player crowd control abilities, something that apparently causes a lot of problems for high end builds that rely on chaining various kinds of crowd control. Frozen Pulse causes cold particles to crash down from the sky, with one of them appearing over on the left side of the screen. (I think it's poor design to have both "Frozen" and "Frozen Pulse" exist as separate boss abilities - way too confusing for no reason at all. Why not call this elite ability "Ice Pulse" instead?)

Arcane Enchanted deserves its own mention as an elite ability. Enemies that spawn with this power will create beams of purple light around them which rotate in circles and output very high damage. Getting trapped by a Waller or Jailer boss and then hit with damage from one of the arcane energy beams is an easy way to have your character killed. Spyderman had an ace up his sleeve, however: the legendary amulet named Countess Julia's Cameo, which prevented all arcane damage and healed him for 15% of the damage taken. Note the green numbers indicating that Spyderman was standing in the purple beams and healing back additional life in the process! This item made Arcane Enchanted opponents much easier for him to face, and I saved Countess Julia's Cameo to be salvaged in Kanai's Cube later on after the stats on it had become outdated.

The major boss at the end of this twisted realm was Zoltun Kulle, an evil sorcerer that the plot of this game forces your character to bring back to life. The writing is just awful here, with Kulle's "sudden yet inevitable betrayal" painfully obvious ahead of time, and yet your idiot character goes right ahead with the plan regardless. Kulle - who is totally different from and not inspired by Horazon the Summoner from Diablo 2 - spawns with two Eternal Guardian minions that function a bit like giant golem protectors. These two minions were extremely slow-moving and Spyderman had no trouble staying away from them while tossing out his spiders. Once the minions were gone, he was able to start chipping away at the huge 6.3 million HP on Zoltun Kulle's lifebar. The dark sorcerer tossed out fireballs and summoned tornadoes, neither of which were particularly difficult to dodge. The most dangerous opponents for a casting character like Spyderman are those who can get up in his face and melee him, which was not something that this boss was keen to do. The whole thing was a leisurely fight that lacked any serious danger.

After defeating Zoltun Kulle, Spyderman moved immediately to face Belial in Caldeum's palace. This is yet another gripe that I have with Act II: the pacing is terrible, with lengthy time spent trekking through the deserts and sewers with nothing of interest taking place, and then two of the three major bosses are fought virtually back to back at the end. Spacing them out a bit would have helped make this area less tedious. Anyway, Spyderman made his way through the viper guards and quickly reached Belial himself:

There are three phases to this boss fight. The first one is very brief and consists of killing off a bunch of viper minions, which should be easy stuff for anyone who's managed to reach this point. The second phase involves a human-sized Belial who moves around the small chamber tossing out blasts of green energy. This phase is typically a pushover as well and Spyderman advanced on to the third phase in short order. In this final part of the battle, Belial grows to gigantic size and takes up about a third of the screen. He calls down a series of different attacks that are highlighted with green targeting circles ahead of time, and the basic idea is to dodge his attacks while continuing to deal damage to the boss. Belial has a truly massive healthbar in this phase (18 million HP for Spyderman here) and with the Corpse Spiders dealing 5000-7000 damage per bite, it was going to take some time to whittle down the big baddie. At least it's impossible to miss such a huge target and every spider was hitting home immediately.

I do not like this boss fight at all, and it's way too similar to the equally-unfair Duriel battle from Diablo 2. The biggest problem is that the room where this fight takes place is way too small, a tiny little crescent shaped platform with no room for maneuverability. Every other major boss fight in the game takes place in a significantly larger space, and the Belial duel turns into an unfun bullet hell shooter setup as a result. This is one of the places where Diablo 3's Fake Difficulty is most on display, as characters that have weaker gear simply won't have enough Toughness or Recovery to be able to survive this fight. Even highly skilled players can't dodge everything forever in this sardine can - your character needs to have sufficient gear to be able to tank through at least some of the damage. This was the stumbling block that ended the journey of my Wizard character back in 2012, as I did not have the items sufficient to make it through and I was unwilling to purchase them in the auction house. Fortunately here in the friendlier setup of Reaper of Souls, with relatively common legendary items and smarter loot drops, Spyderman did have the gear that he needed to survive. He had sufficient life regeneration that he could make do with the occasional health orbs that dropped from Belial, and keep tossing out more spiders until the big guy finally croaked.

Belial's legendary item drop was an axe called the Butcher's Sickle. Even though it had a penalty to Toughness and Recovery, the damage output on this item was high enough that I felt compelled to switch to it, especially after socketing my best possible Ruby gem into the open socket for more damage. (Note: eventually the extra crit damage from Emeralds outperforms the higher base damage from Rubies in weapon sockets, but Spyderman was still too early in the game for this to be the case.) The unique property on the Butcher's Sickle caused enemies to be pulled towards Spyderman, something that he emphatically did not want! Some character builds would love that property but not him. In other words, this definitely wasn't the longterm answer for Spyderman, just something that he was using for the moment until turning up another weapon with a higher DPS rating. (The prior legendary weapon that he had been using, Rimeheart, was saved for salvaging in Kanai's Cube later. I had plans to create a cold-based Wizard in the future and Rimeheart's unique property would be ideal for that variant.)

Act III sends players to the fortress of Bastion's Keep, a location under assault by the monstrous armies of Azmodan. I enjoy the visuals from this act a lot, everything up until the somewhat bland fiery graphics of the Arreat Crater at the end of the act, and the designers did a great job of creating the feeling of being under siege. The one groan-inducing part of this act would be the voiceovers from Azmodan himself, who keeps popping up to twirl his villain mustache and cackle repeatedly at his own invincibility. It really undercuts this character as an antagonist when he says stuff like "you will never be able to lift the catapults on top of the fortress!" and then ten minutes later after the catapults have been lifted follows that up with "I didn't need the catapults, you'll never be able to stop my minions attacking the keep from below!" which is in turn followed by the player having no trouble doing exactly that. Azmodan comes off looking like a bumbling idiot, and that's unfortunate because the rest of the scenery is fantastic. If they had cut out his appearances entirely the game would have been stronger for it.

As far as the gameplay was concerned, this was a point in time where monster health had been scaling up heavily and Spyderman hadn't been able to keep pace on damage, even with the legendary weapon drop from the last act. Normal enemies had more than a million health apiece by now while the Corpse Spiders were still hovering around 10k damage per bite. Elites now had the full four boss affixes and could roll combinations like the Knockback + Teleporter + Plagued + Orbiter setup pictured above. I found myself having to make heavy use of Mass Confusion to make progress since there were lots of large mobs, and the overall pace was very slow indeed. It was bad enough that I considered lowering the difficulty back to Expert again, or even giving up on this kooky Corpse Spiders variant entirely. I was getting close to level 60, however, and I knew that more itemization options would open up at that point. I resolved to stick it out for the time being.

This was the most dangerous situation that Spyderman found himself in since his only death early in Act One. There was an elite mob that rolled Jailer + Mortar + Plagued for its affixes and Spyderman took a true beating, with his health dropping low enough that the screen started flashing red. This was an accidental screenshot that was taken as I was trying to hit the "1" key to use his Potion. I had remapped the screenshot key from the default PrintScreen over to the tilde key (~) since it was much easier to reach in combat, and this had the effect of sometimes taking a screenshot while reaching for the Potion key. That was far from the worst thing since any time Spyderman was drinking potions he was likely to be in an interesting spot worth capturing. I also found myself hitting the map key (Tab) by accident often enough that I rebound it over to Backspace, after Spyderman had a couple of scary moments where he accidentally trapped himself on the map screen in the middle of a big fight. Thank goodness for the ability to rebind different keys on a PC.

The big breaking point in terms of item luck came when Spyderman hit level 61. Prior to the release of the expansion, the old level cap had been level 60 and thus he had been restricted to non-expansion item stats up to this point. In typical expansion fashion, Reaper of Souls increased the level cap to 70 and juiced up the power of the items that could appear after cresting the old cap of level 60. Thus there were lots and lots of stronger weapons and armor that began showing up the instant that Spyderman hit level 61, like literally within seconds after he dinged past the prior level cap. First a rare staff appeared with a DPS rating of 2029 (after I stuck my best Ruby inside its socket), followed within five minutes by a better rare sword with a DPS rating of 2261 appearing. Two minutes later a new belt appeared that significantly outclassed my pre-level 61 armor in that slot. These new expansion-based item stats were far better than what I'd been wearing previously, such as the new sword having +532 Intelligence on it. Compare that to the Butcher's Sickle from just half a dozen character levels earlier, which had +291 Intelligence and a DPS rating of 486. Every single item in Spyderman's kit would be replaced over the next few levels, and all of the increases stats put him back into a healthy place on the power curve once again.

To make a long story short, the monsters had been scaling up in linear fashion and getting a little bit stronger with each character level. Spyderman had been capped out on items until he hit level 61 and could access the expansion stuff, and then his relative power exploded upwards in a huge burst all at once. The game quickly became a lot more fun again, and I ditched any thoughts of needing to give up on his Corpse Spiders variant.

Hey, remember how the spiders had been dealing around 10k damage a relatively short time earlier in Act III? Now they were averaging around 50k damage per attack and critically striking for about 85k apiece. The math on this was much better than it had been before, and suddenly regular monsters having as much as a million HP didn't seem like such a problem anymore. I continued to use Mass Confusion against big mobs of enemies but no longer needed to lean on it as a crutch to make any progress at all. I should mention that Spyderman was using the Unstable Realm rune for Mass Confusion which cut the cooldown of the skill in half, from 60 seconds down to 30 seconds. Several of the other runes either dealt direct damage (not allowed by variant rule) or summoned zombie dogs (also not allowed), and overall none of them seemed as useful as having the skill available twice as often. Perhaps I'd change my mind on what I wanted with additional cooldown reduction later on, but Unstable Realm worked for now.

If you look back at the character screen in the earlier picture above, you'll note that Spyderman's overall damage was listed at 74k before he switched to the rare two handed sword. It went up to 85k after making that switch, and I found another rare two handed sword at character level 62 that had enough damage to put him over the 100k mark for the first time. By character level 65 he had turned up a new rare axe that sent the overall damage stat higher still, surging above 135k on the character screen. It wasn't just the weapons here, it was also the extra Intelligence that Spyderman was stacking up on every other inventory slot simultaneously. (For that matter, his Toughness was also up by more than 50% in a single character level as a result of way more Vitality on all of his equipment.) Spyderman was getting much stronger in a real hurry. He was facing the same kind of monster scaling that had proved to be so frustrating in the pre-expansion gameplay, except that Reaper of Souls provided the item drops and the crafting tools needed to handle that scaling.

This group of elites was another random encounter that proved to be particularly difficult. I remembered the Hulking Phasebeasts as the monster type that had been the deadliest opponent for my Wizard back in the release version of Diablo 3, scoring multiple kills when I went through this same part of the Arreat Crater in Nightmare difficulty. The Phasebeasts are fast, tough melee enemies that innately have the ability to teleport next to your character. They were a terrible opponent for my Wizard character and left me in situations where escape was simply impossible. Spyderman also had real difficulties here and was forced to run in circles repeatedly while throwing out his spiders. Without his Spirit Walk ability to break out of the Jailer effect, Spyderman definitely would have perished here. Dangerous, nasty enemies those Phasebeasts.

There was a spider versus spider battle down at the base of the Tower of the Cursed, as Spyderman faced off against Cydaea. Did Diablo 3 really need to have a second spider-based boss given that it already had Queen Araneae in Act One? Probably not, but the developers seemed to be uncertain how to handle female bosses in this game outside of turning them all into insect-looking monsters of some kind. Anyway, the combat here was also similar to the earlier fight against Queen Araneae in the sense that Cydaea threw out webs and venomous projectiles, then began summoning little spider minions to run interference for her. She summoned more and more spiders as she dropped lower on health, to the point that there were dozens on the screen at once for the later stages of the fight. This was a place where the Corpse Spiders skill struggled to deal with the boss, as Spyderman could not tell his own spider minions to focus solely on the boss. Most of their damage was wasted killing the enemy critters and thus this fight extended out over close to ten minutes of real-world time. There was virtually no danger here as Spyderman could kite Cydaea's underlings endlessly, just a long slog where it was tough to deal any lasting damage to the boss. More than 250 minions died before Spyderman could finish off Cydaea, which was worth more than half of a level's worth of experience after the big massacre bonus was applied. That was some hard-earned XP.

Oh, and the Corpse Spiders were completely unable to damage the Sin Heart in the center of the boss room for some reason! I have no idea why but they couldn't hit the giant beating heart. Even the Leaping Spiders rune had no effect. Since the game won't advance until the Sin Heart is destroyed, Spyderman had to switch to another skill to continue onwards. I used the signature spell Plague of Toads as the silliest option here - go figure, the toads could hit the Sin Heart but the spiders couldn't. Video game logic is weird sometimes.

The boss at the end of Act III is the aforementioned Azmodan, a beefy demon who looks somewhat like a monstrous toad himself. Azmodan has several different attacks where he calls down fireballs from the sky as well as charging towards the player to engage at melee range. Like most of the bosses in this game, he also summons minions from time to time which made handy targets for grabbing more Soul Harvest stacks. After dropping below half health, Azmodan shrinks down the size of the room where he is encountered with a bunch of dark red fiery patches that encircle the outer edge of the chamber, squeezing the player into tighter spaces and making it harder to dodge the incoming attacks. This was a legitimately tricky fight and Spyderman had to employ a lively step to stay ahead of his foes. He dropped to half health on several occasions although I never quite felt threatened enough to need to drink his Potion and put it on cooldown. It was another boss fight that lasted a fairly long time, and this battle along with the one against Cydaea were part of the reason why I had serious doubts about the viability of Spyderman in Torment difficulty. Most of the big bosses have "Enrage" timers on that difficulty whereby they basically must be killed within three minutes or they start dealing insane damage that can't be survived. Fortunately I didn't have to worry about that just yet, and Spyderman made it through a difficult test of his abilities.

Act IV takes the player to the High Heavens, a great and unexpected choice of setting after the first two Diablo games led the player down into Hell for the ending stages. It's too bad that the plot isn't stronger here, as your character is betrayed yet again in order to revive Diablo and set him up as the antagonist for the final act. And wow, not to get up on a soapbox here, but this game's treatment of its women characters is nothing less than appalling. Women in Diablo 3 are either helpless damsels to be rescued, helpless victims to be brutally killed to advance the plot, or scheming witches just waiting to betray the player (in service to an evil male overlord, naturally). Even the female archangel Auriel manages to be captured and has to be rescued by the player! I racked my brain trying to find counter-examples, and the only exceptions that I could find were Asheara (the head Iron Wolves guard from Act II who's barely even present in this game) and Miriam the Enchantress added in the expansion. Not too impressive. At least it's nice that the player can choose a male or female version of each character class, I suppose? I know that the plot aspects of Diablo 3 were a paper-thin afterthought, but they really should have done better here.

In any case, Act IV is the smallest of the five acts just as it was in Diablo 2. There is a boss fight against an opponent named Iskatu immediately upon entering the act, and his gimmick is that he summons masses of little shadow demons to fight against the player in endless amounts. I remember dying here with my release version Wizard because she didn't have an easy answer for coping with the hordes of minions that pop up in this encounter. Spyderman had the same difficulties here that he did against Cydaea, unable to get his spiders to target the boss instead of the shadows. However, unlike that earlier fight he was in no danger at all, since his current gear setup gave him a significant amount of health back with each monster kill and he was downing the shadows constantly. I mean this quite literally: so long as I held down the attack button Spyderman could not die. His life globe fluttered slightly at the very top but never dropped down by more than 2-3% of the total. This was another case of the Fake Difficulty in action, with Spyderman's innate health regen making it impossible for him to die. With no Enrage timer to worry about here in Master difficulty, he was on easy street. Iskatu seemed to sense this after a few minutes and simply stopped moving, standing in place for minutes on end as he slowly died to the little spiders. (More likely his AI pathfinding hit a snag since Spyderman was also standing in place tossing spider jars.) I racked up well over 500 minion kills before this charade mercifully came to a close.

Spyderman was still finding new gear from time to time, although the huge flood that had opened up after hitting level 61 had now slowed to a trickle. (He would have to get up to the new expansion level cap of 70 before seeing another big increase in item quality.) Still, some improved gear did pop up from time to time, and I was able to leverage the Enchantress to tilt some of the item luck in my favor. The little arrows next to the +461 Intelligence on the Immortal Scalp helmet indicated that it was an item affix that I had rerolled with the Enchantress. This is the special property of this town artisan, the ability to reroll a single item affix at a cost in gold and crafting materials. I could get rid of something useless, like +10% damage to the Firebats skill, and replace it with something great like another big boost to Intelligence or Vitality. This is another big reason why Reaper of Souls is so much better than the non-expansion version of Diablo 3, the chance to customize your items and get the desired affixes on them instead of needing to get insanely lucky in terms of what drops randomly. That's not to say that everything is perfect in the expansion (the need to reroll legendary/set items in the extreme lategame while trying to get Ancient and Primal Ancient versions of them is beyond tedious), but it's still worlds better than the pre-expansion system.

Spyderman was able to defeat the other two major bosses in Act IV (Rakanoth and Izual) without any trouble. Izual was surprisingly not immune to the Hex skill and spent most of that fight running around as a little pig while spiders bit him to death. This brought Spyderman up to Diablo himself at the end of the act:

I praised this fight with Diablo back in my pre-expansion writings and I still think it's the best of the act end boss battles. Diablo goes through three total phases, starting with an initial phase where he hurls a lot of flashy fire attacks and occasionally tries to trap the player in Bone Prisons. After Diablo loses a third of his health, he banishes the player to the Shadow Realm, a different map entirely that actually forces a quick loading screen to pop up mid-fight. There's a separate boss here named the "Shadow of Diablo", fortunately with less total health, which must be defeated in order to return back to the main boss. The Shadow of Diablo uses many of the same attacks, with the new addition of periodically disappearing and creating a shadow clone of the player to fight against. This shadow close is the same class as your character and can use some of the same skills, which can make it a tricky encounter for most builds. Well, Spyderman didn't have any of those issues and his character build seemed to break something in the shadow clone's AI programming. I think that the designers never expected someone to use only a signature spell for damage, and therefore they didn't set up the Witch Doctor version of the shadow clone to make use of the Corpse Spiders skill. Similarly, they couldn't exactly have the shadow clone use crowd control skills like Hex or Horrify or Mass Confusion against the player, so it didn't use any of them either. In fact, the shadow close ended up using no skills whatsoever! I think it's supposed to choose skills based on what your character brings into the battle and there was literally nothing for it to steal. Therefore the poor thing just stood around doing absolutely nothing as it was pummeled to death with spiders. I legitimately felt sorry for the poor thing whenever it showed up.

After returning from the Shadow Realm, the player has to finish off the original battle by working through the remaining 2/3rds of Diablo's lifebar. This is pretty similar to the first phase except that Diablo moves a bit faster, attacks more often, and mixes in a few more attacks. The biggie here is the Lightning Breath of Doom pictured above, and I'm truly pleased that the designers made the effort to bring back some of Diablo's iconic attacks from D2 like the lightning breath and his Bone Prisons. The attack looks fantastic from a visual perspective and represents a real danger that has to be dodged. In the picture above you see a rare capture of Spyderman in the midst of using his Spirit Walk, a glowing white skeleton directly below the "The Prime Evil" text in the middle of the screen. I was using the Healing Journey rune for Spirit Walk, which restored 15% of Spyderman's maximum life whenever he used the skill. This opened up a secondary function for Spirit Walk, turning it into both an escape move and also a healing move that could be pulled out every 10 seconds. Both of these functions were handy against Diablo, granting the movement speed needed to dodge the Lightning Breath of Doom while also keeping Spyderman topped off on health.

This was a tricky fight overall, not truly dangerous while not being routine either. I dodged the attacks coming out from Diablo and tossed spiders whenever it was safe to do so, using Spirit Walk to boost Spyderman's natural life regeneration as needed. After several long minutes of combat, Diablo dropped to the floor and perished.

Not too shabby on the loot drops afterwards either! This victory took Spyderman up to level 69, only one level short of the new cap in the expansion. I decided that I'd finish reaching the leveling cap in the early stages of Act V and then switch over to Adventure Mode afterwards. I didn't see any real need to play through all of Act V in the campaign, not when I had finished the original quest by defeating Diablo. There was nothing more to see here and little to be gained by sticking around in Master difficulty. It was time to reach the level cap and head into the endgame proper in Adventure Mode. Would Spyderman be strong enough to make his way through Torment difficulty? I was about to find out for myself.