It has begun...

Some upgrades courtesy of Mephisto.

Hell Hellforge reward.

Not too shabby.

Hell Diablo Slain!

Chaos Sanctuary was SO MUCH EASIER this time without Iron Maiden. It was a bit tricky since my merc still sucks ass and he had to solo the Oblivion Knights, but with some clever teleporting to split them up and take them 1-2 at a time, it wasn't too bad. Worst part was trying to down Lord De Seis, as he is always cold immune and my merc could barely keep up with his regen, but I had a nice stockpile of Full Rejuvenation Potions that I kept feeding my merc and before long, Lord De Seis was dead. Diablo himself was a cakewalk, my Blizzard ripped him to shreds.

Act 5 is always the worst, as it has loads of cold immune enemies, and the ancients might be a real challenge, but I'm going to see how far I can push through. I should be able to at least open the Pindle portal so I can do some more efficient gear farming, and if I can manage to actually get to Baal he should drop relatively easily.

Of course, that will really only be the beginning. Taking on the Ubers will be the ultimate challenge...but I know it can be done.

Hell Ancients Slain!

HOOOOOLY shit was this obnoxious to do. So Korlic is ALWAYS Cold Immune, which meant that my merc was required to kill him. The other two ancients have a chance to be Cold Immune as well, so I basically had to keep "rerolling" the ancients until I got the right combination of modifiers on them. To complicate matters, the only way I could figure out to accomplish the task was to take Korlic out first, as there was no way I could kill the other two ancients while keeping my merc alive to handle Korlic, so I had to separate Korlic from the pack and in the process I couldn't really see if the other two were also Cold Immune. If Korlic rolled with the "Stoneskin" mod, it took far too long for my merc to kill him for it to be reasonable (it would have literally taken around 30-60 minutes just to kill Korlic if he had that mod.) In the event that I managed to successfully separate Korlic from the pack and he didn't have the Stoneskin mod, it still took around 5-10 minutes for my merc to kill him. On the plus side, for whatever reason Korlic would never target my merc, so all I had to do was run or teleport back and forth avoiding his leaps and attacks while my merc slowly chipped away at his health. The first few times I actually managed to kill him, I then approached the other two ancients and found that one of them was also Cold Immune, and there was no way my merc could solo either of them due to the nature of their attacks and the fact that they would actually target him, which meant I would have to reset. The first time that I managed to kill Korlic and then approached the other two ancients and they weren't Cold Immune, Madawc (the thrower) spawned with the Extra Strong mod and 1-shot me before I could even make a dent in them. This was around 3 hours into my attempts, at which point I almost decided to quit, but managed to maintain the will to carry on. Eventually after hours of trial and error, I managed to take out Korlic with my merc and then solo Madawc and Talic.

Ultimately, I probably would have been better off just spending all of this time farming for upgrades for myself and my merc to make the fight easier all-around, but I'm glad I managed to take them out anyway. Now Baal awaits...

TOO EASY.

Now that I've unlocked Hell Cows, it should be a lot easier for me to farm some of the item bases I need, specifically a Monarch to make a Spirit shield for myself.

Next challenge will be Diablo Clone, but that is going to be a loooooong way away. In any case, I've now met the original challenge I set myself 9 years ago, and I must say it wasn't as easy as I expected but it was easier than before, particularly due to the lack of Iron Maiden in Chaos Sanctuary.

Got some pretty sweet upgrades in this latest batch.

^This is why you should ALWAYS reroll your rings/ammys with the 3 rings = 1 ammy and 3 ammys = 1 ring recipe!

Eth Gladiator's Bane for my merc when he can use it, maybe he'll suck less with that and the Bonehew...

Just as a heads up, if anyone feels like watching me waste hours of my life doing Lower Kurast/Meph runs or whatever else I'm doing at the time, I'll be streaming here from time to time. I most likely won't stream all of my gameplay as I like to watch TV shows and such while I play and I don't feel like getting banned or whatever for streaming that audio (not to mention the fact that nobody wants to listen to it.) However, if someone knows how to set it up so that I can watch Netflix or something while I play without the audio for that going through on the stream, I could switch to streaming all of my gameplay. I've tried to set it up that way previously and got frustrated with failure so I haven't bothered figuring it out.