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3-Good luck, I'm behind 7,000 Zombies
Music-The Rogue Encampment
Now that we've made a splash in the Rogue camp and did some volunteer work for them, Kashya will approach us with a quest to undertake.
Several NPCs in this game, by the way, can have different lines of dialogue if we meet them with specific classes for the first time. Kashya remarks on how far from home Arty is. If we were a Paladin, Warriv would suck up to us. Akara meanwhile is happy to see another lady magic-user. It's pretty minor fluff at the end of the day, which is why I haven't super kept up with it.
Apparently, Andariel is not content to take only our living. Blood Raven, one of our finest captains in the battle against Diablo at Tristram, was also one of the first to be corrupted by Andariel.
Now, you'll find her in the Monastery graveyard raising our dead as zombies!
We cannot abide this defilement! If you are truly our ally, you will help us destroy her.
They have found one of their dead captains doing corpse mischief, and since we insist on being an ally, we're tasked to stuff her back into a grave. The Sisters of the Sightless Eye were also apparently involved with Tristram when it started having Diablo problems.
We should go prepare properly for the journey ahead, and we did get some loot from clearing the Den, so now's a good time to meet the rest of the encampment.
Many of our Sisters fought bravely against Diablo when he first attacked the town of Tristram. They came back to us true veterans, bearing some really powerful items. Seems like their victory was short-lived, though... Most of them are not corrupted by Andariel.
Charsi here is the Rogue blacksmith, and she'll sell us various equipment and also repair our gear. Gear can break in this game, though most gear take a long time to break down. Repairing also replenishes ammo and restores magic charges if and when we ever use items that have limited-use skills tied to the item.
Arty is here mainly to dump her starter javelin and buckler and go for what she'll be using instead: a bow and arrow.
I mentioned skill points before, but also every time we level, we fully recover Life and Mana, and get 5 Attribute points. Attributes are fairly straightforward: use them when you need them. This may sound like meme advice but really, you, don't, really, need, more of any of these unless your gear insists you get them. 1 point in all of these have very miniscule benefits as well, so you're honestly just better off banking these points until it's a good time to either get more stat requirements, more life, or more mana if you can't chug mana potions well enough.
Since we're also picking up a quiver for an off-hand to our bow, now's a good time to talk about ammunition, for both basegame and Resurgence. Throwing weapons and ammo for our bow/crossbow all have limited uses, in basegame. This could get annoying for bows because you'd have to keep a supply of ammo with you and revisit the blacksmith regularly to grab more ammo. Most mods think this is really stupid and has done their own ways to make ammo not as much of a chore. Resurgence gives us infinite quivers, and every other ammo just has a lot of shots. Quivers in Resurgence, also have white bases and can be enchanted. This one specifically has a chance to cause Open Wounds on hit, which, is a complicated thing the game doesn't explain. I'll cover it in a side update later.
Now Arty's properly equipped and can leave. But oh, why not say hi to the other merchant?
A spare weapon, some gold, a small gem is all I want in exchange for the equipment you'll need on whatever quests you might undertake.
Now, now, now... Don't be shy, all of my items are guaranteed for life and come with a two-day warranty!
Fun fact: Gheed hates Necromancers, for reasons listed: "Because they smell like dead all the time." He's another general arms merchant in case we need another. He is also big sleaze and his gossip quips are elightening to us all.
But most importantly, he allows us to gamble.
Gambling will open up a page of assorted items. What we get is based on our level. We know nothing except the base, and can pay a fee to buy it and have it auto-identified. Most of the time we'll only get magic items and waste a bunch of money. Sometimes, however, you get rares out of doing this, and very, extremely, ultimately rarely, you can even get set and unique items out of this. It's more a money sink than anything. It's unreliable trying to fish for specific items, but once you no longer have a particular need for money you'll be dumping it all on rolling for items here.
...unless your name is Eastern Sun, in which case, gambling is very good and should be done whenever you have the money to spend. This is because the rates for getting good items from here is extremely increased and the prices for most of these is very reasonable. Also, you can gamble for jewelry unlike normal where they cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of gold to gamble for a ring or amulet. Getting rare items is fairly common, and you can occasionally find a set or unique item through gambling. The only barrier of entry is your level and the fact that money's hard to come by this early on.
Also, while I'm mentioning ES, if you ever have questions about how to get through early game, Gheed also sells FAQ scrolls which, aren't useful for anything other than reading in shop to get info on how ES works. Basically:
-Unpack your gift.
-Use your fulminating potions.
-Just walk out! You can leave!
-If it sucks, hit da bricks! (By creating a new game. In singleplayer the map will be the same, but monster placement will be different.)
-Sell thrown weapons, including potions.
-Sell ancient coupons because honestly you don't need them right now.
-Keep (and ID) ancient scrolls. They're really important!
-Jewelry and charms can be used to recycle into higher tiered items or just new items. Keep that stuff!
-Gamble is very good.
Next to the scrolls is a bunch of cans, called stockers. Gheed will sell these containers for us to be able to lug the many crafting ingredients we'll find in Eastern Sun, including gems, runes, organs, and other things. This includes rejuvenation potions as well. Keeping these and the cube in our inventory is mandatory, because that allows us to quickly get those ingredients out of our inventory by just pressing F8 to run a plugin that'll autostore the goodies into the relevant stockers.
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While Arty goes shopping, I can explain some of our basic items here. Healing and Mana potions work over time. Quaff it, and you'll get the listed amount recovered over I wanna say about 5 seconds. If you hit max Life or Mana, the recovery for that will stop. Rejuvenation (pink) Potions are high-power potions that recover a portion of your max Life and Mana immediately. Median XL changes this so that all potions will recover your health/mana over decreasing periods of time based on the tier of the potion, up to a very high cap. They all heal to full and aren't stopped when hitting full life/mana. It's just the better ones heal to full faster. There is, however, a distinct downside to using potions in Median XL: each recovery buff will also slightly slow your movespeed down. Stack them all and you'll notice a considerable speed decrease. It might even affect other speeds, but this is surprisingly hard to notice in the first place.
There's some other potions available but I'll explain them later. Instead, sold by Akara are Tomes to hold the two types of scrolls we can find. Each Tome can hold, normally, 20 of a given scroll type. In Resurgence, where we never have to identify anything, we only need the Tome of Town Portal to have easy warping back. In MXL, where in addition to that town portal is a skill everyone has, Tomes don't exist.
Anyway, back out Arty goes to head past the Blood Moor. She greets Flavie, who has this to say.
Music-The Wilderness
I dunno Flavie uhh,
I think I'll be fine.
Cold Plains has the easiest waypoint to find. It is always immediately after the entrance and always right by the road. There are very few waypoints as easy to find as this. Savor the moment while you can.
Corrupt Rogue | CR: **
==Can sprint.
==Can block.
The Cold Plains introduces a couple more monsters into the mix: Corrupt Rogues are, actually, similarly stated to Zombies, except they have a brain, they can sprint, and their Attack Rating and Defense is a bit better. The sprinting part is perhaps the only thing to note because they have a tendency to immediately leg it up to you and start swinging.
Corrupt Rogue Spearwoman | CR: **
==Can sprint.
Some of them can also run up with spears, which gives them longer melee range and considerably more melee damage in exchange for their ability to block. They are otherwise the same.
Really, the rub here is that before we could largely walk away from any battle, to flee or reposition. With Rogues able to sprint to keep up with us, we'll have a harder time fleeing if things go wrong. Harder but not impossible. After all, at this point we should have a source of town portal scrolls.
Bishibosh was already mentioned last update, so we just need to go find the right exit. The wrong exit is to the Stony Field, which is for later. We want,
I sense great sorrow and misery.
the Rogue monastery's graveyard. Zombies make a return here, but also,
Skeleton | CR: **
==Can block.
we start meeting some plain ol' bones. Skeletons are like Rogues except they don't sprint. They hit about as hard though.
As for who has gotten all these corpses out of the ground, well,
Join my army of the dead!
Blood Raven | CR: ***
==Superunique
==Comes with Zombies
==Fires Arrows, Fire Arrows (Or, firing fire arrows.)
==Can summon Zombies
==Sprints
say hello to Blood Raven, everybody! Blood Raven has a pack of Zombies as a mob which, while good meat shields, don't do much else unless we stand in a space for too long. Blood Raven will spend most of her time sprinting around, firing normal or fire arrows at us, and sometimes raising another zombie from the ground. She can be extremely annoying to deal with if all you can do is melee swings, because we couldn't hit fleeing Fallen before. We extremely cannot hit a moving Blood Raven now.
But we're LadyArty the Amazon. We are just as capable of being an annoying little pinger as she is. We do have to watch out for her arrows though, as she's the first source of real damage, especially if we eat fire. She can bring us down in a countable amount of hits. But with her Zombies being useless (unless you run right into them) and us being her but better,
Music-Blood Raven Dies
(click here for the full animation)
Rest in peace, sister.
she goes down in spectacular, 15-second fashion, taking her zombies with her. It also helps that I had a skill shrine active, which meant my already good fire arrow had another 2 levels to it, giving it even more damage. Popping a shrine like that and then beelining to an obstacle is a good strategy in this game.
But how does it go for the other characters?
Music-The Wilderness
Too many empty graves...
Zoul's posse has gotten pretty good at distracting enemies while he thwacks them. Despite Zoul's desires, he is sticking to the starter wand. While it'd be better for him to have a good axe or dagger or scythe, that +1 to his minions does far more for his damage output than any better stick can do.
Zoul walks up to Blood Raven and notices something: the first is that the zombie mob Blood Raven spawns with is MUCH more proactive, and sturdy as well! They're not superdeadly, but they can beat our Skeletons if left with them alone.
Also, those are Skeleton Archers in the back. Those entirely new additions to Blood Raven's army are a problem, because they'll support the zombies as they hit our skeletons and turn a close loss into certain death for our minions. We need to book it, because getting the entire mob on our minions means they will perish. Minions will try to stick with us if we run off too far, so we just need to flee for our bones to disengage and stop eating arrows.
Zoul does have the Amplify Damage curse to support his troops, but gone are the days where 1 point in this level 1 skill means you and your friends just deal double physical damage to them. It's now MUCH lower, only a -10 reduction to that resistance at level 1, and lasts much shorter. To make Amplify Damage good, we will have to invest a lot of points into it, but for now every edge we have helps.
Blood Raven in PD2 is a very careful game of kiting and running. We need to thin out that mob. Trying to kill Blood Raven with it is almost a death sentence because the archers, too, deal noticeable damage to us, and there's like 6 of them. There's plenty of other monsters we can make more corpses of, but, well,
Let's just turn to Vanir for a second. He's currently holed up in an optional dungeon: the Cave.
Act I has many of these holes in the ground, all named different things, and they're all two levels. One of them's long and a bit grueling.
The other is a very small floor with a golden chest at the end. Gold chests are end-of-dungeon chests mainly found in optional dungeons that tend to have better than usual gear. It's random whether it'll just be a normal chest drop or give you better chest loot than usual. Sometimes it'll give absolutely nothing! Sometimes it will try its very best to give you uniques. It's a grind, but it's fairly reliable to at least get something out of it because, when it doesn't roll bumpkus, it gives a long list of items.
Diablo II has a lot of these side dungeons and most of them do about the same thing, which is why I'll mention them but not really pay attention to them. There's no big surprise or valuable loot to find that isn't just this. They're time wasters.
Leaving the Cave, Vanir makes his way to the burial grounds and starts working on Blood Raven's army.
So long as Vanir is not getting shot by Blood Raven, he can really tear up that army with his melee splash.
He has nothing to worry about with the army thanks to his points in Sacrifice. Now that the army's dead and Blood Raven can only summon more zombies, it should be easy sailing.
Then this happens. 
Say hello to Blood Raven's new PD2-exclusive addition: Immolation Arrow! Immolation Arrow, traditionally, is a skill Amazon unlocks at Level 24. It's been upgraded to also leave a fire trail as well. The fire trail, is, extremely buggy and unbalanced, and if we stand in it, we die horribly. That is to say nothing about if we directly eat the arrow, which can chump most of our life so that we then die to the fire in a blink of an eye.
PD2's Blood Raven has, problems. If you're using melee or minions, you are going to struggle to kill her, because you have to act very fast to dodge Immolation Arrows in melee, and minions do not know how to dodge, so once she fires an Immolation Arrow, any preoccupied minions hit by it die instantly. (This is why I set up portals before hard enemies.)
That means Zoul has to constantly run up, get his minions to swing, hope she doesn't blow them up, and if she does, run back and get more. He's not quite high enough level yet to get a minion skill that doesn't require corpses, and this ends up taking much longer. At least he can safely avoid the immolation arrows, or at least, be able to take a clip.
Vanir, does not have such luxury. He also does not have a reliable hit chance against Blood Raven, because Blood Raven, being classified a high-tier superunique, has a much higher level than Vanir can be realistically expected to have. That makes his accuracy bad, even when using Sacrifice to boost it by a large amount, because levels in this game matter just as much to hit percentage as Attack Rating does.
If you die in a really bad spot it can be a challenge to grab your corpse and get out before you die again. Also I love this walking animation when you have nothing equipped.
Blood Raven isn't even that tanky either. The best way to deal with her as melee is to circle strafe around and wait until she summons a zombie, which will create a wide enough window for you to get in and try to bop her. Vanir does wumbo damage already so he gets his revenge after grabbing his stuff.
Surely it can't be worse than that.
Greg's much better off now that he has gotten his class set on. It gives a huge boost to a lot of things, including all his skills.
This means his new skill, Thunder Strike, does about three times the damage of just swinging normally, and most of it's added lightning damage. Thunder Strike has to make the hit check for the lightning damage to go through, but the juiced attack rating should make that simple enough.
Well okay no because it takes a few swings to hit Blood Raven. Once we get our onesies-twosies in though, she melts. She is otherwise, not much different and doesn't have anything to deal with our power level. It's really just the fuckery to hitting things in Eastern Sun that she has that makes her different.
Bob's volcanoes chump her army, and Blood Raven does not know how to dodge or shoot the rocks. This allows his vine buddy to focus on Blood Raven, and with a poison hit or two and some volcanos on the feet she goes down.
Our first Unique drops this way. Unfortunately we won't be using it because it has to directly compete with our class sets, which it can't do. The thing about gold, or unique items, is that, while it's cause for celebration when you get one, you then need to get one you can use. Any unique can drop, including ones that are definitely incompatible with what you're doing, and most uniques are designed in a way that support certain playstyles. ...Again nevermind that we have an absolutely OP class set.
The first thing you'll notice in Median XL is many major enemies will have a special lifegauge that appears at the bottom instead of the top when we're nearing them. And it'll show us that Blood Raven has been given lifeleech on her arrows.
Of note, instead of spawning with zombies or skeletal archers she spawns with other corrupted Rogue archers. With the other mobs that'll probably spawn in Blood Raven's vacinity this can be a dangerous encounter,
if you don't have the sort of crowd control Jane does. This was teased in the last update, but we have gotten Blade Storm trained and we've been using it since leaving Den. Its premise is simple: swing your weapon, shit out swords. If there's one demon the 12 swords will all go to that demon, otherwise it'll slice and dice throughout the group.
Blood Raven got some carrion grubs, the zombies you see here are upgraded and will leave poison clouds on death, and there's plenty of arrows, but none of it's enough to stop Jane Croft going in, thwacking a couple times, and watching the army, then Blood Raven, fall. The damage from a bunch of arrows and bites? Doesn't matter if it doesn't kill you.
Music-Crypt
Since that was fast and there's still time, I have Jane explore the two dungeons in the burial grounds. The Crypt and the Mausoleum are quite short, and they only contain more skeletons and zombies, but each dungeon does end in a gold chest. Even shorter if we have map reveal available to speed it up. I tend to not do them, especially this early on, but they are worth doing.
And lastly, Chloe just got a new toy, in the form of a poison knife skill that'll burst into a cloud of poison on impact, then burst again a second later. It takes more finagling since we have to aim the knives and Blood Raven has to stand still for this to do good damage, but since we too are clowning around, and this skill chumped her army, there's nothing to fear. Blood Raven's missing the ability to summon more minions but perhaps that's for the better, because they would just die immediately.
One last note about Path of Diablo 2's Blood Raven. This is Vanir taking fire damage...when there's no fire.
Fuck that arrow.
Music-The Rogue Encampment
Our heroes return triumphant over Blood Raven, some better than others.
You have earned my respect, stranger... and the allegiance of the Rogues. I have placed several of my best warriors at your disposal.
Kashya finally takes our help seriously, and pledges to help us out, by giving us a freebie mercenary Rogue to support us for the rest of the game.
You should replace her as soon as possible. MXL doesn't even give you the freebie so that you will hire a better, level-appropriate Rogue. We're around level 6, (higher in MXL) and the free hireling we got is level 2. You wouldn't think it would be that huge of a disparity, but it is. You'll find gear that you won't wear but your rogue might and then realize the gear is assuming you're at your level, and not the rogue's level. It's very cheap to hire a new mercenary anyway.
We have gone on for long enough though, so I'll discuss Hirelings in the next update, where we'll have to go into the dark woods to see if a village elder is not dead.