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5-Treasure Finding

Now I know there's a big demon lord we need to go kick off our lawn and the fate of Sanctuary is in our hands, but take a look at this.

Rising over the buried dungeons in that god-forsaken wilderness, a solitary tower, like some monument to Evil, is all that remains.

The Countess' fortune was believed to be divided among the clergy, although some say that more remains unfound, still buried alongside the rotting skulls that bear mute witness to the inhumanity of the human creature.

I don't care if this book is using buzzwords to appeal to satanists. There is a rumor of unfound treasure. This takes precedence over everything else. I mean come on we're roleplaying our own treasure hunter.

So we're going to the Black Marsh and we're going to find that tower.

We can even largely gloss over the Black Marsh because there's no new monsters. Just more bone archers and fallen shamans and then a lot of chaff.

Music-Crypt

As mentioned, the tower still exists. Kinda hard to be forgotten when it sticks out like a sore thumb in this geometry but hey I'll let this game have its fantasy. I'm just here for the treasure.

This place holds many secrets.

On the one hand the Tower Cellar is a whopping 5 levels deep. No other dungeon in the game is 5 levels deep. On the other, each floor in the Tower Cellar is shorter than your normal dungeon floor.

More goatmen, rogue archers, and Devilkin--tier 3 Fallen--live here. (sans shamans) Though, that's nothing in comparison to the monster that is introduced here.

Wraith | CR: ****
==Physical and magic resistant
==Can drain mana
==Phases through walls, other enemies, themselves

These things are awful to deal with. They are physically resistant, so those relying on physical will have difficulties facing them. This will only get worse the further we find them in the game, so those who keep solving problems by thwacking them with sticks will eventually find Wraiths to be very awful stonewalls.

The other nasty thing about them is their hits have a chance to drain mana. Right now it's not a huge problem as they'll only drain a little bit, but as before, the further they are in the game, the more able they are to just blink your mana reserves out of existence. It doesn't help that they're also magic resistant so certain skills also struggle against them, but thankfully they're not as magically resistant as they are physically resistant, and when I say magic resistant, I don't mean elemental damage types, so all those work just fine. Regardless, It's the combination of their very good defenses and their ability to damage your mana that makes them a persistent problem throughout the entire game. Few people like them as a result.

Oh and the thread informed me of something I can see but never acknowledged: they can phase through themselves. I mean normally you never want to be in a scenario where multiple monsters are hitting you at once, but watching these things go through everything and even themselves to start hitting you as well can be a nasty surprise.

Other than that, the first 4 levels are identical to eachother. I can't confirm this, but I do feel like you're likely to find champions and uniques blocking the way to the staircase. This dungeon as a result is our first traditional indoors area where we'll have to deal with doorways and groups of monsters lurking behind them.

I bring this up because it's very possible to run through an archway and then every monster in the next room gang up on you, because it can be difficult to see them in the other room and also lead them through the doorway to thin them out. Sometimes that's not even possible because shamans and the like can be camped out in the corner and res any monsters you try to pick off to make diving in easier. There's not that many indoor areas in Diablo II, admittedly, but they can be painful experiences due to this.

Anyway, we hit level 5, which in MXL is referred to as the Bloodthrone. This level is unique in that it will always have the same layout, just rotated so that we're either going up-right or up-left from the staircase.

It consists of a main hallway, four rooms out of that hallway, and the back two rooms leading to the end of the dungeon. Sometimes we'll have to deal with a unique here, but not this time.

Here for a bloodbath? Hahaha...
The Countess | CR: **
==Superunique
==Can sprint
==Can block

Surprise! The Countess is still alive! Like Blood Raven, she has a special gimmick to her fight: she'll light the doorways of the room she's in with a firewall to, not prevent escape, but to deal fire damage if we try to sprint through it. You've seen what the fun buggy PD2 death arrow can do to us if we stand in its fire, so standing in the firewalls is not recommended here.

Unlike Blood Raven, this is all she can really do. She does have superunique stats and can deal some solid damage, but there's some issues to this fight, and MXL didn't give her much of anything to really mix this up, far as I can tell. I guess she has an imp??? That I largely ignored??? Both Jane and Chloe tear through her. The others don't have much difficulty either. Countess is not a hard boss.

The main reason why is because, traditionally she will spawn with Corrupted Rogues. While the Countess is programmed to chill in her room so that we have to either get in before she pops up the firewalls or run through the walls to engage her, her minions will just run right through and engage us before we ever enter the room. She won't, unless in rare scenarios and if she does she doesn't last long. Because of this, we can use the doorway to our absolute advantage and pick off her minions one-by-one before dealing with what is, effectively, just a stronger Corrupted Rogue with neat fire tricks.

(Click here for the full animation.)

I hope to find other such treasures.

Our arbitrary imagination satisfied, we were awarded with something very special that'll drop from the Countess, and this will probably be the first time we see them. I'm talking about runes.

Socketables, which refers to gems, jewels, and runes, are all things we can put into any weapon, armor, or shield to get the listed benefits appended to the socketed item. We've been getting these for a bit, but unless it's something closer to vanilla like PD2 and I am actually using my weapon I tend to ignore them.

Items can show up with sockets. If they do they'll always be white with some mod-related exceptions. Normally only weapons, body armor, helmets, and shields can show up with sockets, but mods can and will put sockets on everything. For example, Median XL loves sockets and loves dumping socketables on us, but most of them I gloss over unless I feel like I need to get more power or defense.

Runes, though. Runes are very important. Runes come in many different letters. Each letter will have its own effect depending on what type of item we socket it into. Some of our mods (MXL, ES) will add more runes for us to collect. ES even turns them into Japanese characters. There's advanced crafting that goes into putting runes into white sockted gear (or grey) a specific way. For example, basegame has the runeword Stealth, or slotting a Tal and Eth rune into a 2 socket chestpiece. It gives various good things but the best thing it gives and why it's the defacto earlygame chestpiece is it gives you increased move speed, attack speed, and cast speed. Literally good for everyone, especially people who want to gofast.

If you don't get the runes from the Countess right away, just kill her again. She is flagged to almost always drop runes, and she's the only monster in the game to do so, meaning you can farm her for most available runes in case you're hurtin' for them.

Further runewords will be covered at a later date, because usually you have to use a guide to remember said rune combos to have any feasible chance of making them on purpose.

Instead, I'll mention gems and jewels. Gems are really good early on. Most gems will add elemental damage to our weapon if socketed into it, and Vanir has been using a scepter with 2 sockets, which I've filled with an emerald and a ruby for added poison and fire damage. There's optimal choices for gems but this will do and this will make a huge difference. For comparison, weapons tend to do on average around 3 to 6 damage. Upwards of around 13 early on in Act I. Elemental gems add something around 3 to the weapon.

Jewels I don't have a picture of because I largely ignore them. They're socketables that will roll mods like a magic item, but from my experience most of them are trash and they have no place in your sockets when gems and runes exist. Several mods use them as crafting ingredients, so that's why I hold on to any I find. Others will make jewels great by adding in non-magic jewels or just giving them better mods in general and a reason to use them, like in MXL, where you can, if you have too many sockets for a runeword, add in jewels first before putting in the runes.

And before I forget, I've been getting a number of charms on some of my characters. Charms, where applicable, are items that grant you extra bonuses if you dedicate your inventory space to holding that charm. Most charms are pretty bad, and most charms will give you extra weapon damage which is moot when you don't rely on weapon damage. Later, however, there'll be better mods on charms and we'll want to keep an eye out for them since they only drop in the wild. Note that this is assuming charms are still charms in our mods. Resurgence and Median XL do things to charms to either make them far less common but far more customizable, or nonexistant except for special charms you can get.

Now, we're done for today. ...Wait, already? That's not right. Fuck it let's do the next quest.

Charsi, when backflipping out of the monastery, left a cool hammer over there. Since we are about to enter said monastery, it'd be nice if we could keep an eye out for it.

Bob learns of this as well, and now's a good time to show what he's been up to. He's gotten enough points and levels now that we can pick up some good crowd-control options.

Winter Fury. Is ridiculous. It's an Eastern Sun addition that turns on an aura of freezing similar to the basegame skill Hurricane. I don't care if its damage is not particularly amazing. I care that, about every half a second, it will hit everything in range with cold.

You see, when something gets hit with cold damage, they are chilled. Certain monsters have lesser effects or immunity of being chilled, but most of them will be slowed. Very slowed. Different sources of cold damage each have their own chill duration and delightfully the game never tells you what has which. Winter Fury has enough duration and hits fast enough to keep enemies in our hail aura coldlocked, making them much safer to engage in melee.

This is good because we're gonna turn into a teenage werewolf.

Now that we have a sizable boost to our skill levels and some good skills to use, we can now start using our shapeshift forms. One of them is focused on raw damage, the other is Werewolf and it focuses on sonic speed. I am going to use this and Winter Fury to blitz through Eastern Sun's normal difficulty. I will be using melee, but I don't really care because everything's chilled and the chaff will be cleaned up by Winter Fury. This will work until later, and hopefully by then I will have gotten more skill points and levels to break out the best shapeshift Druid has to offer.

(you're seeing Greg instead of Bob here because my PC crashed and ate some of Bob's recording.)

The Tamoe Highlands are very unremarkable. It has most of the monsters we've dealt with before: it's really only missing Wendigos and Wraiths. Zombies and Bloodhawks can be left in the dustbin.

Skeleton Mage | CR: ***
==Fires elemental bolts of a predetermined element.

We will, however, find skeleton mages here! They are as reactive and grouped up as bone archers, except instead of physical arrows they fire elemental bolts. This is unique because, while archers had a very high Attack Rating and could reliably hit us. Mages fire magic, which never rolls for hits, and thus, will always hit us.

Not to mention that they're doing elemental damage so our only defense is the relevant resistance, which we don't have right now, because no gear will give a particularly high amount, (and we want poison resist above all else for reasons) so they're very dangerous early on. Eventually this will flipflop around when we have resists and archers will be the most dangerous thing again, but for now these Mages are to be treated with caution.

Before I leave and forget though, scattered throughout Act I are these Fallen camps on the overworld. They'll house a lot of Fallen and Shamans as well, and be a massive blob of the vermin we could cut through. Bishibosh was in one of them and I completely forgot to mention it. But honestly it's more trouble than its worth because there's no extra prizes aside from some chump change they found somewhere. That's probably why I forgot.

Music-Monastery

Evil flows from here.

We're finally at the Rogue Monastery. It's a very large chunk of Act I, being composed of several regions we'll have to cut through. If you consider each and every region and its floors to be part of the Monastery, it's the largest dungeon in the game. But I judge dungeons based on distance between waypoints, and the Monastery has like, 4 of them within.

The Monastery is divided into 6 regions, 4 of which are actual places to care about. We begin in the Outer Cloister, which is just there to give us our first waypoint and then play a guessing game of which of the 3 other directions has the next region.

The Barracks is a more proper, single floor dungeon, that will contain rooms of Fallen Shamans, Goatmen, Skeleton Archers and Mages, and some Corrupted Rogues as well. I honestly think it's the first real challenge, because you'll face sturdy melee monsters and also have plenty of ranged attackers to deal with, some that are legitimately dangerous now.

There's two things of note: first, the staircase down is something to ignore for now. We were told to get a Malus. It's here, not downstairs.

I shall make weapons from your BONES!
The Smith | CR: **
==Superunique
==Extra Strong

Second, we probably should've read the fine print on the quest that said, "Beware of the Smith that guards it."

Just kidding. Remember when I said we could cold-lock enemies and we have many points in our shapeshift skills which means many synergies and yes damage even in Werewolf form? The Smith is not particularly resistant to losing most of his attack speed to Winter Fury. He's blown up afterwards.

Granted, he is dangerous and he can do a high amount of damage and he has a good chance to hit us, but there's many ways to deal with this fight. You could just, not, melee him. He can't catch up to you. Eastern Sun has even given him a mob, he's normally alone, but the mob is even slower than the Smith and Greg is pretty good at doing his exact same shtick. Some may say even better.

MXL also tries to make Smith more interesting by giving him the ability to summon flying swords, that are actual minions instead of projectiles. But as I've learned, while throwing knives at him, those swords are very hard pressed to do anything about us kiting the Smith constantly. Remember when I said melee has a hard time hitting Fallen when they're fleeing? Well we can just act like a Fallen here and the Smith will have a hard time hitting us. And while I said Smith hits hard, and he does, it's nothing points in Vitality and fleeing and chugging healing potions can't fix.

Basically, this fight is asking the question, "Did you have difficulty with Treehead Woodfist?" If you answer no, then the fight goes, "Oh gee well what am I doing here then?"

Here, specifically, Zoul got enough points in his minions to just have them tank the Smith and enough points in his curses to be able to start using Dark Pact. It's underwhelming right now, his main damage is still his minions, but he can now detonate curses to chip in. It's suppose to consume the curses but I'm spamming Dark Pact and it's not consuming anything. I love it when guides lie to me.

All this for a hammer?

The Smith gets compared to a similar boss in Diablo I a lot: The Butcher. (who is very iconic) In I, however, it was much more difficult to break out of melee range and the Butcher hits like a truck at the first point you can fight him. Even Warriors got blown up by him when faced immediately without any tricks. But I really wanna stress, you are far less capable of hitting-and-running in Diablo I than you are in Diablo II. Even our melee-oriented characters have ways to attack, break and heal if wounded, and then get back at it.

Poor Smith. I love his entry quotes, but he is such a jobber. Let's bring that hammer back.

We get a very simple reward: a coupon for one free rare of our choice. Some restrictions apply.

We just need to supply the white base. (It says no jewelry here but I can assure you, white jewelry in Resurgence work.) This will be useful for rounding out our gear before the end of the act, because especially in basegame, it won't be easy to fill up our equipment slots with yellows. We might even still be without a good weapon and this can give us one.

There's some weird funny things about this reward though. It will always adjust the item's level to be your character level + 4. Now, two levels determine the sort of mods an item can roll: the quality level attached to what item base it is, and then the item level, which is typically the same as the level of the monster who dropped it. This coupon is good at all times, and we can come back with an endgame item while we're at level 99 and the imbue is still good. We get this once per difficulty, so if we have no need for it, we can always save it for later.

I bring this up because, online, players can and have offered these imbues as a service to other players. Imbue isn't THAT amazing. It just gives you a free yellow you can control the base of. But plenty of people will cling to any sort of deterministic crafting there is.

Oh wait hold on. Cain is yelling at us to stay. Let's see what he has to offer.

Ancient Horadric texts record that Andariel and the other Lesser Evils once overthrew the three Prime Evils -- Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal -- banishing them from Hell to our world. Here, they caused mankind untold anguish and suffering before they were finally bound within the Soulstones.

Andariel's presence here could mean that the forces of Hell are once again aligned behind Diablo and his Brothers. If this is true, then I fear for us all.

You must kill her before the Monastery becomes a permannet outpost of Hell and the way east lost forever.

Hey, Cain? I know you've been in a cage, but no, shit, Andariel's the cause of this whole situation. It was literally the second thing told to us. We rescued you because we were told to get you because of Andariel. The Rogues have eyes. They saw her. She's real.

Although Cain drops some pretty big terms here, like the concept of Prime Evils and Lesser Evils and Soulstones, I really do not care and we really do not need to talk about Hell politics right now. I'll tell you what concerns us right now: that gate.

Now that we're done getting treasure.

Next time: We have a Maiden of Anguish to kill.