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6-The Maiden of Anguish
Music-Monastery
Now that all distractions are out of the way, we are allowed to confront the problem we were given first.
And what do you know, we're already a decent chunk in.
What nightmarish tortures took place here?
Past the Barracks we have the Jail. Here I clap my hands and go, "Okay, your monastery, why does it have a three floor jail of unrealistic architecture?"
There's a couple things going on with this floor worth pointing out. The first is that this will be our first area with walls that you can't walk through, but you can shoot through just fine. If we're using anything ranged the most to worry about is not hitting the solid pillars inbetween. If we have to run up to monsters to stop them then we typically have to find a door to get into their enclosure, which can be set up in such a way that we'll be having to dodge monsters and projectiles to get them to stop.
Now's a good time to offer advice on exactly these scenarios. We're only going to meet more encounters where we'll have melee monsters up front and ranged monsters in the back supporting them. If you've been playing this game by left clicking things to hit them until they die, ranged monsters are capable of capitalizing on you sitting there and thwacking things to really go through your life and otherwise impede you clearing monsters. What this typically means is that, if you're melee, you're going to want to start adopting a hit and run strategy.
This applies to ranged characters as well. Just about every ranged monster attacks far slower than you do, so it's easy to move around for a bit, wait for the best gap in the firing squad, and attack then. This is a pack of champion archers deleting half of Vanir's life in one volley. Vanir isn't particularly squishy or tanky. The better thing to have done, instead of running in there, is to run around until they shoot, then charge in to minimize damage taken.
Speaking of, Vanir's been using Charge. It's a skill that causes us to run up to an enemy and thwack them, knocking them back. There's a lot of quirks with this skill.
For starters, you don't need a target. You can just go with it. Second, it gives you a massive movespeed boost to get to wherever you click. Third that boost can wonk out and sometimes Vanir just runs veeeeery sloooowly.
Teleport is still the defacto get there skill but this, being a movement skill itself, is also very valuable. We're prohibited from spamming it thanks to its high mana cost and our relatively low maximum mana, but if I was being a true gamer I'd just be loading up on mana potions and slamming them constantly to keep running.
Oh and fourth, Charge doesn't benefit from incrased movespeed...off gear. Every other increase to run/walk speed works, but strangely enough not gear. There's a couple more like how you must move to knock them back and get the damage and AR bonus, and it doesn't need a shield, but I'm pretty sure most people grab this to zoom.
Zoul meanwhile, finds the superunique in the Jail.
Pitspawn Fouldog | CR: ****
==Superunique
==Cursed
==Cold Enchanted
==Shoots Lightning Orbs
He can be very dangerous, because it's already a dangerous base for a monster, (Tainted) and has two nasty modifiers for melee characters. (cursed, cold) As before, they are capable of fighting at range, but now their attacks will chill because they all get added cold damage, even the orbs. They also explode in a freezing nova on death, which does a substantial amount of cold damage and inflict a very long chill.
All cold damage chills, both yours and theirs. How long it chills, however, depends on the source of the cold damage. Typically, charms and most gear have it last for a second, whereas certain mods and high-tier sapphires will last longer, up to 4 and even 6 seconds. Chill from skills, meanwhile, scale off their level and tend to last very long. This is good because many monsters will have chill effectiveness, seperate from cold resist, that cuts down on both how much they're slowed and how long the chill lasts. Cold resist will also cut down on chill length, but won't reduce chill effect.
Monster chill meanwhile tends to last very long and scales off monster level. The end result is stuff like Cold Enchanted will keep you slowed for a long time without sufficient cold resist. The way to overcome that is to stack cold resistance and pick up things like half freeze duration. There's an elusive item mod called "cannot be frozen", and it'll make us chill immune if we get it. All this won't be things we can do this early on though, so for now, we just take the cold novas like champs. I don't recommend this though, since you normally take a -50% penalty to attack, move, hit, basically everything speed except cast speed strangely enough. You can get slowed to the point where you can get stunlocked and die horribly before you can do something about it.
Gargoyle Trap | CR: *
==Shoots fireballs
==Cold, chill, drain resistant
Other than that, these things show up. They're immobile fire turrets that take a beating and I honestly never have trouble with them because they do not do much damage. However, strangely enough, they're valuable experience wise, just, not loot wise. They'll never drop anything. They are rare to find and they don't do much that honestly I really just gloss over their presence.
The Jail can be pretty dangerous. With plenty of ranged monsters, rooms full of monsters to battle through, its winding maze, and the fact that the game is starting to break out elemental damage, this can be very difficult for the unprepared. I already showed me taking heavy damage. Zoul has to regularly summon new bones as his old ones take enough damage and die, and anyone melee has to be mindful of the battles they pick less they eat too much damage. Potions fix all problems involving the long run though, and not only will more drop during our excursion, they're beginning to drop in normal, or tier 3, variants. Potions go from Minor, to Lesser, (no prefix), Greater, and Super. Greater amounts recovered means greater amounts recovered per second as we shove them down our throat. One can't recover faster than the highest potion they've drank, but any extra chugging will be added to the amount you're recovering. Just make sure you don't hit full life, because then your recovery will stop.
The Inner Cloister is about the midway point of the Monastery. It's similar to the Outer Cloister in that it's mainly a filler area of large rooms and some monsters, except we don't have to guess which of the 3 other directions to go to. The next area is always northeast, and there's no side paths.
Fun fact: there was a superunique here, but he only exists if you play without the expansion, which is something I think no one does. There's some reasons to do that and then many more reasons not to. People like runewords, for example, and classic doesn't have them. I guess the game is shorter???
The Cathedral, like Inner Cloister, is always the same fixed design.
Its superunique is still here however:
Bone Ash: CR: ***
==Superunique
==Extra Strong
==Cold Enchanted
==Magic Resistant
==Fires Poison Bolts
==Cold immune
Bone Ash has a lot of modifiers. Specifically, he winds up being resistant to every element due to Magic Resistance, and the poison resist from being a Burning Dead Mage that chose poison as its element. Of note, he hits you you're getting both poisoned and chilled because his bolts will deal both types of damage. Getting hit by Bone Ash is a very bad idea because you'll eat a lot of damage over time and the chill, while brief, can disrupt you to get hit more. If you're Greg where you got...next to no monsters in the Cathedral and you already have good crowd control Bone Ash won't do much.
Normally I tense up for Cathedral, but maybe it's because, in the past, I was used to getting swarmed with Dark One packs backed by Shamans and Tainted, all the while this guy can lob death bolts at you. Nowadays, when I can just position myself in such a way to kite a portion of the monsters inside at a time, Bone Ash can't really be put in such a way that he can get hits in on me. I normally beeline straight to him or at least get far away enough that he won't catch up before I divert my attention back to him.
What I'm saying is kid me had trouble with the Cathedral. To be fair Bone Ash's death nova does hurt a lot.
If you're Median XL, however, the experience is quite different.
Because hey, King Leoric's here! Leoric was a boss in Diablo I, because of course he would be. I honestly wonder if he even knows he's a king of bones helping Diablo out.
Leoric shows up with his Centurions, which are empowered black knights that will run right up and thwack us. These are also in Eastern Sun as well and they're everywhere in that mod. I love these monsters, because they have the best noises.
Leoric himself have two spells he'll cast: a trifecta of bone spears that's physical so it has to roll to hit, and a spirit that will create an expanding damage aura. Leoric doesn't have anything else and I honestly do not have difficulty with him. Just duck out of the way when he gets a spirit out.
Leoric's a warmup for what's abut to come in Median. We'll get to that later.
The Catacombs is the home stretch. ...No it's not it's a 4 floor massive finisher to Act I. The floors are huge, the act is throwing out the worst it can muster, and it's ever more confusing to navigate. The monsters here start doing considerable damage and we're not free from a Tainted getting in projectiles as we try to break through hordes.
Oh, and each floor except the last one has their own unique addition to the roster of Dark One Shamans and Tainted in the Catacombs:
Fetish | CR: ***
==Moves very fast
These things. They can show up here, thankfully not frequently and in small packs, but they are designed to swarm and stab you with comically oversized kitchen cutlery. When I say they move very fast, I mean they outrun you, and unlike Corrupt Rogues, they will not stop moving this fast. Right now they're not really terrifying because they lack significant numbers and Fetishes are known to be made of paper. (Rat Men, specifically, aren't as fast as their higher tiers.) But I will have words to say about these monsters when we start seeing many, many more of them. Good thing of the seven characters I'm playing none of them try to solve problems one at a time, huh?
Fun fact: this unique we're highlighting is Aura Enchanted. Does exactly what it says: the unique has an aura, and it affects everyone around him. This one has Vigor, which will boost their already high movespeed. This is not a problem though because, as an Amazon shooting a bow and seeing this unique stick out like a sore thumb in a room we haven't even entered, we can just open the door and then start shooting and the Rat Men will get blown up before ever passing through the door.
Level 2 has the waypoint for Catacombs and also a new preview monster:
Giant Spider | CR: **
==Has a very hard time caring about you even in melee.
If you hate spiders I'm sorry but this game has very gross spiders. Catacombs Level 2 has them as their preview monster, but these things are very hard-pressed to care about you. Later variants will get added chances to add fire or poison damage, but Arachs don't have any such thing and as such are pretty bad melee monsters. That said though, they can hit pretty hard in better scenarios.
Interestingly, when wounded, they may flee, leaving webs as they move, which will slow you as you try to move through them. They only ever do this when you bring them to low health and it's really ineffective, even in hordes, at doing anything to impede you. Hell until I started recording for this LP, I didn't even know they did this.
The third floor, however, has the nastiest preview monster to find here:
Vampire | CR: ****
==Can cast Fireball, Firewall, Meteor
==Phyical, Cold Resistant
==Steals life on melee hit
If there was ever a proper mage monster in vanilla Diablo II, it's this hecker. Luckily, very early on, we'll only see Fireball and it's not particularly dangerous. But they tend to keep at a distance and then pop firewalls under your feet and then throw meteors at you, which will mark your location and then after a bit a rock will drop down leaving a patch of fire. You may think to melee them, but their melee attack can actually be more dangerous than their spells, with consistent chance for added cold damage, lifeleech, and even resistance to physical and cold. The only reason why they're not 5 stars is because their spell damage isn't dangerous and can be resisted because it's all fire.
And finally, we're at the bottom. It's good form to put up a town portal here and now. It's gonna get ugly.
Now's a good time to take stock of our heroes. Arty, Chloe, and Zoul can solve problems at range. Zoul indirectly solves those problems but he's able to keep at range from big problems and that's what's important. Bob and Greg at the moment melee their problems, but their class sets still keep them at very strong power levels, and Bob can coldlock Andariel and her friends even when she has heavy chill resistance.
That just leaves Vanir and Jane, who has to fight this demoness in the worst way possible. Vanir will take the lead. The first room may have some monster packs, but it's the room after where we'll get the welcoming party. Plenty more Shamans and Tainted will roam this room, and patches of fire and a cool blood pool will serve as obstacles.
Andariel's chamber will have plenty of friends. She herself is near the back of it, so we'll get a chance to clear most of those out. A smart way to deal with Andariel is to clear the front half of the room, trigger Andariel in the back, and then run until she's away from anything that spawned near her. If there's Shamans in the back that can long-range revive Dark Ones, this can be a problem, but so long as we're setting up a one-on-one with her, we'll be on a good foot.
So we clear out the front half, get close enough,
Die, maggot!
Andariel | CR: ****
==Act Boss
==Cold, Lightning, Poison resistant
==Weak to Fire
==Casts Poison Sting, Poison Spray
==Can block
and get her attention.
Welcome to the first act boss. Andariel is a poison powerhouse. Her melee attacks poison, she can cause a spray of poison that will catch most everyone in a large cone in front of her, and she can just launch a poison bolt in case she doesn't like the massive poison breath.
She's a good time to discuss poison damage, because you're going to learn a lot about it your first time around. Poison damage is only ever dealt over a duration of time. Like chill, the actual length depends on its source, but unlike chill, you can be told how long your poison damage lasts. If only it was that simple.
You can't stack poison damage from multiple attacks, but, you can stack multiple bonuses to poison damage. Different poison lengths are averaged but the poison damages are summed together. Poison damage is listed as the total amount of damage done over its given duration, so mixing different damage and durations together can make the actual math a little fuzzy. If you're inflicting poison on someone who already has poison, both the rate of poison and the current length of poison is considered seperately. If your new poison beats both or either of those, it'll overwrite the lesser values. There's a weird quirk where it'll use your new values for one frame, but then snap back to the best poison. Since both rate and duration are considered seperately, longer but weaker poisons being applied after stronger but shorter poisons will give you the best of both worlds. Finally, poison damage can't kill you, (1 Life though means you'll die if someone sneezes in your direction, which happens a lot.) buuuut it will kill everything else!
And that's exactly what Andariel does. Once she gets Poison Spray or Poison Sting off, she'll be able to keep refreshing their very potent poison damage on you and everyone else. This is what makes this a terror for Zoul: his bones aren't poison immune. He has plenty of corpses to draw from, sure, but if you haven't specced points optimally your bones will fold like cheap suits.
But that's not quite why meleeing her is a bad idea. You see, her Poison Spray also deals physical damage. Why? Because. You may also recall that she fires a very long cone of a wide arc of poison clouds. Each individual cloud can hit you. That 7-10 physical damage one of those clouds do? Well, multiply that by I dunno like 10 12 when you eat the entire spray point blank, and if you don't have good Defense, (her spray is not an exception to the "physical damage rolls to hit" rule) all of them will hit. Not to mention you just got hit with 50-100 poison damage over 16 seconds. The sting does the same poison damage, but lasts twice as long and doesn't deal physical. Really, people get yeeted by Andariel, not because of lethal poison, (At about 4.5 life lost per second though it will tick down your life.) but because they're melee, and they ate the entire spray.
So how do you deal, especially as an idiot like Vanir?
Nevermind that his good defense and life allows him to bring the otherwise lethal spray down to manageable. (Hilariously I didn't stack any poison resist on him.) You may be wondering, "She's weak to fire? How do you find that out without a strategy guide?" Well, you go back to town.
It is clear that Andariel is acting on behalf of Diablo to prevent anyone from following him eastward. Her defeat would allow you to continue the pursuit.
Ancient lore has it that while Andariel was spawned in the Burning Hells, she is not fond of fire.
Turns out, you can learn her weakness if you inquire about the Sisters to the Slaughter quest, to specifically Cain, after leaving the encampment after taking the quest and then returning. (You don't get this dialogue if you talk to Cain before leaving the town.) If it makes you feel any better, Kashya will also point you in Cain's direction if you talk with her about the quest as well, again, after you leave and return to town. Who the fuck talks to these NPCs? Did you even know there's different quest dialogue from most everyone if you inquire before or after leaving town?
What's more wild is that she's actually weak to something. Monsters in Diablo II? Tend to never be weak to anything. I'd have to gloss over every single monster to figure out if this is true or not but I'm pretty sure Andariel stands alone as the only monster that takes extra damage from an element. Course, your source of fire damage right now is either rubies, or you're using an early fire skill like Fire Bolt, Holy Fire, Fire Arrow, or Corpse Explosion, but it's something!
But no that's not the trick to this fight. There is a trick to this fight and it's not damage racing her. Come back with me for a lil' bit.
Hey, remember these potions? I'm gonna explain one of them now.
Antidotes remove all poison damage currently on you. That's also what it says in the manual. (It also says various afflictions like there's more than poison damage.) What it doesn't say, is, Antidotes also provide a temporary +50 boost to Poison Resist.
That means, if you have 0 Poison Resist, quaff one of these and you now take half poison damage over half its duration. It's not too impossible to have 25 Poison Resist by the time you reach Andariel either, and if you quaff one of these you now have max poison resist. (They cap at 75.)
That solves the poison problem pretty nicely.
Vanir does so much damage with Sacrifice that he lops off around 10% of Andariel's life with each successful hit. On the one hand he's losing 3% of his life with every swing, but on the other Andariel is surprisingly easy to hit. Her level isn't bloated compared to ours, her Defense isn't loaded, which means if we've been taking care of our AR and don't come in underleveled, we'll have a decent chance to hit her, especially if we add a massive multiplier.
He picked up a yellow scepter at some point which does about the same damage as the gemmed scepter he was using, but is now entirely physical and has extra benefits like having a chance to cause monsters to flee.
This also dropped at some point. This set item, even by itself, is a good choice this early on since it gives hefty poison damage and also slows and knocks back hit monsters. Some monsters are immune to the knockback, but no monster, including Andariel, is immune to getting their attack speed and move speed reduced. Slow is extremely powerful as a result. This is probably why Vanir does not have difficulty.
Zoul is ...just plain lucky. His skeletons swarmed Andariel, and the target of her poison flood is, a set of bones pressed up against the wall, meaning no one else is getting poisoned to death. By the time that skeleton perishes, Andariel's dead. Zoul doesn't have any fancy gear or optimal distribution of skill levels. Zoul is just lucky.
Greg is clearing out monsters with Thunder Wave. It's an absurdly huge wave of lightning that, while its damage output is lackluster, its coverage is not. It's gonna be our crowd control skill for a while. Once the mobs are cleared, he goes in with our previously mentioned Thunder Strike, which is like Sacrifice, except the extra damage is just all added lightning damage. It's not as consistent as Vanir lopping off ~10% with each Sacrifice, but Greg can sit comfortably in front of Andariel thanks to his class set and just hold right click until the lightning RNG rolls high enough times.
In Andariel's infinite wisdom, when Bob's fight begins, she doesn't go after him, or his hireling, but the spirit...the spirit that's poison immune.
Oak Sage is a really good skill, and it's only better in Eastern Sun. It normally gives a substantial multiplier to ally life, which is a very good thing to have especially later on. in ES it's improved to not only boost resistances, but it also has defense and much greater life of its own now. It doesn't attack on its own. It doesn't have to. It's a support summon.
Of note is the blue men shown previously. Mud Golems are an ES addition and they're typically just massive blobs of life and annoyance. You may think blue is a bad color for them. What if I told you normally they're yellow-green and they look like mountain dew golems? (im red-green colorblind do not @ me)
Okay so I hyped this up previously, Median XL makes this fight much harder right?
...No. Look at that lifebar melt. Sure she's melting us as well because I picked a bad time to walk in and start thwacking but your eyes aren't deceiving you. That's a span of 4 seconds and Andariel lost 2/3rds of her life. She's only living because I have to break to heal, and once I start running up to her to finish her off, she starts running, away from me. She should. Jane Croft is scary.
As I swap from the 1 wood to the 9 iron in terms of raw damage, I'll explain the MXL changes. As you saw, Andariel can summon a swarm of poison gnats, which leaves a long-lasting large aura of poison around her. She's also capable of raining meteors from the sky, which will put markers near the target and then expand outwards, pelting rocks across a massive area. She can just hit us from afar instantly with a weak attack, (I think it's actually Holy Fire/the fire damage aura.) and finally lob poison globs to hit us. This is a pretty good kit, all things considered, and as you can see eating these attacks, while not lethal, are pretty consistently damaging. It does make this fight a more interesting affair then just circumventing the spray in various ways and then holding down the damage button. This is good because antidote potions don't exist in MXL so there's no easy cheat out of this fight.
But wait, there's still LadyArty. Surely she had difficulty right?
Music-Andariel Dies
Well...god, just click this and watch.
(It also doubles as her death animation.)
"Hah, this maiden shall inflict no more anguish."
I swear she's hard! I swear it's not normal for me to dunk her 7 times and end this update on a flawless victory! I did check, she literally did not hit either me or Sharyn. That Fallen strat paying off in spades. She got caught up swapping targets several times. She never decided to use her spells. She got played for an absolute fool. I swear she's hard.
Her difficulty, though, mainly stems from just not thinking. There's plenty of ways through this fight: stack defense and mitigate poison damage, deal with her at range, wait for her to engage an ally of yours and then go to town, fleeing if she swaps targets to you. For players new to Diablo II or just action games in general she's the first source of really dangerous damage and to a lot of new gamers I'm pretty sure she'll be your first source of death. She's capable of doing that. I swear. I swear. I will attest that this is experience making her look easy and she should be approached with caution.
Anyway, let's deliver the good news to the Rogues.
Music-The Rogue Encampment
Remember... Diablo is still out there, seeking something in the desert. I'm afraid that this nightmare will not end until you find what it is that he seeks.
Way to sour the mood Cain. I'll just go talk to someone more happy for my help.
I... may have misjudged you, outlander. You are a true hero and testament to the noble spirit which has inspired our Order for generations.
Fare well... my friend.
This is a trope I see very often in fantasy works: mistrust.
All our thanks go with you, my friend.
Of course we're strangers. We just show up here out of nowhere, not directly to help the Rogues, but because we're after that Dark Wanderer. It isn't that we're a hero, it's that our goals align with eachother.
But this is alway set up in a matter of, "We're the hero going to save the day. We are also completely and utterly unknown to the people we help. But don't worry, because they'll be calling us heroes soon enough."
I honestly never liked it. Eventually it got repeated enough that I just roll my eyes whenever I'm thrown to problems and the people I'm helping go eew gross it's a stranger i might have cooties
(You have to go to the talk menu for this one. He doesn't say it automatically.)
I'm not an expert on isekai anime, but I imagine if the isekai'd protagonist is not already the chosen one, this is the trope they use instead. It's an easy trope, because it's a pretty common moral for humans to have: don't trust strangers. The problem I have is that our role as surprise hero to save the day never meshes well with that very moral, so the story early on tends to play out predictably as the first point of contention generated by us being a generic fantasy hero is, "Who the fuck are you?"
To the point where, despite us, saving the Sisters of the Sightless Eye, and ensuring Sanctuary commerce can resume unhindered, we're going to go to the next area and we won't be hailed as a hero, despite riding a caravan of merchants there with news that we helped. (ideally) We'll be hailed as a total stranger.
Now, to be fair, some NPCs will remark on our deeds and say hey you killed a demon lord good job, but some random person nodding is not the same as fame. The next act is gonna start with having to earn the trust of the next settlement to make headway. Sure I'll get nods from these people, but then why am I still going through the hoops as if I didn't do anything?
Sanctuary's currently requiring heroes and I just proved my worth, but aside from some nerds wanting my autograph I'm still a nobody. I seriously thought Diablo II didn't acknowledge my achievements outside of the acts I do them in until I took a closer look at dialogue. Even then, the feeling I'm getting is not, "I'm a hero," but instead, "I have to be a hero again." All because the game outright refuses to establish our player character outside of five paragraphs of background on the character sheet and nothing else.
Next time: We head east.