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8-Desire for the Cube
Music-Lut Gholein
Last time one half of the party got a piece of parchment. The rest already have a head start on them. However, for people like Vanir the Richous, they're forced into the Cain dimension.
The Horadric Mages, after binding Baal within Tal Rasha, magically sealed off his Burial Chamber from the mortal realm. Those same Mages also crafted fearsome Horadric Staves and imbued them with the special power to open the Chamber's hidden door.
After nearly losing one to the thievery of a rogue sorcerer, they divided all the Horadric Staves into two parts - wooden shaft and metal headpiece - hiding them separately to safeguard them.
The Horadrim foresaw our current plight and designed the hiding places to reveal themselves to worthy heroes like you.
Collect both parts of a Horadric Staff and unite them using a Horadric Cube. Then, you may enter Tal Rasha's Burial Chamber.
Cain lays down what we're doing: to break our way into Tal Rasha's pad to stop Diablo and by extension Baal we're going to need a key, with the pieces scattered across the deseert. I don't know how or why the Horadrim thought about revealing where their cool staves are hidden to whoever they term "heroes", but Cain doesn't explain why they thought that nor does anyone else explain. It's Cain handwaving that off.
Which means it's up to me to explain.
(I am showing this pic to continue to pile on Fara. All the possibilites in the world for two paladins to talk to eachother. They went with, "Greetings fellow Paladin.")
We already know who Tyrael is, and who the Horadrim are, but not anything about the Horadrim's deal. Mages and wizards and sorcerers and whatever they want to call themselves in Sanctuary are people who have the potential to manipulate their surroundings; or, do a magic. The setting of Diablo has it be a born gift refined through teaching. Many clans of mages exist, each with their different corporate politics and bright ideas.
Music-Desert
Through reasons yet mentioned, the Prime Evils: Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal, showed up to Sanctuary up day and just, basically went on tour. How and why are questions I'll answer later. For now this event is referred to as the Hunt for the Three, because three of the biggest demons Sanctuary will ever get the pleasure of meeting showing up one day and saying hi is not a good time for this little baby world.
Slinger | CR: ***
==Throws javelins, fire potions, or poison potions.
==Can block.
Oh there's new monsters? Bah fine. A flavor of ranged monster for Act 2 and we'll meet later tiers that'll throw potions instead, up to and including poison potions. Anyway.
When the Primes showed up on Sanctuary's doorstep, Tyrael was quick to intervene. However, even with the Primes in the state they were in, one archangel alone wasn't going to stop them.
Instead, he turned t-wait hold on. I need to talk about this bug.
Scarab Demon | CR: *****
==Can run.
==May deal extra lightning damage on hit.
==May shoot Charged Bolts in all directions when hit.
THESE THINGS. FUCK THESE THINGS.
These are monsters with built-in lightning shits when touching them. We've seen Lightning Enchanted monsters before and mentioned how they do very high damage with their lightning sparks. I also mentioned that they're a nightmare for melee. This is why. That nasty mod on a single monster you had problems with in the last act? It's now the norm in this act!
They also have the ability to run up to you, with about the same consistency as a, say, Bloodhawk doing it. This can be a fun surprise for ranged characters. The only saving grace is that they are considerably less likely to shoot sparks when getting damaged than Lightning Enchanted monsters are. That doesn't help a whole lot when you see a mob of them every minute and you still need to stay away from them at all times until you get enough lightning resist to make them safe to handle close up.
By the way, early on in versions, god help you if you met a Scarab Demon unique that also had a modifier called Multiple Shots. Multiple Shots simply takes any projectile the unique shoots and add 2 more. Scarab Demons can get the mod, but it was bugged in such a way that it made them fire out a lot of charged bolts. A lot. Of charged bolts. A very lethal amount of Charged Bolts you may say. Thankfully that nightmare only exists in the past. Scarab Demons are a scourge enough already nowadays.
Leaper | CR: **
==Moves very fast
==Leaps to attack
==Leaps back when hit
Guess I'll cover the rest of the new additions so I can get back to story time. Leapers are really annoying hit-and-runners that will run around a whole bunch before deciding to jump in and swing, then run around again.
Anywho, the Rocky Waste is an intermediate area that has no waypoint and no quest objectives, meaning we can run straight through it and nothing of value will be lost. It has an optional dungeon! That's not short! And we're going to a dungeon exactly like it in this next area.
While leapers are annoying to deal with you can hit them most of the time.
Carrion Bird | CR: **
==Can fly through the air, becoming mostly untargettable.
Slow to move but quick to attack. However that's largely pointless when they'll spend most of their time deciding to not play this game and by the time they land you're either wasting your time waiting for a little bit more experience or have correctly walked away. They can be dangerous because their attack speed is pretty fast, but first they have to not just leave for 5 seconds, and second they have to swarm and hit you for that to be dangerous.
Now where was I? Tyrael turned to Sanctuary's mortals, specifically those who looked pretty good at fighting fire with fire, to stop the Prime Evils. He didn't pick one specific clan out of the many mage clans, however. Picking the gifted among the reeling mages and training them to stop the worst demons around, the Horadrim became the best fellowship of the ring in Sanctuary at the time, and through Tyrael's guidance to hone their craft, and his plan to seal the demons in salt licks, Sanctuary had the chance to defend itself.
We know of Tal Rasha's fate. I'll fill out the rest: while the Horadrim was dealing with the demons, Tyrael provided them the means to do so. They successfully sealed Diablo and Mephisto, but they fumbled the football against Baal because he managed to destroy the salt lick meant for him. The Horadrim, however, came up with a Plan B: use Tal Rasha as a vessel to contain Baal and also jam what remains of that salt lick in him. You may call it a bad idea, what with the Horadrim imploding, but I would like to point out that Baal is still sealed while his brothers are out partying. I'm pretty sure what they did for Baal worked better than any other Prime, which means it was the best idea. 
Now, you may be wondering where the rest of the Horadrim are now if they were, at the time, Sanctuary's heroes. Well, when Tyrael hi-fived them and peaced out they went back to going, "no no, THIS is the best way to magic." Squabbling over themselves and/or going back to being hermits took the once greatest group of Mages and ensured they had no interest in the future, just how thick their books and how comfy their non-existant thrones are.
(When exploring, if you need to find a waypoint and a dungeon and you find the dungeon first, pop a portal near it. When you find the waypoint, you can then go back to town and take the portal to the dungeon, saving time.)
But I think the biggest blow to Horadric cohesion was having to use Tal Rasha as a human snackrifice for sealing Baal. He was the leader of the Horadrim, and with him dancing with the devil forever and Tyrael thinking nothing bad is going to happen now, loss turned to hunger turned to anger turned to hatred, terror, destruction.
Jered Cain, ancestor of Deckard Cain, tried his best to keep true to the Horadric goal of keeping watch over the Prime Evils, and also in raising a family. Some of the other Horadrim were also just family men themselves, didn't think anything of keeping watch, and just went back home. The rest? Became giant book nerds who would die out over time. The point is, the gravity of what they had just done was largely ignored. Zoltun Kulle, another Horadrim, going into solitude and getting real hyped up over those salt licks did not help matters at all. Someone, Tyrael, forgot how mortals work. Bloody mage wars and forsaking life over power later, Deckard's all that's left.
Music-Tombs
The best mages were all dead. While the mage clans still existed they were a shadow of their past. At this point, given the choice between magic and faith, mortals started trying the other path at this point. Nowadays we hear people sing praises about Paladins and the light and Zakarum and absolutely NOT Tristram and King Leoric.
Anyway, here's the Halls of the Dead. It's 3 levels deep and has a waypoint on level 2.
Greater Mummy | CR: *****
==Has a chance to lethally poison on melee hit.
==Can do a poison breath attack.
==Casts Unholy Bolt
==Can revive any undead that's not a Greater Mummy or a champion/unique.
Can you imagine going to this dungeon, walking into a room like this, and having zero crowd control? PD2 fixes this just fine so this isn't a huge problem for Vanir, but remember when I said I hate Greater Mummies? This room has three of them inside. Even if we get back out of the room and try to pick off the skeletons onesies-twosies, the Greater Mummies can not only pick them back up but also throw unholy bolts as we try to get through. Those shelves you see? They can fire through them. (So can you.) Every room in a tomb like Halls of the Dead has a chance to be like this.
Some people think act 2 is the worst act in the game. I disagree, but I can figure out why they would say that: these dungeons suck to go through, especially if you're melee. Stick your head in the wrong room and you'll get swarmed and blown up. Try to fight the hordes in inefficient ways and they'll be grueling to get through. Interior dungeons aren't very popular, is what I'm trying to say. Not to mention all the sand.
Bat Demon | CR: ***
==Has a chance to deal extra lightning damage on hit.
==Tries, to ambush you from the ceiling
==Flees at low health
I managed to get a shot of one of the new monsters in this dungeon though. This monster is curious because the game will bother to tell you it's capable of zappin' ya. Well gee a lot of monsters in this game have chances for extra elemental damage. It's dangerous, but not super-lethal like the game not telling you a Greater Mummy can melt your flesh off, slowly, painfully.
Oh and while they look like they're on the ceiling and you can't hit them, you absolutely can. Hit where their shadow is, and they'll get hit and go off from the ceiling. That's what makes them, not dangerous. You can just shoot them.
I also missed two monsters in Vanir's run that'll show up here, but uhh,
Fire Tower | CR: **
==Shoots 3 Fireballs
they're mainly just traps. Fire Towers do have a spread of fireablls but don't do a lot of individual damage, and it's all fire anyway.
Mummy Sarcophagus | CR: **
==Spawns Mummies
And it's Bloodhawk Nest, but for mummies. It's a mummy clown coffin. I had to take a picture of a dead one because I couldn't be bothered to catch one being alive.
Speaking of traps, tombs have them but not as monsters. There's floor spikes that, if you sit there like a dummy even after the audio queue, will shoot out and hurt ya. There's also just random holes in the walls that shoot comically oversized spiked balls for...not that much damage. Basically they're very ignorable.
Blood Witch the Wild | CR: **
==Superunique
==Extra strong
==Moves fast
==Can block
==Attacks slow
Found the superunique though. This is who guards the gold chest in this dungeon but, she still has the issues Saber Cats have with trying to actually damage you. Maybe she'll show up with an annoying Greater Mummy and then we can just walk out the room to kite her. I'm not sure. The archives are telling me none of my heroes had difficulty here.
Vanir, Arty, and Zoul, all have to come here because the Horadric Cube drops at the end of the dungeon. For the other four, who already have the Cube, there is zero reason why you need to come here.
I forgot about this at least once while recording.
Music-Lut Gholein
To do it - use the Cube as you would a scroll. When the Cube opens, place both pieces of the Staff into it and use the Cube's transmute power.
You'll be pleased to know that the Cube has other alchemical uses as well...
Six gems plus one sword transmute into a socketed long sword.
You may also transmute two quivers of crossbow bolts into one quiver of arrows, while two quivers of arrows yield one quiver of bolts.
I must leave it to you to discover other formulae.
That's code for, "You don't know shit about the cube," is it?
Well to be fair, uhh, there's, a lot, you can do with it. There's too much you can do with it honestly, so the rest of the update is going to be cube talk. This is what the strategy guide is for: using this cube.
For starters, the cube acts as extra storage. You're able to fit in some more items, intended for combining them and whatnot, but nothing's stopping you from using it as extra storage. (At minimum, vanilla, it turns 4 spaces of inventory into 12.) Every single mod expands cube space in its own way and, humorously, none of them are the same dimensions.
What Cain should have told you is one of the most useful recipes: three rejuvenation potions can be fused into one full rejuvenation potion, turning a 35% instant recovery of life and mana into 100% instant recovery of life and mana...in vanilla. Several mods either change how potions work or nerf the heal amount. It's understandable. Full rejuvs don't care about your life total while healing potions can only heal so much at once.
You can also upgrade gems and runes by putting in multiple of the same type of gem/rune. They'll be fused into the next tier, and this is pretty useful for runes to get the right letters. Course, things in Diablo II can't be easy, as rune upgrades beyond tier 10 (Thul) requires gems of specific type AND tier to keep going up. You can't break down gems into lower tiers either.
I'm skipping a lot of the recipes like the 6 gems + sword = socketed sword recipe (which doesn't actually exist, nice job Cain) or the two bolts into one arrows recipe. (you can buy those lol) This is mainly because a lot of these recipes are hyper-turbo-niche. But you can do stuff like 3 magic rings into a magic amulet and vice versa; using gems, health pots, and mana pots instead of rejuv pots to get your full rejuvs; and rerolling rares, at the cost of a penalty to their item level based on its current level and yours. Also, the reroll recipe is very expensive. Rerolling rares is for high level characters, you'll probably never do it until near the end of the game.
There are crafting recipes to make orange, or crafted, items, but that's its own beast entirely and we don't need them now, nor can we make them now. They'll be covered later.
Gonna C&P these recipes specifically from Arreat Summit, because if you need more weapon damage/defense, these recipes are the best way to do this. I know you need very specific not cheap runes and not cheap gems but it will allow you to, much later on, take a rare that rolled great mods but has an awful base type, or a unique that's useful but is a very early base type, and fix that.
There's one specific basegame recipe that's of interest here, but I'm keeping it a secret. You'll know it when I mention it. I need to beat the game first.
Of note is, with the same cost of specific runes and gems, you can punch sockets into items, even rares. Rares can only ever have 1, magics will reroll their affixes if you do this but can have up to 2, and normals can have as many as they normally can. What amount of sockets they actually get is influnced by item level, but is random.
So anyway, let's go over mod changes to the cube.
Since PD2 has the saddest space for cubing it gets to go first. You can upgrade all runes without needing gems, and even do the impossible and repair ethereal items...if you have the highest-tier Rune to do that. Why am I mentioning it? Cause I find it funny. Not because I'll ever do it. That rune is one of the rarest things in the game. I would put it in a card sleeve man not waste it.
This recipe is basegame but I'm posting it here. You may think this is a recipe to reroll mods on the item. It is, at the cost of its item levels, which means you'll get mods out of a worse pool. It's, not a good use of your item or skulls. It's even worse in basegame because you'll get an inferior quality rare item to top it off, which means your weapon will lose damage. Pretty sure it's trash but who knows, maybe someone did this to roll the perfect mods.
Unsocketing items is also a basegame recipe, (using a moderately-tiered rune) but being able to get the socketables back is not. It requires a special Resurgence item to do. Many of the Resurgence additions to recipes require new items to do, and the biggest additions all revolve around crafting, so Res will have to pass on this update...for now.
For how overwhelming Median XL is, it doesn't add any recipes that don't require an item that will tell you exactly what it does and what to do with it. Of note, Median XL allows you to recycle unique items you have no need of using this Catalyst of Disenchantment.
It's a crafting item guaranteed to drop from Andariael that gives you fruity pebbles Arcane Shards, which you can then fuse five of to get an Arcane Crystal, which is then used as a cost for things like upgrading the tier of items, which works like going from normal->exceptional->elite item bases. For uniques, this will also boost all the affixes on it. If you get two crystals and a specific store-bought oil, you can also just make any tiered unique you want by supplying its base. It's very useful, and the game is starting to have uniques drop occasionally, which means we can expect to get a christmas present in the future.
There's a bit more to cover but I'll get to those when A) I have money, and B) I kill the bosses that have the other catalysts.
Then there's Eastern Sun.
(there's so many subtabs it's wider than the page lmao)
Hmm, how do I describe this without getting too close to the deep abyss? This is the recipe page for ES's armory and it only contains the new recipes. I can, try, to quantify it myself, try to explain how many new recipes there are for you, attempt to roll sanity to comprehend the eldritch knowledge. But you know what? Counting machines can give a better idea of comprehension than I ever can.
Anyway the recipes you'll probably care about early in Eastern Sun involve starter gear to fill in any space your set items leave behind. In Eastern Sun, gems can just be bought, and Ancient Deciphers are regular drops mainly used for IDing Ancient Scrolls for use. (which they uhh, add another 50+ recipes) They also allow you to uptier unique and set items. You can even do that to crafted items.
Anything else right now? Well,
it involves pressing F8 and having stockers.
Next time: We get a staff reassembled.