Act Four, Conclusion: The Agony of Defeat

Whenever you undertake to play a Hardcore character in Diablo 2, you embrace the special burden of flawless performance, at least within the limitation of keeping your character alive. If you should falter and be slain, the game is over. That's part of the fun of Hardcore, and it shines best here in single player, where unlike the Realms there are no lag issues, no server issues, no desynch issues, and you don't get wiped out if your game crashes or you lose connect to the net. You live and die on your own actions, and isn't that how it was meant to be?

Even so, losing a character is a harsh thing.

When I loaded up Ember again, I anticipated that the brutal stairs trap at the River entrance was built in to this map, and that I'd either have to try and survive it, or roll up a new map. So I didn't drop anything at all in town, went down the stairs with a full inventory. Well, what had previously been three Stranglers and three or four Abyss Knights turned into four Stranglers swarming me immediately, and definitely at least four Abyss Knights targetting me immediately from just off the right edge of the screen. Screw that! I quit.

There are times when this game isn't even remotely fair, and this was one of them. I wonder if even Hotfoot could have survived that mess. I'm not even sure I could have done it with teleport even! And they wanted me to play that crap with Ember? No thanks.

In order to force a new map, I had to log on to the net and use Ember to host a TCP game. Once that was done, quit out, log off, and restart the game. Whatever awaited Ember in the River, it HAD to be better, and I would live with it if they allowed me to GET DOWN THE STAIRS before being swarmed by eight monsters!

Ember entered the River of Flame at clvl 26 with the following skills, stats and equipment:

Firebolt @ max (+1 from staff)
Warmth @ 9

Str 10, Dex 25, Vit 95, Nrg 80

Rare Heavy Gloves - +12 Fire and Lit Resist, Half Freeze, -25% Poison Dur, +1 Life - gambled Act 3
Coral Light Belt of Tiger: +29 Lightning Resist, +24 Life - bought from Elzix
Boots: Faster Run, Fastest Recovery, +14 Lit Resist, +11 Life, +7 Stamina - gambled Act 2
Staff: +1 Firebolt - Initial Gear
Ring: -2 Damage, +35 Cold Resist - flesh spawner boss, Outer Steppes
Ring: +29 Poison Resist, -1 damage, +1 Light, Half Freeze, +2 mana, +79 AR - Duriel
Ruby Amulet: +45 Fire Resist, +12 Dex - beetle boss in the Disused Fane
Amber Quilted Armor of Simplicity: +33 Lightning Resist, -40% Requirements - gambled Act 4
No helm (helm forbidden until Nightmare Difficulty)

In stash: Greyform, Lennymo, Broc, Hotspur, Snakecord, and two socketed battle staves, one with +3 Firebolt, the other +3 Blaze (staves saved for use in Nightmare, if Ember survives Normal). Also some spare jewelry: amulet -1 md, amulet + 29 Cold Resist +13 Dex, amulet +18 life, ring +3 Regeneration +29 Poison Resistance.

Ember descended the stairs to the River of Flame and savored the peace and quiet. No foes present. In fact, she had a really large "safe zone" to work with right from the start. She had to walk two screens or more to the right for the first encounter: Stranglers, four of them. They pushed her back to and past the stairs but a bit of Tempting Fate wrought their doom.

Two Maw Fiends found the Strangler corpses and went to work (how they can chew up Strangler ashes and come out with a big gob of entrails to spit at me, I have no idea).

The third monster type turned out to be Blood Maggots, and I rejoiced. No knights, no balrogs, no Urdars -- meaning no heavy fire resistance -- and no spawners! The easiest creature roll I could have gotten for Ember, I think. The Stranglers resist fire pretty well, actually, but their main threat to sorcies is the mana steal, and frankly that was all but a nonfactor to Ember. It was annoying to see them run sometimes, here where they can actually flee beyond range. I kept wondering if one was going to jump up behind Ember and bite her in the ass. That always worries me about those wretched things.

Ember's watchword with the Maggots was patience. The young died in one or two shots each, mostly one shot, and they are not particularly speedy. I'd kill whole armies of them, keeping them safely at bay while waiting for an opening to advance or target a mother.

The fights were actually pretty calm, with these, the three slowest and least troublesome opponent types. There was one large open area, a T intersection with the lava-line in the center, where there must have been fifteen or more mother maggots. This took some time to wade through. There was another identical segment further to the north, moving on toward the waypoint. These two areas were joined by a straight corridor to form a race track of sorts, where one might run and run, turning a loop at each end to go back and forth without ever getting cornered. I wondered if I'd need it for Hephasto.

Well just a little farther on, I woke up all the minions of an Extra Fast Venom Lord boss. Yes Venom Lords here on the River. Don't think I've ever seen that before? Hmm. They were NOT Pit Lords. Oh well.

I needed that race track and HOW! Good grief. Just the minions (and a few annoying Stranglers) put Ember through the most grueling, nonstop twenty minute fight you can imagine. I wasn't even given a choice in tempting fate, since they were quite nearly as fast as Ember with Faster Run and no encumbrance. I'm just glad the boss didn't wake up with them. It was so hairy that I almost made mistakes a few times that may well have led to being cornered and having to Quit n Save.

The boss ALONE, after finally defeating all the minions, took another ten or fifteen minutes to kill.

In the picture, you can see the north side of the loop track via the automap. The south end is just off the bottom left corner of the screenshot.

After slaying this boss (eventually), Ember discovered that there was a full blown loop in a larger sense: a full square formation on the river. This boded well for combating the smith, because I could just keep running and running if need be.

So I pressed on to the waypoint, and the Hell Forge offramp was just short of the waypoint area. I lured out the fat one and led him over to the loop zone, using the lava splits on those lower intersections to give me a safe firing zone. Not completely safe, mind you, and of course he wanders around restlessly and likes to move out of range, forcing you to come look for him now and then.

After a little of this and seeing how little damage I had done so far, I decided to enlist Jamella's aid, in the form of Rancid Gas potions. As of 1.04, fatty is now properly -50% resistant to poison, instead of maximally resistant, and just as importantly, while poisoned he does not regenerate health. So I used potions to the tune of about 40% of his total health (over two dozen potions, and some trips to town to buy more), the rest done with my trusty firebolt, but considering the life he did NOT regenerate during that time, the actual effect may have been about fifty-fifty.

Finally he croaked! Yay! :)

Ooh, nice gems. I was hoping for a Ruby, because I wanted to socket one into my +3 Firebolt Battle Staff for use in Nightmare (I was presuming, at that point, that Ember would live to see Nightmare. Heh). So I took those gems back to town, kept the skull and socketed the other three into the staff, the Ruby first. It created a nice stylish red battle staff. Ember was happy. She even got to pretend that the diamond and amethyst she socketed also were attractive looking and would make all the difference in the world some day. :)

Clearing the mazy part of the River was more work than I expected. No close calls, but some lively engagements. I kept expecting Stranglers who had run away, to jump up and bite Ember in the ass, but even without that they still gave her some grief.

The real work began at the Santuary entrance. Try to shoot mages across the lava proved problematic and I ended up closing in to take out the few who had ventured out. Killing the knights was tough, too, with their max fire resistance. Well maybe not tough, but they forced me back. Even though they move slower, they swing faster than Venom Lords and as such you don't want to be Tempting Fate with them very often. That's a good way to get smacked.

Just inside the Chaos Sanctuary, the boss comes roaring out at me.

He brought two minions with him (they are behind him, offscreen, in that shot) and together they pushed Ember back, then pushed her back some more, and frankly they pushed her around like kittens playing with a ball of string. This was not the most pleasant of experiences.

As you can see, Ember got pushed all the way back to the waypoint for goodness sake, and the boss still has plenty of juice left. I'd only killed one minion, too. The other one ran.

Finally killed that boss, and then it was on to the grueling work of full-clearing the CS. There is just no safe way around that for Ember. Maybe a sorcie with teleport could try and park some critters or avoid some fights, but that was just too risky with Ember. She had to MAKE SURE she killed everything because it would not take much to trap her and end her mission.

Some hour or two later (I wasn't keeping track) it was FINALLY all done. All clear! Only the seals and the seal bosses remained. Ember had leveled up to 27, and I briefly contemplated holding off on two stat points to add them to strength once Diablo was slain. I then thought about the possibility of getting Ember killed while trying to run from some threat and instead pulling up the character screen with a misclick. I've grown used to having unallocated skill points (and STILL I click there at times), but now didn't seem like a good time to be experimenting with this idea. (Whoever at Blizzard North is responsible for the decision to punish those who don't immediately allocate all stats and skills, with those unremoveable buttons, has earned him or herself a whole LOT of negative Karma, let me tell you!) So I pumped Vit to 100, Warmth to 10. I'd just have to wait for level 28 (at the time I was assuming Ember would live to 28) to boost strength to 12.

It was time to open the seals. I started to the North, with De Seis. I used the open-seal-step-through-portal-before-they-appear maneuver, returned via the waypoint and set to work. The first minion died easily, but then three of them came out together and stayed close enough together to force Ember to fight them all at once. I fell back and they pressed on together and we ended up all the way across the pentacle on the south side, where that first island provided Ember some cover and finally let her fight them one at a time, with some maneuvering, by which they were soon slain.

De Seis stayed near the last minion and I had to nibble away at them. Good thing that annoying Thief ability of his is gone now. Ember got lit up by him several times. Then he perished and it was on to the next group. I decided to tackle the speedy balrogs next. I'd gotten a brutal foreshadowing of this combat with that extra fast boss in the River. I had no intention of running Ember willy-nilly around the CS for the next hour, nonstop. I had a plan. I'd first nibble away at any minions I could hit without waking up the Infector. They won't leave the boss's radius, instead charging at you like a bullet only to whip back the other way as they get near you. I thought I might be able to pick off one or two this way.

Take a good long look at Ember's mana pool. That's where it stood after about seven or eight minutes of continuous firing. I have one of the minions pretty badly wounded, too, but there were about six of them shuffling around at warp speeds and though I'd wounded them all, none had died yet. I actually ran Ember's mana completely dry and drank a full rejuv to keep going (for once, I didn't have any mana pots on me. Oh well, not that it would matter much here in a minute or two anyway...)

And then somehow the boss woke up. Perhaps a firebolt struck him. If not, who knows. Here they come, though, full force, full speed. Time to execute the second part of the plan: lure them out to the front of the CS, to the mazy part of the River where I had a portal already set up and waiting. I'd exit through that, return to town, use the waypoint, line up from them across the lava and mow em down like the wretched dogs that they are.

That was the plan, at least.

So here we go, Ember running full speed, this drugged up hyper mob full on her heels, snapping like pirannhas, drooling like lechers, tripping over one another in the chase. Down we go, south toward the river, past the first island, approaching the second island...

Um, there's a Storm Caster in the way. What is he doing there?

Oops.

Well it seems he was stationing himself to sink his teeth into soft sorcie flesh. In the picture below, you see the end of the road for Ember. The portal I cast (even had tp on hotkey for emergencies) is thankfully obscuring the events taking place behind it, where that Storm Caster is biting Ember on the ass. Ahem. And the Venom Lords are lined up, waiting to do much much worse to her.

If this isn't Murphy's Law in motion, then I don't know what is. I took great pains to clear out everything, yet somehow one Storm Caster hid himself away and only popped back out at the ONE place and point in time when he could derail Ember's whole quest. Good grief.

All this work... how can it end this way???

Click Here for the grim details of what happened next.