Diablo II - Hardcore Star Team 6

This time rearranging equipment for nightmare difficulty went fairly quickly. I'll give a brief summary of each here; assume any slot not listed is a generic rare with some resistances.

Barb: Two rare cube-upgraded hurlbats, Peace armor, Immortal King's helm, Sigon's gloves and belt.

Javazon: Javelin with IAS, Peace armor, Rhyme shield, rare circlet with resists, Hsaru's belt and boots for attack rating.

Necromancer: +3 Bone Spear wand (waiting on an Io rune for a White), Skin of the Vipermagi, Rhyme necro head, 3-topaz helm, crafted caster amulet, fast-cast rings.

Assassin: Blade Talons of Piercing, +1 skills blade talon, Heavenly Garb, 3-topaz helm, Sander's gloves, exceptional cube-upgraded rare boots.

Paladin: Angelic sabre + armor + rings, Ancients Pledge in a paladin shield (didn't have 3 more diamonds), 3-topaz helm.

Sorceress: Kris of Piercing, Arctic armor + belt + gloves, Rockstopper helm, fast-cast rings.

Overall, I noticed that arranging resistances came out pretty easy for this team. Everyone has a diamond shield or equivalent (Razorswitch) or resistance skill (Fade, Natural Resistance), plus I have a Vipermagi and two great resist helms.

But the common deficiency on the team is attack rating. Almost everyone is hungry for that: throwing barb, melee javazon, martial assassin, elemental zealot, enchant sorceress. Two have ITD weapons (assassin and sorc), two have partial-set combos with big AR (paladin with Angelic, javazon with Hsaru's), but they still want to do better, and the barb is really going to need some real attack rating solution at some point.

I don't have much to say about the characters presently; this time is as always the peak of their powers, with their main attack skill maxed and synergized, and fighting against fairly weak monsters.

Procedurally, I decided to do more than the previous teams had, and just full-clear everything in nightmare difficulty completely. There are a fair few particular lower level set and unique items I still want (particularly the Angelic amulet), and so I'm going for the maximum chances to get them. For reasons I won't go into here, I kinda don't really care if I'm spending a lot of real time on this, which here was about six hours per character.

Javazon: She was pretty fun, delivering Power Strike fast with an IAS javelin. Javazons usually don't prioritize attack speed much, because Lightning Fury and Charged Strike wipe everything in so few hits anyway (and the one stat Titan's Revenge doesn't have is IAS.) But it's working here, and the one-hand javelin is quite a bit faster than my two-hand spearazon ever was. Also Lightning Bolt reached max this act, and is sometimes useful; its damage is about a third of Power Strike, but because it always hits ignoring defense and blocking, it's sometimes more practical.

Barb: He had a cool moment: he had an experience shrine going into Tristram, and he was able to knock off both Griswold and another boss all the way from long distance without ever coming into range to get cursed to lose the shrine. Besides that, he also had a minor upside of somewhat mitigating all the runs to town for throwing refills; he hardly ever needed any potions (life steal from Sigon's set and mana steal on one axe), so at least he could skip running to Akara and only go to Charsi for the repairs.

Assassin: Damn, Tiger-Tail is a smashingly fun play style. She blew up Rakanishu's entire pack in one kick. With exceptional boots, the Tiger-Tail combo comes to 5000+ damage with all three charges, and that extends over a splash radius.

Bonemancer: He's the most powerful on the team at the moment, which is what should be expected from the one real power build here; definitely at the top of his attack powers presently, and the fastest through the act in real time. The assassin's kill speed could sometimes be peakier, but Bone Spear is consistent and efficient against everything, including the smoothness of being a ranged attack rather than having to walk into melee range all the time. One trick: I remembered to use Bone Spirit's homing attack instead against Blood Raven who runs all over the place and dodges bone spears.

Druid: I could swear that every single fallen shaman boss he met in the act was fire enchanted and immune. Tornado got a workout against them, even still at a low level (10) and unsynergied, it was still enough to kill them in ten or so casts.

Paladin: Same as with the blinky demon imps last act, Holy Shock's pulse damage wipes entire screens of fallen camps. He would run to the shaman, kill him in usually two Zeal cycles... and in that time the entire rest of the camp dropped too. He did get slowed down enough by lightning resistant monsters (Damned types, ghosts, enchanted bosses) and enemies that run away from melee (archers, vampires) so that he wasn't quite faster than the necromancer overall.

Sorceress: Unusually for any sorceress, she was actually the exception, act 1 nightmare is not the peak of this build's powers, caught inbetween Static Field being maxed but no longer able to go all the way on its own, and Enchant isn't ramped up yet with mastery and synergy. Enchant did get up to several hundred fire damage by the end of the act, though mostly not quite enough to one-hit monsters after bottoming out with Static (on players-5.) One fun detail is that an enchantress virtually gets an extra +2 skills for offense, by way of a skill shrine! Enchant lasts long enough (up to 15 minutes) to make it worth going back to one each time I recast it (in fact the shrine itself adds more duration than the time it takes to go get it), and this time there just happened to be one right outside camp on the blood moor. Anyway, Static plus Enchant melee is indeed a fun play style... although she really needs some defense, she takes a lot of hits quickly every time she's up in melee range.

I actually found Sigon's entire set this act! At least one each of the helm, armor, gloves, belt, boots, and shield. Pretty cool, but I looked for someone to use that, and it really just isn't good enough. All the good stuff is in the partial set bonuses up to three pieces, but there's very little beyond that; the full set is really underwhelming for all the slots it takes up (seriously, 12% fire resist as a full set bonus?) The best use I had for any of this was to give the sorceress a combo of the gloves + boots + belt, more details below.

But also I twigged to another trick with Sigon's that I can't believe I never realized before: the helm + armor combination works for mercs! They get the attack rating on the helm and 10% life leech. Plus the armor has lightning resist which is the most important for a merc, particularly going into act two full of beetles.

And the other important set piece was the Angelic amulet, which did turn up (after about eight Tancred's or Civerb's amulets first.) This completes that full set for the paladin, for all that good stuff listed there, particularly the +skills to add a Zeal hit.

WHOA. For the first time on these teams, there's the big one, Tal Rasha's amulet! Although, funnily, this is the one sorceress build that doesn't really need +2 skills, since Static doesn't need it and Enchant gets prebuffed. I'm actually not sure if she'll use this at all, but at any rate a level 67 requirement means not until the end of nightmare anyway.

Ethereal Tannr Gorerod, that's a pretty hefty beatstick for a merc, and I had the inputs to upgrade it right when it dropped for the javazon. After the act it went to the sorceress's merc; as I said, her entire backup plan for fire immunes is to rely on her merc. Also Impaler war spear, alright for a merc now, tremendous when upgraded if I get a Pul rune to spare. And Iron Pelt armor, always good for a merc too.

Another amazingly spiffy ring for a melee sorceress. One thing I've been missing was any good fast-cast rings, but there's a great one there, including the attack rating.

Magnus's gloves, a good filler piece for nightmare. The javazon wants that; 100 AR and 20 IAS comes to slightly more offensive dps than her +2 jav skills glove, plus it has 15 fire resist. Bloodfist glove too, and the bonemancer took that, just for the 40 life and 30 hit recovery even if he doesn't use the IAS.

Nagelring, first one for this team after at least three Manalds, best on the javazon since she needs the attack rating too. Also a Mahim-Oak Curio which found a home on the sorceress.

Couple more hits in the charm department, although I'd like some resist other than cold on these...

Stormeye war scepter, but the paladin doesn't want that, it has nothing for attack rating or speed. He doesn't want a Holy Thunder runeword either for the same reasons.

Kuko Shakaku bow, but even though it's great for an enchantress (fire damage transfers to the explosive arrows blast radius, plus piercing), I'm deliberately not putting it to use here. My last enchantress used Kuko and didn't fully get into Enchant's big melee damage, and I want this one to be a true meleer all the way.

And I got four Io runes in the act. One went for the bonemancer's White runeword of course. The other three got cubed into a Lum, which makes the first useful mid-game runeword, Smoke. I decided to just make it now even in a mediocre base (a demonhide armor), since Lum shows up often enough to make more later if I want. So this could go to use right now on the druid, since he had only a Stealth there, so the big resists on Smoke opened up every other slot for life and magic-find.

One other thing I did now that I hadn't for the previous teams: I'd been collecting perfect skulls, and now used six to reroll a rare in the cube. I hadn't bothered with this before, and just sold any skulls for cash instead. But now I thought about the math: flawless skulls sell for 15k, and the rare reroll takes 18 of them, so that's effectively a price of 270k. Yeah... a rare circlet costs way more than 270k worth of gambling, so this is worthwhile. The result was junk this time, but it is worth continuing to do.

After the act, my gamble target this time was gloves, since now all the good glove affixes are consistently available (20% IAS, +2 martial or javelin skills, all the resists and magic find.) These were my two big hits from that, and that last one is really awesome. In fact I stopped gambling after that one! The assassin couldn't possibly expect to beat that (+2 martial and 20% IAS come together on 1/350 rares), and I probably don't need to fill any more glove slots beyond what I've got with these and the various set items. The only other big gamble result would be one with javazon skills, but she probably cares less about a rare and more about a +3 skills prefix, which can be shopped.

The sorceress got a significant equipment rebuild, discarding the Arctic set combo. She started with the Sigon's gloves + belt + boots package, for 30 IAS and 50 magic find. She also added the Mahim-Oak Curio amulet, which is perfect: 10 all stats, where the dex is exactly enough to support her kris dagger, and the strength plus 10 on Sigon's gloves is exactly enough to support Sigon's boots and also a gothic plate armor socketed with 4 topazes for magic-find. And the resists on Mahim-Oak and Rockstopper and the Sigon's pieces added up to enough to allow changing out her 3-diamond shield for a Rhyme instead. The Rhyme actually came from the javazon; they swapped shields; the javazon now wanted the diamond resists there, to open up her ring and helm slots for magic-find, after I got more topazes for another 3-topaz crown.

The barb is also using a Sigon's gloves + belt combo; I had to pick between him and the sorc for my only copy of Sigon's boots. The sorc got it, because the barb is a better place to make use of boots without run speed (with resists and magic find instead), since a ranged attacker doesn't need speed as much, and he has increased speed as a skill.

I now had enough topazes to make a 3-topaz helm for everyone who wanted one. The exceptions who didn't: the barb's IK helm is more than equivalent; the sorc is prioritizing Rockstopper and using a 4-topaz armor instead (Rockstopper is better than any armor I've got); and the druid has a Lore instead because my only Oak Sage pelt has 2 sockets and not 3, although I might even change that out for topazes when I get more.

Presently I set up the characters with lots of magic-find, quite a bit earlier than I'd done with the other teams near the end of nightmare difficulty. Here's a look at what they've got presently:

I try to make sure everyone is pulling their weight and not being carried by others for magic-find. I assess this like this: make sure no character is more than double any other, including the baseline of 100%. So the paladin is finding items at 329% of base value, and the druid at 179%, which is within a 2:1 ratio, and that's acceptable.

Assassin: This act I really got to see the feast-or-famine, all-or-nothing nature of the Tiger/Tail build. When she's hitting everything at full speed, she blasts through monsters as fast as any build possibly can. But... there are a lot of ways for it to go wrong. That whole three-charge cycle takes a long time, unlike for a phoenix striker who usually does only one and hardly ever more than two. Monster shield blocking is seriously irritating - on all the burning dead and greater mummies in the tombs, getting the three charges of Tiger would sometimes drag out through as many as eight or ten grindingly lengthy swings. Getting chilled is also a big problem, as is mana burn - it's hellishly infuriating to get the charges and then waste them when mana burn makes the finisher drop to normal attack instead. Plus of course plain old fire or physical resistance.

If any of these potential hindrances goes wrong during a charge-release cycle, that puts her in danger of failing the three-second melee test (running away gives you about that long to pick off the nearest monster before the rest of the swarm catches you.) And two or more hindrances always screws up killing anything, so it's a scramble to regain control of the battlefield and catch up. This assassin felt perilously endangered so often - I had to smack emergency rejuves far too often in this act - it's so hard to keep monsters off her if anything gets in the way of that charge-release cycle, even with Cloak and Mind Blast.

Later in the act I started improving somewhat in driving her. Often a good play pattern is to take only one charge of Tiger Strike each time before finishing, so that Dragon Tail's knockback happens more often, timed to keep occuring just as the monsters start to re-converge from the last one. And also I remembered and started using a melee assassin's backup plan against dangerous bosses: switch to rapid-fire Dragon Talon alone without chargeups, for the continuous knockback-lock in hit recovery.

Barb: He got a significant damage upgrade here, with a Might merc; he can trade off Defiance since he's got his own Shout for the merc's defense plus Battle Orders. But actually what I'll talk about here is his Peace armor. It's here for the Critical Strike oskill, but actually the CTC Valkyrie from it is surprisingly helpful too. The lifetime before she de-spawns is unstable, but it does seem that if she makes it past the first few seconds, she will usually stick around for the duration of fighting a pack of monsters, and she's very useful to distract monsters and hits away from the merc for that time. And she's even surprisingly good at attacking; she's skill level 15 so she gets a lance weapon, and could actually kill things in five or so hits. Besides that, Peace's CTC Slow Missiles is also highly entertaining whenever it triggers, particularly on a screen full of sparking beetles.

Javazon: Her power level will start to wane soon. Power Strike peaked early, but gets only slightly better from here, and that comes by pushing to very high skill levels which would mean trading off the magic find that I want to keep for nightmare difficulty. Her big problem is attack rating, since Power Strike's multiplier is bugged and doesn't work, so all she's got is one-point Penetrate, and javelins never come with ITD or sockets for Eth runes. Even with Hsaru's belt + boots for AR, her hit rate is still barely 70%, and that's only going to decline from here. Her Plague Javelin is ramping up now, and that might have to take the lead as her mainstay into hell difficulty. For the moment the merc and even the Peace valkyrie are also carrying significant parts of her offense.

Sorceress: She had one drag in the act: no skill shrine to prebuff Enchant showed up until very late, in the canyon. That was actually pretty significant, Enchant was around 800 damage without a skill shrine and 1200 with it. She then also gambled herself a Volcanic +3 fire skills circlet for prebuffing, and that on top of the skill shrine took Enchant up to 1600 melee damage, much better. Significantly, it was now enough to one-hit greater mummies in the tombs after bottoming out with Static Field; cast that from outside the room, then teleport in to one-shot the unraveler.

An amusing interlude: I had socketed the barb's IK helm with regular topazes, since I didn't have more perfect ones yet. I got them during this act, and then was waiting on a Hel rune to clear out the old gems. Then... the barb went and dropped himself a second copy of the IK helm instead, haha. Except... this one has 2% less base magic-find than his first one. I decided to just socket the perfect topazes now and use the new one; saving the space and having the magic-find for the rest of the act was more important than 2% MF later. Plus there was the chance that someone else would drop yet another copy of the IK helm...

... and hah, that happened for the very next character to play! And this third one is 36% base magic-find, 6% better than the original one.

Now the story was filling in mid-level items, some specific ones that I had hoped to target and get in doing the extra full-clearing.

First a Razortail belt. This is what the barb wanted, permanently, since the piercing attack is one of few ways to significantly improve throwing damage. Plus the dex and max damage help a little too.

Dark Clan Crusher, +2 druid skills, that's usually the best weapon option for a druid elementalist absent Spirit. But...

Also a Blade of Ali Baba. And the druid can use this instead. Most characters on this team need to use the weapon slot for hitting things, and the bonemancer isn't giving up +8 Bone Spear on White, but the druid can actually fit this just fine. And it even works best for him since he has the most trouble on this team for arranging magic-find elsewhere; he wants an Oak Sage helm instead of 3 topazes, and he has trouble with the strength requirement for a 4-topaz armor.

Magefist, definitely a keeper piece for the sorceress's Enchant prebuff package.

Rattlecage armor, found by the javazon and she's the one who wants to keep it in stash for crushing blow on act bosses. In fact this is something Lightning Bolt does better than Lightning Fury - it can deliver crushing blow without being subject to defense and blocking. She used that to good effect to bring down Duriel.

Trang-Oul's gloves, although this is the time I don't need it with a necromancer who isn't poison. It might be possible that he wants it for fast-cast anyway, or the javazon might want it for poison damage, so I'll keep it for a while at least.

Second Rockstopper helm, found by the sorceress while wearing the first one, always fun when that happens. I'm going to be responsible and prudent and put this on the assassin. Much as I'd like to keep a magic-find topaz helm on everyone, she really does ride on the edge of disaster enough that she should have this.

But then I replaced the assassin's magic-find: I got an ethereal gothic plate, and cube-socketed it to get the bugged defense value (multiplies the ethereal 50% a second time) and four sockets for topazes. This has 300 defense, actually not much less than the Heavenly Garb she traded out. As ethereal, its lifetime is limited, but I think it can get through most of the rest of nightmare difficulty, and it gives me another reason to be more careful with her. Finally, also the resists on Rockstopper let her swap in a Nagelring for more magic find.

Spire of Honor unique lance, another good beatstick for a merc. Actually what I've been missing is merc Honors; about eight attempts at cube-socketing partizan bases have all so far bricked on getting the 5 sockets.

The barb crafted this amulet for himself mid act, and started using it. That small bit of monster-flee was actually pretty nice to disperse thick packs, particularly ghosts in the tombs. Like most ranged characters, he doesn't mind a bit of monster-flee, he can just keep throwing at it while fleeing.

There's another keeper crafted amulet, even at the bottom of the fast-cast range at 5%, that's still exactly enough for him to have the fastest breakpoint at 75 (30 from Vipermagi, 20 from White, two 10 fast-cast rings, 5 here), and the mana here helps significantly too.

WHOA, somebody's going to want that, but no idea yet who's going to need Fervor jewels, we'll sort this out come hell difficulty.

And whoa, that jewel is going to look sweet in some elite armor come hell difficulty.

Angelic set: I found another entire copy of it this act, the ring, amulet, armor, and two copies of the sabre. But I really couldn't put it to use anywhere. Really the sabre can't be used well by anyone besides the paladin, and he's already got the full set. The thrower barb and javazon can't use a sword-class weapon; the assassin and sorc could but they'd really prefer a faster weapon class (claw/dagger) and which can have ITD, and the necro isn't giving up his White wand. The druid hypothetically could take the Angelic set, but he doesn't need the attack rating on the rings, and so it's much simpler for him to just take the Blade of Ali Baba instead for magic find.

So the best I can do with the Angelic set is another three-piece package of the amulet, armor, and rings. Either the barb or javazon would love that (the assassin and sorc also would, but they have ITD weapons so they don't need the AR on the rings.) The winner of this question is the barbarian, because he now has Razortail occupying his belt slot, which blocks out the other good set AR combos (Hsaru's and Sigon's), so he really wants the Angelic package for the AR as well as the magic-find.

Natalya's boots... but that's actually not an upgrade for the assassin, her existing rare has more resists, and this base item is barely any more kick damage. Actually the paladin did take it, just because it's 40% run speed plus physical defense; he doesn't need the resists.

Chromatic Ire staff, usable for some fast-cast sorc builds, but doesn't do anything for an enchantress.

The Ward shield, but low in its resistance range (36 out of 30-50), so it can't beat a diamond shield.

Coldsteel Eye and Ginther's Rift, both solid and common mid-tier exceptional weapons... but they don't fit anyone here; there are no physical meleers, and the elemental meleers need defense piercing and these don't have that. I was slightly tempted to keep Coldsteel for the sorceress to do physical damage, but I tried that idea previously and really the merc just dominates anything physical any sorceress can do.

The thing I'm missing is any good weapons for the barbarian, still on two rare hurlbats with mediocre (80%) damage. Asheara in act 3 can sell hurlbat base items, so I tried crafting some (the Blood crafting recipe for axes works on throwing axes) but didn't get anything good in a few attempts. I then decided I needed to save the crafting inputs for elite base items, and Flying Axes can start to drop towards the end of act 3 here.

Again here I full-cleared everything, including even the false temples and the Durance. Mostly on players-5 outdoor, players-3 indoor, players-1 in the Durance and whenever there were exploding dolls around.

Assassin: She was fast again through act three after struggling a little in act two. Really the difference is monster shield blocking, where the monster types in act two (skeletons, greater mummies, spear cats) have that to badly disrupt the charge-release rhythm, but the act three monsters don't.

Here's an illustration: that's how many flayers can fit in a Dragon Tail explosion radius! But...

Fanaticism-enchanted undead dolls would be exactly the wrong time to go exploding a whole crapton of shit, heh. Although Dragon Tail's explosion radius is bigger than theirs, so I could try to pop them just at the edge of my range but outside theirs. I did that a little bit, but then I worked out smarter tactics. The key skill is Mind Blast; spam that until there are only two or three non-converted dolls, which are few enough that they can be popped safely with Tail without risking death. And a refinement to that is to collect the three charges of Tiger before doing the mind blasts, so I can pop Tail immediately when the conversions line up for it.

Or, of course the other time-honored plan for dolls is to let the merc handle it. (Although then he tripped the untargetable bug, and this time it was critical to exit the game to fix that. This had also happened in act two, and then I tried hiring a new merc instead, which also fixes it, except the hireable one in nightmare difficulty is Holy Freeze, and he was just completely crap at surviving compared to Defiance.)

One mistake was that ethereal topaz armor I put on the assassin. I hoped it could last through nightmare, but it didn't even make it through the Kurast areas, turns out a charge-release attacker is going to take a ton of hits during all the time she has to spend in melee range. And the second mistake was that I didn't think ahead to have a backup armor on hand... but then, hah, she went and dropped herself a second copy of Heavenly Garb to replace the one she had traded out. (I still have the first one, but it was on somebody else's merc.)

Paladin: He's also vulnerable to dolls, also very prone to popping too many at once, particularly since it can happen in two different ways with Zeal itself and Holy Shock's pulse damage. He had to smack emergency rejuves against them a few times. Then I learned to keep my distance and let the merc and pulse damage do the work. Actually what he's missing is shield blocking (no dex), that does work against the doll explosions.

Barb: He was noticeably smoother with much better hit rate from the attack rating on the Angelic set, and the piercing on Razortail also helps too. But really, half his offense is still the merc carrying him. He needs better weapons (still with mediocre rare hurlbats); Flying Axe bases for crafting can start dropping now, though I didn't get any yet. After the act I did shop one Ferocious Hurlbat from Halbu, although shopping Cruel needs character level 66 which will be in act five.

Javazon: Her attack rating with Power Strike (its multiplier is bugged and doesn't work) is becoming a real serious problem, now dipping below 60% to-hit even with Hsaru's boots/belt for AR. It was really noticeable when I played her right after playing the barb and having fixed his attack rating. But there's just no real solution for her; javelins never have ignore-defense or Eth runes. A Fool's javelin is probably the best she can do; I'm hoping to get one from crafting or imbueing, or just might have to spend a day shopping one at Anya.

She's also been increasingly relying on Plague Javelin for her offense, even without any synergy into it yet. I'm OK with this; it may start to overshadow the lightning skills, but I'm cool with that, it still makes for a different javazon than the usual one where Lightning Fury annihilates everything and poison is the afterthought. Plague Javelin was particularly useful against dolls from a safe distance. Although of course her offense there was also the merc just like everyone else too.

Druid: His fun part was the Blade of Ali Baba; besides the magic-find, 150% gold find is also quite noticeable. In fact he happened to become my highest gold-find character among all of my teams in this series, since his Rhyme and rare belt and boots also all happen to have it on top of the Ali Baba. He was cresting 1000 on half of his regular gold drops, and look at that pile from the council here. Anyway, besides that, the one minor downside of the Ali Baba is the slow attack speed; it doesn't affect any combat for an elemental druid, but it actually does figure in to the kicking animation for baskets and jugs and such, and that was actually noticeable.

Sorceress: She's still working perhaps better than she should; the combo of Static + merc kills just about everything, she hardly even needs to do much of her own melee attacking, particularly with teleport to position the merc. Remember that Enchant also fixes the merc's AR in addition to damage. He could wipe just about any entire pack in seconds after bottoming out with Static.

This sequence was wild as all hell. First, a Spirit Shroud. Perfect. I specifically wanted exactly that for the assassin: defense if upgraded, skills, and cannot-be-frozen in the armor slot so she doesn't have to use a Rhyme. And it came at the perfect time, exactly when she needs a new armor.

Now the wild part: that happened early in the act, and so at the next waypoint I exited and reopened the game, so that I wouldn't lose out just in case another copy of the same unique item happened to spawn. Silly, but I always want to take any small advantage...

... and then it actually did! Before he was even out of the jungle, the paladin dropped a second copy of Spirit Shroud!

Ok. One goes to the assassin. I upgraded it with runes (can spend one each of three Lem and two Ko on hand) and also committed a socket quest to it, with a topaz since she's short on magic-find compared to the other characters (everyone else is using either a topaz helm or armor.) The second Spirit Shroud will go unused for the moment but most likely to the paladin for hell; he also wants defense and skills and cannot-be-frozen so he can use a four-diamond shield instead of a Rhyme; although for nightmare difficulty he'll keep the Angelic armor instead for that full set.

And a similar hit was another Skin of the Vipermagi, found by the necromancer while wearing the first one, hah yeah I'm having fun with this, go go magic-find. Although this one is bottom end on the resistances, 21 out of 20-35. The druid will take this, better than his Smoke which is overkill on resists, and he'll want the fast-cast when he'll need to start using Tornado in act four against fire immunes.

Also yet one more entry in the skills-in-the-armor-slot department, Silks of the Victor, although that's not really helpful, it used to be good pre-expansion, but now Vipermagi and Spirit Shroud are both better ways to get that. It's still better than my worst merc armor (an extra copy of Sigon's) so it went there for now, and might upgrade it for merc defense once they reach the strength for it (170 for ornate plate.)

Also in the wildly improbable department: two copies of the same unique from the same chest! This was a sparkly chest in the great marsh, which has a 2% chance to drop all uniques, and this one hit it. That second Demonhide Gloves was a triple-durability rare, meaning it failed to spawn unique because a copy of it already had, instantly before. (The item is Venom Grip, which really isn't useful for anything.)

Skill charms: Well, the first one technically has a useful suffix. The second one is a hit, for prebuffing but then stays in stash and doesn't even take up inventory space, and that actually came from my very first gem reroll. And that third one is beautiful. Not pictured: I also got one for bow skills which doesn't help here, and also paladin offensive auras which would, except that I lost it from town when the game crashed, argh, though losing it might actually have been a blessing in disguise, his skills are strong enough and he probably should stick with life charms instead.

Here's something I've always wanted on these teams but never found before: a druid pelt with both Dire Wolf and Grizzly. The odds of this pairing are only 1 in 700... and amazingly I got it twice in this same act just now! The importance of this pairing is to functionally allow using Grizzly without spending any skill points in the tree; it's really not workable with Grizzly alone and not Dire Wolf as well, since that supplies a passive life boost that Grizzly needs to survive. Importantly, this interaction functions as a mastery not a synergy, so it gets boosted by other +skills once you have it from an item. But... oh my god, the wasted potential... the one on the left came with ONE lousy freakin socket, so it can't be cubed or Larzuked for more, and can't be a Lore or Delirium or even just take a bunch of resist runes. The one on the right is better with a bit of fire resistance, and might be Larzuked into two sockets, but it's still a far way from anything really good. But then:

Wow. Ok, +3 to all elemental skills plus some decent virtual life probably beats those other options, so for hell either I'll spend skill points up to Grizzly like I always end up doing, or just go without him. One thing to talk about here: How good is Life Everlasting? It functions as virtual life, with the math like this: it's worth its value times however many physical hits it would take to kill you. It's typical that you might get killed by three physical hits with extra-strong or cursed or whatever, and so then this would have given 72 points of reduction against that, close to a Whale suffix. I'd prefer a real Whale suffix of course, but I do trust Life Everlasting in lieu of it. Physical damage is usually the only real threat to kill a well equipped character; elemental damage is seldom a threat if your resists are maxed.

First, I got another Angelic amulet and ring (plus another ring from last act), and so now the javazon can have that Angelic package too to fix Power Strike's AR. Too bad she can't put on one more Angelic item to get the 100% magic-find on the two rings.... I don't have another copy of the armor, and a javazon can't use a sabre... wait, she actually can! She can throw a Plague Javelin, and then weapon-switch to the Angelic sabre plus even a Rhyme for when the poisoned monsters actually die. I'm not sure whether this play style will be fun or tedious, but it's silly enough that I'll try it for at least a while, particularly on lightning-immune monsters coming up so she'll need to be using Plague anyway.

Also a Goldwrap belt dropped this act. The javazon took this too, since she could trade out Hsaru's belt thanks to the attack rating from the Fool's javelin and the Angelic set, and she needs attack speed after trading out her old faster javelin.

Now she needed resistances after trading out other items from those slots, and also a resist charm for the Harpoonist's one. The best way to add resists was to trade out her topaz helm (she's now got magic-find on Goldwrap and the Angelic pieces), for that circlet from earlier with huge resists and 30% run speed, so then she could use boots with resists and magic-find but not speed.

Finally, her other big score came from an imbue after the act. It was time for her to try her imbues; unlike other characters, an amazon doesn't need to wait until later, since her class's items don't get staffmod skills that depend on imbue level. What she cares about are the affixes of Valkyrie's (+2 skills), Quickness, and Fool's, which are all available now.

And bingo! This one got Fool's along with +2 jav skills, nice payoff. And +4 mana per kill even helps too for Power Strike.

Got a bunch of shields. Lidless Wall, which the sorceress or druid or javazon might want at some point (it's big physical defense too.) Also a Visceratuant but that wouldn't be better than Lidless if the sorceress wants either. And a Whitstan's Guard (highest blocking), but I don't think I'm building anyone here for blocking.

Peasant Crown, always right on the fringe of usefulness, someone might take it for hell difficulty, particularly for this team where I have a lot of great but slow boots so run speed in the helm slot can help.

Diggler dirk, I want that as a possible endgame option for the sorceress, ignore-defense with speed (although it's a slow base) and some resists thrown in. Also a Hexfire sword, +3 fire skills and ITD; I think the sorceress would still rather have a faster dagger-class weapon instead, but it might conceivably be her choice, the fire skills bonus does apply in melee via Fire Mastery.

Tal Rasha's belt, though not sure if this sorceress really has any use for that or any more of the set, even with the amulet.

Kelpie Snare, found by the javazon and a good fit for her merc, slow his targets while Plague Javelin works.

Second Rattlecage armor, the barb will keep that for crushing blow on act bosses.

A minor equipment rebuild for the druid: He changed from a Rhyme shield to a 3-diamond. That let me trade out resists from other slots for magic find - his rings, and actually unsocketed his Oak Sage pelt from Lore for topazes instead. More generally, I'm realizing I really should stick with 3-diamond shields over Rhyme more often, for anyone who doesn't need cannot-be-frozen. Rhyme is tempting for the magic-find, but really it's better to just cover huge resists in the shield slot instead and put magic-find in ring and socket slots.

Javazon: I was excited about her getting to use Plague Javelin against lightning-immune monsters... and then she never got any, and kept getting poison-immune venom lords instead in almost every area, hah. Anyway, the Fool's javelin and Angelic set pieces fix the attack rating for Power Strike significantly, though still not perfectly, her hit rate is still only around 80%.

Paladin: He also didn't get any lightning immune monsters, although abyss knights and storm casters are resistant. They would get damaged at about the same rate by either Holy Shock or his now-maxed-but-unsynergized Holy Freeze, so I did flip to Freeze sometimes for the variety and the chilling.

Assassin: And her challenge was fire-immune doom knights. Mostly the best way to handle them was to just keep using Tiger-Tail chargeups anyway, at one target at a time for the physical damage, even if the fire splash wasn't hurting them. Tail still works to deliver Tiger's physical chargeup multiplier (that doesn't convert to fire, that's Fists of Fire that does that) and also attack rating, and the splash knockback still happens too and helps tactically. I did try using Dragon Talon instead of Tail, which might be slightly better for speed and mana cost, but I found that I kept fumbling on the hotkeys trying to switch to Talon all the time, so simply staying on Tail instead was easier and more practical.

On defense, the defense from her Spirit Shroud armor made a noticeable difference, compared to everyone else on this team who don't have defense armors yet. She could pretty confidently hang in packs of five or so monsters (enough to fill up a Tail splash radius), taking damage slowly enough that healing potions could entirely compensate. Remember that survivability has a geometrical effect: as the denominator of how much net damage you take goes to zero, your survivability horizon goes up not just linearly but asymptotically to infinity.

Sorceress: She shared the same challenge of fire-immune doom knights, of course. My plan all along was to handle them entirely with the merc supported by Static Field, and that worked here. It's actually a pretty fun and different play style, to manage the merc's tactical combat tightly by teleporting frequently. Because of her merc dependence, she will always have my best merc weapon out of the team. Currently that is a Spire of Honor, which has the downside of being slow, but that's actually a good fit here; teleporting is always fast enough for the merc to get off one attack almost immediately, and I want that one attack to be the heaviest hitter to kill a monster before his attention changes. Although his big downside was getting chilled, which really craters his attack speed; one particular Holy Freeze boss pack was troublesome, and so was Izual's frost nova chilling, when the merc kept focusing on him and not knocking off the doom knights in the area first.

Druid: He's got a pretty big arsenal now with all the elemental skills, and it takes a surprising amount of work on my part to wield it all. He has to keep up with casting Hurricane, Oak Sage, Cyclone Armor, Fissure at packs, Firestorm at single targets, Tornado at fire immune (doom knights) or resistant (venom lords.) He can start using Hurricane now with a few points into it, after Fissure/Firestorm/Tornado are now maxed. Although one thing I didn't realize in planning this build is that Hurricane's casting timer conflicts with Fissure and Firestorm, hmm.

Barb: Didn't mention this among last act's items: I got a good merc spear (130% ED) with CTC Amplify, and whenever that triggered from the merc, that made a real difference in how fast he could take down anything by throwing.

The Hellforge runes came out splendidly: Um, Pul, Lem, Fal, Fal, Lum, Dol! That's tremendous, at least one of everything good, and that makes for loads of possibilities here. Once again I worked out the probability of doing this well or better: it comes to 10.9%, to get at least one Um in 7 tries, and at least one Pul-or-better in 6 remaining tries, and at least one Lem-or-better in 5 remaining tries, etc. So this was an 89th-percentile result. Anyway, the one option this team doesn't need is any Crescent Moon weapon with the Um, with no physical meleer. So the Um will go into a Duress or Stone armor, although I don't yet know for whom, and it won't happen until I get a good elite base which isn't until into hell difficulty. I've also gotten four other random Lem drops along the way through the acts.

Besides that, there was hardly anything else of note from the short act. The one significant item was Tal Rasha's mask; there's no leech-based meleer here, but it's always great for a merc. It goes to the paladin's merc, since he's the most needy for merc survivability (no support from teleport, decrepify, mind blast, life multiplier, other summonables), but least needy for merc damage so he's the lowest priority for Honor polearms with leech.

I did get a Heart Carver dagger, which might be able to deal a little physical damage for the sorceress if need be. Besides that, there was this list of filler items that don't really have anywhere to get used: Crescent Moon amulet (two copies, wow), Naj's circlet, Frostburn gauntlet, Coif of Glory helm.

And I got my first Flying Axe base item, for the barbarian to do a Blood weapon craft (takes any axe, including throwing axes), but it came out with little (50%) damage. It's about the same for dps as his existing rare hurlbats, but with a bigger stack size, so it'll be a slight upgrade whenever he gets a second flying axe to pair with it.

One thing that's somewhat different about this team is that my item organization is skewed differently from my normal procedures compared to the others. I'm saving so many extra inputs for crafting - rubies and Orts for the barb's throwing axes, and emeralds and Sols for maiden javelins. The characters are now high enough level to get most of the desirable affixes, although I still need to wait for the base items to come, they're not shoppable. So every character has about ten of those gems and runes clogging up space, awaiting the base inputs for the crafts. Usually I keep important items for each character in stash and fill any holes around them with junk jewels for crafting, but this time all those holes are full of extra gems instead. That pushes the jewels into inventories, and really the ultimate effect is that those are displacing extra charms, marginal stuff like 8 life on a small charm, so I've been discarding that sort of thing sooner than usual.

Javazon: Her great moment was the Ancients, thanks to the merc's Kelpie Snare spear. Turns out 75% slowing works on them! And that made it trivially easy to kite them indefinitely while Plague Javelin did the work. Besides that, she did come to rely on Plague quite a bit this act, with some lightning immune monsters (damned types, gloams) in various places, but also just against large crowds of anything like flayers or doom knights. And yeah, Plague Javelin is the most underrated skill in the game, easily able to wipe a screenful of monsters in one cast. It just gets no attention because it's not instantaneous and nobody wants to wait six seconds for monsters to die.

Bonemancer: He reamed through the Ancients in about five seconds each. Maybe I shouldn't have put this class on this team. As the one standard power build here, the bonemancer is just on a whole different level of dominance for annihilating monsters compared to anyone else in this group. And that's only going to escalate in hell difficulty, where all the other classes run into immunities and resistances but bonemancy really doesn't.

Sorc: She had to do a walk of shame: she had to go beg the vendors for a prevent-monster-heal weapon, when she actually couldn't kill Achmel of all things (the second Baal minion wave), he spawned fire immune and also poison immune and she couldn't stop his regeneration and the merc couldn't outrace it with Decrepify on him from Baal. (I do have a solution to this for hell difficulty, coming up.)

Assassin: I'm still getting better at driving her. This was my big realization: the way to play a Dragon Tail kicker isn't to watch the charge-releases, it's to watch the monsters. The critical play is to watch when too many monsters start coming into range, and then fire off Dragon Tail's knockback in an instant whenever that happens. Ignore the Tiger charges; it doesn't matter if you have one or three or even zero; the overriding concern is to keep control of the battlefield with that knockback, and the damage will follow given enough time.

Rockstopper helm number three. This happened because of what I was doing with the javazon, use her weapon-switch to swap to the Angelic sabre for magic-find, whenever I could catch the timing right for a boss to die from poison or the merc, which I managed for roughly half of them. Scored a nice payoff here thanks to that. And look at those resistance numbers, those are even higher than the first two Rockstoppers. I was debating whether this would go to the javazon or paladin...

...and then this dropped, a Darksight Helm. I absolutely love this item for a paladin, Cloak of Shadows charges for the class with the worst crowd control in the game. And it interacts perfectly with the shield slot: cannot-be-frozen here means he doesn't need a Rhyme, which means he can use a four-diamond shield instead, which covers resistances so he doesn't need that from Rockstopper in the helm slot. So the paladin will take this and the javazon gets her Rockstopper. (The funny part was that this dropped for someone else before the paladin played act 5, then while playing him, I kept trying to cast Cloak of Shadows anyway as if he already had this helm, hah.)

Aldur's boots, always a fine piece, max run speed with resists and life. It went to the barbarian; nobody else here really wants to go up to the 95 strength requirement. Also because:

I got a big package of the Immortal King set this act: the gloves (actually from the cow level after), belt, and boots. I will put this to use... but the customer isn't the barbarian, it's actually the sorceress! More on this in the setup for hell difficulty.

Guardian Angel armor. I loved this the first time I found it, back on my first team with the hammerdin. But this time... it doesn't quite fit. This paladin already has extra max lightning and cold resist, from the Resist Lightning and Cold auras that synergize Holy Shock and Freeze. And he's not built to use increased blocking, without a shield suitable for it, and not with dexterity. So the only thing that's left on this armor is skills and max fire resist, which isn't enough to justify the slot or the strength requirement. Of course it's still great for a merc, and will go on the paladin's.

Dwarf Star ring. This went to the druid; of the caster classes with low life, he's the one who can most use life in the ring slot since he least needs fast-cast or resists there, and could be in danger from a fire enchanted explosion with his short-range spells.

Wow, check this out, ethereal Pierre Tombale Couant. The damage number there doesn't even tell the whole story - now factor in 55% deadly strike on top of that!

Runes: got an Um rune from a random drop (and already have one from the hellforge), we'll talk about this in setting up for hell difficulty. Nothing else higher than a couple Fals.

Stuff that doesn't help anything: Langer Briser crossbow, Kuko Shakaku again, Silkweave boots but that's pretty useless (run speed and defense, nothing else.)

Besides all that, the postscript after this act was in acquiring quite a number of more items in various ways to gear up for hell difficulty.

I imbued elite boots for the assassin. She had actually imbued claws, so I had the sorceress do this, since the sorc doesn't need a class-specific imbue. This came out, solidly decent enough. Any other improvement over this would be small enough that it's not worth spending resources to chase, so that saves me trying any more imbues or gambling for an elite crafting base or spending runes to upgrade one of my existing boots. (Procedurally: this imbue was actually done by the paladin, since he had already finished act 5 when I had the base item available, then I had the sorceress give him her imbue on a paladin shield. The sorceress also traded her second imbue, to the barb on a flying axe, for a socket quest in exchange.)

Then the next story of item acquisition here was some shopping trips to the vendors.

First, this pair of gloves for the javazon. Yeah, I wanted 20% IAS, but once this one came up, I didn't have the heart to keep pushing for that at even lower odds, this will be good enough, actually she gets to the same speed breakpoint either way. She really can't pack on much attack speed anyway; her javelin doesn't have any since the Fool's modifier on it is more important for Power Strike to ever hit anything, and javelins can't be socketed for a Shael, and Goldwrap in the belt slot isn't great either if it's displacing a Whale belt. Yeah, the purpose of this character was to work Power Strike to its max with a faster one-hand javelin (compared to my two-handed spearazon), but the chips haven't fallen that way and she'll have to make do with lesser speed.

I also got equivalent assassin gloves, +3 martial skills and 10% IAS. And same for her, 10 is good enough to meet a breakpoint and she doesn't need 20.

Next from the shopping spree was the assassin's new claw for hell. Piercing is an absolute must for her, but it occurs pretty rarely, so I wasn't going to grind for something perfect but just take the first Piercing claw with any sort of useful prefix on top of that. Anya delivered this, and it's splendid! Unfortunately Larzuk bricked and gave it only one socket, but that's still okay, the missing Shael can be compensated for by a Jewel of Fervor socketed elsewhere for the same good breakpoint.

And the sorceress also shopped her new weapon for hell, this Fool's of Swiftness kris dagger. Fool's is good enough for her attack rating; Piercing isn't a must for her as it is for the assassin; the sorc doesn't need to hit a whole streak of chargeups and a finisher, she's fine with a roughly 85% hit rate from this with Enchant's pretty hefty AR multiplier. 30 IAS is perfectly fine too; she doesn't have to hold out for a perfect 40 suffix; 30 plus 20 on gloves exactly gets to her second-fastest speed breakpoint and that's perfectly fine, in fact it doesn't even need a socket quest for any Shaels.

And this was pretty wild. While shopping for the above stuff, I happened to come across something I wasn't looking for at all - great shields, each strictly better than a regular 3-diamond! The first one here went to the druid, since he doesn't have hit recovery in other slots (like Rockstopper or an armor runeword with Shael.) The second shield is the javazon's. And the sorceress, the most fragile here by far, greedily grabbed that last one instantly. It needed (and was worth) a socket quest (and Larzuk blessedly hit two sockets this time), and wow that's just about the best shield anyone is going to find in this format.

And also a couple best-in-slot belts as well; I was semi-intentionally looking for these along with the other stuff, while quickly shopping at Gheed via the cow portal. (I'm OK with three-row belts; two is too little but three is alright.)

Not shopping, but here's a look at some great jewelry that came from gambling and crafting. Death Circle ring is spectacular (including the attack rating) and the assassin took it.

And lastly, the other important item coming into play now is this. This is the weapon that the paladin wants all the way to endgame. The big problem for the elemental zealot build is that it has absolutely terrible attack rating. He could shop for a Piercing weapon (scepter) too, but he can do better than that: four Eth runes in a six-socket base, which works for him since he's not tied to a claw or dagger class weapon. Military Pick is the choice for the base because it's the fastest 6-socketable one-hander that doesn't have the high stat requirement of a phase blade, plus it's available now instead of waiting until later into hell difficulty. (Ok, this isn't quite his best possible theoretical weapon. That would be something like a Marshal's war scepter of Piercing. But the odds against that are tremendous and Ormus and Malah can't really be shopped quickly.)

I did have to think about the best way to get it - should I keep trying the cube-socket recipe at a 1/6 chance each time, or spend a socket quest instead? Here's the analysis: the expected cost of socketing is 6 tries of the package of Ral + Amn + perfect amethyst. What's the opportunity cost - what else would that stuff get spent for instead? Basically six crafting attempts of some sort. Would six craft attempts be likely to improve over whatever they might replace by a margin of more than a socket quest improves an item? No way, the socket quest guarantees adding one good affix to something, while most crafts are pretty bad and unlikely to beat whatever else I've got by that much. So I went ahead with the cube-socketing recipe on every Military Pick that dropped all throughout nightmare difficulty, and got it on close to the expected schedule after six tries or so.