So without further delay, I introduce Marlina, newly matriarched and actually my first character ever to beat Diablo 2 all the way through Hell difficulty!
~
Marlina
Character details and statistics:
Class: Sorceress
Experience: 1,469,574,968XP
Level: 88
LCS (lol at forgetting to place the stat and skill points I got on leveling up to 88)
Naked/Gear
Strength: 80/82
Dexterity: 25/43
Vitality: 385/420
Energy: 35/58
HP: 936/1165
Mana: 208/357
Stamina: 536/571
Defense: 6/877
Lightning: 4-5113
C/Lightning: 4-3071
Frozen Orb: 354-372
Firewall: 1252-1294
Resists: all maxed with primary set-up, on switch resists were 8/41/50/17 (fire/cold/lightning/poison)
Skills
Cold tree: Frozen Orb (20), all pre-requisites had 1 point, plus 1 point into Cold Mastery. Total: 26 points.
Lightning tree: Charged Bolt (1), Lightning (20), Chain Lightning (20), Lightning Mastery (20), TK, TP and Static Field each had 1 point. Total: 64 points.
Fire tree: Warmth (1), Inferno (1), Blaze (1), Firewall (5), Fire Mastery (1). Total: 9 points.
Equipment
Primary weapon set-up: The Occulus paired with Moser's Blessed Circle socketed with two perfect diamonds.
On switch: a 'Leaf' Gnarled Staff with +2 Firewall before the runeword bonuses were applied.
Helm: pretty decent rare coronet (+20% FCR, +1 sorc skills, +12 all resist, +31 to life and +18 to dex)
Armour: Skin of the Vipermagi, dropped for me with perfect all resists.
Belt: Gloom's Trap (all this does is pump my HP and mana somewhat)
Gloves: Crafted caster gloves (pretty meh but I wear it for the +17% magic find)
Boots: Rare wyrmhide boots (again, pretty meh but it has +30% FR/W and +16% magic find)
Amulet: Rare, it's ok. Has +1 sorc skills, lightning and poison resists, and some gold find.
Ring 1: Nagelring (yeah yeah - it's the only unique ring that's dropped for me! I carry it for the magic find)
Ring 2: Crafted caster ring, it's ok/average. Has +10% FCR, bonuses to mana, and a bonus to fire resist.
Charms: 1 grand charm of sustenance, 2 large charms (both give life but one also gives mana), and half a dozen small charms mainly with the vita suffix, but there was one that also had +all resists, and another that had a small % of magic find.
Companion
Fazel, Holy Freeze merc. Loyal follower and all-round badass. This guy is a beast. He can tank like nobody's business, and he did some scary awesome damage (500-2K). He had insight in a polearm which Marlina found vital to keep her from quaffing potions every 5 seconds, and treachery in his armour which activated fade often enough to max out his resistances (which pre-fade are around the 50% mark).
Weapon: 'Insight' Collossus Voulge
Armour: 'Treachery' in an ethereal Boneweave
Helm: Rare coronet
History write-up
I began Marlina quite a long time ago. As I posted in the link above so long ago, she began as a non-orthodox build, specifically C/L with Blizzard. This setup was fine in normal and nightmare, as most builds are to be honest, but once she hit hell it became apparent that the build wouldn't cut it. Nevertheless I struggled on through the early acts of hell, before coming across a boss mummy in the tombs of act 2, which was immune to both cold and lightning. There was nothing she could do and her merc wasn't doing enough damage before the foul creatures unnatural regeneration restored it to full health. It was standing there laughing at us! Marlina decided that enough was enough, and the time had come to unleash the fury of firewall on hell's denizens.
So she went back to town and bullied Drognan to part with a staff of firewall. This served well in a pinch, and I decided to make Marlina into a tri-elementalist. Unfortunately because this wasn't planned from the start it was very much a suboptimal idea, and really I should just teleport my way past intransigent demons with the temerity to spawn dual immunites to the two elements she had focused on.
Now my memory isn't entirely clear on the rest of the history, but I believe i took her all the way through to act 4 and beat Big Red who's now Dead. After that I went to act 5, laughed at how Marlina and her defiance merc were getting killed in 2 seconds flat by everything, and decided I needed to reevaluate the character. One thing I decided on was to replace the defiance merc with a holy freeze one, and I can't believe what a difference it made. The holy freeze not only slows every critter on the screen, but it also increases the merc's damage. I had also gotten the redrunemod and runeword mod installed at some point, which proved mighty useful when I made an insight polearm. Also on recommendation from the posters here, I chose to go with a treachery armour for him, as the hellforge had graciously given up a lem rune for my troubles.
Anyway I eventually decided to put Diablo on the backburner and play other games for awhile. A long while, as it turned out. I decided to pick the game back up recently after I got sick of the back to hellfire mod, and because I had never matted or patted a single character, EVER, I decided it was high time I would do so. Although I didn't do this right away. I decided I'd try my luck at pit runs, countess runs, pindle runs, mephisto runs, LK runs etc etc. It was pretty boring to tell you the truth, but I did it mainly so I could try and complete the Tal-rasha set, which I had at least two items for (the mask and the wand). Of course, luck is a fickle thing, and a whole bunch of items that I didn't want/need for Marlina dropped instead. Sigh. Rune drops also weren't happening with great frequency, but when they happened, I appreciated them all the same.
Anyway a few hours ago I decided enough was enough and went ahead with my plan to conquer the throne of destruction. First stop, I had to get to the frozen tundra and the ancients way and finally confront those three doof-head homicidal statues.
The battle with the ancients was annoying because the first two rolls, I killed jumper and thrower, but spinner killed Fazel each time before I could throw him a potion. I had littered the top of the peak with potions all over the place, and good thing too because I wound up drinking almost all of them by the time I finished. The third time ended in success as again, I split them up and took them out one by one. Spinner is always the hardest I found, at least for Marlina. After this I went in the WSK, got scared by all the crazy monsters, teleported my way all over WSK2 until I found the waypoint and got back to Harrogath. It was then I remembered I had set the players setting to something stupid because I had been doing some goddamn magic finding or LK runs or something and I forgot to put the player settings back to 1.
Anyway the next time I played I decided to finish up some business I had with Nihlathak. I was scared of his corpse explosion, as I had heard on hell it could sometimes be a one-shot death. As it turned out, it wasn't. Marlina had enough HP to deal with it quickly by teleporting the hell out of dodge and waiting for a health potion to replenish her and Fazel. The maxed fire resistance certainly helped as well, I imagine. By using herself as bait to draw small groups of monsters away from the evil wizard, Marlina was able to isolate and defeat the demons while also negating the dangers of corpse explosion as well. When it was just him and a handful of burning dead archers, Nihlathak went down like the traitorous dog that he was.
Now it was on towards Marlina's date with destiny! WSK 1 and 2 had viper magi, succubi, skeleton mages, cadavers, and flayer blow darters as well. Level 3 had ghosts and storm mages. Level 4 had gloams and doom/oblivion knights, and invaders. Anyway they all went down, none could stand before the fury of chain lightning. And when they could, frozen orb proved effective at punishing the demons for their arrogance.
Then it was on towards the throne. None of the waves proved scary until Lister came with his posse of demon dinosaurs. But static field to quickly halve their HP, followed by lots and lots of lightning, and even the most aggressive of demons can't stand for very long. Baal was waiting for me at the worldstone, but his attacks were feeble and Marlina decided to show him who's boss. By the end of it, Baal was cowering in the corner while Marlina was zapping him full of electricity and frozen death. So much for the lord of destruction. Damn bastard was stingy with the loot as well.
Thoughts
The ancients were the toughest fight Marlina faced, in large part because spinner killed Fazel twice which necessitated a reroll. Splitting them up was the way to go in all three cases, and ultimately she won in the end, but spinner could take her health down quite easily if given half a chance.
Now with 1.13 respec was granted, and I used this first to experiment. I went with charged bolt instead of chain lightning because I thought it would be better. Unfortunately I found it to be lacking, so I went back to Chain lightning. I kept the tri-elementalist part about the build, even though I could have taken the points from firewall and its pre-reqs and put them into, I dunno, cold mastery or charged bolt to increase the damage of frozen orb and lightning/chain lightning respectively. Firewall is nice to have though for those dual immunes, but Fazel can do a lot of damage by himself, so maybe a tri-elementalist is simply not necessary.
Occulus is a good wand, but it's also a double edged sword (not... literally, of course) as the random chance to teleport activates at the slightest touch. Marlina had a lot of HP, had teleport and also maxed out resists, so a single hit often did nothing to her. Ironically though one bad random teleport into a middle of a doomstack of monsters often resulted in her death or at least a lot of confusion. I had tal-rasha's wand but stats wise, it didn't beat occulus. If I had the full tal's set I would have ditched occy though. I'd like to thank the people who responded to my previous post that I linked to above for their advice on runewords and mercenaries. It may not have seemed like much, but it made all the difference in the world.
Those are the only thoughts that occur to me right now. Don't know what I'll do with her now, almost certainly just use her to do some LK runs or countess runs or pit runs. I still have the cow level to do. lol
Pictures!
Crafting can be funny
And again
Ist dropped in the maggot lair, while Sur dropped somewhere in the Durance of Hate. An Ohm dropped in the Pits but I didn't take a screenshot. Hellforge dropped a Lem. Incidentally, it feels good to liberate all those lost souls that were trapped inside Mephisto's soulstone, plus it looks pretty too.
Mephisto went down first. Then came Big Red.
Burn baby burn!
Zap
Now it's your turn to zap, Talic!
No, you're supposed to stand still while I zap you.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Why do they call them Venom Lords if they, um, breath fire, and not poison?
One fried demon dinosaur, to go!
'Hahaha puny female spell caster! You missed me!'
NOOOO Fazel! Damn you Baal! You'll pay for that! The prices that Qhal-khek charges for resurrection are absurd!
Cowering won't save you!
Fazel, you and the world of Sactuary have been avenged.
WTF this stuff won't even cover your resurrection fee GODDAMNIT
Stay awhile and listen, I'm old and sound like Sean Connery
Hope you enjoyed the read.
|||I'm Sean Connery!Always my favorite!
(tl;dr want to play d2! Will read later!)
Way to go with your first Mat! I'm glad you finally made it through hell! I do like some of the picture captions. Puny female caster, Pff! No aim!
How did your skill layout go? Spread into all three categories? Did read that you used +2FW leaf staff (If you talked a/b it in the write up, just ignore this question)
This makes me want to make my soso like yours. I love FO, and Lightning and CL can be so powerful sometimes! I also enjoy firewall. There can be a lot of damage output with that skill (At least on the lcs...)
I do look forward to reading everything later tonight/tomorrow. What I've read so far you did a nice write up!|||Great write-up. I especially liked your diablo pic...you caught him just at the right moment.|||Well done!
When Fazel has fully recovered will you be giving him a Delirium helm or something as a reward?|||Thanks guys for your comments.
@Coju: the skill spread was ok. I sometimes wonder though if maybe I should have skipped the fire skills and instead just put those points into another electricity synergy or into cold mastery to boost FO's effectiveness. Then I remember that at least one of the Ancients was immune to both lightning and cold, so I dunno. On the other hand, you can easily reroll by casting a portal, so yeah. Like I said above, it was a bit of a spur of the moment decision to make her a tri-elementalist so late into it. If I were to have done it properly, what I might have done instead would been to do nova for the lightning skill, FO and 1 point into CM as I did here, and some spread into firewall. FM and LM would get some attention too (probably more LM really since firewall by itself already does huge damage)
@kstarm: thanks, yeah that was a great picture of Diablo dying.
I remapped my keys so Q no longer brings up the quest log, which sucks because I hate seeing it pop up when you kill Diablo and Baal and all the rest. It makes taking a screenshot a pain, and I had forgotten what key I mapped it to when I was doing Baal (I may not have mapped it at all come to think of it, I just use the mouse).@tarantella: I actually did make a Delirium helm, I just don't know who to give it to. Fazel has a rare coronet that among other things, gives him life steal. I'm wary of replacing it with anything else because I suspect part of the reason why he's so tough for the most part is the life steal replenishes him a fair deal.
A minor update: I did the cow level and by god the cows are tough. I didn't kill the cow king, because I might want to do the level again and again for the lulz. But wow, I don't know what to think.|||Super jorb on the mat! Be really careful with nova if you go that route, it comes with a hefty gear requirement because it forces you to get so close, you need to do enough damage with a high enough faster casting rating to get enemies in a pseudo stun lock otherwise you get gobbled alive.
Since you've whacked Nihlathak already i'd go for it and whack the cow king, since this is your first mat I'd make it a full clear of the game.|||Congrats on your first Mat! Hopefully she'll be the first of many.
|||Grats on the Mat. I enjoyed reading her story 
If you enjoyed a Tri-elementalist, I would start by trying to get more gear for her, so that she can be stronger. Every time time I tried non-cookie cutter builds, I always wished I had better gear for them.
And for that I would respec to full-blizz and go cowing/pindle/trav. You would "only" need a seed where council is all together and could run several targets (in my case helps me to run more time).
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