Bluebonnet entered Hell Act 4 at clvl 51 with the following skills/stats/equipment:

Blizzard @ 20
Glacial Spike @ 20
Cold Mastery @ 13
Shiver Armor @ 1
Frozen Orb @ 1
Ice Blast @ 1
Frost Nova @ 1
Frozen Armor @ 1
Chilling Armor @ 1
Ice Bolt @ 1

Str 60, Dex 25, Vit 100, Nrg 160

Resistances, Max Fire/Lit, 70 each for Cold/Poison.

These aren't the numbers she started with, but thanks to gem irregularities through patches 1.04 and 1.05, she ended with +57 to all on her shield, rather than the lower random numbers she had before.

Rare Mage Plate: +44 Lit Res, +15 Pois Res, +36 Life, +2 mana, +5 Dex - found Ruined Temple, Hell
Rare Mask: +27 Poison Resist, +39 Life, +7 Fire Res, Fast Hit Recovery - found Upper Kurast, Hell
Dragon's War Scepter of the Magus, +37 mana - bought from Ormus in Normal
Gothic Shield, gemmed with three perf D: +57 resists - finished Act 3 Hell, in the Kurast Sewers
Rare Greaves: +44 Fire Resist, +22 Lit Resist, +26 Life, Faster Run - found Act 3 temple, Normal
Lizard's Plated Belt of Colossus: +2 Mana, +55 Life - gambled Act 2 Hell
Frostburn: gambled at clvl 39, in extra innings so to speak (due to crashes) in Act 4 NM
Prismatic Amulet, +17-24 to all Resists - Maffer Dragonhand, Act 3 NM
Sapphire Ring of Might, +42 Cold Resist, +5 Strength - gambled Act 4 NM
Rare Ring: +45 mana, +13 Life, +12 Str, +16 Fire Res, +1 mana/kill - Gidbinn reward, Hell

Wyrm's ring of Thawing I might use when Cold risks were low: +51 Mana, Half Freeze.
Rare Ring: -2 each Damage and Magic Damage, +19 Mana, saved for Diablo.
Lots of full rejuvs, a Nagelring and a Manald Heal, and odds and ends kept for nostalgia.

Imbues Used: Nightmare and Hell. Normal Imbue remains available.

Imbue Result: nada, armors that sold for 25k each.

Strength help needed to wear those rare Greaves.

Bluebonnet is on a Complete Game Run, full-clearing all areas of all difficulties once each, parking as few monsters and redoing as few areas as humanly possible from game to game. Deaths so far: one.

ACT FOUR

Blue has been on extended hiatus due to range nerf on Glacial Spike radius in patch 1.04 (all radiuses of virtually all skills were nerfed there, when they "fixed" a range irregularity without compensating for range this cost the player. The range was restored to approximately the original value, but properly rounded rather than spiky -- in patch 1.05). I finally got around to completing her quest.

Blue's trip through the final Act represents pretty much the opposite of what I've been playing lately: namely, low offense chars in lower difficulties. Ember, for example, had more Vit and more Life than any just about any other Sorcie ever, through Nightmare. Yet her offense was severely restricted, so I had to bend all my resources to dividing the enemy into manageable numbers, then whittling them down. Bluebonnet has overwhelming offense that cannot be resisted. She can crush any size mob and would be viable (if a bit challenged) even without Static in solo-8. Her life is strong, too, almost as high as Ember's, but this is Hell Difficulty. Blue can take a hit, but can she take two? Maybe, maybe not. She certainly can't afford to be swarmed. So the challenge here is not to get kills, but to maintain distance so as not to get killed.

Glacial Spike helps a lot with that. I can target, freeze, even slay normal monsters. Takes a lot of shots to kill some of these things, though, and even with almost 700 mana, it just doesn't last. Unless I want to return to town for a mana refill after every third or fourth kill (and what do I do when the mobs arrive in force?) I will have to use Blizzard.

One of the secrets of blizzard is target size. Have I mentioned this before? I don't remember. It's been months since I played or wrote about Bluebonnet or so much as touched a cold-tree skill. Larger targets get hit more by blizzard -- a lot more -- especially when moving. Smaller targets get hit less. Thus, target size is always important when weighing which skill is best at a given moment. Fetishes are purely GS targets. Blizzard will only hide them from you. Thorned Hulks, on the other hand, are so big and slow, and so robust, there's no point spending half your mana to kill one. Cast blizzard on them, stack em two or three high, and watch how fast they crumple.

In act four, most targets are large. Corpulents, flesh spawners, casters, balrogs... large. Knights are medium and flesh pups are small. Those are the targets against which you whip out the GS more often, especially one on one. It is still worthwhile to stack a few blizzards in the path between the spawners and your sorcie, though. Some pups will get through, but if you don't slow them down, you'll spend all your mana and still not kill the spawning mothers.

One final note: Blue's Mastery is now so high, there's no such thing as a resistant target. Targets differ in size, speed, threat level, but their resistances are irrelvant. That alone makes the Cold Tree the strongest for dealing with bosses, Static Field notwithstanding. Cold Tree faces less resistance to begin with, but lacking mastery you CAN get stuck with trouble. You'll know what I mean as you move through Normal, when you play with cold skills. That aspect simply vanishes once Mastery reaches the top of its efficiency curve. I'll be dumping all of Blue's act four skill points into Mastery, but not because she needs it. Rather, there is nowhere else left to put those points, so might as well get another one or two percent difference there.

I drew Venoms, Knights and Doom Casters on the Steppes. You know, I have only seen Cliff Lurkers once in the last six or eight weeks. (What does that say about me? Two things. One, I don't "level up" much in Act Four these days. Two, I don't play as much as it may seem). I used to draw them almost every game. I guess things balance out over time.

There was a knight champ pack not far from the gate. Blue got smacked once, losing over half her life in one blow. That was all the reminder I needed that this was not Nightmare.

I wiped out the Steppes with mostly Blizzard. I used GS on all the Trapped Souls (hey, when I clear, it all dies) and occasionally on stragglers, or on the largest mobs to slow their advance, freeze a few inside the blizzard rain and trap the ones behind them in there as well, making for quicker or safer kills.

Some Doom Caster champs were guarding the top of the stairs at the gate onto the Plains. I let them chase me to the steppes, where they were dispatched. The plains held mainly Burning Souls, also lots of flesh spawners and some corpulents. The Corpulents were easy blizzard bait, although their AI movement pattern is erratic, so sometimes they won't cooperate on staying in the area of your blizzard.

Burning Souls are an interesting opponent for a cold sorcie. If you GS them while they are moving (invisible but for their glows) they will freeze that way. Sometimes you won't know you've also frozen a moving Soul (while shooting another target) until you get an extra ice puddle. That happened a couple times while I was killing Trapped Souls. Heh. Burning Souls are not hardy, but for a cold sorcie who tends to be more stationary than other sorcies, Burning Souls are a bit more dangerous, because they will often try to close to melee range and they can pop up all over the place. So you avoid blizzard on them for three reasons: first, they are small targets; second, they have low health, you can kill them in two or three shots (they aren't even as sturdy as the Trapped Souls, I kid you not); third, you want them immobilized.

There were some lively moments when large mobs awoke, with mixed monster types.

The Flesh Spawners were another problem. They are cold resistant, but that hardly bothers Blue any more. They are still annoying, though, because it takes way too much mana to GS them (unless you catch one alone, with no pups yet), and they will breed while your blizzards rain on them. Some pups will get through the blizzards, so you need to stack them high and stack them quick, in order to SAVE mana. Yes, that's right, you need to spend a lot of mana in a hurry with blizzards or you are only going to spend more GSing a line of charging pups.

So all in all, I had to use more blizzards, a lot more GS, and make a lot more trips to town for mana refill, despite having over 700 mana. This was one of the times where I really felt the lack of Warmth.

Izual? Poor Izual.

"Ring around the Rosie. Pockets full of Posie. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!"

The City held Abyss Knights, Stygian Hags in great numbers, and Dark Familiars. I long to see Dark Familiars on lower difficulty, but they are juiced with extra speed and extra hit power in Hell, and their erratic movements don't respond well to Blizzard. As such, this was another area where I had to use more GS than I would have preferred. Blizzard was still used more, but it had to be supplemented. There was an ES Holy Shock bat boss who just keep running away, trying to lure me into uncharted territory. What a pest he was. I took some nasty hits from some of his minions, so there was no way I was getting within melee range of him. I finally nailed him half the city later.

There were some times when I cast blizzard outside of buildings (or inside) and lets area of effect reach beyond the walls to kill things swarming on the other side. I took a shot of this but I didn't like the way it turned out, you couldn't see enough of what was really going on there.

City cleared out, and I've found two mage plates, imbuables. I just sold them. I'd had to have quit out to go to normal to use my last imbue, and screw it. Even if I hit, it didn't matter now. I had max resists, decent AC, high life and mana, one fast recovery. Enh, that's plenty good enough. I won't be dying, right? Right?

On to the River, and Blue drew that nassssty starting segment. Worse, she drew more Abyss Knights, also Stranglers and Maw Fiends -- AND Grotesques! (I can't ever recall drawing four racial types on the River. I did not think that was possible, not including random boss/champ packs, but it happened here). And she drew one HELL of a stairs trap. Hardcore, I might have bailed out of this one, as the brutality of it was overwhelming. I had to microloop, microtempt, stack blizzards, GS GS GS once when they trapped me dead cold in a corner. I'm only lucky I held my moves so tight, because another step or two to the south would have awakened the Venom Lord champs sooner than I could have handled them. They were extremely hairy even as it turned out.

Hotfoot could not have beaten that trap. Period. Ember would have run away screaming bloody murder.

The larger variety of opponent types proved interesting. I returned mainly to Blizzard but now had to use more GS for support in terms of freezing things inside of the blizzard stacks because the river is linear and you do not want to be looping yourself right into a sandwich.

Nests of Abyss knights were only mildly troublesome. I can pinpoint dodge their shots with solid efficiency -- unless I'm lagging, at all. Online I just don't have the connect speed to servers to pull that off. I must give them the widest possible berth or I will be slain without hope, even if the server is behaving, because 56k is too slow for this game element to function properly online, and even the tiniest bit of data loss (aka lag spike) means certain death.

Got an easy draw with Hephasto and didn't even bother to pull any tricks on him. I just stacked the blizzards and ran circles around him. I knew it would get a bit hairy toward the end, as I am now CERTAIN that he speeds up, the more damage he takes. Blue has only Faster Run on her boots, and loses 5% of that to her 3D Gothic shield, so once he went into overdrive, he was faster than her and she tempted him de facto without a choice in the matter. I had to continually pause long enough to cast an another blizzard, pretty much once, maybe twice per loop, and only when he was chilled.

Relatively speaking, this was disgustingly easy. You might even say I dissed him, killing him this way, but it would only have taken much longer to do it across some barrier, and my river draw did not offer a good spot for that. It did offer me that nice loop zone, though, plenty large enough to get the job done but without some huge obstacle in the middle to turn it into a full chase, scene. That would not have been good, as I would not have been able to keep inside the stack nearly as much.

At the head of the river maze, two different nests of four Abyss Knights each were perched on the high ground, in niches, to either side of the entry aisle. Oh joy. Death trap for me online. Single player, that's another story. I ran up the aisle and right past their shots. No good to stand back and get nailed. So I let them shoot at me and watched the shots miss behind me as I kept running, then pause a moment to call a blizzard or two down on their heads, then run back out of their as their second volley is fired. This is more risky than it sounds, as there is more firepower there than required to kill me, even with near max resist across the board. However, as risky as this was, it was the safest possible way for me to deal with this. I could have tried my slvl 1 Frozen Orb from a distance and hit them offscreen, but that would have taken forever and ultimately only been riskier for me.

Up the river we go, into the CS. There were more Venom Lord champs there, but these didn't have me locked in a sardine can like the ones at the River stairs. These died quickly, with no risk to me. I had to be careful of Lower Resist curse, of bone spirits and mageshot, but their resistances were decimated by cold mastery and they were pummeled soon enough.

The seal bosses had some interesting abilities, but unfortunately for them, immunity to blizzards was not among them. I had no trouble.

There was a mana regen shrine on the Vizier's side. Actually there were two, one more up front in the entry hall, and I used it for the Vizier, which allowed me to stack so many blizzards, the poor teleporting bastard died faster than either of the other two bosses. You can see the regen icon over Blue's head.

Diablo... I just stacked a long line of blizzards back and forth across the hall and let him charge me (slowed) through them over and over. He takes so little damage standing still, but once he starts moving, he absorbs more pounding than you would expect.

The poor guy didn't put up much fight. I used two mana potions after the shrine regen wore off. That's it. He died way too easily. Not quite as painless for me as Hotfoot's hydra slaughter, which completely humilated him, but this was almost as bad.

Blue ended the game with her scepter and boots from Normal. Amazing. She had terrible luck with Frosties, as you may recall, but eventually gambled them.

My final assessment of Fire-only vs Cold-only is a tossup. Fire has it easier, and safer, most of the time (at least with Hydras -- Meteors and Firewalls are not as safe) but really gets the business from resistant opponents and has a worthy challenge in Hell Act 4. Cold gets the business in Normal difficulty and through early Nightmare, but once Mastery comes online and Blizzard (or Frozen Orb, if you choose that) gets enough levels going, the killfest begins. Cold never sees the level of challenge that Fire encounters at times. Fire is a wild ride between ridiculously safe/easy and extremely tough, while Cold is a steady ride that is harder on average but has no nemesis opponents or situations.

The only question now... is how Lightning-only will compare. I'll let you know when Zap finishes her run.

Bluebonnet finished her complete-game clear at clvl 53, with one death. No monsters parked or skipped, no maps rerolled, no save-exits. I take more and tougher risks with softcore characters and virtually never Save and Exit with them, because that is how I learn what will and won't work in the nastiest situations. Blue's only death came in the Ruined Temple in Hell in a situation that was hopeless before I ever entered it. She survived at least five other hopeless situations, including that ridiculous trap on the river in this final session, and getting mobbed in the corner of the Viper Temple and drinking most of a belt of full rejuvs. She had far more dangerously-close calls in Normal than I'd care to admit to, and that continued well into Nightmare. I believe my performance with her was stronger (and wiser) than my run with Hotfoot, and that ultimately Hotfoot had it easier overall. I suppose it depends on whether you prefer the occasional, really tough fight, and a relaxing pace otherwise, or continuous lower-level but unrelenting danger and tension that Blue underwent, as to which was truly harder.

- Sirian

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