Here is my write up of some of my experiences and thoughts from playing on the EST, one of Sirian's Diablo 2 team concepts.

I took the role of the Paladin in the EST team. The EST Paladin is a support role--my job was to help the other support characters enable the Sorcies to do their job--kill monsters.

I found the building of my EST Paladin an interesting task. I would be spared the resistance restrictions of the other players, and I would be bonused by the Paladin’s innate blocking skills. The normal Paladin problems of the difficulty of getting good AR and damage at the same time would be heightened by the EST rules, though, which would, unless I was incredibly lucky with a drop or imbue, pretty much guarantee a low-damage weapon. The rules also severely restricted my available auras and combat skills.

The decision I eventually made was to build him for two different roles, one for "early" play consisting of Normal difficulty and the beginning of Nightmare, and one for "late" play consisting of Late Nightmare difficulty and Hell difficulty.

My reasoning was that early on, the sorcies would tend to struggle, having to operate with low-damage spells, small mana pools, and very low hit points. It was at this point they would need the most protection and for me to be the most aggressive. With this in mind, I selected sacrifice/prayer for my early combat skill/aura combination. I boosted prayer up to slvl 3 to keep the party’s life filled up and chose sacrifice as my melee skill as it boosts both AR and damage. This worked out pretty well. If I were doing it again I would stop prayer at slvl 2, but live and learn. The prayer was helpful, and with the sac running I was a pretty stout primary melee character throughout normal difficulty even in large games. Actually, I was too good a melee character in Normal difficulty for the concept of the team, as I was very effective in melee and tended to be more active than was actually necessary in combat. Eventually my weapon restrictions caught up with me, though, and Sac could no longer work its magic without enough base damage to use its multipliers on. As a very high damage weapon or concentration were not available choices in this case, it was time to move on to a different skillset.

Here is where my plan for the late role of the Paladin and reality diverged. 8-). I had PLANNED to shift my aura to meditation, and use my stat points to pump dex and keep my to-hit ramping up with monster clvls so I could continue to hit with sac. I thought we were bound to come across a socketed knout and that would give me enough damage to get by with sac’s insane +432% damage kicking in. I envisioned myself dropping back to the shadow of the Barbarian and picking off stragglers and lone monsters that broke through to threaten the sorcies while the others did the bulk of the killing.

Four things happened to change my mind. 1) we lost our barbarian, 2) I got a good look at Trefflix’s (bowzon) capabilities, 3) LL posts on Iceblink and smite Paladins, and 4) I got some excellent advice from a friend. With no barbarian, I needed to maintain a tankly role, especially after Nightmare when we lost our shield Zon as well. As Treff’s damage ramped up, I noticed that he was much better at straggler control than I was. With his ranged attack, he could break off the main attack instantly at any time and immediately shift his damage focus to virtually any monster without ever having to move. I also noticed that he had realized this and was doing a great job of watching our respective rears 8-). The fortuitous Iceblink posts put the thought of the utility of being able to lock up nasty bosses with smite into my mind. And finally, while playing with my test (non-EST) Paladin in a friendly game with Charis (before he joined the team), and managing to die all over the place in early NM, Charis rather tactfully pointed out that deaths to a tank in EST would be extremely disruptive (and dangerous) to the rest of the team, and that I ought to consider pumping up my vitality. Simply put, the fastest way for me to kill something on the EST in Nightmare and Hell difficulties is to just stand there and let a sorcie do it for me. The more hp’s I have, the bigger a mob I can try to "post up" against and the longer I can hang in there against them while those lovely aiming circles of meteor spread out around their feet 8-)

So I transitioned to my "new" second role--the amazing bubbling pseudo-Valk 8-). I pumped meditation to the max, and enabled Holy Shield and Smite. I initially tried to continue using Sacrifice as my main attack, swapping to Smite just for tough guys or boss types. Eventually I noticed that I was taking a lot more damage from regular monsters than from the bosses, and belatedly figured out that a lot of the damage I was taking was coming from the monster I was fronting and not from the rest of the pack. Once I swapped to 100% smite I cut my potion usage in half (of course, it also cut my damage down to 16-36).

I was still guzzling reds at a rate of at least 5x the rest of the team (I would leave town each time with an entire 4-row belt and 2/3 of a pack of reds each time), but I had found a working combination that I came to really enjoy. The die was cast, and the killing was fun. Besides, you could tell when I managed to poach a killing blow off the poor sorcies--through pure chance, the normal gear I wore would up with around +260% gold from monsters. My rare killing blows helped finance the team’s gambling addicts 8-).

Overall I am quite happy with the way my Pally turned out. He couldn’t kill anything solo in Hell difficulty. Hell, he couldn’t even DAMAGE anything in hell difficulty. But that was never the point of the role I was playing. I was proud to be called "bubbles" 8-) (a reference to the graphic of the Meditation aura). At slvl 21 it regenerated the EST mana at +380% with a radius of 35.3 yards. That is slvl 30 warmth! There is also a lot of fun to be had in being a nasty-boss smiting specialist 8-). There is nothing quite like locking up Mephisto or Hephasto to put a smile on your face.

EST Play

I found EST play to be the most intense Diablo gaming experience for me since D1 Ironman. I needed to know who was where and who was in town so I would know what resources to expect to help me out (one of the great ironies of my role was that I was a support character that relied 100% on the support of others to live). I needed to watch the whole screen the whole time. Someone wander off my screen? Start monitoring their health bar so I’ll know if they find trouble. Battles were an endless loop of prioritize, act, reprioritize, act, reprioritize, act, etc. etc. In normal D2 play you almost never leave a monster with 10% of their health left to attack a new one. In EST play it was SOP for me. The monster with 10% of its health left will NEVER reach the sorcie before he goes down, but the new one blundering on-screen with full health might--time to hustle over and put a body on it. When things were going well it was an intense immersion into the game world. In other words, a lot of fun....

Team dynamics

It was a long road, but we went from keystone cops to a flexible killing machine. In Normal Act One there were some episodes that were either low comedy or high tragedy--in other words, you just wanted to beat your head against the monitor 8-). It wasn’t actually bad play though, just bad TEAM play, and from good team players, oddly enough. I personally pulled some remarkable boners. We just came from different backgrounds and had different playing styles. An illustrative example of team development would be our handling of LEB’s. After a couple of disasters with these, we eventually settled on a very formal method of dealing with them. Rules of engagement (minions first, isolate leb), rules of procedure (everyone get clear of leb before attack and signify they are ready), and rules of precedence (x is the leb killer, with curse help from nec). You felt like you needed to put on a tuxedo and shake hands with the damn monster before you could hit it. But it worked. Once this was working well, it slowly transformed into a simple "I got him" from whoever wanted the primary role against the leb, and finally morphed into a voiceless un-choreographed dance of death with the monster that left all the EST standing and the monster dead, with polite kudos to the slayer.

The final Hell/Hell run was just slick 8-). A flexible, always moving, always supportive, interlocking team. It was a long road, but the original concept from Sirian was completely validated. And a lot of fun....

Individuals

Ah yes. A team is no fun if we are all the same 8-). I’m going to give a few words about the folks I played the most with. All who played on the team were valuable, but I’ll stick to the ones I played the most with.

Sirian. Besides being the creator, leader, referee, and den mother, he is also a hell of a player. I am basically an old granny on the point, so, in order to finish the game before the next millennium, Sirian took point a lot of the time. This also allowed him to get a good look at the monster situation first, and then pick his spot and curses to shape the battle. Make no mistake. Sirian and his curses saved as much ass as all three sorcies combined. He wasn’t killing. He was saving us from being killed. Dim Vision and Terror are powerful weapons. For some reason, I never cared about lower resist 8-). And another thing. Let me introduce Sirian the eel. Sirian is, by an order of magnitude, the most elusive D2 player I have ever gamed with. The situations he can extricate himself from boggle the mind ("It’s inconceivable!" for you Princess Bride fans). More boggling, he eschews the "run like hell" method of self preservation for the art of the matador--the tiny measured steps that allow the monsters own ai to do them in as Sirian lives to curse another day. He is a tempting fate performance artist. We love you, man 8-).

Jaffa Tamarin (Flame_Vixen). I was fresh off my Hot Babe when I started EST, and acutely aware of the hazards of a fire sorcie. In normal, I probably kept a closer eye on him than others because I knew how, like strafe, inferno can be hazardous to your health because it locks you in place. I tried to get in front of him to block off monsters and set up the inferno blasts. Whatever special effort I might have taken was repaid 10,000-fold in Nightmare and Hell difficulties. There is no sweeter sight than, when, surrounded, your health bar flashing full/empty/full as you frantically punch 8 or 10 potion buttons, you see, oh, 10-20 meteor aiming circles blooming under the mob’s feet, and you know, you KNOW, that they are dead and you will live. Thanks Jaffa.

Trefflix (zParticle). I played bow-zon in the test EST. I know what it is like to run around in normal difficulty feeling like a 9th wheel. But man, did he come into his own. Awesome, pinpoint, freezing damage, delivered as needed. He never had the overall wide area mass damage potential of the sorcies, but the ability to focus ALL the damage on any one monster of his choosing was a huge asset. Especially as he has great vision, and gets those annoying suckers off your back for you. I still remember having Izual locked up, the whole party concentrating on him, when a stray wandered up behind me. I never missed a beat. I knew bow-man would be watching. He shifted his attack, offed the stray, and went right back to primary. Thanks.

Static (aka StaticField-X or Chukles). Static is the best name because we gave him so much 8-). Imagine. You have teleport, so staying clear of monsters is not a primary concern--you can always hop out. Your primary attack tends to wake up mobs off-screen. And b.net is a lag-fest. This adds up to character deaths. It doesn’t matter how good you are, these facts will kill you. And, being loving team-mates, we would never rub it in, right (heheh)? Credit where it is due--Chukles adapted and got very clever and his death rate dropped down below mine before the game was over. I just wish I got to dress cheerleaders...

FrostyBeer(Espy Lacopa and Charis). Ah, the iced beer cometh. 8-). A bit of a difference in players. I try to set a standard for inane commentary in-game, and Espy was a proud partner 8-). Seriously, a good player, and thanks for the fun. Charis is an old friend from D1 days, and you just can’t name a more persistent, innovative, tactical, team-oriented player. Therefore I found it vastly amusing to see him turn into (at times) a reckless, hard-charging, meditation dependent, mana-addict 8-). A warning to all meditation paladins: slvl 20+ meditation around sorcies is like catnip around cats...

Things I’ll Never Forget

Let’s see. There was the night I mk’d Sirian in the Flayer Dungeon (oops), the night I managed to get myself killed vs a Stygian Watcher, the night I just stood in a council member’s hydras and died because I thought they were Flame’s hydras and I was watching everyone’s health bar but my own, the night I sold instead of repaired an iceblink (ouch), the running "watcher" and "barrel killer" jokes, and the growing number of dubious portals pronounced "safe" for folks to come down 8-).

The single battle I will probably never forget, though, is just a footnote to the EST games. Late one night, we were down to 3 folks, Sirian, Jaffa, and myself, and clearing out a couple of Temples in act 3 for fun before we quit for the night. We had just hit the bottom of the stairs and moved enough to activate a slow-closing stair trap when Jaffa dropped, leaving the two team members with no offense and a double mob of monsters to deal with. If we ran for it, we could make the stairs, but that would hose them for good probably, and be a poor way to end the night. Sirian didn’t run. It was one of those times when it was a very good thing that there is no audio connection, as my language was rather heated--I wasn’t in the mood for a death and I saw no way to win this one. But you don’t abandon a teammate, so cursing his persistence, off we went on a mad, mad, dance of Dim Vision and dodge, smite once to stun and run, DV and dodge, duck around a corner and hope, DV and dodge. Sirian finally got the mob to lose track of us, and it was time to deal with them, extraordinarily carefully, excruciatingly slowly, one by one. It takes a LONG time to smite a hell diff minion spider to death, even with amp on, and it seems like it takes 10x as long when you are doing it scant yards from the entire rest of the mob while they stand there in DV mode. A slip of the mouse from me or a fumble on the curse keys from Sirian and we would be monster chew toys. Monster by monster we eventually carved out a little room to walk, then a safe hall, then a safe doorway. Jaffa returned to give us some punch, and the temple was ours. I don’t know how long it actually took, but it felt like hours 8-). It was one of those amazing intense gaming times when you suddenly realize that you are sitting on the edge of your chair, your jaw has been clenched shut, and you REALLY need a beer.

Thanks to all the members of the beta EST, who helped Sirian refine his concept, to all eight members of the EST, for all your help, skill, and good humor, and especially to Sirian, who thought up the concept, made it happen, shepherded it along, and let me be a part of it.

--cy

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