THE UGLY TRUTH OF WUSSIE'S DEATH TOTAL

As you have deduced by now, I've led you on a bit of stage trickery. I hope you don't mind. I tried to be kind! To take you on this incredible journey, you had to fly it blind. Illusionism, misdirection, a bit of a magic show. Conceal a few bits of truth, you see, that you were dying to know. Now that the trick has been revealed, you're granted a new perspective.

Wussie's accumulation of deaths ain't what you were led to believe. Now that her disguise is revealed, the truth can be perceived. She woke up in town, her face pointing down, a surprisingly small amount. You can, on your own, figure it out: Wussie Girl's total death count. The number of times that Wussie Girl died rhymes with hero, you see. I know that's not what it seemed, but who told you to listen to me?? She lost an amount of deadly engagements that sounds like the simple word "done". Yes, I admit, the surprising truth is, her deaths totalled less than one!

You got that? Good. OK? All righty. OK then!

QUEEN HARDCORE-HEROINE'S FINAL STATS

Frozen Orb @ 20
Cold Mastery @ 6
Static Field @ 14
Teleport @ 1
Lightning Mastery @ 1
Hydra @ 6
Warmth @ 7
All necessary Prereqs @ 1

All skills +2 (Stone of Jordan, Rare Amulet with +1 Sorcie Skills)

Strength 25, Dexterity 25, Vitality 10, Energy 295, 370 Life, 906 Mana, clvl 53

LET'S TALK ABOUT NORMAL DIFFICULTY

Obviously, while I led you to believe that Wussie's braveries were carefree, I knew that a single misstep, wrongly punched potion, or moment of hesitation in the face of immediate yet unanticipated danger, could -- perhaps would -- end it all. That's what made Wussie so much fun, though! Don't you see. :)

I did not expect to die in Normal, though. In fact, I made a point of reducing my risk with the available items. (Forty Life is not very much, I must tell you. I felt a whole lot better with 70, then eventually, more than 100). So those sashes, boots, gloves of Fox were snatched up when Charsi or Gheed was selling. At clvl 12 or 13 (don't recall which), some items of Wolf went on sale and Wussie snatched up a boot, and then a glove. Her life got up to a startling 130ish. I also set in to gambling for her top priority item. On the fifth gamble attempt, at clvl 14, I landed it!

With 40 life and "fastest hit recovery" on gloves, Wussie was pretty well set for a good long time to come. Starting in act two, she'd have to pay attention to resists, not just keep going for more and more and more and more +life gear, though. This was still back in D2 1.06, so there was PLENTY of +life gear on sale. Once in act two, I upgraded her items from fox to wolf, and some of them to tiger. She got up to almost 200 life! And... that was quite nearly her limit. As you may remember, she was sporting a life total about 280ish in Hell Act One. Life for Wussie became a constant trade-off between various items offering life, resists, or other survival goodies like half freeze, hit recovery, run speed, belt size, strength boosts, and so on. I shifted her gear around a great deal, and spared no expense to try to continue to improve it.

By the end of act two, her very best +life item configuration offered her an astonishing 220 life. Heck, that's more than many of my standard characters have at that point! So she was cruising along here, even against Duriel.

However, as you can see, no fire or cold resists with that config. So her standard (everyday use) gear still had her life below 200. Fire Resistance would pose a problem for some time yet to come. Wussie would have to use a Ruby wand throughout most of her fighting career to keep decent fire resist up.

Do you remember this shot?

Quite a different take on this trick, once you realize I led this Extra Fast Cursed maniac all the way back through the jungle... not with a softcore wussie, but a hardcore heroine. Ah, but this just goes to show the INCREDIBLE power of the teleport skill. Frankly, I had no trouble, no close calls, and after I took that picture at the edge of town, Wussie led him back out into the Spider Forest, teleported across the river, and assassinated him in mere moments.

That's the thing you need to remember. Offensively, this was a completely unrestricted build. The strongest killer I have ever made (I never built an uber barb or zon). Where Ember was played with minimal offense, no teleport, yet completely sturdy vitality (almost all her points there), Wussie had everything into energy, a large pool of mana, teleport use unrestricted, and the strongest sorceress spells available in terms of survival (even now, I believe this remains true for D2X). Zap-zap-zap, Static Field smacks them down, orb or hydra lays them low. Here in Normal, Wussie was using GS, and only at slvl 1 (remember how the game FINALLY offered her a few +3 GS staves... when she was clvl 29! Ha!) Still, that was godly offense, I tell you. For me, at least. I could kill anything, and easily, with Wussie Girl. I just had to take care not to get hit.

By the end of act three, I had both life and resistance going. Wussie had it sweet, thanks almost entirely to two things that are gone gone gone in D2X: 1) Plenty of +life gear sold at merchants and 2) She could gamble not only for uniques, but for GOOD quality keeper rares while still only in Normal, then on into Nightmare. In D2X, you've got to get to about clvl 40 to get the same quality stuff -- except on amulets or circlets.

LET'S TALK ABOUT NIGHTMARE

No, not nightmare difficulty. Sorry. I mean the nightmare of the Expansion Pack. Arrgh! I originally planned a "tell all" confession here, complete with details about all the close calls wussie had, explaining to you where she ran into danger vs where I only made it SOUND like things were tough, by invoking the "we're not going to talk about that" clause. You might be surprised at least in some cases to learn what gave me no trouble, and then what did. :)

Alas, my passion for all things Diablo II has faded more quickly and more thoroughly than I can explain. This report is, in effect, my closing activity. For all the effort I put into this site, and communicating my experiences and thoughts to you, I would like to break the clock and freeze time in the moments when things were brightest and most fun. In the variant spirit, I just always presumed that anything Blizzard messed up, I could counter for with clever variant design. Alas, for D2X, that is just not the case for me. Too many frustrations, imbalances; too much junk food, not enough nourishment. Sometimes no recipe can salvage spoiled ingredients. That leads me to wonder if D2's playability was planned, or merely lucky, since D2X in every way moves away from what was fun about D2. The 800x600 resolution has to be the worst offender. The game's AI wasn't adjusted for it, so using it makes the game SO incredibly much easier to play, yet having tasted 800 resolution, I don't care to go back either, so the whole thing is dead in the water for me.

A one-man site like this, which relies on work hours spent by a single individual to generate all the content, it's a labor of love for sure. Yet if the love fades, all that is left is the labor. As recently as a few weeks ago, I thought that I might just sit back and update less, and see how I feel. Well, I've been playing other games. Four times, with different characters -- including Subpoena, who was the most fun of all my expansion characters -- I tried to pick it back up and play. Each time I grew bored to tears within an hour, sometimes less -- as bad as or worse than my final experience with Thrower, for those who remember that before I took him down. Diablo is just not entertaining me any more. Particularly in light of playing other games, which are more challenging and less repetitive, the spark just isn't there any more. With that being the case, I haven't had the will to work on this site, to post the updates to the Hall of Heroes, where some fine players have sent me some interesting stories, nor to update my own characters, nor even to post "nothing happened this week" notices, to keep you informed. I've had quite a few folks write to me in the last week, asking what's going on.

I feel like I have let you down. Not by failing to update, and not by losing touch with the game. Rather, by stringing it out, hoping that my antipathy toward the expansion would fade and I might resume some level of activity. That turned out to be a false hope, and there's no place to lay that other than at the feet of Blizzard North. I am now certain that the Lounge closing is not what did it for me. The Unter-Rares were the last straw. I worked at the game for a whole month, nursing a list of variant chars through the drudgery of normal (because there's no way to start at higher difficulty, we get force-fed the trainee section if we want to play at all) on the promise that the items would get fixed, straightened out. And then they go and break the rares? The ONE item type that purist chars rely on, now that sets and uniques can't be gambled, and with not enough runewords to choose from. That was another mistake: I paid how many dollars for a runeword option, to get what? A dozen items??? And to wait months for them to spoonfeed us a few more here or there? Screw that and screw them. That's how I feel now. Max Schaefer's comment about how his company is the expert at making games... may have been true once, but they've lost touch with me. Their audience now seems to be kids, mainly: a generation brought up on cheat codes and Diablo 1 hacks. Those hackers became the majority of D1 customers, and that was apparently not lost on Blizzard. The D2X ladders are filled end to end with level 99's, who can get there in days, and that's just one example of catering to the instant-gratification crowd. I seriously wonder why Blizz even continues to pay lip service to opposing duping.

My PK protest marked the end of me granting Blizzard North benefit of the doubt. I had made excuses in my own mind, for why they wouldn't or couldn't fix some of the game's problems, or accepted the premise that they would eventually. I wanted to believe that. I just don't any more, and nothing that has come from them since I mounted my protest has given me any reason to restore that faith. So... it's time for me to shut down. All I could possibly say from here on out would be more and more negative, and since that was never my aim with this site, my mission here is complete. I did all I could to be supportive of Blizzard, until crunch time came and it was made clear to me that my view of what's fun and entertaining is ultimately not shared by these guys. We might have some things in common, but they aren't enough. It's a deal breaker for me after all.

And yet there is one thing they screwed up that I am unendingly grateful for. You see, although I was supposed to get a beta CD, I never did. Not from Blizzard. Like Bolty and Pete from the Lounge, like several others who were invited to the beta, my beta CD never came. I'd like to tell you about the generous person who sent me a CD on the hope that my input would help make the product better, but that arrangement was made in secret, so that's one more story that won't be told. And so the beta test was a full week old when a CD reached me and I was able to start participating, and in that week, I completed my quest with Softcore Wussie: the last time I had truly untainted fun with this game. My most fun characters were Hotfoot, Blue, Ember, Skeletorr, Astra, Lytra and... Wussie. What did they all have in common? Hardcore variants. Well, OK, Hotfoot and Blue weren't hardcore, per se, but they were my practice runs for hardcore. They were the chars with which I pushed the limits to see what I could or could not handle. That's the main thing missing from D2X: the continuity necessary to play Hardcore without a cookie cutter uberchar. Most of the game is mind-numbingly easy, and then a few things are just plain silly, rather than difficult. The very style of gameplay I enjoy the most got stabbed through the heart in the expansion, and now it's dead. Yet I did have fun with D2. Although Ember's run through act four nightmare was the most challenging thing I did, and Skeletorr's entire adventure was the most strategic, Wussie's Hell run was the most fun. I was able to reach the pinnacle of entertainment with this game solely because Blizz screwed up and didn't get my beta CD to me. I had no idea what a favor that was! In hindsight, I'd have had more fun if I hadn't participated in the beta at all, but that one week delay gave me my greatest satisfaction in playing Diablo II.

For you see, Wussie almost died at the start of Hell. Like, unbelievably close to death kind of incident. That's one fight I simply must discuss. It is the last thing I will write about concerning this game.

LET'S TALK ABOUT HELL

Remember this picture?

Stairs trap, MSLEB with Fire Enchantment, too. Any multishot archer is a BIG DEAL (TM) to this char, but a LEB? Yikes. You can see Wussie's hydras down there targetting that boss. You can see a white globule spinning by Wussie to her right, making her hair stand on end. So here's what happened. This boss comes charging up there, hydras are still firing at her, she is sparking in waves. Wussie was in DEEP trouble and I had to get her out of there. Only... the stairs were in the path of the sparks and she got hit and... I got up those stairs alive, with two hit points left. Two.

In the account, I said, "When Wussie got back from town..." and the implication drawn was that she had died and had to return. Obviously not, since she made it to queen. I did go to town, though. See, I never lied to you in this. I carefully left out details to shape the conclusions you would draw, and I also talked hypothetically about "softcore wussies" and how much difficulty they had, but I never connected the two. I either concealed some of the information, or I wrote in general about situations. I didn't say anything false, and tiptoeing along the edge of that limit is what gave this account its humorous, coy flavor. Wussie did go to town, and I had to think very carefully about what to do, as that MSLEB boss was right there waiting for me at those stairs.

And that was the great fun of this character. She was NOT a wussie, not to any degree. I was full clearing, on one pass, no rerolls, no save and exit. I figured there were two things I had to do. One was to get away from the boss, which meant teleporting PAST her into uncharted territory and securing some ground somewhere on that tiny level from which to operate. The second thing I had to do was not set her off. I thus had to WAIT in town for shiver armor to dissipate, as I could NOT afford to have it go off, and cause the boss to spark, as I ran past her, and likely tempted her. Turns out I DID tempt her, as she was THAT close to the stairs. She was right on them, in fact, and she DID hit Wussie with the multishot fire-lightning enchanted arrows as I ran past her. She only hit me with one of the five arrows, thank goodness, and gulping a full rejuv allowed me to keep running. And run I did, then teleported into the middle of the room, into the midst of her minions, then teleported again and again and again until I got to a safe corner.

That picture you've seen. Here's the version you haven't seen yet:

While in town, I had temporarily sacrificed cold resistance for more life. I had all kinds of items for wussie by now, yet she had been STRONGER in Nightmare. I had to give up a shield with 50 hit points to start using that 3D Large shield, you see. In Act Two, I would be obtaining a Stone of Jordan for her, sacrificing another 39 hit points off a ring. She was typically running under 300 life through most of Hell. She would eventually find/gamble better stuff in act three, able to have resists, supplmental safety bonuses like half freeze, hit recovery and poison reduction, and still have life bonuses, but that was some time away yet. The final item that allowed her to max out everything came into play at the City of the Damned -- yes, that late. It was a rare mask with resists and high life and more. But for now, I still had to swap items as the situation called for more life or a particular resist or whatever. Here you can see the shot I got of her altered stats with a temporary item config as the battle with the MSLEB was in progress.

Stuck over in that corner, Wussie was NOT yet safe. The MSLEB was trapped in the stairs niche, but this was a crowded level and there were all kinds of monsters awake now, including a second LEB who, of all things, was Cursed. Cursed LEBs tag you with Amp if a spark hits you, so Wussie is running around cursed, ready to take double damage, and it's just really really exciting and fast-paced stuff as I continually had to teleport to avoid the crowds. I finally got a handle on that second boss...

Once the rest of the place was cleared out, I worked the archer boss with hydras. These were very low level hydras, though, working a Fire Enchanted boss, so they weren't doing all that much. This fight took minutes, and Wussie had to brave archery shot and fat white gobs several times, as the boss would come out after Wussie when she went to refresh the hydras. Wussie had several more close calls.

The final blows were dealt with Frozen Orb.

That was the closest that Wussie came to death, but she had countless other dangerous moments and many close calls. Act One in particular was brutal, with piles of multiple shots opponents, including some with one-shot kill potential. Remember this gal? Wussie ran away BETWEEN the arrows of a volley, which if any of them hit, could have slain her instantly.

I'd like to go on, to write about all the other interesting engagements that Wussie had. One notable problem was that in Act Three, I had to be careful about showing the name of the hireling. That could have given away, to an alert reader, the fact that Wussie had survived through a specific fight. So I very carefully edited around the Iron Wolf icon on several occasions. Here are some shots from act three and four, showing where Wussie's gear finally came together and some of the shots where you can see a particular mercenary. Feel free to cross check against the other pictures, if you are curious about who survived what.

Some of the toughest moments for Wussie came in act three, especially that cursed MS archer in the Forgotten Temple, and the battle with Sarina and that mob in the Ruined Temple. Yikes. Like... I still don't even want to talk about that one. :) Whatever you can imagine, that was worse. It was even tougher than the MSLEB in the Cave, just that I didn't quite come as close to dying in terms of actual damage applied to Wussie. The sewer, with its hordes of undead flayers and multitude of one-shot-kill bosses was another serious hot spot. I had entered one corner, been swarmed by bone flayers and had to retreat and enter by another stairwell, and work my around very carefully, making continual use of teleport to keep waterways between Wussie and the enemy.

Skeletorr and Wussie Girl were the two characters with which I had the most fun. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that they were also the only two characters with which I performed a hardcore complete game clear. That was the main thing that inspired me to open the Hall of Heroes: not the achievement aspect, but the celebration of the playstyle. For me, this was Diablo II at its best, and I wanted to share that with you.

I hope that you have enjoyed my writings about the game, that they have been a good investment of time and energy for you. I'll miss the connection to fans of my site here, the piles of emails, the kinship, the cheerfulness. If you're still playing and enjoying the game, knock out a few bosses in memory of my chars and best of luck to you. If, like me, you've moved on from the game, I hope you have some good memories to take away with you.

My site won't disappear, and neither will I. I may write another report or two about Jagged Alliance, or I may open up other pages. My Descent Level archive has been here for a number of years, and my Diablo II pages will likely be, too. I just won't be adding much more, if anything, to them.

I might keep the Hall of Heroes open, but I would need help to do that. As in... a volunteer or two to crop the screenshots and put everything into the appropriate html format. I could then upload the reports and keep the Hall going on that basis. Personally, though, I don't have the drive or time or will to do that workload myself, so unless some people step forward to help out, I won't be able to continue its operation.

So here's a salute to the last of the Fun-to-play Sorcies, when this was my favorite class, before the spell timer stole her joy:

It's been fun. I'm glad we got a chance to talk about it, even if it did take six months to get around to it.

If you want one last run of entertainment, go back now and reread Wussie's tale with the knowledge of her true nature, and enjoy the dance around the truth and through the humor and under cover of misdirection that I wrote for you, with you being in on the joke this time. My final gift to my Diablo II fans. Best wishes, and take care.

- Sirian

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