ACT FOUR
Skeletorr begins the final act at late clvl 50, with 34 Str, 25 Dex, 121 Vit and 160 Nrg.
Raise Skeleton @ 3
Raise Skeletal Mage @ 9
Skeleton Mastery @ 20
Summon Resist @ 4
Iron Maiden @ 7
Dim Vision @ 5 (+3 from Wand)
Confuse @ 3
Clay Golem @ 1
Golem Mastery @ 1
Amplify @ 1
Weaken @ 1
Terror @ 1
Life Tap @ 1
Decrepify @ 1
Lower Resist @ 1
All Skills +4, from Necromancer's Wand (+2), Wormskull and Eye of Etlich
Necromancer's Wand: +2 All Skills, +3 Dim Vision, +9 Mana - bought from Akara in Hell
Wormskull: +1 Necro Skills, +10 Mana, +25 Poison Resistance - found Canyon of Magi, NM
Bloodfist: +40 Life, Fastest Hit Recovery, +5 Minimum Damage - gambled Act 2 Normal
Rare Quilted Armor: Fastest Recovery, +59 Life, +21 Fire Resist, +18 Lit Resist - gambled Act 1 NM
Eye of Etlich: +1 Skills, +3 Light, 1-3 Cold Damage, 5% Life Leech - gambled Act 3 NM
Rare Boots: Fastest Run, +13 Fire Res, +14 Lit Res, +16 Mana, +98% Gold - gambled Act 2 NM
Gemmed Large Shield: +57 Resist All - completed in Black Marsh, Act 1 Hell
Demonhide Sash: +59 Life - found Stony Field, Act 1 NM
Rare Ring: +24 Lit Res, +40 Fire Res, -2 Magic Damage, +1 Light - Gidbinn reward in NM
Rare Ring: +27 Lit Res, +13 Cold Res, +32 Mana, -2 MD, 4% Life Steal, 1-3 Fire Dmg - gambled Act 2 Hell
Civerb's Icon - gambled Act 4 Normal
Amulet: +1 Necro Skills, 50% Poison Dur Reduced - gambled Act 1 Hell
Rare Amulet with cold and lightning resistance - gambled Act 2 NM
Hotspur, Nokozan Relic, Nagelring
Effective Skill Levels:
Raise Skeleton @ 7
Raise Skeletal Mage @ 13
Skeleton Mastery @ 24
Summon Resist @ 8
Iron Maiden @ 11
Dim Vision @ 12
Confuse @ 7
Clay Golem @ 5
Golem Mastery @ 5
Amplify @ 5
Weaken @ 5
Terror @ 5
Life Tap @ 5
Decrepify @ 5
Lower Resist @ 5
This is it for Skeletorr: the big show, the curtain rising. Act Four, Hell.
The game started calmly. An army of necromages was quickly raised from the ranks of fallen Doom Casters, Venom Lords, and Corpulents.
Keeping the mages alive in this first map area was easy, but keeping the warriors alive was impossible. They got smacked down hard, charging even the dimmed targets. My warrior count rose and fell continuously.
There were no battles of any great note in the Steppes. The greatest danger was that I'd lose track of a corpulent and get spit at from behind. Skeletorr had enough life to survive such a hit, but I didn't chance it. I had to dodge half a dozen such attacks, too, but I stayed alert.
The entrance to the Plains was well guarded. Finally, Skeletorr's army was involved in heavy combat.
Spawners, Corpulents, and Doom Casters. The hordes of Flesh Beasts gave the spitters an endless supply of ammo, increasing their threat level. The battles involved a great deal more carnage, with brutal losses on both sides. Skeletorr was drinking mana potions because he had to raise so many replacement troops and continually cast new curses.
Stone Skin and Magic Resistant on the boss was a tough combination. I used both Lower Resist and Iron Maiden, and neither were especially effective. The Extra Strong on the boss gave a slight edge to Maiden, so I finished with that.
Izual took a while to bring down, but I kept him occupied with golems and tried not to doze off while I waited.
Other than those two bosses, and extra sniping from the corpulents, the Plains went by without leaving much of a mark on this tale. Now when I got to the City, that was a whole new ballgame.
Near the entrance, there was a large building teeming with Stranglers. Skeletorr realized that the time had come to dust off his Confuse curse. Better get into some practice with it now, because it would be his only hope in the Chaos Sanctuary. If he lived that long.
Confuse is a PAINFULLY slow way to kill anything, even in single player. I did manage, after a few minutes, to get a couple of those Stranglers killed off, but then the pace was just crawling and I gave up. There were at least five still alive when I left there and moved on.
Pit Lords and Dark Familiars made up the minority population. Since the Stranglers would flee once wounded, I had no choice but to Dim them. This took a brutal toll on my warriors, and next thing I know, Skeletorr was reduced to mobile artillery only, relying on the fog of war (DV) to maintain the element of surprise.
I did try other curses, but the fleeing Stranglers were just too much of a pain in the posterior. So I dimmed the entire city, end to end, and was able to make it through without any crises. Slow, steady work, relying on nothing but my mages now, or on Golly to tank against bosses and champs.
One thing of note: when I returned to that building where I'd left the Confused Stranglers, I found them all dead except one. Apparently, as with Terror, there are effects of the Confuse curse that linger even after the curse duration has worn off. It would be interesting to play a Confuse specialist in the Expansion, IF they have fixed it so that killing via Confuse actually earns experience now. If not, obviously, that would be unworkable.
Getting started on the River was a pain. Inevitably, I had to unsummon most of my army just to get down the stairs, and then try to fight a bit of a stairs trap while underpowered. Grotesques, Abyss Knights and more Stranglers. Tough draw, since the Grotesques and their pups were begging for Iron Maiden, but I could not afford it. I had to dim the mages and the cowards. I had no choice!
Like the Plains, the River became a place of unending carnage. Without Fiends to eat the Corpses this time, though, I was able to maintain a decent shield of warriors, albeit with an appalling casualty rate. The one boss on the River was dispatched quickly.
Skeletorr reached the waypoint. Next up would be Hephasto and his one-shot-kill potential -- particularly dangerous once he was wounded, when he'd be all sped up. Then would come the maze and the end of Skeletorr's army at the entrance to the CS. And from there on, true Hell. But first things first.
Hephasto drew Lightning Enchanted. Not the best, but at least it wasn't any of the three abilities I truly feared: Teleportation, Holy Freeze and Extra Fast.
There was one time he got his sights on Skel while sped up, and I ran for all I was worth. He was considerably faster than me at that point, and there was a true tempting of fate. Swing! Miss. Whew. Raise a new golem, refresh Iron Maiden, soon he was down. Not without a moment of excitement first, though.
The maze proved far more brutal than I expected. With the Abyss Knights broken up, I could not keep them all dimmed. I know it SOUNDS easy so far, just dim everything and stand around waiting, but in practice it's much more than that. Trying to keep three or four pockets of knights, or stragglers, all dimmed at once was more than I could manage with the curse duration I had on hand.
My casualties were apalling! Look at all the broken artillery!
Thanks to a pocket of grotesques, whom I deliberately allowed to spawn extra pups, Skeletorr had recruited a whole army by the time he reached the gate to tackle the boss at the door.
Golly and two stalwart warriors faced him down, while the rest of my troops milled around in the back. Skeletorr was trapped here and the situation was far more tense than it appears. Remember, this was D2 1.05, not D2X: full minion collisions, stragglers that get lost get wiped out, no mercs on hand. Just Skeletorr, a stone skin boss, Iron Maiden and a sad little slvl 1+4 clay golem.
Now we've reached the gate, and out come the first Oblivion Knights.
My troops managed to kill the first two such knights, but my losses were staggering. The survivors managed to wound a third mage and I used Confuse to finish him off, but by then, all my troops were dead. Dead and gone.
The time had come to bid adieu to Skeletorr's troops. His little minions had brought him all the way to the Gates of Diablo's Sanctuary in Hell. From here, he would have to complete the job alone, and with no means whatsoever of dealing any kind of direct damage.
This is why I put his last four level ups, and his Izual quest reward, into Confuse. At slvl 7+4, I still had less than 8 seconds of duration, not to mention that the Oblivion Knights had curses of their own. The battle from here on out would be my wits against their sheer numbers. My strategy against their unrelenting programming. My style against their brute force.
My strategy? Simple as can be. KILL NOTHING. Every non-mage in the Sanctuary was a potential troop, and I knew I'd need whole divisions of them to take down all the mages.
I drove them before me with Terror. Run, little demons, run. Gather round now. Form up.
Look! An Oblivion Knight! GET HIM! *Confuse* *Confuse*
Oblivion Knight casts Decrepify. Skeletorr casts Confuse. Oblivion Knight casts Life Tap. Skeletorr casts Terror, then Confuse. Oblivion Knight gets swarmed, pummeled, mugged. Oblivion Knight dies. Skeletorr whips his troops with more Terror, pushing the hordes before him. Look at them scuttling hither and yon! Look at them darting away at his command!
Progress was slow, and mana was draining quickly. I'd stored up a whole act's worth of mana potions, but it was not as many as I'd have liked. I managed to avoid much more drainage from Storm Casters, but I was tempted more than once to switch in Civerb's Icon for my Etlich, give up a skill point and get more mana regen. I held off on that, though.
Another mage goes down, then another. Several of "my own" troops were slain in the process, most of them by way of attacking one another rather than from mage damage. If you don't already know, Confuse is a very chancy kind of curse. Unwieldy. It's only useful here because everything else is rendered useless. You do what you've got to do!
Reaching the second lava pool and nearing the pentagram, Skeletorr is now whipping SO many troops before him with Terror, that I realize I've actually got too many. I can't even move because I am frozen in place, forced to renew and recast Terror nonstop. Must have been AT LEAST forty troops all active, all screaming for my blood when they weren't running away in Terror or battling one another in Confusion.
Praying that I wouldn't regret this, I stopped to thin them out. I summoned Golly, cast Iron Maiden on part of the mob, then spammed more and more and more golems until about two dozen of the troops had expired. I tried to save the Doom Knights and kill off mostly Venoms and Storms, since the slow walking speed of a Doom Knight is to Skeletorr's advantage. (Find that surprising? I believe if you ponder it a bit, the full circumstances of the raging curse wars between Skeletorr and Hell's mages, you'll figure out why).
Onward and still onward I pressed, struggling titanically for each foot of ground. Terror terror terror, a constant struggle to contain these restless demons, to bend the weaker ones to my will so I could use them against the stronger ones. Not a finger did Skeletorr lift in direct opposition. Not a weapon did he swing, not a single damage spell, not so much as a throwing potion used. Purely the power of his will, exerted upon the weak minds of evil.
Past the side wings now, where Terror sent many demons scurrying, only to come at me again from behind. Skeletorr had to preserve as many troops as possible to use to take down Lord De Seis. Finally I reach the mage wing, and gah, the unfriendly draw. The layout wherein the mages can appear directly on top of you as you open the seal. I had to whip a platoon of Venom Lords into the corner ahead of me, to combat a trio of OK's holed up in there. This proved tougher than any of my fights against mages out in the open, and I was not encouraged. I did prevail, however. And then I summoned Golly a few times to clean up the last couple fighters and Venoms, before I popped that seal and jumped through a waiting portal before they could materialize and instantly surround me, to conduct a summary necromancer executioning.
Return via waypoint and run to the CS. Everything clear until I near the pentagram, where Terrorized demons rush at me in packs, only to be sent scurrying for the umpteenth time by more Terror. I work hard to keep them at bay. Must not waste them, they are precious resources, limited in number.
Arrive back at the mage wing, whipping a dozen demons ahead of me. Where the Vizier represented Ember's arch-enemy, for Skeletorr the climactic battle lies here, with De Seis. This would be for all the marbles. If I succeeded here, the rest would be downhill, anticlimactic -- a mere cleanup action.
So let's get it on!
Whipping my troops into the corner was a demanding task. They struggled against my will at every turn, fought back and tried to rush me at every moment of weakness in my control. Every tile of ground obtained was hard fought and growing harder by the moment, as the mage pack began to counter my curses. Four or five minutes passed from that last screenshot to the first actual engagement with the mages. Four or five minutes to whip my troops a distance of perhaps thirty yards in game terms. Finally I get them into place and cast Confuse, and the battle is joined!
Every Convicted icon you see on the floor represents a demon fighting on my behalf, attacking mages while Confused. De Seis and his buys covered one another very effectively. It only took one curse from any of them to throw off my entire attacking force, while it took me two curses to force a re-engagement (Terror to break their targetting lock on me, Confuse to turn them hostile to the mages). This was a losing proposition for me, but I pressed on to the limits of my mana and beyond. Eventually, attrition took its toll on "my" forces, as they began to attack one another, and suffered many bone spirit and missile hits from the mage gang.
Through all of that effort I accomplished... nothing at all.
Their regenerative powers healed the minions. I could not get "my" troops to focus on any particular target. My control over these demons was clumsy at best, fragile and quite fleeting, awkward and inefficient. As long as the enemy remained grouped, they were too strong and I was getting nowhere. Oh, true enough, "my" demons inflicting some hurting on them, but it was slow and without order, and as time passed with me engaged in curse-and-countercurse for minutes on end, the minions' wounds were healing.
When two thirds of my troops had fallen, I fell back, leading the rest away, then shooing them off with Terror. "Go heal", I told them. "Go away! I'll summon you when I need you again." Of course they didn't cooperate -- they never do. Controlling demons is not for the timid. You must dominate them continually, never let up, or they will consume you. And who can keep that pace going? No wonder the heros who tried to contain Diablo and Baal have failed. The only way to defeat a demon is not to play that game at all. Even these lesser demons were too much to control, and could only be wielded like the clumsiest axe.
I had to divide to conquer. I had to get some of these mages isolated from their partners. I needed to Amplify the damage my own troops were doing, and I needed a way to get "my" forces to concentrate on one target at a time, as well as get some relief from ceaseless curse warfare. I summoned Golly to eat some of the bone spirits, then realized that I could use him as a herding tool on the mages. So I managed to lure out one mage minion a short distance by placing golems right BEHIND him to force him toward me -- good enough to Terror some troops past him and have them attack him from behind. Go boys go!
This tactic met with success! I was able to destroy one of Seis's minions!
That seemed to wake him up, for he personally came roaring out at me full tilt, his pack in tow. Skeletorr was sent scurrying away, and the next thing I know, De Seis is out in the open and it's a whole new ballgame now.
De Seis followed me all the way to the pentagram! I managed to get a Confused mob to attack him at one point, and that seemed to take the edge of his aggressive streak. He had brought three of his minions with him. This left me the perfect opening... to go back and mug the stragglers he left behind!
I whipped some more troops ahead of me into the corner, where I forced them to attack the two stragglers, who were themselves separated!
With these two minions isolated, Skeletorr was able to defeat them each in turn. The score now read three minions down, three and the boss still to go.
Time now to engage the big guy. Since he does NOT regenerate, any damage done to him accumulates directly toward victory.
Ugh, yep. Using Storms and Venoms to fight him. Not very efficient. They were harder to control, and would often use their useless ranged attacks. Still, the Doom Knights were in short supply, and came only with yet more mages to have to kill, so I used what I had available.
The minions made it tough going, though. They stayed near the boss, and together, the four of them gave me much grief, wiping out my curses as soon as I could set them up. I needed to further divide these pests.
Using Golly to push them around a little I managed to get one down toward the front gate, where I parked with a Golly treat to snack on while I returned to the pentagram. (No troops down there at the moment, so I knew I'd have to go back for him later). I managed to isolate a second minion up above the pentagram, and that spelled his doom.
Now it was down to just the boss and one minion. I led the minion away as best I could, but he was no longer enough of a pain to worry about. I began a continual assault on De Seis, luring out more and more my reserve troops. I did not quite have troops to waste, but I had plenty enough to get the job done, with even a bit of room to spare. Persistence of will led me on toward victory.
I could taste it now. As with Ember, once she had used poison potions and overcome the jail break of the Vizier's minions at the waypoint, I could TASTE the victory now. I had already won, and it was a matter of carrying out my victory to its conclusion without any crucial mistakes. Die, lord of bone spirits. Die.
There was still the minion companion to dispatch.
Then I had a couple more Oblivion Knights not yet awakened in the two side wings. They proved easy enough to dispatch by turning their own Doom Knight lackeys against them. Then the only thing left was to lead some troops down to that parked De Seis minion, the last of Hell's mages, and complete my victory.
As I said, the rest would be anticlimactic from there.
I raised nearly an entire army from the Infector's minions, De Seis's corpse, and the odd bits and pieces, for battling the Vizier. Seven warriors, seven mages.
Sadly, this was not yet the Expansion, and I had to babysit my troops back through the maze to keep from losing them, and I STILL lost five of them. Five! Oh well. Time to put down the last seal boss and wrap up this little tea party.
Now as you may recall, in Normal, Skeletorr's entire force was wiped out by a fire nova before they so much as got off a symbolic shot at Diablo. In Nightmare I got my revenge, with a few mages hitting Diablo from behind with ice bolts before he noticed them and swatted them down. Who would win the symbolic contest this time?
Diablo. So it goes.
That was naught but a Pyrrhic victory for him, though. He was doomed, doomed, doomed.
Oh, for sure, there was the usual fireworks, the big light show. Blah blah blah. "Not even death can save you from me." Blah blah.
Diablo did force me to make one concession. These slvl 1+4 golems were really eating the mana. I switched out Etlich for Civerb's Icon, reducing my +skills from four points to three, reducing the casting cost on Golly a bit, and improving my mana regen.
Here's an interesting shot of Golly #57. I tell you, it's tough to be a golem. You get put into the most unfun situations. Where's the sport in this encounter? Sheesh.
Talk about your Listerine commercials. There's a poster boy for Tic Tac if I ever saw one. Breath so bad, poor Golly is completely stupefied, and just stands there to be slaughtered by the stench.
Then Diablo actually tried to pull a fast one. Check this crap out.
Someone forgot to tell him that this is just supposed to be "going through the motions". Apparently he mistook this for an actual battle. Silly demon lord. Such tricks are for kids!
As the assassin would say, "Try and cage ME, demons." Still, that was a potential "oops" moment in the making, and I was lucky to be able to avoid that fate. For I would NOT have saved and exited. No way I was doing that whole Confuse-My-Way-Through-the-CS exercise again. This was do or die for the would-be King of Skeletons.
As it turned out, I did while he died.
When I started this character, I never imagined even for a moment that I could be standing here. I figured his power would run out in Nightmare, or perhaps early Hell. Guess not. Even with no direct damage options, no Revive, and the absolute minimum golem, I was able to complete the game. Here you see my skill trees, with the +3 skills I had in effect as Diablo died.
This was one of the funnest characters I ever played, and certainly the most interesting in terms of forcing me to find creative solutions, with only underpowered options on hand, to a variety of problems, including many I did not foresee. The sheer number of minions kept me safe in many instances, but their astounding fragility rendered that "safety" as much a state of mind as an actual fact.
I regret that changes made to the game since will not allow anybody to repeat this adventure, ever again -- not quite this way. However, other new challenges may allow a skeleton-only necromancer to have as much fun and, overall, as much challenge, without some of the more tedious aspects, like minion collisions in town, and having to babysit a large army due to the culling of any lost sheep. The summoning necro got more of a boost in these kinds of changes than anybody can appreciate who hasn't personally played a skeleton keeper, and the boosts to skeleton life in higher difficulties will make them a little sturdier, so perhaps more appealing to some. Maybe someday I will try this run again in the Expansion.
Hope you have enjoyed the ride. The game's over, but there is one remaining bit of unfinished business.
- Sirian
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