ACT THREE

To begin Act Three, Vilehand had a really nice rare blade (high damage, increased speed, high AR boost), a nice rare shield (-2 MD, fastest recov, minor life/mana bonuses), a life leech ring with +AR, rare boots with faster run and several minor resistances, rare chain gloves with all minor bonuses, and a helm with two skull chips providing some light health and mana recovery.

Stats had to be spread out (one might even say spread thin). Strength at 60, to be able to wear plated belts, among other things. Dex at 51, to use blades. That didn't leave much for Vit and Energy. Life and Mana both barely over 100.

Poison Dagger @ 9
Bone Armor @ 9 (providing 100 points of physical absorption, no help against elements).
Amp Damage @ 1
Weaken @ 1
Iron Maiden @ 1
Terror @ 1
Clay Golem @ 1 (used as a weak decoy, or occasionally with IM for Vile's only ranged attack).

Vilehand had little need for curses in general. I could have used Weaken on any sizable mobs or particularly tough opponents, but generally I just... didn't. His Bone Armor was thick, and rather than continually spend mana on Weakening opponents, I'd just let the armor protect him, recast it when it got down to only one of the three spinning shards. Vile only engaged long enough to poison each target once, and with mobs larger than three, reclicks were a problem. Hitting a target again just wastes mana, and the targetting can be pretty difficult to micromanage even with no lag. So generally I'd poison a couple, then back off a little (not far), let the mob resort, and try to increase certainty on targetting those not yet poisoned. As for elemental attacks against Vile, so far only bosses were a problem there, and Terror could not help with those (nor could the Dim Vision line of curses, which I am quite fond of but skipping for this character).

Act Three is where Vilehand would come under serious elemental attack, so I needed to be concerned now with raising his life, his mana to a lesser extent, and his resistances. Vile had found a total of five diamond chips. I transmuted three into a flawed and saved the other two. Normally I will cube all remaining chips when I leave Act Two, but in this case, his need for elemental protection is SO urgent, I may do the Cow Level hoping for more diamond chips to help speed up access to a gemmed shield.

To this end, I decided to gamble for Twitchthroe. Twitch would help with blocking, yes, and provide slightly more attack speed, both very useful for Vile's purposes. If I could hit on Twitchthroe early enough (still in Normal, preferably) I could then rely on it's +10 boosts to Strength and Vitality in figuring my goals for those stats. I remember I need 88 Dex to use a Stiletto. I will likely stop there and rely on the +AR boost from Poison Dagger skill (and likely some AR boost from a rare weapon, as I have now) to carry him through. I don't remember my target strength; I need to check back with the Chaos Sanctuary for that. But it's more than 75, and 75 is my temporary target for using a tower shield, should I turn up even one perfect Diamond. Vile already has 60, so if I found Twitch, I could get away with just five more there, in the short term, and focus on much-needed Vitality and Energy boosts. I'm also in the market for a Frostburn, and I expected to replace the skull helm with one providing lightning resistance and life boosts, or whatever good caps I got from gambling. Biggins Bonnet would be about as good as the skull helm, and rares could be a lot better.

So out into the forest we go, and it's teeming end to end with Cloud Stalkers. These weak pests did not require any poison. Vile's blade could finish them off with a normal attack. (This really is an incredibly nice rare, especially for something bought by accident!) The fetishes... sometimes they died from a normal blow, but often they had a bit of life left. (Just as with Ember, who remembered them being just a wee bit too strong in normal to die in one shot, except for the weakest ones). So Vile used poison against the fetishes and didn't worry about it. Thorned Hulks, well, those would take a poison hit and then keep right on ticking, unaware that they'd joined the ranks of the walking dead. A short time later they would just collapse into smoke.

I find myself wondering what it may have been like to play a Poison Dagger necro in version 1.0 -- you know, BEFORE the patch where Blizzard crippled poison users by no longer updating poison damage in real time. As it stands now, all you know when you look at a poisoned monster's health bar is that their true health is less than it shows, but more than zero. Now I understand their urgent need to reduce net traffic on their servers for Realms. Anyone who played the game in the first month online knows how bad it was! But... why does that fix have to apply in single player too?? Why can't Vile get to SEE the life draining out of his victims? Couldn't they have drawn a line somehow, so that single player handles the updating of poison one way, and multiplayer another way? Darn it. All I can do is guess, and wait. If the green wears off and it ain't dead yet, I have to hit again. But... I won't know until AFTER I get the next hit, how much life remains in the target. You practically have to be a computer programmer to use poison dagger, reading between the lines to figure out what is ACTUALLY happening with the game code, because the game itself provides inaccurate information. Why on earth the client-side can't estimate, the way they do with so many other things, I'm not sure. Seems to me that once the server acknowledges the hit, the client ought to be able to reliably guess from there, at least for monsters. Anyway...

The first alcove in the forest contained the Spider Cavern. Vilehand gave those nasty arachnids a taste of their own venom! Ha! Unfortunately, my head wasn't in the game here. I knew Sszark was waiting, I even knew where. I knew how hard he would hit, and that I shouldn't take him for granted, but even so I was either overconfident or merely inattentive, and it never even occurred to me cast Weaken on him. After I woke him up, I got a stab in on a minion, then Buy-a-Vowel himself charged out to the front, I stabbed him once, took a brutal hit in turn, got cursed, Bone Armor mostly shot in one hit. I recast the armor and retreated, yet somehow I missed the turn (or rather, hadn't realized how far I was retreating and didn't look for the turn soon enough) and ended up trapped down a cul-de-sac with Big Aqua and two cronies closing in on me. I lost it for a moment. True panic! This has to be the biggest tactical blunder I've made in some time. Not even caught by surprise, either, just mishandled it two ways: no weaken, and now walking right into a lethal trap.

Now folks, this is why I always put my best available ASP skill on hotkey remapped to the spacebar. (ASP == "Ass Saving Potential"). For sorcies, that is usually Teleport. Or... if playing a Hot Babe or other No Teleport sorcie, Town Portal. For Barbarians, it would be Leap Attack or Leap, maybe Howl if I am playing leapless. For Amazons, it's Valk, Decoy or Portal. Paladins, it varies by the character. Holy Freeze, Vigor, Town Portal, Smite... it just depends.

For Necromancers, the ASP skill of choice is always Terror. Terror is great not only for saving one's own ass, but also that of any coop partners or hirelings. Terror just plain rules, and Vilehand survived this fiasco ONLY because I was able to hit my spacebar the instant I recognized my blunder, cast it on Sszark's goons, and get the Hell out of that corner. Even so, the boss hit me once with Vile still cursed and I watched his bone armor disintegrate, and two thirds of the life orb with it. Gulped a minor rejuv, ran like Hell, and only when reasonably clear did I reach for the bone armor hotkey and resume the fight.

That fight wasn't over yet, and despite this brush with death it still didn't occur to me to use Weaken. Tsk tsk. Like I said, my head wasn't in this fight strategically. Tactically I did well enough to survive, but... definitely made mistakes. With the two minions still cowering in some dark corner (I tracked em down later) I was able to go one on one with Sszark and put him down. Took a while, but I did not again allow him to get past the Bone Armor.

I got a plated belt from the gold chest in the Arachnid Lair, +12 Life. That was a weaker bonus than my old belt but I wanted four rows and wanted them now. I figured Asheara would sell me a decent plated belt soon, anyway. Something in the Black Marsh dropped me a Sigon's Visor. That is usually a sale item at best, but Vilehand isn't your typical character. The mana boost on the Visor is +30, and that's better than anything else one could obtain at this point, including mana regen from skulled helms, due to Vile's relatively low mana at this point (40 in Energy). I made the switch. I also found a low grade Amber full helm of 50% Poison Length reduction and bought that, stashing it for later use.

I pressed on through the Marsh, leveled up to clvl 23, added five to Vitality (my urgent need for more mana had been temporarily sated by the Visor) and increased Poison Dagger to 10. I was content with the way a single hit would take down even poison resistant Rotted Corpses, but bosses were taking longer and longer now to kill, even though they only needed a few hits, so that was of some concern.

And then... two studded leathers on offer at Alcor. I gambled the first, then said Why Not and spent another big wad of cash on the second. And just like that, Vilehand had his Twitchthroe. Two tries! Well, the gambling luck just keeps on rolling for Vilehand. Nothing's going to be "accidentally" gambling up an uberblade, but this was pretty cool. Attack Rating now almost up to 1000 with Poison Dagger! Hitting things 87% of the time, very high percentage. Misses were rare. I could just about rely on "One Swing, One Hit, One Dead Duck", with a few exceptions.

This makes for a very different playstyle. Once you get used to the rhythm, it's actually quite easy to manage. Vile is not the quick killer, but he's turning into a much stronger character than I anticipated. Some of that is item luck, and it's still early in the game... or maybe I'm just still in Ember mode, and by comparison even an Act Two merc seems like quite the butcher of monsters. :) But seriously, Vile is doing pretty well. Sszark threatened to kick his ass, but nothing else has come close.

Well... except maybe for Shaman boss packs. Ran into a few of those, not just the Witchdoctor, and got burnt pretty badly a couple of times. Vile kicks major boo-tay against physical damage opponents, but those magic users are a slightly different breed. This goes way beyond matters of resistance. Fact is, Vilehand has nearly double effective life against physical attacks, plus high blocking makes him even sturdier; but he has rather low health and modest resistances for magical punishment. I really need to beef him up in that department or he's going to get poleaxed by Diablo's breath.

The Gidbinn reward ring helped out: +19 Mana, +20-something Fire Resist and another minor resist bonus. This ring won't carry him to Baron, but it's great for now. Also rolled up a really nice new Heavy Gloves: Half Freeze, +18 Cold Resist, +8 Dex, and some other things. I'm not going to count on that Dex permanently, but it's nice for now.

In the Kurast Bazaar, Vilehand ran afoul of another mob of magic users, led by one Cold bastard:

I actually managed to kill some minions with a frontal assault, stabbing them then letting the poison kill them, but Vile took a good bit of damage even with moving in and out of their range. Finally I had enough of that and used Terror to chase off the remaining minions, downed the boss one on one and tracked down his cronies later. This tactic worked so well, it got moved up to Primary Strategy status as a staple in the arsenal.

By now I also had leveled to 24, added five to energy, and invested my prereq point into Decrepify. Decrep is the closest thing you will find to Terror or DV for bosses and champs (and Oblivion Knights, but that's another story). Decrep's one drawback is it's incredibly short duration. Even investing wild amounts of points into this skill won't raise it to the level of continuous use. Yet... it's definitely a marvelous skill even so, with a strong short-term ASP. I keyed it up in place of Weaken and vowed to make use of it. I'd start with the Black Council. Two seconds is nothing on Realms. By the time your lag crosses both ways, half the spell duration could be over, and that's when the Realms are behaving decently! Here in solo land, though, two seconds is plenty of time to step up, take a stab or two, and back off. Monsters swing slower, hit for less, and take more damage from Vile's stab, at least the physical damage portion. I would not be investing any additional points into Decrep, but since I needed it to get to Lower Resist anyway, might as well make use of it.

Vilehand totally owned the Esem wenches. I drew a T layout, then just blocked the door. Only two at a time could attack. One stab was death to the minions. I let Sarina beat on me without concern (although her Spectral Hit did bypass the armor to some degree). I also used an old D1 tactic to kill the minions off one at a time as they stepped up: shift clicking. I won't say that I dared not move -- frankly I wasn't in that much danger -- but tactically it was ideal to maintain that position while I had them funneled and most unable to attack me. Yet if I tried to target one and misclicked, Vile might dance around and uncork the whole bottle. So I blindly shift-clicked, attacking at a DIRECTION, not a target, and that worked wonders. Sarina took so long to die (That Specral Hit offers some low Poison resistance to bosses) that she was the last one standing, but frankly this was a routine fight. I invested the quest points into Vitality.

The Disused Fane had a bit of a stairs trap. Not unknown, but usually that place is fairly calm. Then what has to be one of the top five all time worst stair traps I've seen tried to ambush Vile in the Forgotten Reliquary.

We weren't done yet, either. Four spider maguses were RIGHT ON the stairs in the Forgotten Temple. I had flashbacks to the wall to wall trap, the worst one ever, that Hotfoot found (and said No Thank You to) in the same spot, same temple, same layout, in Hell difficulty. Vile's draw looked almost as bad. Come down the stairs and a mob of fans swarming the great hero for his autograph. But no... not nearly that bad. At least there was an opening to move, and the whole room wasn't packed wall to wall. Still... if that had been two encounter groups instead of one, or a boss there... well, let's just say this was a game you could have accurately headlined: "Ambush City: Danger Lurks in Kurast Temples".

Vilehand reached clvl 25 while in Travincal. I had found a new belt, now with +22 Life. I increased Dexterity by two (to 53, in preparation for taking it to 78 five at a time from here out, although when is yet to be determined). I then added my prereq point into Life Tap and planned to use that on both Bremm and Mephisto. Life Tap is generally NOT useful with all this Bone Armor, but... with this nice dagger, I could attempt toe to toe combat, poison once then switch to normal attack and keep on stabbing, and allow Life Tap to serve as a continuing health potion to recover damage from sparks, poison, or other magical damage that bypasses the bone armor. Like Decrep, this skill probably isn't something I'd get for Vile if I didn't have to, but since I do, might as well put it to good use. Vile's normal modus operandi is to get in, stab, then get out, but a few opponents make that problematic, so it should be good to have other options.

So here we go with the Council. I adroitly lured them out only one at a time (I'll comment more on how and why, later on, in another chapter, for reasons I can't reveal now). Then, frankly, the fights were disappointing.

Disappointing?? Yep. Old Sszark hits harder than these chumps. Or maybe that was the Decrep in part. I didn't really let them lay into me. Their death explosions hurt the most, by far. Vile is going to need some more vitality and serious resists to do battle with any bosses in nightmare with more than one elemental enchantment. Imagine a Cold Enchanted Bishibosh. Yes, Vile could be in some trouble in a hurry if I don't get the items. Normally I have resistances on armor: Greyform is a cheap gamble, or I'll turn up some rare with +life and resists. Not an option here. Need to get a better belt and jewelry!

Bremm Sparkfist was beaten down with a dagger. That about sums that up. By donning that Amber Helm I had saved, -2 MD from the Duriel shield, -1 MD from a ring, and Life Tap, Vile just stood there and stabbed him to death, his Life Orb resting on full the whole time. Heh, so much for that. Decrep put the brakes on Maffer, although his punch led to some armor recasts.

Mephisto's melee attack seemed to do about fifty damage when it hit. There was one time, though, that he shot his cold orb at me even though we were engaged in melee, and Vile nearly bought the farm. Oddly enough, this attack wrecked the bone armor. I wondered if that was what happened to Ember. Could there be some effect (intentional or bugged) that amplifies the cold shot? Or... maybe there is way for him to critical strike with it? Or... maybe it wasn't his cold orb after all. Maybe he has two melee attacks. I didn't get a good enough look to be sure. I just know that there was one point when he got in one heck of a hard lick, and it was different than his normal attack. Vile had a lively fight with Mephy, with some potion use, but oddly enough this fight ended quickly. My overall impression of Vilehand's performance was quite favorable. Far from having to stab these guys with poison then cower in some corner for half an hour, he was able to stand up to them in true melee style and wipe the floors with them. I'm looking forward to Act Four now.

- Sirian

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