INTRODUCTION

It's time for me to kick back, grab a beer, set aside my variants and offbeat playstyles and underpowered builds, and enjoy a relaxed game with a powered up character.

I am finally going to get around to trying my hand at Frozen Orb. While I'm at it, I'll toss in some Static Field, even though I wouldn't really need it here in single player. But what the hey, you know. I'm going to get to 25 Strength (you could not PAY me enough to suffer through another char with a two-row belt, like Ember, sorry) and the rest to Energy. ALL the rest to Energy. 10 Vit all the way, baby. Yep. Dyin's no problem to a softcore wussie. You just dust yourself off and rejoin the fight!

So what's the deal here with this name? Well, that's for kicks. "Softcore Wussie" fits my taste for irony on more levels than I am going to explain. How can a sorcie using the two strongest available skills be a wussie? She will mow down whole screens of targets, that's not very wuss-like, is it? Well, apparently some think it is, if you pay little or no heed to survival. Kill kill kill die, kill kill kill die. So it goes. I'm not bothered. I'm going to have some fun here, old style: jump on out there and dare them to kick my ass if they can. Ooh yeah, this is gonna be some kickassin type fun, I tell you. Such chars are sure to die -- only takes one slip -- but who's counting? I won't be. Unlike all my other chars (ALL my other chars), this time I won't be telling you how many times I die. Well, maybe at the end. If I bother to keep track, that is.

NORMAL DIFFICULTY

The game won't hardly even begin for Wussie Girl until clvl 30. That's when her big skill comes along, and everything up to that point is just marking time. So what I am going to do is stay in normal. That's what a smart softcore wussie would do: keep things easy, and avoid that experience penalty. Don't want deaths slowing down the process. Gamble yourself dry, keep gold low, live fast, die fast, level up fast. Yep, that's how a softcore wussie handles things. So let's get this party started!

Act One: firebolt firebolt, until clvl 12. Put one point to Warmth, one to Ice Bolt (but never bother using it), then grab Frost Nova, Ice Blast and Static Field all at clvl 6. Throw knives at Bishibosh and Bonebreaker, use some Ice Blast and take a few swings with a fat old spiked club. Bosses: Static. (Why not Ice Blast everything? Mana efficiency. Firebolt does more damage per mana)

At clvl 12, replace firebolt with fireball. Now Wussie Girl has some minor AoE punch, and I had some fun rounding up mobs to get extra damage from the same shots. Andariel: Static. Slow her with Frost Nova, finish her with Fireballs.

The Sewers in Lut Gholein meant Ice Blast for single targets and some of my now-growing Static for mob dillution. With Bluebonnet, I had to do a lot of hacking with weapons by this point. She had some rather tough moments, for Normal. Wussie Girl has much more mana, and she also has one level of Warmth, which adds to that total. Add in the Static, and I didn't need to do much swinging at all. Wussie shot them all down.

Handling the Halls of the Dead meant a lot of fireball and static. I'd have thrilled to have Glacial Spike here, but not just yet. Oh well. No big deal. By now I had a couple of +Life items going, which allowed me to tread as I pleased. Mostly. I'm not here to rummage around in Normal anyway. I just want to get to 30 and start Orbing stuff up, you know?

Finally got to Glacial Spike and Teleport. Kill rate increased dramatically, for the moment. I started looking for GS staff, even though I knew it would be pricey.

Wussie Girl took to relying solely on Glacial Spike, but for Cold Enchanted or Magic Resistant bosses, and some of the vipers (fireball was just as effective vs those cold resistant baddies, and for less mana).

The Ghouls in the Arcane Sanctuary were mildly annoying. Their cold resistance had them unfreezing too soon, and requiring many shots, yet they would not sit still for fireballs, they would run. I used some SF on them, but mostly just spammed them with GS and drank mana or carted junk to town.

By this time, I had Static up to slvl 12, which covered just about the entire screen. I was going to take it to 15, but I decided now that more warmth was a higher priority. So I left SF at 12 and increased Warmth to 4. This helped eased the mana crunch -- mana crunch despite all points into Energy, at that. Wussie Girl is big spender, you know. :)

Speaking of which, a softcore wussie doesn't hold on to much gold. Why should she, only to lose large chunks of it to multiple deaths? Living check to check, that's the wussie way. Gamble on any trinkets you can. Why the heck not.

Wussie found a lot of Experience shrines in acts one and two. As such, she was my first character ever to reach clvl 23 before fighting Duriel, WITHOUT having repeated any areas. Luckily for softcore wussies, there is no experience penalty for dying in Normal difficulty. We aren't going to talk much about that, though.

I managed to gamble up a pair of Tireless boots of Speed: fastest run and increased stamina recovery. This was very helpful to my Wussie Girl. She has to run a lot, you know, but she gets tired rather quickly. We don't need to mention deaths incurred for lack of stamina, do we?

Duriel got staticked, big bug go squishy. Who needs strategy? Just stand there and spam the SF. If you get killed, just pick yourself up, hit the portal, open a new TP, and have at it some more. That's the wussie way! Let's not talk about how many times my Wussie Girl got killed. That part isn't important anyway. Finish him off with a few gspikes. On now to act three.

Not much to say about Act Three. Shoot flayers, make icicles. Yeah. To spice things up, I could teleport INTO the midst of flayer mobs. Dare them to kill me if they can. How many times did they manage it? Let's not talk about that, OK?

Wussie Girl did conduct full clears. Why not? She wouldn't be leveling any faster in act four, not running around with slvl 1 GS and slvl 1 fireball as weapons. Frankly, it was easier to get lazy kills here in Act Three, where a couple zaps from SF and then finish whole screens with a couple ice spikes... yeah. Might as well full clear.

Did you know that undead flayers actually sting even in normal, when you run around with ten vitality? Amazing fact, but true. Let's not talk about that any more, OK?

Also, it is a bad idea to teleport into Endugu's room with no fire resistance. Silly softcore wussies who do such things before raising town portals... well they deserve to walk naked across half the jungle to get back to the fight, don't they? Let's not talk about that, OK?

Teleport is unreliable under conditions of bad lag, but even in single player there are some situations where it cannot save you from your own overcommitment. We don't really need to elaborate on that, though. Some things don't bear mentioning.

Meteors are an interesting event to a softcore wussie. Fortunately for my Wussie Girl, I had bought her a Ruby wand by the time she got to Travincal: a nice one, too: max value, +49 Fire Resistance. Cutting damage in half, that ought to trim a few off the death total. Not that anybody here is keeping track of that.

It so happened that I played all of act three in one session. This is very unusual, but when you are hurrying along heedless of death, spamming spells with a large mana pool, and playing single player without beefed up enemies, it goes faster, you know. So I decided to do something cool I've been meaning to do for a long time. And what would that be?

Click Here to find out!