Rogue Revival Team Launch

[Sullla]

I put up two more summaries of Rogue Revival on my website, so that it now covers up through Act One and Two of Nightmare. I also pulled some posts out of this thread to provide a better description of the whole Countess experience, so please let me know if this is not OK.


http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/diablo2.html

[ErickSinda]

The stilletto is all yours. I'll try to show up a little early Monday and dump all the extra stuff I've collected on the ground for everyone's perusal.

Erick.

[ErickSinda]

Not two meetings into it, and I have to post my first absence. This coming Thursday is my 27th birthday, and my friends are dragging me kicking and screaming to the nearest bar to feed me beer until I'm blue in the face.

<== me, after lots of beer.

Well, maybe they're not dragging me, per se.

Either way, I'm not going to be around, unfortunately. I'll catch up with you guys on Monday, for sure.

Erick.

[Jaffa]

I'm also not going to be at Thursday's session, as it clashes with a Queensryche concert.

[Sirian]

This week, the Rogues are destined to tangle with the Great Mother.



All of our magic combined may not be enough.

LET US PRAY.


- Red Rover

[Cyrene]

So....


What's the Vegas Line on the Over/Under for Rogue Deaths in the Claw Viper Temple tonight?

[Sirian]

Unless we get the hardest draw (more bone warriors and greater mummies) we'll come back and do it again. There is a stain upon our honor that must be erased.


- Sirian

[Sullla]

There was much adventuring done tonight by the Rogues, ranging from the depths of ignominy to the highest heights of triumph. Here's an illustrated synopsis of our trip through the Claw Viper Temple (Hell).



Here we are about to enter the Temple, waiting around for Cy to finish up with some monsters around the Lost City waypoint. The previous night's session in the Claw Viper Temple was only the second time we had ever completely lost an area (the other being Level 2 of the Pit), so I think everyone was eager to get another crack at it. I was personally praying we wouldn't get another all cold-immune draw on the monsters, but no such luck. Perhaps it was fated to be that way.

We draw a much more friendly staircase layout than the previous trip, with the stairs tucked away in a somewhat defensible cubby. Unfortunately, the first group of enemies we run into is a big pack of Viper Champs. They start charging, there's no room to work with at all, and Rogues start dropping like flies. I high-tailed it out of there back up the stairs one step ahead of death, then wait to see if anyone managed to get a safe portal up. After a few minutes of chaos, Sirian sets up a new portal in what appears to be a safe location:



As you can see, by this point most of the Rogues have already lost their equipment. This position is tenuous at best, though, and within seconds there are monsters pouring into it, WAY more than we can handle. In the confusion, I believe that door behind us was opened, by the monsters themselves, and there's more skeletons and snakes coming after us. Rogues start teleporting in every direction (accidentally waking even MORE enemies), I manage to get out through someone's portal, and the situation is an utter mess.

We try to make a third stand further north of the stairs off another portal, and have some mild success, but then Sirian jumps into a closed room to scout it (thinking there are maybe 3 or 4 Vipers inside). Well, the whole room is packed with snakes, there's a boss in there too, Red_Rover is dead in less than a second, and then the monsters open the closed door and come pouring out at everyone else. We've completely lost control of the situation, bodies are everywhere, monster boss packs roaming free throughout the level. At some point in time here, I get killed for the first time and lose my equipment. As it turns out, Dathon is the only one who manages to hold on to his gear.

What happened next? Everyone died a lot.



Sirian, Jaffa, Cy, Hawk, ME003, and Erick were all doing their best to draw the monsters away from the portals we had set up to create SOME kind of safe ground for us to do the level. They were making some progress, but there were a LOT of bodies on the ground. Hawkmoon described it as a "slumber party" down there in the Temple, which had me laughing. For about 20 minutes, it was nothing but death messages over and over again. I honestly thought we had absolutely no chance to clear the level.

So what am I doing at this time? Well, Dathon is wisely staying in town since he's the only one with any gear at this point. I'm staying in town too because
1) I stink at doing the rapid teleportation thing and figured I'd do more harm than good down there
2) I actually have quite a bit of experience at this point, more than a third of the way to the next level, and I'd prefer not losing it all if I can avoid it.
You can feel free to call me "Svava the Coward" at this point. But I honestly didn't see anything I could do to help, so I just waited around until I could accomplish something useful.

Eventually though, all those deaths managed something important: the area around the stairs was relatively cleared out. So we all gathered together and jumped the stairs, with Dathon tanking the snake down there while everyone else pounded away with magic:



Look at all those bodies! And that's just by the entrance. Now take a look at all the bodies on the minimap:



And again, those are only the closest ones on the minimap. But that Viper champ actually does go down, and then a second viper, then a third, with Dathon taking for the group and everyone else shooting from safety. We manage to clear out the intial hallway by the stairs, much to my own surprise:



Continued, next post...

[Sullla]

As you can see on the minimap, we managed to clear out the small initial hallway down to the entrance to the main north-south hall. I had managed to buy a longbow by this point in time so that I could at least do Enchant fire damage to the enemies; I noticed that some of the other Rogues were punching away to do Enchant damage. Hey, whatever works.

Of course, no sooner had we begun to enter the main hallway when the closest viper boss showed up:



He announced his presence by of course killing half the Rogues in rapid succession. But Dathon was able to tag him with a Prevent Monster Heal poignard that Erick had been keeping in his stash (and which he had recovered from one of his many bodies). Once the boss was tagged, we were able to shoot at him from a distance with either arrows or magic, popping back and forth between two portals at opposite ends of that small hall for safety. After a while the boss fell to the lightning attacks of the Rogues (which also had a quasi-knockback function).

With the boss out of the way, the going got a little easier. We headed west at the first intersecting corridor, still taking on the enemies in groups of one and two, avoiding waking large mobs. We managed to clear that short corridor and then the room at the end of it, killing our first Unravellers in the process. After that, we headed north up the main corridor:



You can see we had secured the stairs and the one room to the west. The gigantic concentration of bodies to the north was where I had a portal set up and where there had been a lot of attempts to draw monsters away from other portals. It was knee-deep in Rogue bodies there. Grisly as it may have been, we were making progress though up the hallway.



Here we've reached the little niche where I had my portal set up. About half of the Rogues have their bodies back at this point, and we're starting to feel good about our position. From this spot, we went west again down the corridor to pick up another huge concentration of bodies; my original body was in the room directly below MoonGrabber's portrait on the minimap. That room linked up with the room we had earlier cleared out, giving us a loop of cleared ground with which to work. Once we got there, I realized (to my own surprise) that we were going to do it. It would take another hour or so to do the rest of Claw Viper Level 1, but the Rogues full-cleared the whole thing.



See? That's the map from later, when we had finished the whole floor. But before we could completely celebrate, there was still Fangskin on Level 2 to take care of:



Extra Strong/Extra Fast/Lightning Enchanted is not a good combo to deal with, but Fangskin didn't start out on the central platform and that gave us a safe zone to work with. Cy and Jaffa absorbed the brunt of the lightning while everyone else blasted away at Fangy. Not being Fire Immune, he died pretty quickly from Enchant damage. After that, the Rogues shot down all his minions, then started in on the Preserved Dead (who could be frozen and shattered, unlike the Cold Immune skeletons). Jaffa really saved our butts here by standing at the top of the stairs to the central platform and drinking an entire inventory of red potions to keep the enemies out of our hair, allowing everyone else to shoot them down from safety. This floor was easy compared to the previous one, only one or two deaths - much better than our disastrous foray here in Nightmare!

I finished with only two deaths for the night, which I'd like to chalk up to Diablo expertise but was mostly due to staying in town when everyone else was trying to move the monster packs. Maybe I'll try to work on that in the future...

Summing it up, it was an amazing team effort to get through that first temple level. Everybody really pitched in and worked together as a team to salvage a situation that certainly appeared to be hopeless. I hope some others got some decent pictures or stories out of this that they can add here too. Just wanted to say again - all of you are the best.

[Sirian]

Just to remind everybody how much of a variant we're running, an unrestricted character could walk in there and solo the place.

Here's a shot of my Tiger Strike sassy, soloing Pit Level 2, where she only once even broke a sweat.



All those non-fire-immunes in the Viper temple would get a kick out of this girl.


Truly, though, it was more than any 20 minutes with the portals. We went down into the Temple at about 8:20 PM EST and it was 9:20 PM before we had that tenuous foothold at the front door. Even that was a desperado gambit on my part, calling everyone together to descend in a pack, naked girlies going to punch and throw magic, and try to carve out a niche after we finally managed to lure most of the monster pack away from the stairs.

Also, Sulla sometimes gets Jaffa and Cy mixed up.

I bought a wand of Attract lvl 1 and a dagger of Confuse lvl 2 for this fight. The attract only lasted 3 seconds per shot, though, and wasn't as helpful as I had hoped. Ironically, the Confuse did a much better job, lasting six seconds and affecting more monsters.


As for my blind hop into the room with the snakes... OK, that was a mistake.

This is probably as hard as it can get, since even fire or physical immunes can be slowed or pinned with cold magics and bodies shattered. The cold immune skellies combined with the charging snakes (who charge MORE since our knockback bows keep giving them room and triggering their charge AI) made for the most compelling challenge I can remember since Wussie's hairball on Cave lvl 2 or Ember's jailbreak in the NM Chaos Sanctuary.

Sulla, do you want me to package up some of my screens and send them to you?


- Sirian