Well, AssIsGrass is, once more, out of retirement. For how long, I can't say, but it's possible I may finish her 3rd dot this time before something else grabs my attention. We shall see. 
I'd never conceived of AssIsGrass as anything but a dual-claw assassin. Dual claw offers a good selection of benefits for someone like AssIsGrass: blocking of both ranged and melee attacks that isn't dex-dependent, percentage AR increase from claw mastery, ability to equip claws that boost her skill levels, and the ability to dual wield runeword katars that give stat bonuses like Strength. However, it's time to face two overriding factors: the variety of good claw-class weapons to choose from off the ladder is strictly limited, and even if she were to find one, the stat requirements are crippling for a base-stat build like hers. Strength, she can get ahold of in limited amounts, and she needs it for the better pieces of armour anyway. Dex is harder to justify, and she can only carry so many charms.
So, time to try another approach. AssIsGrass 'borrows' some gear from some of her other off-ladder colleagues. First up is a Lionheart mesh armour; with a 79 Str requirement, she needs her Strength Katars or a strength ring, plus a couple additional charms with resists and strength, in order to equip it, but it itself gives +25 strength, so she can unequip the strength katar or ring afterwards. This gives substantial stat boosts across the board, as well as life and resists, and the +20% off-weapon damage is gravy. Next is a Nord's Tenderizer truncheon; even with Lionheart to boost her Str, this is one of the few elite weapons that's within her attribute budget, but it's also a relatively strong option, with significant physical and cold damage. She sockets it and puts in a Nef rune for knockback. Third, having knockback on the Tenderizer and enough Str to equip it also means she can replace her crafted gloves once again with Lavagout. Fourth... well, if she's not going to be dual-wielding claws, she might as well equip a shield. Her options are Rhyme and a 3D shield, but she's not going to be blocking much with her 50 DEX, so 3D sounds like the better option. Of course, she doesn't have any diamonds right now, let alone perfect ones, but a couple trips through various parts of nightmare should correct that problem and net her some much-needed XP as well. For now, she just buys a kite shield to put them in as she acquires them. There is still one problem, however. At some point, she knows she's going to die again, and without having enough strength tiering going on to re-equip Lionheart, corpse recovery is going to be a pain, especially since she won't be able to re-equip the Tenderizer either. She doesn't want to replace one of her angelic rings with a strength ring permanently, however, as that gives up a lot of AR, which she really needs. However, she is able to find an answer in a hat she borrows from my off-ladder necromancer. It is a necro hat, with +2 Necro skills, but the other mods are quite tasty as well -- 6% mana leech (her only source of leech), +16 strength, +19 dex, fire resist +39, and 2 sockets, one of which contains an Ort for an extra 30 lit resist. She considers whether it's worth giving up +3 shadow skills for it; earlier when she had been dependent on Claw Mastery and Weapon Block, she hadn't thought so, but now she decides the time is right to make the switch. Not only does it give her enough strength to equip the Lionheart without worrying about corpse recovery, but in conjunction with the Tenderizer it also allows her to look forward to a day when she will be able to mostly do without blue potions. A very quick test drive on the Blood Moor in hell demonstrates that the Tenderizer does indeed sport considerable killing power. The LCS shows her doing (before venom) between double and triple the damage she had been doing previously with the condensing claws. She keeps the shadow hat in her inventory along with a magekiller's ammy for prebuffing in town; this gives her a total of slvl 20 SM and slvl 11 BoS/Fade/Venom when casting in town, and 4 levels less in the field.
Suddenly, AssIsGrass finds herself with positive resists in hell! She hadn't expected to ever achieve that with her dual-claw setup. This brings up the question of whether she should switch from BoS to Fade. It didn't seem worthwhile before when it would only bring her up from abysmal to horrible... but now she has the potential to actually have max resists with Fade up. Still, BoS is her only source of faster walk/run. It may depend on what area she's in as to which she uses. Getting surrounded by Flayers without any faster walk/run doesn't sound like her idea of fun. On the other hand, facing Hierophants and the Council without Fade might be a similarly bad idea. Probably Fade will see situational use and she'll largely continue with BoS as her mainstay for the moment.
AssIsGrass decides to continue without bothering to head back to Nightmare and search for diamonds for the moment, so as to get a better idea of how well her new setup will work in hell. She finds the going is still on the slow side -- it still takes many hits to kill even one mob -- but nowhere near as painful as before. She clears the rightmost quadrant of the Arcane Sanctuary in about 15 minutes (it would have taken close to an hour, previously) and to her delight finds the Summoner on the first go. She tries Fade out just in case she were to get hit with an elemental attack, but needn't have bothered; she dodged his first couple shots easily enough and the moment she got in firing position, SM obligingly teleported into the fray and distracted him. For all the boneheaded stunts SM pulls when facing multiple opponents, when it comes to quick and efficient tanking of single high-threat targets, her mobility with dragon flight is a great asset. If I had to do it over again, though, I think I'd want to try Shadow Warrior and see if I liked it better.
Onwards! Played on players 2, solo, with Ned sitting in town.
Canyon of the Magi:
AssIsGrass didn't find the Canyon to be terribly difficult, though some mobs took longer to kill than others, most notably the cold immune Crusher mobs. She did kill a couple Crusher boss packs on her way to the true tomb, but nothing stood out.
True Tomb: AssIsGrass didn't pick the correct direction first shot, so she wound up clearing a substantial portion of the tomb. Aside from the resurrectors, her most annoying opponents here were the apparitions, due to their tendency to lay the beatdown on her shadow and trigger its AI retreat routine more frequently. Also, being PI, they tended to take a fair while to kill, and due to the stacking it was harder to pick out a single mob to kill for DS to blow up. Nevertheless she made steady if not rapid progress through the tomb.
Tal Rasha's Chamber: Duriel proved to be fairly tame; though he did take a while to kill, AssIsGrass incurred no deaths. In fact the big bug only managed to lay a claw on her a couple times and she was never under 50% health. She just ran in, kept him occupied with a shadow as much as possible, and whittled away, escaping via portal when things looked dicey only to return via the stairs. Soon enough, she was on her way to Kurast!
Spider Forest: AssIsGrass found the Spider Lair quite quickly and went down to snag her Khalim Eye. Sszark was FE Cursed EF Might; her minions were speedy enough and hit hard enough that the Shadow went down quickly and before she could recast, three minions came running after her. AssIsGrass tried to get away and get some room to cast CoS or recast her shadow, but they were just as quick as she, and two hits later AssIsGrass went down. Fortunately there were only those three in range of her corpse, so with CoS retrieval wasn't a big problem. From there she pasted those three, who'd wandered outside of Might range, then proceeded onward to find Sszark, who'd separated herself from her pack and went down without much fuss. A few more minions later and the eye was hers.
Great Marsh: The only way to the Flayer Jungle proved to be through the Great Marsh, so AssIsGrass braved the gloams to continue her journey. They were nasty enough, but with Fade up, the normal ones were certainly possible to deal with. A boss pack with a nasty set of enchantments might have been another matter, but fortunately she didn't run into anything like that. She did run into several Soul Killer and Soul Killer Shaman champ packs, however. She found the going slow at times, but not cripplingly so, especially with Death Sentry on tap to thin out the corpses. There were a few dangerous spots and one or two close calls, but no deaths.
Flayer Jungle: The trip through the jungle provided hordes of Flayers and Soul Killers, and not much else. These were sipatched mostly without too much difficulty. AssIsGrass would simply hit CoS as soon as she saw an incoming swarm, which would usually give her enough time to get the Shadow engaged, a DS up, and possibly her first corpse down. Continued use of CoS helped to ensure that her Shadow did not get overwhelmed and that flankers were not a huge problem. She made her way to the Gibdinn, secured it, and then went down into the Flayer Dungeon to snag Khalim's Brain. Mostly she encountered Gloombats and Flayers, including several boss packs, with a very light sprinkling of dolls. However, nothing gave her enough trouble to cause a death, and she reached her goal without incident.
Lower Kurast-Kurasat Bazaar: Nothing much exciting here. Thanks to her by now fully diamonded kite shield, AssIsGrass's cold resist is now up to a decent level before adding Fade, and maxed with fade. The most dangerous monsters are the thorned hulks, since they are immune to Nord's cold damage and can frenzy up on poor SM. Still, a quick CoS removes the frenzy attack, so not too difficult to deal with. AssIsGrass entered the temple dreading a stair trap, but fortunately there proved to be some room to maneuver. She cleared out the side wings of spiders and then triggered the center room mobs. Fortunately, CoS and the shadow made sure she only gave ground slowly, even though Sarina's babes are all cold immune. Still, there were enough mobs in the pack that she was eventually forced back to her escape portal, not quite managing to kill Sarina before she had to bail. Still, the crowd had been thinned enough that when she re-entered by the stairs, she was able to make it to the other wing before getting swarmed. From there it was a matter of clearing her way back to the stairs, then polishing off Sarina and the other wing, before clearing the last monsters in the main room. Victory and the tome was hers, without deaths!
Kurast Sewers: Nothing special, no dolls but lots of other undead. Riftwing gave a scare but AssIsGrass managed to prevail with no deaths and snag Khalim's Heart.
Upper Kurast-Causeway: Nothing too scary, though there were 2 bosses and a champ pack on the causeway that made for a nice running battle.
Travincal: Lots of hierophants, but no scary bosses were encountered. Ismail was loose in the area in front of the temple and gave chase as soon as AssIsGrass approached, which was a bit of a surprise; nevertheless she managed to contain and defeat him, earning a flail. The other two council members were killed at the entrance to the temple.
Durance 1: FELECE Vampire boss pack first thing. Fortunately with good resists all round due to Fade, was quite survivable. Then a doll boss pack, and a cadaver boss pack, neither much of a problem to deal with with liberal application of CoS to keep them at a distance.
Durance 2: A lucky draw in terms of placement; stairs up, WP, and stairs down were all fairly close together. Several vampires, maulers, & cadavers encountered, but no boss packs and nothing really tough.
Durace 3: LE vampire boss pack in entranceway proved relatively simple to dispatch. Bremm was pinned in a corner where his sparks couldn't do any harm and Furied with no real difficulties; his minions all outran his Fanat range and had been killed beforehand. Neither Voidbringer nor Maffer spawned with scary mods, and both were dispatched easily. Mephy was furied from across the moat and went down without trouble.
Along the way, AssisGrass found a decent enough rare jewel with +30 cold res, +fire damage, and +lit damage to insert in her hat. Now, she's off to go hunt down Diablo! The Durance and henceforth will be done in the 1.11 patch. It just goes to show how long I've been letting this char sit to mention that I first started playing her in 1.09...
I'd never conceived of AssIsGrass as anything but a dual-claw assassin. Dual claw offers a good selection of benefits for someone like AssIsGrass: blocking of both ranged and melee attacks that isn't dex-dependent, percentage AR increase from claw mastery, ability to equip claws that boost her skill levels, and the ability to dual wield runeword katars that give stat bonuses like Strength. However, it's time to face two overriding factors: the variety of good claw-class weapons to choose from off the ladder is strictly limited, and even if she were to find one, the stat requirements are crippling for a base-stat build like hers. Strength, she can get ahold of in limited amounts, and she needs it for the better pieces of armour anyway. Dex is harder to justify, and she can only carry so many charms.
So, time to try another approach. AssIsGrass 'borrows' some gear from some of her other off-ladder colleagues. First up is a Lionheart mesh armour; with a 79 Str requirement, she needs her Strength Katars or a strength ring, plus a couple additional charms with resists and strength, in order to equip it, but it itself gives +25 strength, so she can unequip the strength katar or ring afterwards. This gives substantial stat boosts across the board, as well as life and resists, and the +20% off-weapon damage is gravy. Next is a Nord's Tenderizer truncheon; even with Lionheart to boost her Str, this is one of the few elite weapons that's within her attribute budget, but it's also a relatively strong option, with significant physical and cold damage. She sockets it and puts in a Nef rune for knockback. Third, having knockback on the Tenderizer and enough Str to equip it also means she can replace her crafted gloves once again with Lavagout. Fourth... well, if she's not going to be dual-wielding claws, she might as well equip a shield. Her options are Rhyme and a 3D shield, but she's not going to be blocking much with her 50 DEX, so 3D sounds like the better option. Of course, she doesn't have any diamonds right now, let alone perfect ones, but a couple trips through various parts of nightmare should correct that problem and net her some much-needed XP as well. For now, she just buys a kite shield to put them in as she acquires them. There is still one problem, however. At some point, she knows she's going to die again, and without having enough strength tiering going on to re-equip Lionheart, corpse recovery is going to be a pain, especially since she won't be able to re-equip the Tenderizer either. She doesn't want to replace one of her angelic rings with a strength ring permanently, however, as that gives up a lot of AR, which she really needs. However, she is able to find an answer in a hat she borrows from my off-ladder necromancer. It is a necro hat, with +2 Necro skills, but the other mods are quite tasty as well -- 6% mana leech (her only source of leech), +16 strength, +19 dex, fire resist +39, and 2 sockets, one of which contains an Ort for an extra 30 lit resist. She considers whether it's worth giving up +3 shadow skills for it; earlier when she had been dependent on Claw Mastery and Weapon Block, she hadn't thought so, but now she decides the time is right to make the switch. Not only does it give her enough strength to equip the Lionheart without worrying about corpse recovery, but in conjunction with the Tenderizer it also allows her to look forward to a day when she will be able to mostly do without blue potions. A very quick test drive on the Blood Moor in hell demonstrates that the Tenderizer does indeed sport considerable killing power. The LCS shows her doing (before venom) between double and triple the damage she had been doing previously with the condensing claws. She keeps the shadow hat in her inventory along with a magekiller's ammy for prebuffing in town; this gives her a total of slvl 20 SM and slvl 11 BoS/Fade/Venom when casting in town, and 4 levels less in the field.
Suddenly, AssIsGrass finds herself with positive resists in hell! She hadn't expected to ever achieve that with her dual-claw setup. This brings up the question of whether she should switch from BoS to Fade. It didn't seem worthwhile before when it would only bring her up from abysmal to horrible... but now she has the potential to actually have max resists with Fade up. Still, BoS is her only source of faster walk/run. It may depend on what area she's in as to which she uses. Getting surrounded by Flayers without any faster walk/run doesn't sound like her idea of fun. On the other hand, facing Hierophants and the Council without Fade might be a similarly bad idea. Probably Fade will see situational use and she'll largely continue with BoS as her mainstay for the moment.
AssIsGrass decides to continue without bothering to head back to Nightmare and search for diamonds for the moment, so as to get a better idea of how well her new setup will work in hell. She finds the going is still on the slow side -- it still takes many hits to kill even one mob -- but nowhere near as painful as before. She clears the rightmost quadrant of the Arcane Sanctuary in about 15 minutes (it would have taken close to an hour, previously) and to her delight finds the Summoner on the first go. She tries Fade out just in case she were to get hit with an elemental attack, but needn't have bothered; she dodged his first couple shots easily enough and the moment she got in firing position, SM obligingly teleported into the fray and distracted him. For all the boneheaded stunts SM pulls when facing multiple opponents, when it comes to quick and efficient tanking of single high-threat targets, her mobility with dragon flight is a great asset. If I had to do it over again, though, I think I'd want to try Shadow Warrior and see if I liked it better.
Onwards! Played on players 2, solo, with Ned sitting in town.
Canyon of the Magi:
AssIsGrass didn't find the Canyon to be terribly difficult, though some mobs took longer to kill than others, most notably the cold immune Crusher mobs. She did kill a couple Crusher boss packs on her way to the true tomb, but nothing stood out.
True Tomb: AssIsGrass didn't pick the correct direction first shot, so she wound up clearing a substantial portion of the tomb. Aside from the resurrectors, her most annoying opponents here were the apparitions, due to their tendency to lay the beatdown on her shadow and trigger its AI retreat routine more frequently. Also, being PI, they tended to take a fair while to kill, and due to the stacking it was harder to pick out a single mob to kill for DS to blow up. Nevertheless she made steady if not rapid progress through the tomb.
Tal Rasha's Chamber: Duriel proved to be fairly tame; though he did take a while to kill, AssIsGrass incurred no deaths. In fact the big bug only managed to lay a claw on her a couple times and she was never under 50% health. She just ran in, kept him occupied with a shadow as much as possible, and whittled away, escaping via portal when things looked dicey only to return via the stairs. Soon enough, she was on her way to Kurast!
Spider Forest: AssIsGrass found the Spider Lair quite quickly and went down to snag her Khalim Eye. Sszark was FE Cursed EF Might; her minions were speedy enough and hit hard enough that the Shadow went down quickly and before she could recast, three minions came running after her. AssIsGrass tried to get away and get some room to cast CoS or recast her shadow, but they were just as quick as she, and two hits later AssIsGrass went down. Fortunately there were only those three in range of her corpse, so with CoS retrieval wasn't a big problem. From there she pasted those three, who'd wandered outside of Might range, then proceeded onward to find Sszark, who'd separated herself from her pack and went down without much fuss. A few more minions later and the eye was hers.
Great Marsh: The only way to the Flayer Jungle proved to be through the Great Marsh, so AssIsGrass braved the gloams to continue her journey. They were nasty enough, but with Fade up, the normal ones were certainly possible to deal with. A boss pack with a nasty set of enchantments might have been another matter, but fortunately she didn't run into anything like that. She did run into several Soul Killer and Soul Killer Shaman champ packs, however. She found the going slow at times, but not cripplingly so, especially with Death Sentry on tap to thin out the corpses. There were a few dangerous spots and one or two close calls, but no deaths.
Flayer Jungle: The trip through the jungle provided hordes of Flayers and Soul Killers, and not much else. These were sipatched mostly without too much difficulty. AssIsGrass would simply hit CoS as soon as she saw an incoming swarm, which would usually give her enough time to get the Shadow engaged, a DS up, and possibly her first corpse down. Continued use of CoS helped to ensure that her Shadow did not get overwhelmed and that flankers were not a huge problem. She made her way to the Gibdinn, secured it, and then went down into the Flayer Dungeon to snag Khalim's Brain. Mostly she encountered Gloombats and Flayers, including several boss packs, with a very light sprinkling of dolls. However, nothing gave her enough trouble to cause a death, and she reached her goal without incident.
Lower Kurast-Kurasat Bazaar: Nothing much exciting here. Thanks to her by now fully diamonded kite shield, AssIsGrass's cold resist is now up to a decent level before adding Fade, and maxed with fade. The most dangerous monsters are the thorned hulks, since they are immune to Nord's cold damage and can frenzy up on poor SM. Still, a quick CoS removes the frenzy attack, so not too difficult to deal with. AssIsGrass entered the temple dreading a stair trap, but fortunately there proved to be some room to maneuver. She cleared out the side wings of spiders and then triggered the center room mobs. Fortunately, CoS and the shadow made sure she only gave ground slowly, even though Sarina's babes are all cold immune. Still, there were enough mobs in the pack that she was eventually forced back to her escape portal, not quite managing to kill Sarina before she had to bail. Still, the crowd had been thinned enough that when she re-entered by the stairs, she was able to make it to the other wing before getting swarmed. From there it was a matter of clearing her way back to the stairs, then polishing off Sarina and the other wing, before clearing the last monsters in the main room. Victory and the tome was hers, without deaths!
Kurast Sewers: Nothing special, no dolls but lots of other undead. Riftwing gave a scare but AssIsGrass managed to prevail with no deaths and snag Khalim's Heart.
Upper Kurast-Causeway: Nothing too scary, though there were 2 bosses and a champ pack on the causeway that made for a nice running battle.
Travincal: Lots of hierophants, but no scary bosses were encountered. Ismail was loose in the area in front of the temple and gave chase as soon as AssIsGrass approached, which was a bit of a surprise; nevertheless she managed to contain and defeat him, earning a flail. The other two council members were killed at the entrance to the temple.
Durance 1: FELECE Vampire boss pack first thing. Fortunately with good resists all round due to Fade, was quite survivable. Then a doll boss pack, and a cadaver boss pack, neither much of a problem to deal with with liberal application of CoS to keep them at a distance.
Durance 2: A lucky draw in terms of placement; stairs up, WP, and stairs down were all fairly close together. Several vampires, maulers, & cadavers encountered, but no boss packs and nothing really tough.
Durace 3: LE vampire boss pack in entranceway proved relatively simple to dispatch. Bremm was pinned in a corner where his sparks couldn't do any harm and Furied with no real difficulties; his minions all outran his Fanat range and had been killed beforehand. Neither Voidbringer nor Maffer spawned with scary mods, and both were dispatched easily. Mephy was furied from across the moat and went down without trouble.
Along the way, AssisGrass found a decent enough rare jewel with +30 cold res, +fire damage, and +lit damage to insert in her hat. Now, she's off to go hunt down Diablo! The Durance and henceforth will be done in the 1.11 patch. It just goes to show how long I've been letting this char sit to mention that I first started playing her in 1.09...
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