We
last left RonniePumpkin the Bearzon having just entered Hell, and needing some final prep.
First order of business was to fix her terrible resistances. I was going to
blatantly steal take a page out of a
@maxicek idea and use Kira's but... she's not high enough level yet. So for now she looks like this:
Not bad! 2k+ life, so all stat points will be going to strength now to help with damage numbers. Also threw a Delerium on the merc for additional crowd control and it's out into Hell. Through the
Den and initial thoughts are; she's beefy. Still quite strong on /p8 despite not having any real damage modifiers other than Werebear. I can sense that she'll be slowing down later, but that's okay. She's very safe with all the safety measures of the merc and her own P+M skills making her hard to hit. So far so good! One thing I didn't know is that even if the merc transforms, she can still fire arrows.
Weird. Treehead gave us our
first PI/CI battle. It was lengthy, but never dangerous. I'm not looking forward to more of those as we don't have a viable solution to it other than letting OW/CB do the job. After that it was shortly
through to Cain and we hit 77 which prompted a proper re-gear.
Popped the Kira's on and the resistances got much better (big surprise!), which freed up some charm slots for some more damage. I could now replace
TEH FROAT with another Angelic ring to never have to think about AR again, and I popped a jewel (25ED%/15IAS) into the Kira's to get her to 10 FPA (the max attainable without Fanat). I figured while I was taking inspiration from max's gal, I may as well go Titan like she did as well! The merc is loaded with safety features (HF, FNova procs, Delerium) and Ronnie is set with D/A/E so why not pump the damage numbers a bit more?
There we have it! 1.5k health definitely seems a bit low but she feels good and I really like the uptick in damage (and the novelty of going Titan). She cruised her way through the rest of A1,
taking out Andariel with ease.
An absolutely ridiculous slog through the AS as this group doesn't
have any great solutions for PIs. It's up to the merc entirely, so it was a bit slow going. Luckily we guessed the correct wing on the first try so my sanity was spared.
More ghosts in the true tomb but no Unravellers (Beetles and Urdars, as you can see by the corpse-pile in that screenie), so it was soon enough through to the
big bug.
As far as p8 boss fights go, that one sucked. It was never dangerous, though it did require a couple town trips for pot refills. It was just longer than I would have liked. Ronnie already attacks slowly enough without the help from Duriel's chilling and HF. Either way they took him down and made it to the jungles. I was glad I buffed her resists now as situations like this were not uncommon.
Feeling the low health now!
Bit of a stairtrap in Sarinas temple smoked the merc, but an otherwise smooth journey through
to Meph. He left a
colourful drop behind, and it was off to the underworld for Ronnie.
Not the nicest welcome to the Outer Steppes...
Through
Izual, then
Hephasto with ease (Io at the Forge, yuck.) and Diablo was
no trouble either. Not a ton to say as she's still holding her own quite well. Sure, kill speed has slowed a bit as expected on /p8 without any damage auras, but it's safe and smooth and she's never really in trouble. If anything dicey comes up, the Valk takes the brunt of it and we move on Like this:
PI Ghosts in the CP slowed us down but Ronnie persevered (well, the merc did anyways) and soon enough Anya was saved, though it did get a bit hectic in there at times
Thanks, Delerium! I didn't feel like going after Nihlathak, so it was straight the Ancient's Way where she hit 86 and right up to the Ancients. I knew I could potenitally be in for some trouble on /p8, so I used an old tournament strategy and popped a Decoy up top to hopefully separate the big boys.
It worked!
Korlic (LE/MB) was the first to fall. We lured Madawc over next and disposed of him easily. We then crossed all our fingers and toes and went to see Talic's stats.
Nice! Sure, Spectral Hit + Extra Strong is a bit dangerous, but I couldn't believe Ronnie's luck that she didn't draw any Stone Skins, that would have been very tedious to deal with. So with Ronnie and the Valk to absorb all the damage, Talic was easily dispatched and it was soon through the WSK to the Throne.
The waves gave us no real trouble (
man that zon can tank!), nor did the big guy himself.
That's that,
Matriarch at 86.
Whew. Longer writeup than I expected! She was great fun though, I'll have more thoughts in her Mat thread. One more character to go!