Great exp, In fact this is my first run going into hell at lv75. I usually find myself at 74.5-74.8.



It definitely is going to be difficult. I'm severely lacking a Lem rune.

Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes

I'm not even surprised getting snakes anymore... My A5nm could've been called Taurs and Snakes only. I pretty much had to ditch the shadow and merc for floor 3 and carefully deal with the snakes, harpies and spiders, nihlathak proved quite harmless though:


Ancients: I decided to deal quickly with an extra strong madawc and let shadow tank the other 2 - no 1v1 cheese needed yet.
WSK: By far and away the easiest "non-overworld" maps of my A5 run

Have I mentioned how much I love dragon flight vs baal?




As is usual for my singlepass runs, cows netted me nothing save a few gems. I dinged 75 off them surprisingly (although I was very very close after baal).

Things I'm missing going into hell:
Lem rune for lawbringer (prefer to put this in a 3os pb tho)
+400def 3os light armor base for duress - may have to settle on my 291 def embossed

Pulling out ele res grand charms in hell gets me close to max res all around after swapping out the nokozan for the Curio's we got from diablo - I also don't mind the +10 to attributes, as I had to make space for the charms by giving up some shitty life grand charms. It also brings my block up to 66%. I'll be starting Hell with 73F 70C 72L 32P and can tweak this a bit once I have my Duress. I have 1,009 HP so I did make it past the 1k hp hurdle (finished nm on 999 +curio -gcharms still netted life).

Thanks for reading! You're inb4 the R.I.P.

I kind of anticipated the day starting off rough, and it did not disappoint! Things were really tough to chew through, and Blood Moor started off with an extra difficult LE+HFire+Strong Zombie pack.

I decided it was time to just accept the fact that I needed to burn my Um rune even if I wasn't happy with the base:


I predicted this happening about 10 minutes before getting here


We were well rewarded for our efforts though:

I quickly made my way through the overworld maps to get to the burial grounds:

Lots of telestomping+CoS required - she was a bit of nuisance:


Crypt had bonebreaker (extra strong/fast/might) AT THE START OF THE MAP! I have never seen this, chest immediately to the left.. Crypt and Maso were tedious if only because they were terrifying. Bonebreak was the the tip of the iceberg as fanat/might auras + extra strong seemed to be a theme today; I even ran into treehead's cousin in cold plains (extra strong/fast).

Surprisingly the maps seemed to get easier from there.. cave wasn't nearly as hard as maso/crypt. I blew through stony and underground passage. Dark wood proved little issue save the might+cursed carver pack next to Treehead. Also Treehead was next to the opening door on DW. I didn't have a lot of kite space and had to run around a fair bit. I gambled about 30+ rings. I tried my hand at crafting some safety rings and an ammy, but that didn't go well. But I did manage to find some okayish upgrades.

Finally I got to the raid boss; There's nothing quite like having a cursed mob immune to both primary sources of your damage. Fortunately I had shopped a 5% amp +2 Shadow Discipline Katar yesterday (also a +2 Shadow Disc / +3 Shadow Warrior katar, sadly no +3s but this sufficed) Lots of weapon switching to alternate between Amp and CB let me whittle away at poor Griswold. (The merc kept dying to the LE)



I Stopped after Tristam with Dark Wood complete. I'll pick up from Black Marsh tomorrow and probably attempt to clear the rest of act 1 - depending on how tilting wraiths are going to be. Here's where my gear and stats finished for the day:

Great run thru so far. Rooting like hell for that lem to drop. Was in titanao's stream when u raided other night. Was funny i had just read ur progress like an hour before. Keep grinding and stay safe and hopefully no more trap maps like that drifter.

That's awesome! I really love hearing that. And that was my first time in Titan's stream and really enjoyed my time there.

Not too much to add today. It took me a little over 5 hours to go from black marsh to inner cloister. Tower was slow due to all the wraith packs - I mostly stood back using BF + weapon swap for amp, OW, CB, Venom, etc.

It felt pretty bad climbing my way through Tower to result in this Countess drop:


Again, overworld maps were cake, even with some really interesting/dangerous packs. The hole wasn't so bad either. The Pit did start off difficult with a cursed multi LE archer pack trapping the door, but I managed - I also had some other nasty archer packs scattered in tower/the hole (might/extra strong etc)

The Pit also coughed up my first PB drop. I tried rolling for 3os, sadly I got 6 os. I don't think we'll be seeing Last Wish this run I'm still hopeful for the Amn Lem Ko Phaseblade


I was way more worried about the smith than I needed to be, he went down fast, but I was cautious too:


There was a fun fire skele mage pack with conviction and LE on one of my jail floors. It's nice that I'm a bit overcapped on lightning and fire; Although, I did go back to my stash to grab some ele res charms to insure that I'd be safe - 260% fire 270% lightning felt pretty safe for him I was contemplating pushing to Andariel today, but my stamina was close to the end after 5 hours and I wasn't sure how troublesome catas may prove. I'll try to proceed into Act 2 tomorrow.

As always thanks for reading!

This post was edited by LogicalLynx on Jun 29 2020 06:19pm

A really uneventful day, also short. I moved through cata much quicker than anticipated.

Andy was a pain, I hate interruptable, multi-attack animations (fury, kicks), also typical boss drops for me:


Radament was a little scary being extra strong and FE. I safely cleared around him using DS to clear corpses before focusing him down.


I'm surprised I'm still not Lv 82. I'm fairly certain I was a bit higher on the barb at this point. Probably unlucky spawns on the maps that mattered (the mlvl 83+ maps)


Thanks for reading!

The further we go the harder it gets. Being starved of runes does not help. Even my rocky waste map entry was difficult (gated by 4-5 unique packs not kidding). Stony tomb took some time as well, but the rest of the overworld maps weren't really that bad. Halls of the dead however...

This picture says a lot:


Getting to floor three was beyond grueling. Unravelers, and more unravelers, champion unravelevers, unique unravelers, oh and don't forget mummy sarcophogi shutting down use of CoS for fear of halt line 422!

There were quite a few nasty packs in maggot lair too and a few "too" close of calls, but this pack took the cake that I had to screen it for you all:


I didn't want to anywhere near it especially with a Possessed champion pack in that room.

It took me 6 hours to crawl my way through Rocky Wastes to the end of maggot lair. I feel that death is a possibility every stream. A single lem rune would change my game, I'm not sure there are many other "gg" drops atm, but I could do with some +skills maybe?

Thanks for reading. Hopefully tomorrow I can make it to the end of Viper Temple.