Funny, but long story from today. I saw an announcement that Asia would walk dclone at 5AM or so my time. Too late to stay up, too early to get up. So I did what I usually do to try to take part - left my 5 characters logged into Asia server, hoping the servers were stable.

Checked this morning - yep, Diablo has invaded the Sanctuary. Annis 1 through 4 collected no problems my bringing my smiter in to clown on Diablo in the Palace Cellar. Nothing notable or to brag about there. It's common work.

But for whatever reason on account #5 which was my BO barb (level 78), it was impossible to connect to his game. Every time I tried to join with my smiter I got "Cannot connect to server". Log out, retry, fails. Change region, come back to Asia, fail. Tried off and on throughout the day trying to see if I could my Smiter in to do the job. Nope, was not happening. My poor BO barb was on an island. There was no support form other characters, and no option to bring in any gear to help with the task. It was just whatever I had on this random Barb that is purely for buffing my sorc and pali.

So honestly, I don't really need another Anni, but I really didn't like the idea of leaving a perfectly good Dclone there to live on in my game. That smug f##k was just sitting there in the Palace cellar, taunting me. So I started looking at what resources my Barb had available. Could I somehow pull this kill off?

So as far as gear goes, it's all + war cries stuff. +3 WC ammy, 5 BO Delirium, Myth. This is not looking promising at all, though my merc will be buff AF from a 40+ BO.

I have in stash...Sigons Set, a Duriels Shell. Some random uniques bows...Goldstrike and Buriza. Random runewords Rhyme, Insight in a cryptic axe. I did have some random unique swords for leveling as well, which will later become important. This shit was not looking promising. But there I saw it - my salvation - my merc leveling stick - a (non-eth) Hone Sundan Yari with 2 Amns and some random IAS jewel. That 45% crushing blow could just do the job, though the damage was woeful.

And then there is my merc. I had been experimenting with the A5 frenzy barb with iron skin, and the Sazabi set + Lawbringer phase blade. What I had found is basically he hits like a wet noodle, but he is tanky AF. So I had a feeling he could be an asset, but I had to somehow be able to damage down big D, because the merc sure as shit was not going to be able to make that work by himself.

So first attempts at Dclone were woeful. Merc ended up dying, but he hung in there for a while. And btw, I only had 30K gold on the character. So after every failure, I had to go out in the wilderness to farm gold to rez my merc. I tried to use poison to prevent Dclone from healing, and it seemed to work, but my AR was so pathetic that I could rarely apply it.

So I went to the drawing board. Figured I would try swapping my A5 merc for an A2 one, and give him the hone sundan, to try to use him to do the work on Dclone. I had a feeling that wasn't going to work, as A2 mercs are pretty squishy without good gear, and yep, I was right. He got punked by Dclone hard. So I brought back the A5 merc.

I decided I was going all in as much as possible here. I blew an Akara respec on my barb to go full Berserk with even the stupid spear mastery talent, so I could actually hit Dclone with the Yari. I also added the battle cry talent - it proved to be very effective in allowing both my characters to hit Dclone. Attempt #9 showed some promise that it could be done. Got Dclone down to about 50%, but then he started regening hard. The merc could livelord if I kept battle cry up, which would allow him to connect on his frenzy and leech some life, but I just didn't see how I could actually deal enough damage to win. At this point I was giving up hope that this was going to happen. I started consider leaving the game and moving on with my life.

Opening my stash again, I read every letter of the description of each item I had. I was praying I had something in here to help make this happen. And then my prayers were answered, I found the miracle. One of the random unique swords I had in my possession was none other than Headstriker. Right there, it had what I needed the most. "Prevent Monster Heal" as one of the attributes. And at that point I knew things were going to be OK. It still wasn't easy and it took a very long time. But I was able to pop Dclone with headstriker, switch the Yari, and power him down. Of course, at this point I had barely any rejuvs to rely on, and the next to last attempt failed at Dclone at 5% when my merc was mysteriously 1 shotted, which forced me to get back to the gold grind. But by attempt #19 or so, I was able to bring him down.

So in all what my barb was wearing:
Hone Sundan Yari
Sigons Hat
Sigons Gloves
Sigons Belt
Duriel's Shell
+3 WC amulet (had literally nothing better)
Aldurs Boots
A life leech ring with a little poison damage
A random rare ring with ML and lightning resists

Merc was wearing full Sazabi + Lawbringer. The tankiness of the merc was key. Pre A5 merc buffs, this just would not have been possible in my assessment.

So yah, it can be done with extremely limited resources. It was definitely the most challenging thing I have done in D2R lately.

And if you have read this far and have <1000 forum gold, be the first to reply to this message and I will give you the unid Anni I collected with my crappy barb for free.

Sanderson charm

Jesus fucking christ that's a dear diary for the ages

10/10 would read again. gg op

winner of the anni! hope you make good use of it!

I enjoyed the read, gz.. HC?

This post was edited by BdizzleD2 on Nov 2 2022 10:09pm

Been there, i always make a barb for dclone but then once he is lvl 85 or so, i go play my main and forget about it until dclone spawns and i realize i forgot to make black or malice or whatever, happened several times already, sc or hc, sommetimes i manage to kill him with garbage others i end up getting help, it always sucks though.

nope was SC. hardcore i probably wouldn't have bothered, though my barb never died through the whole thing. the merc did more than a few times though.

i mean this is kinda pathetic and epic at the same time. way better than my first attempt at dclone with an actually geared blizz sorc, though i eventually figured out how to do it.

Dibs

This post was edited by wing_fighter2 on Nov 2 2022 10:41pm