Act 4 was quite unremarkable, probably because I mostly ran through it to go for the quests without wasting time.

Diablo was a bit more difficult though. He killed a couple of my skeletons, but my own character was of course never in any danger.



I finally got a wand that's better than my starter "+1 to skeleton" wand. Pretty terrible still, but it will do until I find a 4sox sword.

My highest rune so far! I don't really need the Dol+Io runeword because I don't know yet if I'll spec P&B in Hell, but I will start looking out for good base wands anyway.



A prismatic amulet with FCR! This is like a low-level version of the level 89 crafted amulets people use. I'll be keeping this until I find a +3 Summoning Skills amulet.



Another surprisingly good item. A +15 life SC dropping in Normal, seems pretty rare to me!

Running into Baal for the first time. Anyone who's played a summoner before will know that his Decrepify curse is absolutely the worst. It probably decreases my DPS by 50%.



This wave took me 5 minutes, but gave me a ton of XP even at level 42.



Finally time to kill the bastard. Just for this battle, I put a point into the skill "Desecrate", which spawns corpses to be used. In the end, Baal didn't kill many of my skeletons but the battle did take plenty of time.

His drops were meh, but I guess my merc will be happy...



... but then I identified this, and was happy too.

Nightmare Act 1

A quick peek at my stats when I start Nightmare. My character itself is not particularly tough, but I have so much meat shield that it hardly matters.



Another set item. I used to be obsessed with the Sigon set when I was a complete noob, so finding these still gives me some joy.



Not a bad drop by the Countess. I will want to make Ort+Sol whenever I find a good base for it, so this Sol rune comes in handy.

These low level uniques are quite unremarkable... I'm looking forward to getting my first Exceptional uniques.



Andariel was again no match. She seems to be weaker than Normal Baal.



Lum rune!

Another unique, still pretty useless.



This, however... It's a pity that it doesn't give 50@ like it does in retail D2, but it's still a fantastic item. I'll probably use this one for a very long time.

Great start, looks fun!

Enjoyed the read, keep it up 😁

Something interesting I noticed... The Valley of Snakes is right next to Lut Gholein on the map!



Not half-bad I guess.



...!