Kylearan sends an async team to death or guardianship

[T-hawk]

OK, now that's a worthy finale, way more than the cow level.

If you want to push up the challenge level, the game has that built right in, choose characters with different variant builds. I never felt complacent playing my no-vitality bowazon or melee necromancer. Heck maybe even do it KoP style and never bother spending half your skill or stat points. It's always going to be true that regular monsters are never a threat and only bosses and boss packs are, but then again that's the same for Final Fantasy and we got lots of gameplay and reporting out of that.

I agree that the time sink is a significant downside, but I haven't figured out any way to improve that; in fact each of my teams kept taking longer than the previous as I kept deciding to do more clearing and shopping. Like, I wish D2 could scale the entire game to run at 1.25x speed.

[KingOfPain]

DClone was a nice surprise. I suppose you hit it with the Blackhorn first

[Kylearan]

DClone was a nice surprise. I suppose you hit it with the Blackhorn first

Yes, correct. I've looked for ways to prevent Dclone's regeneration, and because of Venom's silly capping all poison durations at 0.4 seconds I needed a different source. Looking through my items, I found Blackhorn's Face. I remembered that the Prevent Monster Heal effect wouldn't trigger from mercenaries and thus tagged Dclone myself, then switched back to Vampire Gaze from my cube mid-fight.

But even this fight was much easier in the end than anticipated, once his regeneration was stopped. I guess I just could have kept Blackhorn's Face on the full time instead of switching.

Now I wonder how feasable the fight would have been for the paladin, or the sorceress. But I don't have another SoJ, so...

[KingOfPain]

Not sure about the Pally with his skill set. I suppose Conviction can make his elemental attacks work. The key to melee (example Vengeance) as always, if you can leech enough you can't die.

The Sorceress not so much. DClone resists all 95%. No leech. Tho, there are still ways to cheese a win such as Infinity, or something similar to the moat trick with Mephy. The best place to do so is to enter the Palace portal via Arcane Sanctuary. DClone spawns right at the portal. The door to the room on the left is too small for DClone to get pass...