09-28-2006, 11:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-30-2006, 02:27 AM by Son Of Diablo.)
===================================
SOD's PvM Hammerdin Guide for Diablo 2:
===================================
*-*-*-*-*-*
contents:
*-*-*-*-*-*
i) About paladins
ii) Why a hammerdin?
iii) Stat allocations
iv) Skill allocations
v) Character leveling method
vi) Mercenary
vii) Gear - Equipment
viii) Mffing
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i) About Paladins
Paladins are an all round class, capable of creating some of the most deadly melee and caster characters in the game. They are stickly melee characters but with 'auras' that can not only effect themselves but their party or enemies.
There are several popular builds out there at the moment from the hammerdin to the shockadin being a couple of the caster (magic based attack characters) to the zealer and smiter both melee
(physical based attack) characters.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ii) Why a Hammerdin?
Where to begin, there are many different reasons but to short list them. You can have an attack around 10,000 per hammer (and you get a screen full of the things), not only that but unlike most other caster characters there are only 2 monsters in the entire game which are immune to the attack (although diablo clone / uber diablo and the beasties in uber tristram give it a go too).
With the correct mercenary (explained later) you can have a defence of over 10,000 easily, that combined with the skill holy shield will mean that you won't take much damage from physical attacks and with the reccomended gear, your resistances to elemental attacks will also be
minimised. So there you have it. You can kill fast, are hard to kill and they are great fun.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iii) Stat Allocation
This you will find is pretty much the same for any character.
Strength - Enough for items
Dexterity - Enough for maximum block with Holy Shield skill active
Vitality - As much as you can
Energy - Nothing
Reasoning for this is pretty self explanitory, even though in early levels mana will be hard, by the time you have concentration and blessed hammer completed you won't need to worry about it although a couple of mana potions is always a safe bet. I'll briefly try and explain the holy shield & dexterity link. If you imagine that without holy shield you have a 50% block rate / 50% of phyiscal attacks will be blocked. With holy shield this figure could be raised to the maximum of a 75% block rate. Dexterity increases your block rate in minor amounts so personally i like to spend every single stat point in vitality and slightly adjust my items/charms to attain 75% block rate others want to spend the points in dex, the choice is yours.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iv) Skill allocation
There are three sections labelled "defensive auras" "offensive auras" and "combat skills"
skill allocation is actually very easy, all you need to do is put the following amount of points into the corresponding skills. 1 means only a point as it's a prerequisite for the skill we really want.
Combat skills
Blessed Hammer-20
Holy Shield-20
Holy Bolt-1
Charge-1
Smite-1
Offensive Auras
Concentration-20
Blessed Aim-20
Might-1
Defensive Auras
Vigor-20
Defiance-1
Cleansing-1
Redemption -1 (INVALUABLE)
Prayer-1
I have recently made a hammerdin and skill maxed in this order, blessed hammer, concentration, vigor, holy shield, blessed aim. But by all means swap the last two over. Depends on how you feel your damage is going, if you need more, pump up blessed aim, if your lacking in defence, go for shield.
As you can see, there are 108 points used for those. "How can you get 107 skills when you only get one per level" you may say, simply by completing a couple of quests in each difficulty setting (normal, nightmare and hell).
1) Act1 "The den of evil" - you only need to go outside of town and stick to the paths in the cold plains to find it. once inside kill every monster, return to town and recieve your skill point reward.
2) Act2 "Radamants Lair" - inside town in the north west corner is a trap door. Enter and proceed to kill your way down two floors (to level 3). In level three you will eventually come across a large group of skeletons with a large shaman. Proceed to kill everything and once Radamaent dies he drops a "book of skills" in your inventory (default key i) right click the book to have it disappear and give you anotehr skill point.
3) Act4 "Izual" - this one is probably one of the harder skill quests to complete solo especially on the hell difficulty for a poorly equipped character, there is also no surefire direction in which to locate Izual you simply have to run onto the burning steps, find your way to and locate
and kill him.
4) Act5 "The Ancients" - although not technicially a quest in exchange for skill points, if you are at the start of a level (and I would reccomend 24 for normal difficulty) then completing this quest will complete your current level, shame it can only be done once per difficulty level! All
you have to do is find the Arreat Summit and beat the three guardians. I would strongly suggest that you find a group of friends or a higher level character to assist you in defeat of these three foes. Not only do you have to defeat all three at once but one of them casts battle orders
(BO) on the others and they have immunities.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
v) Character Leveling Method
There are MANY variations of leveling up a character quickly, but i'll try and attempt it with
level breakpoints.
1-15 Tristram repeatedly
15 - 19 arcane sanctuary / tal rasha tomb runs
20 - 24 the 'not so' secret cow level (wirts leg from tristram, tomb of town portal and cube them) best to be with a high level lightning caster so that they can kill everything except king as if you are in the party when he is killed, YOU cannot open cows anymore.
24/25 - ancients quest
25 - 40/50 - Baal runs, not particularily tough on this difficulty and when you hit 40+ kill baal himself to move onto nightmare
40/50 - 75/80 - Nightmare ancients then baal runs
75/80+ Hell baal runs I would always reccomend running games with the maximum 8 players in a game to benefit from
the most exp/monster ratio. Try to level in full games but in an area on your own so that you don't have to share your exp with others.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vi) Mercenary
The really single most variable thing in the entire paladin build.
Most people will choose a nightmare act2 defensive merc as they are equipped with the paladin aura 'holy freeze' which slows your targets.
There is nothing wrong with this, you teleport into a group of enemies, and start your hammers the holy freeze slows enemies so you can kill them quickly. This I find fine for characters who
are not as strong and cannot control mobs of enemies easily but not for a trained hammerdin.
MY personal preference is a normal act2 defiance mercenary
Reasoning: He boosts your defence by extraordinary amounts. Defiance is a paladin skill and with this mercenary you have less chance of being hurt by physical attacks and what I use the hammerdin for mfing (andy,meph,diablo,baal,keys and uber runs). It's the perfect choice for me due to the fact that once all gear is on your resistances in hell will be
maxed and therefore the only way to minimise damage is to have a high defence and block rate personally i have seen hammerdins with 25+k defence with BO, holy shield and a defiance merc.
Mercenary gear below.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vii) Gear / Equipment
This is a moderatley expensive character, certainly not as high as a lightning sorceress, it requires a few high runes to create the runewords, then sell/trade to get the other items. Of course this is my ideal equipment for a MF hammerdin who has a balance of MF and kill power.
Character Gear
- Helmet - Shako (with either a perfect topaz for MF or a BER if for tank)
- Armour - Enigma (JAH, ITH, BER)
- Belt - Arachnid Mesh belt
- Gloves - Magefists
- Boots - War Travelers
- Shield - Herald of Zakarum
- Weapon - Heart Of The Oak (HOTO) Ko, Vex, Pul, Thul
- Amulet - Maras Kaleidoscope Amulet
- Rings - 1 Stone of Jordan/Bual Kathos wedding band and 1 raven frost so you cant be frozen.
- on weapon switch - Call to arms & spirit shield.
Then you have to consider your inventory.
i'd reccomend loosing the tome of identify all together but you can have any of the following depending on how you like to play:
Gheeds Grand Charm
Annihulus
Hellfire torch (i'd get one of these and the annihulus for ANY char)
Paladin combat skillers
+20 life small charms
+40/45 life grand charms
Personally, i'd go for Gheeds, anni, torch, then as many skillers and life sc's as possible. of course you won't get all you need at once so I keep life charms until they are replaced by skillers.
Mercenary Gear
When it comes down to it, you have two options. Ridiciously strong or resistant to damage. I go for resistant to damage as the merc gets a bonus from our concentration already so...
Helmet - Etheral Vampire Gaze / Shako with BER
Armour - Stone or Fortitude
_________________
Alternatively, if you're going for all out damage, try this.
____________________________
Breath of the Dying
6 Socket Weapons
Vex + Hel + El + Eld + Zod + Eth
____________________________
50% Chance To Cast Level 20 Poison Nova When You Kill An Enemy
Indestructible
+60% Increased Attack Speed
+350-400% Enhanced Damage (varies)
+200% Damage To Undead
-25% Target Defense
+50 To Attack Rating
+50 To Attack Rating Against Undead
7% Mana Stolen Per Hit
12-15% Life Stolen Per Hit (varies)
Prevent Monster Heal
+30 To All Attributes
+1 To Light Radius
Requirements -20%
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
viii) Mffing or Magic find refers to the term '% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items from items' and allows rare or unique items to drop in place of regular items. The sole purpose for 90% of characters I make.
We have the skill, the items and the level (85+) Mf is not dependant on character level!. now it's down to tactics.
BOSSES: choices are: andariel, Duriel, mephisto, diablo, baal - i do all
sub bosses: the countess, the council (travincal), pindleskin - again all keys: the countess, the summoner, nithalak - i'm doing the countess &
the summoner helps finding duriel and nithalak is the only out of the way.
*-* Boss Strategies *-*
Andariel - Once you are high enough of a level (75+) i'd go straight to the hell difficulty setting. NOTE: Andariel frequently drops jewelry, rings and amulets. Proceed to the Catacombes level 2 waypoint and run / teleport to level 3 enemies are not that difficult but your lightning resistances should be at least 20+. Once you hit level 3 you can incurr some difficulty but as long as you have your mercenary holding foes off you should survive fine. Level 4. Now you are in Andariels lair, the home of the Matron of poison based attacks so make sure you have some resistance. If you are relatively weak, take out the surrounding
smaller minions to give yourself some room to manouvere and make sure your mercenary does not release Andariel by walking onto the north eastern carpeted area. Once Andariel is disposed of collect your rewards and get healed of poison in town.
Duriel - This feat should really be attempted after visiting the summoner (see below), once the summoner is dispatched DO NOT go through the red portal to the canyon of the magi just yet. You should see several shapes in flourescent blue gently hovering around. There are several shapes and each one corresponds to a tombe in the next area (there should be a pattern on the floor which shows them all) ONE OF THESE PATTERNS WILL BE MISSING. This indicates which tombe Duriel is in!
Locate and enter the tombe, As soon as you enter Use the Holy Shield Skill, there will be snakes down here which can really put a crimp in your life and even kill you. Slaughter your way through to the last area where he resides.
The easiest way to kill him is to let the mercenary become his primary target, then get in there and hammer the crap out of him, it does not take long but he does have a couple of things to be aware of. He has the paladin Holy Freeze Aura, thereby slowing your attacks. When he strikes, he stuns you for a couple of seconds so it would be wise to cast holy shield again before encountering him. Collect loot and use a TP (Town Portal) to heal and identify drops.
Mephisto - Now we're starting to get to the trickier of foes, mephisto is located on the third level of the last waypoint. DOLLS (little fiendish like creatures with oversharpened carving knives) can be your bane before you encounter him, once again let the mercenary become the target for damage. To kill mephisto is not hard at all as long as your lightening resistance is 50+ as he has a couple of nasty attacks, one being the sorceresses nova attack whereby a circular wave of lightning is shot
out but follow the link for the full list. Simply spam (repeatedly use) as many hammers as you can to whittle his life away, collect the drops and use the red portal to your south east to go to act4.
DIABLO - The name of the game, this to me is generally the most fun area, plenty of high level monsters, especially the casters. These creatures are the reason why you need plenty of gold. They
kill mercenaries like they were going out of fashion. They cast a curse known as Iron Maiden (IM) which reflects damage dealt back to the mercenary, 1/2 hits on an enemy will kill your merc. The only
way to stop this is if you are either godly enough to tackle them solo or if you are going with friends. The target here is to open six portals, two north, two east and two west. East is generally adopted to be the first by most players, simply clear the area around the portals, open them both, kill the unique monster that appears, rinse and repeat.
Once all portals are open, and the spawning uniques are dealt with, any normal enemies dissapear all together. Then you have some dramatic rumbling followed by diablo's voice saying "not even death can
save you from me". After a pause of approximatley 2 seconds he spawns in the centre on the star/ pentagram above the pit of flame. Fire resistance is a must but again for an experienced player, he will
take all of 10 seconds to vanquish.
BAAL - Actually by comparison, Baal is easier than Diablo to defeat, it's only getting to him thats a pain as you will have to locate the throne you should be experienced in this field from levelling your character so clear the hordes that appear, then dispatch with Baal. NOTE: BAAL has a character level of 95, meaning that he can drop ANY item in the game, leviathon armour, deaths fathom and anything else above or below can be dropped from this monster - GOOD LUCK.
Key Running:
The Countess: She is not hard at all, simply hack and slash / teleport your way to the top of the tower and smack the 8itch up. Runes and the first of our keys are located on this wench.
The Summoner: As mentioned above he is the key for an easy path to Duriel. To locate him though requires trial and error, having Enigma or 2 accounts with a teleporter really comes into it's own here. Once he is located though, very simple kill, he uses cold based attacks but won't get more than a couple off before he hits to floor.
Nithalak: Easily the toughest of foes for finding keys (subsequently one of his is worth 3 or so of the others) so take care. He resides past the Halls Of Pain Waypoint, proceed carefully until you find his lair.
He has an extremely nasty attack, he will send waves of minions at you and once dispatched he uses corpse explosion on them to use their bodies in battle once more. As the name implies the body literially explodes causing damage to surrounding hero's. There is a couple of ways to bypass this, one have the 'Redemption' aura active while disposing of the monsters so that souls of the enemies replenish your life and the bodies dissapear or only attack nithalak himself, once he is banished you can take care of the minions at your leasure and collect your key.
You will want to join full or nearly full games to have the best potential to get good items, if people are doing some baal runs, do diablo, meph and andy if you can. Drops are better in quality the more people are in the same game. I actually use a little trick until i get enigma, I can run two accounts at the same time so i build a teleporter sorceress with as much faster cast rate items as i can and let her get into an area and make the portal for the hammerdin.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a first guide, I know full well that there are going to be lots of flaws so feel free to let
me know what should be added to make it better.
it was fun to make and i hope somewhat helpful.
SOD's PvM Hammerdin Guide for Diablo 2:
===================================
*-*-*-*-*-*
contents:
*-*-*-*-*-*
i) About paladins
ii) Why a hammerdin?
iii) Stat allocations
iv) Skill allocations
v) Character leveling method
vi) Mercenary
vii) Gear - Equipment
viii) Mffing
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i) About Paladins
Paladins are an all round class, capable of creating some of the most deadly melee and caster characters in the game. They are stickly melee characters but with 'auras' that can not only effect themselves but their party or enemies.
There are several popular builds out there at the moment from the hammerdin to the shockadin being a couple of the caster (magic based attack characters) to the zealer and smiter both melee
(physical based attack) characters.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ii) Why a Hammerdin?
Where to begin, there are many different reasons but to short list them. You can have an attack around 10,000 per hammer (and you get a screen full of the things), not only that but unlike most other caster characters there are only 2 monsters in the entire game which are immune to the attack (although diablo clone / uber diablo and the beasties in uber tristram give it a go too).
With the correct mercenary (explained later) you can have a defence of over 10,000 easily, that combined with the skill holy shield will mean that you won't take much damage from physical attacks and with the reccomended gear, your resistances to elemental attacks will also be
minimised. So there you have it. You can kill fast, are hard to kill and they are great fun.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iii) Stat Allocation
This you will find is pretty much the same for any character.
Strength - Enough for items
Dexterity - Enough for maximum block with Holy Shield skill active
Vitality - As much as you can
Energy - Nothing
Reasoning for this is pretty self explanitory, even though in early levels mana will be hard, by the time you have concentration and blessed hammer completed you won't need to worry about it although a couple of mana potions is always a safe bet. I'll briefly try and explain the holy shield & dexterity link. If you imagine that without holy shield you have a 50% block rate / 50% of phyiscal attacks will be blocked. With holy shield this figure could be raised to the maximum of a 75% block rate. Dexterity increases your block rate in minor amounts so personally i like to spend every single stat point in vitality and slightly adjust my items/charms to attain 75% block rate others want to spend the points in dex, the choice is yours.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iv) Skill allocation
There are three sections labelled "defensive auras" "offensive auras" and "combat skills"
skill allocation is actually very easy, all you need to do is put the following amount of points into the corresponding skills. 1 means only a point as it's a prerequisite for the skill we really want.
Combat skills
Blessed Hammer-20
Holy Shield-20
Holy Bolt-1
Charge-1
Smite-1
Offensive Auras
Concentration-20
Blessed Aim-20
Might-1
Defensive Auras
Vigor-20
Defiance-1
Cleansing-1
Redemption -1 (INVALUABLE)
Prayer-1
I have recently made a hammerdin and skill maxed in this order, blessed hammer, concentration, vigor, holy shield, blessed aim. But by all means swap the last two over. Depends on how you feel your damage is going, if you need more, pump up blessed aim, if your lacking in defence, go for shield.
As you can see, there are 108 points used for those. "How can you get 107 skills when you only get one per level" you may say, simply by completing a couple of quests in each difficulty setting (normal, nightmare and hell).
1) Act1 "The den of evil" - you only need to go outside of town and stick to the paths in the cold plains to find it. once inside kill every monster, return to town and recieve your skill point reward.
2) Act2 "Radamants Lair" - inside town in the north west corner is a trap door. Enter and proceed to kill your way down two floors (to level 3). In level three you will eventually come across a large group of skeletons with a large shaman. Proceed to kill everything and once Radamaent dies he drops a "book of skills" in your inventory (default key i) right click the book to have it disappear and give you anotehr skill point.
3) Act4 "Izual" - this one is probably one of the harder skill quests to complete solo especially on the hell difficulty for a poorly equipped character, there is also no surefire direction in which to locate Izual you simply have to run onto the burning steps, find your way to and locate
and kill him.
4) Act5 "The Ancients" - although not technicially a quest in exchange for skill points, if you are at the start of a level (and I would reccomend 24 for normal difficulty) then completing this quest will complete your current level, shame it can only be done once per difficulty level! All
you have to do is find the Arreat Summit and beat the three guardians. I would strongly suggest that you find a group of friends or a higher level character to assist you in defeat of these three foes. Not only do you have to defeat all three at once but one of them casts battle orders
(BO) on the others and they have immunities.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
v) Character Leveling Method
There are MANY variations of leveling up a character quickly, but i'll try and attempt it with
level breakpoints.
1-15 Tristram repeatedly
15 - 19 arcane sanctuary / tal rasha tomb runs
20 - 24 the 'not so' secret cow level (wirts leg from tristram, tomb of town portal and cube them) best to be with a high level lightning caster so that they can kill everything except king as if you are in the party when he is killed, YOU cannot open cows anymore.
24/25 - ancients quest
25 - 40/50 - Baal runs, not particularily tough on this difficulty and when you hit 40+ kill baal himself to move onto nightmare
40/50 - 75/80 - Nightmare ancients then baal runs
75/80+ Hell baal runs I would always reccomend running games with the maximum 8 players in a game to benefit from
the most exp/monster ratio. Try to level in full games but in an area on your own so that you don't have to share your exp with others.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vi) Mercenary
The really single most variable thing in the entire paladin build.
Most people will choose a nightmare act2 defensive merc as they are equipped with the paladin aura 'holy freeze' which slows your targets.
There is nothing wrong with this, you teleport into a group of enemies, and start your hammers the holy freeze slows enemies so you can kill them quickly. This I find fine for characters who
are not as strong and cannot control mobs of enemies easily but not for a trained hammerdin.
MY personal preference is a normal act2 defiance mercenary
Reasoning: He boosts your defence by extraordinary amounts. Defiance is a paladin skill and with this mercenary you have less chance of being hurt by physical attacks and what I use the hammerdin for mfing (andy,meph,diablo,baal,keys and uber runs). It's the perfect choice for me due to the fact that once all gear is on your resistances in hell will be
maxed and therefore the only way to minimise damage is to have a high defence and block rate personally i have seen hammerdins with 25+k defence with BO, holy shield and a defiance merc.
Mercenary gear below.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vii) Gear / Equipment
This is a moderatley expensive character, certainly not as high as a lightning sorceress, it requires a few high runes to create the runewords, then sell/trade to get the other items. Of course this is my ideal equipment for a MF hammerdin who has a balance of MF and kill power.
Character Gear
- Helmet - Shako (with either a perfect topaz for MF or a BER if for tank)
- Armour - Enigma (JAH, ITH, BER)
- Belt - Arachnid Mesh belt
- Gloves - Magefists
- Boots - War Travelers
- Shield - Herald of Zakarum
- Weapon - Heart Of The Oak (HOTO) Ko, Vex, Pul, Thul
- Amulet - Maras Kaleidoscope Amulet
- Rings - 1 Stone of Jordan/Bual Kathos wedding band and 1 raven frost so you cant be frozen.
- on weapon switch - Call to arms & spirit shield.
Then you have to consider your inventory.
i'd reccomend loosing the tome of identify all together but you can have any of the following depending on how you like to play:
Gheeds Grand Charm
Annihulus
Hellfire torch (i'd get one of these and the annihulus for ANY char)
Paladin combat skillers
+20 life small charms
+40/45 life grand charms
Personally, i'd go for Gheeds, anni, torch, then as many skillers and life sc's as possible. of course you won't get all you need at once so I keep life charms until they are replaced by skillers.
Mercenary Gear
When it comes down to it, you have two options. Ridiciously strong or resistant to damage. I go for resistant to damage as the merc gets a bonus from our concentration already so...
Helmet - Etheral Vampire Gaze / Shako with BER
Armour - Stone or Fortitude
_________________
Alternatively, if you're going for all out damage, try this.
____________________________
Breath of the Dying
6 Socket Weapons
Vex + Hel + El + Eld + Zod + Eth
____________________________
50% Chance To Cast Level 20 Poison Nova When You Kill An Enemy
Indestructible
+60% Increased Attack Speed
+350-400% Enhanced Damage (varies)
+200% Damage To Undead
-25% Target Defense
+50 To Attack Rating
+50 To Attack Rating Against Undead
7% Mana Stolen Per Hit
12-15% Life Stolen Per Hit (varies)
Prevent Monster Heal
+30 To All Attributes
+1 To Light Radius
Requirements -20%
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
viii) Mffing or Magic find refers to the term '% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items from items' and allows rare or unique items to drop in place of regular items. The sole purpose for 90% of characters I make.
We have the skill, the items and the level (85+) Mf is not dependant on character level!. now it's down to tactics.
BOSSES: choices are: andariel, Duriel, mephisto, diablo, baal - i do all
sub bosses: the countess, the council (travincal), pindleskin - again all keys: the countess, the summoner, nithalak - i'm doing the countess &
the summoner helps finding duriel and nithalak is the only out of the way.
*-* Boss Strategies *-*
Andariel - Once you are high enough of a level (75+) i'd go straight to the hell difficulty setting. NOTE: Andariel frequently drops jewelry, rings and amulets. Proceed to the Catacombes level 2 waypoint and run / teleport to level 3 enemies are not that difficult but your lightning resistances should be at least 20+. Once you hit level 3 you can incurr some difficulty but as long as you have your mercenary holding foes off you should survive fine. Level 4. Now you are in Andariels lair, the home of the Matron of poison based attacks so make sure you have some resistance. If you are relatively weak, take out the surrounding
smaller minions to give yourself some room to manouvere and make sure your mercenary does not release Andariel by walking onto the north eastern carpeted area. Once Andariel is disposed of collect your rewards and get healed of poison in town.
Duriel - This feat should really be attempted after visiting the summoner (see below), once the summoner is dispatched DO NOT go through the red portal to the canyon of the magi just yet. You should see several shapes in flourescent blue gently hovering around. There are several shapes and each one corresponds to a tombe in the next area (there should be a pattern on the floor which shows them all) ONE OF THESE PATTERNS WILL BE MISSING. This indicates which tombe Duriel is in!
Locate and enter the tombe, As soon as you enter Use the Holy Shield Skill, there will be snakes down here which can really put a crimp in your life and even kill you. Slaughter your way through to the last area where he resides.
The easiest way to kill him is to let the mercenary become his primary target, then get in there and hammer the crap out of him, it does not take long but he does have a couple of things to be aware of. He has the paladin Holy Freeze Aura, thereby slowing your attacks. When he strikes, he stuns you for a couple of seconds so it would be wise to cast holy shield again before encountering him. Collect loot and use a TP (Town Portal) to heal and identify drops.
Mephisto - Now we're starting to get to the trickier of foes, mephisto is located on the third level of the last waypoint. DOLLS (little fiendish like creatures with oversharpened carving knives) can be your bane before you encounter him, once again let the mercenary become the target for damage. To kill mephisto is not hard at all as long as your lightening resistance is 50+ as he has a couple of nasty attacks, one being the sorceresses nova attack whereby a circular wave of lightning is shot
out but follow the link for the full list. Simply spam (repeatedly use) as many hammers as you can to whittle his life away, collect the drops and use the red portal to your south east to go to act4.
DIABLO - The name of the game, this to me is generally the most fun area, plenty of high level monsters, especially the casters. These creatures are the reason why you need plenty of gold. They
kill mercenaries like they were going out of fashion. They cast a curse known as Iron Maiden (IM) which reflects damage dealt back to the mercenary, 1/2 hits on an enemy will kill your merc. The only
way to stop this is if you are either godly enough to tackle them solo or if you are going with friends. The target here is to open six portals, two north, two east and two west. East is generally adopted to be the first by most players, simply clear the area around the portals, open them both, kill the unique monster that appears, rinse and repeat.
Once all portals are open, and the spawning uniques are dealt with, any normal enemies dissapear all together. Then you have some dramatic rumbling followed by diablo's voice saying "not even death can
save you from me". After a pause of approximatley 2 seconds he spawns in the centre on the star/ pentagram above the pit of flame. Fire resistance is a must but again for an experienced player, he will
take all of 10 seconds to vanquish.
BAAL - Actually by comparison, Baal is easier than Diablo to defeat, it's only getting to him thats a pain as you will have to locate the throne you should be experienced in this field from levelling your character so clear the hordes that appear, then dispatch with Baal. NOTE: BAAL has a character level of 95, meaning that he can drop ANY item in the game, leviathon armour, deaths fathom and anything else above or below can be dropped from this monster - GOOD LUCK.
Key Running:
The Countess: She is not hard at all, simply hack and slash / teleport your way to the top of the tower and smack the 8itch up. Runes and the first of our keys are located on this wench.
The Summoner: As mentioned above he is the key for an easy path to Duriel. To locate him though requires trial and error, having Enigma or 2 accounts with a teleporter really comes into it's own here. Once he is located though, very simple kill, he uses cold based attacks but won't get more than a couple off before he hits to floor.
Nithalak: Easily the toughest of foes for finding keys (subsequently one of his is worth 3 or so of the others) so take care. He resides past the Halls Of Pain Waypoint, proceed carefully until you find his lair.
He has an extremely nasty attack, he will send waves of minions at you and once dispatched he uses corpse explosion on them to use their bodies in battle once more. As the name implies the body literially explodes causing damage to surrounding hero's. There is a couple of ways to bypass this, one have the 'Redemption' aura active while disposing of the monsters so that souls of the enemies replenish your life and the bodies dissapear or only attack nithalak himself, once he is banished you can take care of the minions at your leasure and collect your key.
You will want to join full or nearly full games to have the best potential to get good items, if people are doing some baal runs, do diablo, meph and andy if you can. Drops are better in quality the more people are in the same game. I actually use a little trick until i get enigma, I can run two accounts at the same time so i build a teleporter sorceress with as much faster cast rate items as i can and let her get into an area and make the portal for the hammerdin.
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As a first guide, I know full well that there are going to be lots of flaws so feel free to let
me know what should be added to make it better.
it was fun to make and i hope somewhat helpful.
![[Image: M1.gif]](http://i451.photobucket.com/albums/qq232/iamjoshii/M1.gif)
