Here's the list of character builds I selected for this team, in the order that I settled on them. This was my first run at this play format, and so I just took the strongest candidate for each class that I wanted to play. The later teams would take into account other considerations, to differentiate from this team and from other characters I've played before.

• Necromancer: Standard bonemancer, one of my favorite classes in general, much more active and interesting than a summoner.


• Assassin: Standard trapper, also a favorite for hardcore. This was my only previous purely untwinked and self-found Guardian, and should be considerably more likely to survive than a melee assassin.


• Amazon: Javazon. Picked over a bowazon because those skills work with any javelin in a limited item pool, rather than needing to find a good bow. She will need both lightning and poison javelin skills to deal with immunes.


• Barbarian: Whirlwind and Berserk main skills. I think this is the best barbarian build overall. Whirlwind does more dps than any other barb combat skill, and it's so much more active and fun and smooth to whirl through the monsters than to use any of the slower and duller combat skills. Plus Berserk for physical immunes or high resistance.


• Druid: Wind spellcaster. Like the javazon, that's the best build of the class to cobble together with a limited item pool. And has strong survivability between max Oak Sage for life and hiding behind a summoned grizzly.


• Sorceress: Lightning/cold. A solo sorceress always needs dual elemental trees, to deal with immunes. The standard build for that is fire/cold (meteorb), but I think lightning is smoother and more fun, compared to meteors being slow and clunky to use.


• Paladin: This one is the hardest. This is by far the worst class for survival in solo hardcore. He's fully exposed to monsters all the time: no summonable minions to hide behind, no teleport or long range attack to keep away, no disabling skills like Cloak of Shadows or Dim Vision or Shockwave, and no life multiplier skill like Battle Orders or Werebear.
  
  I actually played through act 1 with my paladin before deciding what build to commit him to. Doing that reminded me how clunky paladin melee is. You have to tediously left-click on every monster individually, you can't right-click-drag to auto-attack in empty space like every other melee class can, because the paladin's aura has to occupy the right-click spot.
  
  So I eventually decided this paladin had to be a hammerdin after all. That really is the strongest version of the class; any other build is very weapon-dependent (Zeal, Vengeance), very slow (Smite, Fist of the Heavens), or just underpowered (Charge, Holy Shock.) I've fared poorly with hammerdins before in hardcore, with two previous dead attempts, but I'll take that as a "challenge accepted" rather than shying away from it. So here we go.

I'm mostly going to skip ahead to the end of normal difficulty. There's not all that much interesting to report from the early acts. The one notable item from early on was a necromancer head with +3 Bone Spear and +1 Decrepify, which meant he could use that and save all the prerequisite points in the curse tree up to Decrep.

So the characters proceeded through normal difficulty on their early skills. Anyone can whack their way through act 1 with any makeshift skills and equipment, not really worth talking about. Playing a single pass through on players-7, each character reliably reached level 18 by the end of act 1 and 24 by the end of act 2, to kick in the skills at those tiers. Level-18 is the major offensive skill for several of these builds: Bone Spear, Charged Strike, Blessed Hammer. The druid and assassin had to go through act 2 with melee also until getting up to Tornado and Lightning Sentry, and the barbarian was really slow through all of the first three acts until he could finally get Whirlwind at level 30. But nothing in those acts is ever really much of any threat, particularly against the high life total of a barb and druid.

Along the way, I made Stealth armors for several of the characters; first for anyone who would use faster cast rate (sorc, hammerdin, bonemancer, wind druid), and also the trapsin and javazon used one for a while for the run speed.

Towards the end of normal difficulty, interesting items started to appear:

Baal for the trapsin dropped a Rockstopper helm. Quad resist, three elements and physical. No skills, which is usually what you go for in the helm slot. It's often merc equipment and may end up there eventually. For now I'm putting it on the paladin, who probably needs the physical resistance the most, and +skills the least, with basically no passives, and Blessed Hammer is already more than powerful enough to destroy Nightmare.

Darkglow armor (actually 2 copies of it), +5% to max resistances. The paladin also got that, since he can live without +skills in the armor slot too, and can reach the high resistance cap between Rockstopper and a paladin shield. The second copy might have gone on the trapsin, but she got something else cool: a Twitchthroe armor, but ethereal. Only the trapsin and javazon on this team can use the IAS, but the javazon gets hit more, and she also gets a Peace runeword (+2 amazon skills) instead. So the trapsin will use the eth Twitchthroe while it lasts, so far for all of act 5 and it only lost 6 durability.

Sigon's gloves and belt (30% IAS partial set bonus), gave it to the javazon as the one who uses IAS more than the trapsin. Also Sigon's helm but that doesn't add anything, along with plenty of all the usual junk set items.

Also a Wall of the Eyeless (20% FCR in the shield slot), would be fun for the sorceress or wind druid in normal difficulty, but once into nightmare (it was found late in act 5) can't really use the lack of resists.

The bonemancer shopped his +3 Bone Spear wand from Drognan as bonemancers usually do, and someone turned up a Dol rune, to account for half of his White runeword. Hopefully the Io will show up too before too long, from the hellforge in nightmare if not sooner.

Also started to find Sol runes for Lore helms, a standard early option for most characters, currently on the sorceress. The barb and druid are waiting for some good class-specific helm to load up with Lore, haven't yet found anything with enough relevant skills, though the druid does have a +1 circlet. Amazon got a great gambled circlet too, +1 skills with life and resists. A Tarnhelm also dropped, also +1 skills, currently on the bonemancer.

And Anya's class-specific-item reward for the sorceress delivered a hell of a beauty, an orb with +2 lightning skills and good life and mana and even fire resistance. That happened because of something I did right - delay talking to Anya until you gain more levels, because the item depends on that. I didn't think to do this with the other characters but remembered for the sorcie, it paid off, a +2 tree skills prefix requires affix level 40.

Ironically, I kept getting good 1H melee weapons -- the one item category I don't have anyone on the team to use. (Barbs want 2H swords, because for Whirlwind all swords count as 1H for better speed breakpoints, but deal 2H damage.) Found a General's Tan Do Li Ga flail and Griswold's Edge sword, both could have been pretty decent paladin Vengeance weapons for quite a while, cube-upgraded to exceptional. Also got one ethereal self-repair rare sword, hah.

But the barbarian had a hell of a time finding any good 2H sword option. I made all of Steel, Malice, and King's Grace runewords in various 2H sword chassis, and gambled a few rares, but wasn't really happy with any, best was Steel in a Flamberge because it reaches the best WW speed breakpoint, but it's still not great damage. He went all the way through act 5 with that, though it got grindingly slow particularly against Lister's pack and then Baal. Then gambled a rare flamberge (fastest 2H chassis) with some enhanced damage, serviceable after a cube upgrade to exceptional, but also still not great.

But then at the very last moment of normal difficulty, Baal for my last character (the sorcie) dropped a Bloodletter unique Gladius! Even as a 1H weapon, that deals more damage than any of the 2H swords! So the thing to do is dual-wield that and the next-best sword, the gambled rare (both are the same speed.) Usually dual-wielding doesn't really help a whirlwind barb (other than Grief), your best sword loses more damage dropping to 1H than your second-best sword is worth, but now it's the right setup until something better comes.

From here on, I wrote up a report for each act for the following difficulties, organized as follows, click to move on.

Home | Start | Nightmare | Hell