Maldar, the Magnificent

[MongoJerry]

MALDAR: ACT IV, THE CHAOS SANCTUARY, Part I

At six in the evening the following day, I started up Diablo II again, prepared for a long campaign against the Chaos Sanctuary. The first thing I needed to do was reroll the River of Flame monsters to get ones that could easily be led to parking spaces. There are seven kinds of monsters that can appear in the River of Flame:

1. Maw Fiends
2. Stranglers
3. Pit Lords
4. Urdars
5. Grotesques
6. Abyss Knights
7. Blood Maggots

The first four kinds are easy to lead to where you want them to go. The last three require a lot more work. There's an 11% chance of getting a RoF without any of the last three kinds of monsters in it, so one should expect to reroll the RoF nine times to get a RoF without them. Even better would be to get one without urdars as well, because they can be annoying with their stun attacks, but there's only a 3% chance of getting a RoF without them as well, so that would mean rerolling the RoF on average 33 times to get the "perfect" roll.

I rerolled the RoF about a dozen times and kept getting blood maggots for some reason. I kept going. I finally got a good roll and tried it. Maw fiends, stranglers, and urdars. Unfortunately, one of the first groups of monsters to meet me was a champion pack of urdars. I tried to park them, but it was hard with all the other urdars around. Even blind normal urdars could still take swipes at me and stun me when I tried to pass them. Then the champion urdars would catch up to me, and I'd get stuck in a series of stuns and have to run and tp to town. Then, I'd return to the RoF via the waypoint, find out that the champion urdars weren't parked far enough back, try to park them deeper and repeat the whole process including the being clobbered and stunned part. It just wasn't working, so I quit out and rerolled the monsters a few more times.

And got a roll with maw fiends, stranglers, and pit lords. Woohoo! Perfect! I had to make sure not to mess this one up. Below the waypoint, there was a boss pack of maw fiends and a champion pack of stranglers. No problem. I Dim Visioned the normal monsters and got the maw fiend boss and two of the champion stranglers to follow me. I led them deeper into the River of Flame in the northwest direction while casting Dim Visions along the way. When I ran into a new boss pack of stranglers, I figured I'd led the maw fiend and champion stranglers far enough. I tp'd to town and returned to the RoF via the waypoint.



Then I Dim Visioned the normal monsters again and got the other two champion stranglers to chase me down the southwest direction as far as I could go and ditched them there.



When I returned to the RoF via the waypoint again, I checked my handiwork and made the disturbing discovery that one of the champion stranglers who I thought I had ditched in the northwest direction hadn't followed me as far as I thought. That strangler would definitely cause problems if I tried to park monsters in that direction. I bone prisoned it and made a mental note not to come near that path.

But on the whole, things were looking pretty good. I used Dim Vision and Terror to push back all the normal monsters toward the southwest as you can see in the following diagram (look at the automap -- sorry, it's the brightest I could make it). Yes, I know, I'm a geek. If you're reading this, so are you.



I then began the painstaking process of drawing all of the monsters from the bridge area down to the indicated parking spot below the waypoint.



After a long while, I managed to move every monster from the bridge area to the parking spot. I'm not absolutely sure how long it took, but I would guess that from the moment I first turned on the game to this point took about two and a half hours.

After much exhausting work, Maldar finally reached the entrance to the Chaos Sanctuary. Will he be able to handle what he finds inside?