ACT V




Wow.  Well, you've made it.  Welcome to Act V.  You think you're badass.  You've got da gear, you've got da equipment, you've got da skills, you've got da levels.  You're gonna kick ass.  Well, welcome to the expansion, prepare for an ass kicking.  That's right, for the next 8-15 hours of game play you're going to get wasted, over and over and over.  You may not die, not even once, but you'll still be getting your ass kicked, and it won't be pretty.
Here's the low down.  You've killed Mephisto and Diablo and destroyed their essence stones, thus banning them from ever returning to Earth.  So Baal's all pissy, and he goes to the barbarian highlands to corrupt the worldstone, thus enabeling Hell's forces to charge Earth full force.  By the time you get there he's already on his way north to the worlstone chamber.  So you rush after him.  Well...don't go so fast, you'll get killed =P  You have to do all these quests as you slowly make your way up the long road up the mountains towards Baal's throne of destruction, and the worlstone chamber.
Well you finally get there and you get into the throne of destruction and there's Baal, laughing at you.  So he summons demons and minions to kick your ass, and they do.  Every tough demon you've fought in the game gets summoned to kick your ass.  Eventually you kill them, and he retreats to the worldstone room.  So you chase him in, and kick his ass.  He was disapointingly easy.  I went toe to toe with my health drain skill and kicked his ass while my hirling and shadow dealt with the things he had summoned to distract me.  Anyway, then he drops crap for loot and you find out about the sequel.

You may not loot this corpse at this time.  I love running around with all these corpses, searching them for loose change and such.

There's a lot of cool quests in Act V, such as one quest where you get to socket any one item, as long as it's not socketed already.  This one allows you to personalize any item.  I chose to personalize the claws that I got in an earlier quest from this very NPC.  I'm still using these as my main hand weapon.

The undead are pretty cool in this act because when you kill them, they just get back up and attack you again!  I usually get too frustrated with the, and let my hirling and shadow deal with them.

I wish killing uber mobs in EQ was as cool as it is in D2

Go forth now, assasin, and win the game!

I've collected a lot of potions for when I take on Baal.  I just wish I knew ahead of time that he was going to be so easy.  I wouldn't have kept nearly as many.  I was down about 15 potions after I killed Baal, 12 of which were used on his minions he summoned before when he was on the throne.

If I were the Lord of Destruction I think I would have chosen a more discrete name for my chamber, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Here's Baal on his throne, where he summons minions for me to fight.  This part was the hardest part of killing Baal.

Here's Baal as I engaged him....cake.

Here's Baal, dead!

And here's Tyrael explaning the sequel.  Apparenlty Baal has already corrupted the worldstone, damnit you were late!  So instead Tyrael is gonna destroy the thing, which apparently will slow down the advances of the demons from Hell, but now there isn't really anything to stop them from returning to earth (forshadow, Diablo III). UPDATE: Forshadow, Diablo III sometime...maybe. If the fine folks at Blizzard can *ever* finish Warcraft III. But of course, after that, they'll have to have everyone working on World of Warcraft, the Warcraft MMORPG =P But then maybe we'll start to see some work on the sequels to Starcraft and Diablo II we're all waiting for.






The Secret Cow Level