Looks like you killed a blue pack with Keepers of the Trove bloodlines mod.

 

Yup. Each champ in a blue pack will all drop the same item base and rarity.

 

Keepers of the Trove. Bloodlines mod that was added to the core game. Pack of mobs drop the same base item type rare.

 

Screw wanders too, apparently, cause I ended up rolling a facebreaker. I reroll too much... anyways, definitely my strongest char so far. Just got to 63. At 60, when I equipped some trash jewelry and Abyssus, my dps got to 18k with Ice Crash... with a 3l leveling chest. 63, enter Daresso's 5l and 16k Cyclone/27k Ice Crash buffed dps. Feeling super tanky, and I still have a meh levelng shield. With Lioneye's, I'll have so much armor. Bloodmagic melee ftw, facetank everything and have no mana problems.

I like how my trigger counter-attack can one-shot weak blue packs XD

 

Cruel Malachai Tempest down.

It's helpful when you know that Malachai will use his KO punch upon spawn. That's how I died the first time. He instakilled me when spawning. Never even got a hit in. That's what I got for clicking all over the place because I'm impatient while waiting for spawn animations.

 

Even Dull is so far down the ranks. Lowest it goes is to 70's.

 

Killed Malachai on normal, had about 3 close calls, but managed somehow. Now I can relax on Cruel Act 1

 

Cruel Malachai after nerf was easier then Normal Malachai before nerf. But good job.

 

Or you were just that much stronger

He is also HC, I think, so he can't even let himself die once. More power to him, I died twice to post Nerf mala in normal while leveling a scion last night. Of course, I was also not really trying to avoid dying, but he still blindsided me with a ground slam twice.

Be warned anyone in HC going into maps: be very careful of the new desert and pit 68 maps. The desert map has that stupid blink/mirror arrow guy from the dried lake, except many times worse. Super high phys damage and its really hard to keep track of the real one when 10-20 copies of him are all chunking you with spooky black bolts.
The Pit boss is the guy who cyclones at the end of Duresso's Dream. The thing is, the zone you fight him in is rather small and 5-6 waves of pitbull and rooster demons spawn to help him. If your ear is not fast enough, it's easy to get swarmed.
The new 69 channel map has the giant parasite-infested bird from the aqueduct, and he does an insane amount of damage as well. Much easier to deal with though, as long as you are careful.

In other news, most of the good leveling items and mf gear is apperently much more rare now. Aurasieze, Goldwym, Goldrim, and a number of others are almost nonexistent in the new league, with the handful that have been found being 3+ ex apiece.

 

Well, my EK Shadow died almost ten times on Normal Kaom. Like, seriously, how in the fuck even do people play this game HC? It's borderline unfathomable to me to be able to run these bosses without ever dying. Maybe I'm just that terrible at the game or something, idk.

 

A lot of it is just playing builds that are strong. Let's say a veteran player wants to make an EK Shadow, but he knows EK is shit until end game (I don't know if this is currently the case.) Instead of suffering through 68 levels of mediocrity, he runs Firestorm/Flame totem and blasts his way to maps in a day.

Doing it this way allows you to almost entirely focus on defensive passives, which gives you a much larger margin of error while likely having higher DPS.

 

While I wouldn't call it elite, I'm generally not having problems killing things. It's the avoiding having the same done to me that's providing frustration, though I was doing pretty well about not dying until I hit Kaom's Dream. That entire zone just took a massive volcanic shit all over my character, the boss especially so. Too much shit on the screen all the time due to all the totems.

 

Immortal Call + Cast When Damage Taken saved my hide numerous times, without them I would be toast, but now Act 2 Cruel going strong on Tempest.

 

How many passive points have you allocated for offense and defense respectively (Not that Shadow has much of a choice, which is why he's a bit of a niche pick currently)? Feel free to link your tree if you want. Just curious.

I'm gonna assume you had max fire resist.

Honestly, for softcore it doesn't really matter until Merciless because the EXP penalty is so marginal.

 

Tree.

I mostly just need to level more so that I can tag a few of the life node clusters around me (Melding and Hired Killer obviously since they're right there, and then going up to Heart and Soul in the Witch area of the tree). But like you implied, Shadow isn't a very defensively solid class.

 

If I were to point to a single thing, I'd say all of the crit nodes are your problem. Crit nodes are typically the very last thing you pick up since they don't improve your DPS a great deal without Crit Damage. Cast Speed would have almost guaranteed provided more DPS.

Just by not grabbing those, you could have 2-3 more Life clusters filled out by now. Then there's a few extra nodes that could have been saved by routing differently for leveling and then respecing later.

That being said, for softcore this is fine. You literally do not have to care about dying until cruel and even then it's not a big deal, so putting off Life nodes isn't the end of the world. I merely point it out because this is the kind of thought that goes into playing a hardcore character.

 

Yeah, I could have just ignored the entire Quickness - Assassination - Coldhearted Calculation road and just gone straight up to Trickery and then veered left to the path I'm currently following. It'll probably be fine anyway though. That zone just gave me some headaches because I'm running more evasion than anything else to provide defense at the moment (will go ES once I get to a level where I can use some of the gear I have for it) and that area is not evasion friendly due to all the chaff clogging up the map.

 

Well 2 things are king in HC. Masterful knowledge of boss mechanics and defenses. HC chars generally go for a lot more hp and make sure resists are always capped past like normal. (like 170%~ hp from tree by maps)

Also, playing SC just teaches bad habits because you know when you die, you only lose 10% exp. So just the act of playing through HC, teaches you better habits that result in you dying less. You should give it a try for a couple characters, might find you enjoy it a lot even if you die.

 

That is true, earlier I played softcore - my char was all over the place, haphazard, died often and eventually my interest to the game waned. Fortunately my friend persuaded me to play HC and the game is now interesting for me, you must always be prepared now and it instills certain in-game discipline. Now I remember how I didn't understood people who played HC in Diablo 2 so long ago - how I was wrong!

 

Just made it to HC Cruel A2 myself a little bit ago. I'm playing risky with Blood Magic, but we'll see how far I get.