Diablo II: The Obsession Tournament

As per the name, in Obsession Tournament obsession is the name of the game. Choose a skill and then you are required to max it and all of its synergies out before choosing another skill. The same holds true for stats, choose either Strength, Dexterity, Vitality or Energy and four out of five stat points must be placed there each time the character is leveled up. Along with these restrictions there are equipment rules as well. An element is also picked and then all equipment used must reference this element in some way, same holds true for the attribute selected.

I choose an Amazon named Mercury who would be obsessed with Plague Javelin, Lightning and Vitality. Going started slow as both javelins and armor were lacking for most of Act I. This was Ok since the main attack isn't even usable yet, so still progressing but slowly. Only against Andariel did Plague Javelin become available, but from there onward things became much easier. The normal monsters were tanked by the Act II town guard while Mercury poisoned them all from afar. The only problems appeared from Act bosses who killed off the mercenary. Mercury would run circles around them and throw javelins periodically to keep the poison acting at all times. Very slow way to whittle down a boss' life, but eventually they fell.

One extra rule that caused me problems is that all equipment used must be of the type equal to the difficulty the character is in. Therefore in normal regular equipment is used but in Nightmare the character must have all exceptional equipment, and so forth. This means starting Nightmare Mercury was basically naked and starting from scratch.

Once Plague Javelin was maxed out Mercury moved on to maxing Valkyrie for an additional tank to help out the mercenary. He's been getting swarmed up to this point and needs help surviving monster mobs. Mercury got to Hell and then suddenly realize I poorly planner her out. She didn't have the strength/dexterity to wield an elite javelin. As a result she would have to punch her way to Baal. Tried this up to the Cold Plains and then called it quits and retired, took far too much time. This of course is a good lesson for me, plan out the character way in advance before starting to ensure something like this never happens again.

To redeem myself I started Wraith, an Assassin obsessed with Strength, Poison and Cloak of Shadows. The idea was that CoS would keep her alive in the most dire of circumstances and then she could obsess in an offensive skill afterwards. Unfortunately I never got that far. Wraith met her end at level 22 to the lightning beetles of Act II Normal. Her lightning resistance was at 40% but with so many charged bolts flying around she couldn't drink health potions fast enough.

This lead to the third and final character of mine in this tournament; Rayne the sorceress obsessed with Vitality, Lightning and Static Field (then Firewall). Her basic strategy was static field like mad while the mercenary tanked, then firewall the remaining monsters. This worked wonders in Normal where SF can actually kill monsters. Nightmare had problems as SF can only reduce monster life to 1/4 their total. However Rayne didn't get much of a chance to see how NM would go, she met her end to a Might enhanced, Extra Fast, Extra Strong, Cursed Treadhead in the Dark Wood. The mercenary died within seconds and Rayne couldn't outrun the pack.

That ended this tournament for me, I had just restarted a week or two earlier and wanted to concentrate on Softcore characters and magic finding for a while.