Diablo II: The Peasants Tournament

The Peasants Tournament by Morathi was an interesting concept for a tournament. The basic premise is that each character is a peasant, and therefore restricted from having access to certain items and skills. Specifically no spells above level 18 are allowed to be used, although they may have points added for synergy purposes. Also defensive equipment was restricted to those without metal and all equipment restricted to only normal/rare/magical, no set or unique items allowed.

I entered with Calypso, a Firewall and Glacial Spike sorceress. Her progress was slow but steady. In the beginning she simply went melee and whacked all of the monsters she encountered. Later, as points were invested in Ice Blast that skill was used as the main monster killer and as a support feature for the mercenary. Being mana intense I found the need to return to town early and often, which was quite annoying. Things didn't get any easier once Firewall was available, as that skill is fairly mana intensive as well. However on the flip side Firewall was able to kill off any monster fairly quickly so progress sped up a bit.

General game play saw Calypso freezing her enemies with Glacial Spike and then dropping a Firewall on them while a GS or two were thrown in to keep the monsters in place. For those monsters that were highly fire immune then GS and Static Field were used in concert, with the mercenary cleaning up the mess afterwards. While this worked well in Normal and the beginning of Nightmare it definitely slowed down a bit as NM progressed.

Alas Calypso met her end in the sewers of Act III due to player error. Instead of dropping a Firewall on Icewing's pack but instead Teleported into their midst instead. With no FHR or FCR Calypso was stun locked and the mercenary was unable to scare the pack away due to having a very weak weapon.

Overall it was fun, but I was beginning to doubt that Glacial Spike with only a single synergy would be viable in Hell to deal with all of the fire immune monsters. I tend to doubt it as it had major issues dealing with monsters in Act II NM, much less the massive HP increase they'll all get in the later part of NM and Hell. I don't think I'll rejoin this tournament, I have so many softcore characters I want to build and a lot of new toys from the recent MFO and Pindlethon to use on them. As a result I'm going to do that for a while instead of any public tournaments.