Diablo II: Certain Death Tournament

The Certain Death Tournament by Wakiki is an mutation of a previous tournament I had played, the No Vitality tournament. The basic concept is that no stat points may be placed into Vitality at all. The way this tournament is different from the No Vitality one is that an extra restriction is placed on equipment where no more than 30 health allowed per item and only a single health charm per charm type (small, large, grand) is allowed. This means no shopping for those +100 health armors and such, so all of the characters really are walking paper targets. As one can imagine there were quite a few deaths in this tournament, and my character was no exception.

Jaheira, of Baldur's Gate fame, was planned as a Trapsin (an assassin using traps). I had never created one before so thought this tournament would be a good place to start, considering her skills allows her to remain far away from monsters 90% of the time. She started off using melee combat to deal with monsters, due to how simple the first act of the game is. While progress was slow Jaheira didn't encounter any real problems until her untimely death. Once traps and Cloak of Shadows became available to her progress became both quick and safe. When a pack of monsters was encountered she would first cast Cloak of Shadows to blind them all to the presence of both the mercenary and herself. Then several traps were laid out and Jaheira would watch the carnage that resulted.

Outside things were very simple, with lots of room to roam and no choke points Jaheira could move freely. It was the indoors or underground areas that gave her the most problems, specifically those with doorways such as the Countess Tower in Act I NM. Since Jaheira couldn't see what was awaiting her, she took to casting a trap on the other side of the doorway to see if any monsters were nearby. If they were, then more traps joined the first one until they stopped firing. Otherwise the way was safe and Jaheira could walk through the doorway. As such progress was slow inside, as either this tactic or just casting a single trap at all intersections and turns in the underground caves was used at all times from Nightmare difficulty onward.

Unfortunately Jaheira still was unable to protect herself fully, as evident by the fact she was taken down in a drive-by from a crow type monster in the Spider Forest of Act III in Hell. A unique boss with unknown stats flew into the screen and eliminated Jaheira before any reaction could be taken, then flew away just as fast. Quite odd to have a deeds screen with no monsters present, but that's what I got.

My conclusions about this are that trapsins are way to overpowered, but I still wanted to build one for my collection. So next step is to recreate Jaheira in Softcore mode, and twinkled.