It’s late…errr early, but I am now the proud owner of an Annihilus charm on the ladder. I entered the standard SDMB game in hell to do a little MF’ing and pretty soon after entering the SOJ counter started at about 1419 and continued climbing, and climbing, skipping only 1 number here and there. I went and cleared all of Shenk’s minions, preparing to do the Dclone kill trick in the very likely case that I was unable to kill him solo with my level 78 sorc.
After that, I was tired of waiting and went MF’ing around for a while. I got a pretty good haul off of Meph and just after picking everything up I was looking over my loot and I got “CONNECTION INTERRUPTED”…I was in quite a bit of distress as the SOJ counter had climbed about 40 times at this point. Luckily, I was able to rejoin the same game and the SOJ counter quickly continued climbing at the same point it had been before. I waited in town for a while and talked to the NPC’s periodically to keep the connection up.
Then it came: DIABLO WALKS THE EARTH
I felt my pulse quicken as I went to the Frigid WP and approached Eldritch. Only thing was, Eldritch was there and there was no Dclone. I killed Eldritch and his buddies and at this point I was scared that Dclone had somehow taken the place of Shenk. I resisted the urge to go look and continued into the Frigid Highlands, clearing everything in my path. Approaching one of the areas where the soldiers are held captive, I saw the telltale ring of fire come at me. I went in for a closer look and sure enough Dclone was there next to another super-unique MSLE FI/LI guy that looked like Shenk (not Threshsocket) and a whole huge swarm of CI Champion spear-chucker thingys. It was not looking pretty.
By teleporting around like mad I was able to get Dclone to back off a bit and let me deal with all the spear-chuckers one by one. After taking care of them, I went on to the Unique whip-weilding guy. He had mad HPs, almost like he had taken on Dclone’s amount of HP’s or his resistances, but not both. It took me quite a while of spewing frozen orbs to finally take him out. Now it was just me and Dclone, so I decided to see if there was even the most remote possibility that I could take him on solo, fair and square. There wasn’t…no way, no how. Static doesn’t work on him like it does other monsters, it worked very slowly and my FO’s and meteors weren’t doing diddly compared to how fast he regen’ed.
It took quite a while and a lot of frustration, but I was finally able to lure him out of the embattlements into semi-open ground. I then tried to get him to follow me over to Shenk, but that proved even harder than it was to lure him the short way out of the embattlements. He would follow me sometimes, but would then stop and eventually retreat farther back then where he had started. I decided to bring Shenk to him instead and that proved MUCH easier. Once I herded them together, I unleashed meteors on the CI mana-burn Shenk and between the effort of trying to keep them close together and all the damn mana-burn I wasn’t paying attention to my life. Just as I died, Shenk and Dclone were walking further apart and Shenk walked into one of my burning meteor spots and died. I was in absolute panic because they weren’t that close together and I thought I had blown it. As I lay dead, I rejoiced upon seeing DClone enter his death throes a few seconds after Shenk and hearing the telltale sound of a charm hitting the ground.
Ahhhh, music to my ears!!! I’ve never had such a pleasant D2 death as I went back and collected my body and my Annihilus sc… +1 skills, +13 to all attributes, +14 to all resists, +8% exp. gained. Far from the perfect 1/20/20/10, but I’m not complaining. I was beginning to think that I would never see Dclone on the ladder…it’s a good thing the Shenk (cheap)trick exists though, or else who knows how long I would have stayed awake trying to get that sucker.
And I have a wonderful, wonderful Titan’s Revenge. Now I have to find a good belt for you to try and wrangle your T-Gods from you. 