Tamarin of APT
(nightmare difficulty)
(nightmare difficulty)
[Tamarin of APT is a member of The All Pally Team #1 on USWest. The All Pally Team concept was developed by Concillian, see his page here and the page for Team #1 here.]
I decided to develop Tamarin as a no-DEX polearm paladin, relying on his Blessed Aim aura and the AR boost from Sacrifice to be able to hit anything (later supplemented with the Conviction aura from another team member). There are several polearms without any DEX requirement, and the best of these is the poleaxe (and its exceptional cousin, the partizan).
Fate was obviously please with Tamarin's choice of weapon, for with his
very first gamble on a poleaxe, while the team was resting in Kurast, he
picked up the unique Battlebranch, which was about as good a weapon as he
could expect to get for normal difficulty.
The team flew through normal difficulty, hitting some of the optional areas for item-hunting and leveling but not attempting a full game clear, and Tamarin got his Sir title at the relatively tender age of level 24. [Not quite a record for me, but close :)]
Through the early part of nightmare difficulty, with no Conviction yet and the team severely under-leveled compared to the monsters they were fighting, the team relied heavily on Tamarin's Blessed Aim aura, and there was much complaining whenever he needed to visit town and the rest of the team found themselves suddenly unable to hit anything. Tamarin reveled in his temporary position as the team's most-wanted member, at least until Solomon's Conviction aura arrived somewhere in the Kurast jungles.
Tamarin's other specialty was in dealing with lightning-enchanted bosses. Having quite accidentally achieved near-max lightning resistance from his normal equipment, and with the high levels of life-steal he was using to keep from killing himself with Sacrifice (which he still managed to do a couple of times [ooops]), he could melee a lightning-enchanted boss and pretty much ignore the charged bolt field (just so long as he kept on hitting the monster). The high-point of his LEB slaying career came when he solo-killed Bremm Sparkfist, trapping him in a corner and hacking him to death with his (imbued) partizan while the rest of the team kept out of the way of the sparks.
The All Pally Team #1 started nightmare difficulty with just four members (Concillian, Kestrel, Marcus Might and Tamarin). The roster was boosted with the arrival of Solomon (and the much-needed Conviction aura), and it was these five who fought through Hell to face Diablo in his Chaos Sanctuary. Though it wasn't Diablo himself who gave the team the most problems (there were two deaths to Diablo, both of the shieldless Tamarin getting fried in Diablo's lightning attack). Much more problematic for a team of melee-only characters were the Grotesque spawners in the River of Flame, and the team suffered many deaths getting swarmed by the difficult-to-target Grotesque Wyrms.
Tamarin of APT became a Lord at level 32 with the stats shown (showing the effects
of level 20 Blessed Aim on AR, but without the boosts to damage and
defense that would normally come from auras used by other team
members). Skills at this point:
Also taken as prerequisites: Might, Prayer.
Normal equipment setup:
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