With Hellgate’s future uncertain, I turned back to Diablo 2 for my action-RPG fix and finished taking my HC necro through the rest of Act 5 normal today.

Baal himself is actually a pushover, and I just had to make sure I kept Decrepify up while the skeletons whittled away at him. The dangerous part of Act 5 for an HC player is actually the Ancients, since you have to fight all three at once, they like to move around a lot, one of them has a nasty whirlwind attack, and another can throw axes. They’re not *too* bad in normal, and I just had to run around a lot to keep throwing Decrepify on them, but I’m really not looking forward to them in NM and Hell, where they can spawn with random abilities as well.

So, I can now technically start the NM difficulty, but the usual suggestion for HC is that I farm Baal for a while until I hit level 45 or so, just to make things a bit safer.