An unexpectedly useful newbie hard core experience

For no particular reason, I’d decided this season would be “hard core or bust”. I’d previously taken a non-seasonal crusader to paragon 250 or so hard core, so it seemed like something new to try and I had bit of experience at it…

Long story short, I’ve had three different characters make it near level 70 just to die right at the “finish line”, so to speak.

This time, I decided I would take it really slow and just stay on Hard difficulty until I hit level 70, period.

For a change of pace, I also decided to run bounties instead of rifts, if only to build up a few cube mats so I could cube some of the legendaries I’d saved from the previous masters of my current Crusader, may they RIP.

In one of the bounty caches, at level 15, I got a Death’s Bargain. This is pants that turn your life-per-second rating into an “aura of death” at the cost of preventing your normal life regen. Normally, I’d toss a “monkey’s paw” sort of gear into the vault or even just salvage it, but I figured, level 15 was easy enough to level back up, so, why not? It would be good for a laugh.

Turned out the joke was on me!

Part of it is that at level 15, my Crusader’s native life-per-second is only like 40, and the pants come with a rating of 33 built-in, so it almost doubled it. Part of it is that “hard” difficulty is barely difficult. Either way, what I expected was that things might take some damage but my Crusader would have issues keeping his health up.

Instead, everything that got near me exploded. :wink: It was quite ridiculous, actually. Even with Elites, all I had to do was run in circles around them until they died. I didn’t need to push any buttons unless I just really wanted to clear out a crowd. It was like I was using some super thorns build with “thorns” that had a radius of 10-15 feet around me.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not suggesting this pants is better than, say, Pox Faulds or something else that does a similar job. I’m just amazed that something I’d always thought of as “bad” turned out, instead, to be “good”.

Now, I’m having to resist the urge to push my difficulty level up a couple of notches just to see how far it actually is “good”, heh. I’m sure that as my Crusader levels up and that 33 life-per-sec on the pants recedes into smallsville, that the overall effectiveness of the pants will decrease substantially. In the meantime, I’ve started favoring life-per-sec on the other bits of gear I pick up and I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts, lol.

I’ll definitely be putting these pants back into the vault for the next apprentice Crusader to equip. :wink:

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I hear you. I think every player at some point goes into autopilot when speed leveling. In HC, many (self included) have been guilty of forgetting to exit the game and come back in at a lower torment level once hitting 60. I have been killed at level 69 a few times.
There is a mental prompt of ‘only one more to go’. I may have a tempting of fate and luck problem sometimes? Haha.
Because many characters can go right through, it is easy to neglect this, especially when your character is still killing enemies with ease and not taking damage. Then, only to find one hit either wipes you out or takes 90% of your life.
In saying all of that, nonetheless, it’s still fun.

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Yeah, I can agree with Bassdude here, died at level 67 on my way to 70. Should have taken a break instead. Slain by unknown. This was with Playstation XOne though, different platform. Although advice still holds.