When Hardcore is too Hardcore!

In explanation of the previous post: a few days ago, our brave hardcore, elite, blind heroes had still not made it to Act 2 of Torchlight.  The first 20 levels or so were manageable  but after that, they found constant permadeath in the dungeons and regions of the second half of act 1 (the ice region!).  One fateful night, three of us decided to make a run on the final Act 1 dungeon, but had to level up one of our fellows in the process so running around the ice region was in order.  Much to our surprise, a random boss not even in a dungeon fired off an attack that killed both the level 25 Engineer (with a LOT of hit points) and the level 17 Berserker.  My character, Blactaculus 2, was hit about as hard as possible, but managed to survive.  After all the deaths, this was the final straw for Elite hardcore blind.

What caused both characters to die in one attack we cannot determine.  The attack itself was an ice shot that hit multiple times along a straight line.  Chillhoof has this same attack and I have lost at least one character to it– but he’s a major boss. This ice guy was just a dude running around.  Were there criticals rolled at this time?  Multiple criticals?  We can’t be sure.

That said, we’re putting away the hardcore mode for awhile to see the rest of the game together.  We will be back to Hardcore Elite, but as of now, the blind run is over and we— we failed!   This is a testament to the difficulty of Torchlight 2 on the higher levels for anyone stating that the game is too easy: be more ELITE.