ER Titan Quest hardcore challenge after-action report:

Tonight's games contained the slate of usual suspects. Chance, Pancake, and sauer advanced through Act3 to Act4, which involved two different A3 boss kills. Xenguard (L61) was around for a while bringing the pain in A3 and A4. Gabriel and I, along with a couple others part-time, cleared a boatload of ground in early A4 doing side quests, eventually getting them all (before the portal from Medea to you-know-where). Nali's ternion oracle has uber AoE for late normal.

Personal report: I'm up to L40 now, dinging on the last A3 boss kill. This has been good; Xenguard dropped me a couple more items to balance my gear, but most importantly I was able to put on a blessings of the (grail?) amulet. it has mega, mega all-around resists. This means I now have 250 DPS, which is so-so, but I average about 75 across all the resists. The first 5 are all 80. Stun resist is over 100. I also have pretty decent avoid projectile: I dominate every other archer I've seen so far. In a few more levels, I will be able to put on a Tracker's Hood for a huge DPS boost (I am lacking DEX for it right now). I'm at ~4500 or 4700 HP. I also have 3.5 mil gold so I can respec pretty freely now, which is nice. After putting on the blessing amulet, I got rid of the +elem resist bonuses to heart of oak, which freed up 6 more skill pts for now.

Things are going well! I'm hoping Nixx and other lowbies catch up soon. We will be doing more act3 runs this weekend, I imagine ;)

hardcore challenge: like Diablo 2's hardcore mode, I will retire this char and start a new one if I die.