An Ode to Holy Bolt

Holy Bolt. These two words invoke fond memories of afternoons spent crawling through the dungeons of Tristram with Jimbob, battling Diablo's hordes of evil minions. It also brings out a small snicker. Jimbob and I are both blasphemous fans of stupid things, so a spell called Holy Bolt in our demonic, dungeon crawling hack and slash game was too good to be true.


Holy Bolt did it all: it did damage to any undead creature struck with it, and it healed your ally if you shot them with it. Actually, I guess it didn't do it all. After all, it's hard to justify sitting back and spending your mana shooting radioactivie crucifixes at the bad guys when just walking up and smacking them is usually quicker. Likewise, if your partner is getting their ass kicked, Holy Bolting them is probably the least efficient, least helpful thing you could do.

I don't mean this to suggest that Holy Bolt is useless, far from it. It makes this big "foom! foom!" sort of sound as well as providing a light source along the path. This is the only skill in the Diablo games that is only good for entertainment value.


Speaking of blasphemy and comedy, look at this.

To be fair, I've never really used Holy Bolt in Diablo 2. So I loaded up the game and logged in with Old_Whitey, my lvl 16 paladin. I went down into the sewers of act II, aimed my lvl 1 holy bolt at a bunch skeletons and was once again underwhelmed. I'm sure if I focused the character on Holy Bolt it would wind up being a kick-ass spell. Against undead. And useless against everything else. Still, a Holy Bolt paladin - a Boltadin, if you will, is intriguing to me. It reminds me, for some reason, of Jimbob's Cold Snap Magic deck.

So hear's to you, Holy Bolt! You're dumb, but you make me laugh.

Fin.