In the pools I finally went to moving just a little bit at a time. I think that maybe all the attacking going on was interfering. 'Finished' in quotation marks because I did have to kill more than I planned to. I'd kind of like to go back and try the Water Temple in Varn to see if that always happens. My (very vague) memory is of going down that ramp and not running into anything till you got to the bottom, but I could be wrong. Took me a few reloads to do the hive. Wasn't sure if regular magic worked on the Queen (I should have remembered but I didn't). Tried with blaster and then daggers and neither of those was doing the trick, so finally went to Shrapmetal (at expert level).
As I noted previously, it's actually a pretty easy and fast game for the most part. Gold was a problem pretty much all the way through and I had to go seek out chests to loot several times - even just to train. My equipment wasn't all that great but it was ok. Finished at level 53.
