Boners

[mageofthesands]

Bone Wall and Prison make for great crowd control. Don't dimiss them for only synergies.

[Minionman]

I was going to start one of these things and was wondering how to deal with magic immunes. Is a mercenary enough, or is corpse explosion useful, or would I need something else? Otherwise, this does seem like a really cool character.

[Shade]

I was going to start one of these things and was wondering how to deal with magic immunes.  Is a mercenary enough, or is corpse explosion useful, or would I need something else?  Otherwise, this does seem like a really cool character.

Throwing axe/knife of vileness on switch. This little thingie works wonders to me. To deal with magic immunes, you imprison them first, stop their regeneration with single hit of your weapon (note that PMH does not work if your merc using item with it), and let your merc kill some critters. Then some corpses appear - blow them up!

Also, Malice spear/polearm/sword on your merc is good for this. While PMH will not work, Open Wounds will.

[whyBish]

In loving memory of King Zen, for those of you who might remember him

Wow, that is going back

Good luck with HC :)

[Lelorinel]

Yay, someone else who remembers Zen!

[Bob the Beholder]

Yay, someone else who remembers Zen!

I remember the name being mentioned as the first hardcore, three dot, expansion character on the realms.

Am I getting the reference right?

[lfd]

Isn't "King" (or "Queen") the title given to hardcore three-dot classic characters, rather than expansion?

[Obi2Kenobi]

Yes

[Lelorinel]

Darn, nobody remembers him.

Way back when level 40 was a 'high' level, classic D2 was the only game in town, and the expansion was not even dreamed of by players(believe it was around v 1.05-1.06), there was Zen.

King(Yes, he actually held the title king for killing diablo in hell difficulty) of the HC overall Ladder, level 60-something Bone necro who was a PK extroaordinaire!

At the time he was the talk of the HC community, at least when I was playing hc.
He was surrounded by legend, everything from he's a hacker, he is the owner of blizzard, he has a level 50 Bone Spirit, etc.....

So, all in all, he was the first and last hero of bnet.

Hope that explains my statements.


*Edit*
Update, Fluffy_reborn made it to level 35!

[Dr. Disaster]

Hi,

since Shadow mentioned me i thought i throw in the current stats of my necro BroknBones. He's much fun and also fast to play; not über enough to fall asleep before the screen but safe almost anywhere.

clvl 85
str and dex almost base
vit 170 -> 647 life
nrg 282 -> 731 mana

"Why so much energy?" you may ask. Well i never was lucky enough to find any good +mana item combos, SoJ's, Frostburns etc. and i really hate running to town to buy mana! Ok those hell bitches can be annoying with their life-burn curse but most of the time they die fast enough.

Teeth/Bone Spear/Bone Spirit/Bone Prison 20
Bone Armor/Corpse Explosion 1
Bone Wall 14

As you see he uses only the bone part of the poison & bone tree. With other necro builds i noted that the poison tree part is too weak/too slow to be more than support spells in hell diff. Summoned minions require IMO too much skill points to be effective and without minions i see no real need for curses.

Skill adders: +1 all skills, +9 poison & bone skills, +3 Bone Armor, +5 Bone Spear

This totals to:
Teeth (30): 24 times 520-677 dmg (great crowd control even in hell)
Bone Armor (14): 660 dmg absorb
Bone Spear (35): 3040-3207 dmg
Bone Spirit (30): 2883-3095 dmg (never used since it's slow, mana-burning and weaker then spear)

That's enough magic dmg to finish off most monsters with a few hits. If they can take much more they get prisoned/walled in first and then killed. In case those rare magic immunes crawl :o out i prison them and watch my trusty cold arrow rogue pick them off :D

"A rogue?!?": as Shadow already said BroknBones had a holy freeze merc up to his early 80s. Pretty nice for slowing critter hordes down. But the tougher the critters got the more often he got in my way of play. When it came into heavier prisoning/walling the poor guy got blocked too offen from reaching his life-leech-target or escaping which caused quite some merc death series in several areas. So i finally swapped him against a rogue since for her it doesn't matter on which side of the wall she ends up ;)

A few real threats still remain. Those are monsters or attacks that pass thru Bone Wall/Prison: all forms of ghosts and gloom lightning streams :blink: Then you have to fight while retreating/evading and use your merc as cover. Too bad Teleport is a Sorceress-only skill.

That's it. Cya around
Dr. Disaster

[Chesspiece_face]

A few real threats still remain. Those are monsters or attacks that pass thru Bone Wall/Prison: all forms of ghosts and gloom lightning streams  Then you have to fight while retreating/evading and use your merc as cover. Too bad Teleport is a Sorceress-only skill.

1 point in Dim Vision could help out a lot against those small but vocal few.

[Brista]

So the point I was trying to make is that for a bones-only necro, exploiting the Marrowwalk bug results in a less powerful character than just investing directly in bone prison.

Jimbowe, I think that the way that Marrowwalk would be used to power up a bone build would be to drop Bone Wall or Dim on things and not use charges at all

So essentially just a free 33 point synergy bonus

So it would power up some other people's builds and is a very clear bug

[Caaroid]

So essentially just a free 33 point synergy bonus

So it would power up some other people's builds and is a very clear bug

Yes, but it is all the more satisfying to kill an imprisoned marrow necro...

[Brista]

touche :lol:

[juj]

Hi - this is my first post since I joined the Lounge. I have a lvl 93 necromancer with most points in the bone tree - he is single player, softcore and plays with a might aura mercenary. I have placed a few points in various curses but most of the points are in the bone tree. There no points in the summoning tree. I have maxed bone spirit, corpse explosion and bone prison with some additional points in bone spear and bone wall for the skill synergies. While there have been a few deaths these would have been avoidable with better play on my part.
I am adding this post to your thread becasue of the mention of mercenaries - I can usually keep mine alive with use of bone prison and wall. The biggest threat to the mercenary is iron maiden oblivion knights.
I have written a historical guide to how I played this character - I will include the web address in a future post if people are interested in how this character progressed to lvl 93. By now he is mostly magic find - I am lucky enough to have two computers and I can set up TCP/IP games to transfer items to mules.

[Caaroid]

Try Bnet, it's fun!

Anyway, the trick with might mercenaries is, that they don't do damage, they deal DAMAGE. That allows them to leech a ton, and survive a lot better than most other mercenaries against leechable enemies.

My friend's summoner uses a might merc, and he makes a habbit of hell-cowing with merc and golem only (afraid of accidental king-kill), and I saw Durga stand in the middle of a mob and tear it apart (the usual method is Durga-Amp-CE, but my friend can be a showoff at times :P)