As a wise man once said, experience is the best teacher:)
Until you spend some time fiddling with the build in practice there are some things about the build that are easily overlooked. IM works better with a Merc than Amp damage because every monster that attacks becomes injured, rather than every monster that the Merc attacks. By the time the first corpse drops, most of the group are at about half life or less. The first CE blast will just be enough to kill off at least one more and start a chain reaction. If the situation were reversed and just Amp is used, the majority of the monsters will have 100% health. Since Amp does 60-100% of the monster hitpoints, and is 50% fire and 50% physical damage, AMP adds another 30-50% physical damage. This results in a 60-100% physical damage and 30-50% fire damage. Added together this is 90-150%, which sounds pretty good on paper. But if you add in fire immunities etc (and see this in practice) the CE chain effect fails to work roughly 50% of the time. Is this bad? Not at all. But it doesn't kill groups nearly as fast as IM.
As far as my comment on CE necs being item dependent, that I agree is arguable. But for this build (which I do believe extends to all Necs using CE as the main killing skill) the extra range each point gives to CE is important. It's far more bang for the buck. It damages more monsters, and more importantly draws more of them towards the necromancer. The more monsters you can draw in, the more dead bodies for the CE chain effect to keep happening.
On number crunching, you are dead on about Moon Lords. They were always annoying buggers to take on. But what about monsters like Hellspawns? These suckers do 69-93 damage, or an average of 81 damage. They have a hitpoint range of 4378-7296, or 5800 average points. But lets assume its the max, 7.3k health. At 2000% return it's 1620 damage every hit. That averages to about 4-5 hits before they die. If you have 8 of them attacking the golem, they are half way dead within give or take 3 seconds. Throw in the 33% damage reduction and it's 4 seconds. By then one drops dead from the Merc weapon and they are cleaned out with CE. It does not happen that fast with Amp. I wish it did, otherwise I'd of used Amp all the time. Switching between curses was always a pain:)
Although the Arreat Summit contradicts this notion, the more players in the game the stronger a CE nec is. Granted the damage to health ratio raises against his favor, the amount of corpses in an area overcomes this loss and turns it to the Nec's favor. As far as making groups goes, with my Necromancer it was easy with some faster run/walk (I had over 100% thanks to some small charms). A large health pool plus some bone armor minimized any problem of running for grouping, and monsters always picked up the Golem or the Merc by the time it was over.
We can certainly go back and forth number crunching and nit picking some more, but where's the fun in that?:)I invite anyone to go out and try out the build for a while, it really is a lot of fun. If you still hate it, I concede its tomay-to tomah-to and your mileage may vary. But I promise that its far from feeling like a decreped old news build:)
Cheers,
Munk
Edit: Took out the block quote.
Until you spend some time fiddling with the build in practice there are some things about the build that are easily overlooked. IM works better with a Merc than Amp damage because every monster that attacks becomes injured, rather than every monster that the Merc attacks. By the time the first corpse drops, most of the group are at about half life or less. The first CE blast will just be enough to kill off at least one more and start a chain reaction. If the situation were reversed and just Amp is used, the majority of the monsters will have 100% health. Since Amp does 60-100% of the monster hitpoints, and is 50% fire and 50% physical damage, AMP adds another 30-50% physical damage. This results in a 60-100% physical damage and 30-50% fire damage. Added together this is 90-150%, which sounds pretty good on paper. But if you add in fire immunities etc (and see this in practice) the CE chain effect fails to work roughly 50% of the time. Is this bad? Not at all. But it doesn't kill groups nearly as fast as IM.
As far as my comment on CE necs being item dependent, that I agree is arguable. But for this build (which I do believe extends to all Necs using CE as the main killing skill) the extra range each point gives to CE is important. It's far more bang for the buck. It damages more monsters, and more importantly draws more of them towards the necromancer. The more monsters you can draw in, the more dead bodies for the CE chain effect to keep happening.
On number crunching, you are dead on about Moon Lords. They were always annoying buggers to take on. But what about monsters like Hellspawns? These suckers do 69-93 damage, or an average of 81 damage. They have a hitpoint range of 4378-7296, or 5800 average points. But lets assume its the max, 7.3k health. At 2000% return it's 1620 damage every hit. That averages to about 4-5 hits before they die. If you have 8 of them attacking the golem, they are half way dead within give or take 3 seconds. Throw in the 33% damage reduction and it's 4 seconds. By then one drops dead from the Merc weapon and they are cleaned out with CE. It does not happen that fast with Amp. I wish it did, otherwise I'd of used Amp all the time. Switching between curses was always a pain:)
Although the Arreat Summit contradicts this notion, the more players in the game the stronger a CE nec is. Granted the damage to health ratio raises against his favor, the amount of corpses in an area overcomes this loss and turns it to the Nec's favor. As far as making groups goes, with my Necromancer it was easy with some faster run/walk (I had over 100% thanks to some small charms). A large health pool plus some bone armor minimized any problem of running for grouping, and monsters always picked up the Golem or the Merc by the time it was over.
We can certainly go back and forth number crunching and nit picking some more, but where's the fun in that?:)I invite anyone to go out and try out the build for a while, it really is a lot of fun. If you still hate it, I concede its tomay-to tomah-to and your mileage may vary. But I promise that its far from feeling like a decreped old news build:)
Cheers,
Munk
Edit: Took out the block quote.