Damage modifications

[Crystalion]

It is not even a race.  The poison will turn off the regeneration and replace it with the poison damage rate for the duration.

Off hand it looks like necro skelies don't have any native resist, getting only resist to poison from summon resist, without penalty for difficulty level, capped at 75%. This right?

Since there isn't a clever "slow missile" vs. meph poison cloud (i.e. some solution to prevent the cloud from occuring or getting to nearby chars/minions) nor is there a Paly aura for resist poison, nor can you give your non-hirelings antidote potions, it would seem there are only three ways to ameloriate this problem:

1) town healer (very nice to have Atma healing now, since act 2 has lots of poison, and it saves time)
2) wells (not likely to have one near meph, or near a waypoint, are we?)
3) Paly Cleansing aura

#3 is only effective after the cloud goes away, and only if the cloud isn't highly recurrent. Looks like #1 is the only viable method? (well, if you had 8 Paly's with their auras "properly" phase spread, you'd limit the poison duration, post cloud, amazingly, but that's beside the point).

p.s. iirc the poison cloud is big enough that surrounding Meph with a (poison immune) bone prison and expecting even your high melee range act 2 merc to poke at him without getting poisoned seems unlikely (and, of course, you can feed mercs antidotes, so this is way off-topic). Previously I have seen that act 2 mercs often successfully jab at enprisoned melee monsters without retaliation (which I enjoy seeing almost as much as act 2 HF mercs with a massive slow weapon and face of horror). At least Mephs other attacks can be largely siphoned off (by Decoys, or by players/minions hiding behind nearby walls/obstructions).