Important Necro Changes

[TaiDaishar]

Yeah really, you people. Throw the necro a bone, for chrissake.

He's the one supposed to throw the bones.

[Mavfin]

Um, isn't he the one who makes use of the bones others throw around??

[Occhidiangela]

The number of pips on the bones.

Now, to get 42 Skellies and mages, together, takes how many more points in each skill??

Used to be, one could fill town with skeletons . . . CH had a necro like that for a while.

[Mautaban]

I did some play tests in hell/8play, and as I see it, there is no such difficulty penalty applied to CE. It normally takes 2 CE to take down crowds in 8play/hell, which is a bit overpowered (*cough*).

[LucianDK]

And you used amp at all to empower the CE? A blowmancer may work well with an avenger using conviction, he zaps fire imunities, making your CE even more deadlier, and makes the first corpses for you so you can blow them up. You cast amp to kill physical imunity and to allow him to leech from physical imunes and massively bomb crowds with CE.

[Mavfin]

I guess that means that necros are no longer just 'curse bitches'?

I mean, now, everyone else will be 'corpse bitches' for the necro, right?

(And that's Mav's humor for the morning. Such as it is.)

[Obi2Kenobi]

Never made one of those. I've heard that is what most necros ended up being... ;)

[Guest]

I tried out skeletons in hell with 20 in mastery 20 in skeletons, using both amp and decrepify. And 1 point in summon resist.

They are tough. But they do almost no damage. Im sure skill from items will help, even at double the damage they wont be killing much. My merc was many a better killer than all them together it seemed.

One thing if you did the skelly deal, I dont think you will not need a golum.

I also tried this with magi at 20, That didnt make much difference damage wise, if you were going for the skells as tanks, I think I would stop magi at lvl 3.

What really stood out was that they made such nice tanks.

[kandrathe]

One thing if you did the skelly deal, I dont think you will not need a golum.

Not using double negative logic doesn't make things less confusing. :)

Are saying that if you choose to use Skeletons and Skeleton Mastery you do not need golems? Or, are you saying that if you choose to use skeletons as tanks, you will also still need golems due to the pathetic damage of skeletons?

[Guest]

I only intended for one of those negatives :)


I meant.

If you use the high power skells, then you dont need a golum.

[Occhidiangela]

Or were you using other curses from behind your army of "buffed up" Skeletons.

I had thougt that a Clay Golem was not a viable choice, from a few other posts.

[LucianDK]

Poisonlords are going to be the new uberchars in 1.10!
As there have been talked about, poison does sick damage in 1.10, and ive just verified it myself.
I used the library of test chars and items from d2.net to build a legal necro with a friend. Ie no hacked items, and 'teoretically' one could get a lvl 99 char, if they have several months to spare, and items that someone eventually could manage to find and put together.

max poison nova, explosion, dagger, terror and lower resist
bramble runeword, 172%, helm with 3 perfect 5/5 poison facets. Trang gloves 25%, trang shield and death's web wand, the shield and wand is socketed with a perfect poison facet each.

from jevels 25% inc. poison skill damage/25% poison res. reduction
wand 50% poison resistance reduction
gloves 25% inc. poison skill damage
shield 25% poison resistance reduction
Bramble 172% increased poison skill damage (200% potentially)
lower resists curse 63% poison resistance reduction

totals:
222% increased poison skill damage (250% potentially)
163% poison resistance reduction (100% from items, 63% from curse)

I ended doing around 35k damage with every casting of poison nova. But, it lasted a lot longer than 2 seconds. Almost 10 seconds i think, and putting the cursor over the monster lifebars showed their life was eaten consitently. I just had to run around till they keeled over. I didnt try poison dagger as my test char wasnt built for it. But it seems like to me if you want to maximize poison dagger, you also need a good defense. But you cant max a curse, the 3 poison skills and armor with its 2 synergies :( And poison explosion promised staggering damage, but its radius is simply waaay too puny, i had monsters running through the cloud several times without taking damage. It is too small. The same counts for terror, i took it to experiment with, and it was quite a disappointment, hard to hit any monsters in the heat of battle, they run too fast. Especially in act5 hell.

I tried worldstone keep in hell, but there was too many poison imune enemies, the clawvipers having too high resistance and imunity for my lower resists at max to be able to null it. But the chaos sanctuary in act4 is another story. Basically, i managed to clean it with only dying 2 times. And none to diablo!

And it shall be noted i played in players 8

Players rejoice, the necromancer is now a top of the line character! Or at least untill blizzard recognizes how ridicolous damage a well built necro for 1.10 can do :P

[IlleglWpns]

The bramble runeword is broken. Reports from the 1.1 beta forum say that it mistakenly adds %1000 poison damage.

[lemekim]

The bramble runeword is broken.  Reports from the 1.1 beta forum say that it mistakenly adds %1000 poison damage.

Those reports, while having some foundation, are actually a result of some miscareful calculations.

As Lucian noted, his poison nova lasted 10 seconds now instead of 2 (well, probably slightly less). Bramble indeed adds 172% or whatever it is stated on it, and NOT 1000%. But all the new enh% damage to poison also increase duration of the poison skills. So 200% enhanced poison damage will give you 3 times as much damage per second, and also increase duration 3 times. So while the damage per second is still only 3 times as high, the increased length makes the total damage per single shot 9 times as high (but again, the poison damage per second is only 3 times as long). This is what we see reflected in the character screen, since the screen shows total damage per each shot.

Since the increased duration matters little, at least in necro's damage dealing abilities, the effective poison damage incresse is about 3x. And according to Lucian, his poison nova was doing about 4k damage per second. Compare this, to say, amazon, who probably can do 4k now per volley with multishot, and fire it faster then 1 shot per second. But the fire and forget is nice I guess. Is it overpowering? I guess up to people to decide.

[Guest]

All I put on him was a some about 400 def in armor and a posionmancer was able to kill pretty well.

a few npc tanks and that posion drops bad guys quick.

With skill items a poison mancer will be quite powerful, I think.

[LucianDK]

on second note, i think the blind curse may have been a better choice than terror to use. For if they cannot see you, they are not moving, and it has the added benefit of stopping ranged attackers from laying the smack down on you till you can get in range and poison them. And when still, and potentially right beside corpses of their friends, you ought to be able to use poison explosion to great effect and catch them in the hugely damaging and small cloud.

Dim vision has a healthy range of 15.3 yards at lvl 20, were terror is fixed at a measly 2.6 yards.

Plus even at lvl 99, i successfully hit hell frenzytaurs with terror, with no effect! They did not flee from me. The monster level/char level curve of this spell is greatly hampering it. If it cannot be usefull even at lvl 99

[Occhidiangela]

Maybe now it will be better appreciated. :)

Sorry to hear about the Terror Clvl / Mlvl problem.

[kandrathe]

Gads! How many Sur runes have dropped for you? And then, 5, count them, 5 PERFECT Poison Rainbow facet jewels. Now Trangs gloves are common enough for a char who's run around NM long enough, but being that Mephisto is not the Itamz farm he used to be, they will not be as common. Trang-Oul's Wing is not easy to find. Now, then who knows how hard the new elite wand Death Web will be to find. I can count in the low single digits the number of exceptional unique wands I've found in the last two years, and again, Mephisto's shop is closed.

I'd say this is a fantasy as a legal character, unless many (ie. clan) players contribute to its construction.

[LucianDK]

it may be such in the start of official 1.10 online, but people WILL have their perfect poison lords sooner or later, it is just a question of time.

[Mavfin]

So let them. They're not the 'superfast' killers that most on bnet want, so they won't be THAT popular....