Aaagh! Vast hordes of em

[Crystalion]

> 1.10 state of affairs

Yes, CE at 50/50 fire/physical does get more powerful without the 50% global physical resist. But the Zon and her cute little 100% physical arrows gets more powerful, too. The arrows do more damage proportionally than CE in terms of resistances

I haven't played a zoomancer in quite a while

The AS says that it does indeed repair charges. Heck, I'll say it: I LOVE the new Ort repair recipe.

Don't forget AmpDamage. There is a huge non-porportional [vis a vis 50% global gone, whether Necro or Amazon benefits proportionally more] edge if the Necro ever faces a nearly immune or phys immune that he pulls down into cream puff status. I am not aware of how many/often high or immune phys mobs now appear in v1.10, but clearly there used to be a *lot* of phys immunes mobs the Necro could not Amp whereas now the mobs *can* be amped. This is a huge boon to the Necro.

My Necro (a v1.09 freebie bone prison spammer with CE maxed--yes, in v1.09 Hell this build had problems) uses a thorns merc. I got to hell without ever bothering with revives or skelies. Now, in v1.10, it makes a lot of sense for me to use revives, because they distract the enemy and the thorns vs. no-more-50%-global-phys mobs again makes sense to get corpses generated for my Amp/CE finishes. Is my playstyle more complicated than Amazon MS/chill/knockback? Yep. Is my rate of kill better overall? Probably not.

Now that the Phys resists are reasonable I've been considering that LIfetap (50% melee damage deal stolen as life, apparently *no* effect to fight of mob leech resist) might actually keep my merc alive ala the old blood golem cheese, as he does almost as much damage as his HPs. I presume his jab actually attempts more than one stab at that damage level as well.

Ah, Ral or Ort to repair is quite funny, if you can figure out a way to rush the Act5 rune reward. CorpseMourn [exceptional Ornate armor] has 40 charges of level 5 CE (4 yard radius) so it might indeed make sense now for a non-necro to plan on the occasional chain reaction mass slaughter. That begs the question of [how] did they "fix" the cow level. I've not thought to take a trip there yet as I've been having too much fun playing my new Assassin [boy, Baal moving around semi-intelligently is a real shock, as I hadn't expected to need to fight a war of attrition].