08-04-2003, 08:32 AM
Quote:Speaking from 1.10 experience, a Defiance investment is equally worthless. Even actively running the Aura with Holy Shield starts to fail in Hell difficulty. It's not as if there are any points to spare anyway.Speaking from 1.10 experience, a Defiance investment is certainly worthwhile especially if you already have maxed out holy shield. Coupled with high defence gear, hitting about 10-15% chance to be hit works wonders in hell. Really hard-hitting boss, there's always smite (at any slvl) for the stun.
Against a PIMB pack like that, you could try a switch to meditation aura... works even better if you happen to have prayer maxed. That would solve your mana problems and allow you to continue your zeal/vengence/smite attacks. Your party members would likely thank you for it as well.
For the pack in question, I don't see much problems at all for the times I played with a pally-zon combo... defiant zealot + mageazon though :). The amazon can keep the entire mob quiet with freezing arrow while the paladin can shut up the boss with smite until the rest of the pack goes down. Might be a bigger problem since you're playing with a strafeazon, but meditation should help a lot and depending on the freeze duration and mana pool of the zon, it may still be possible to keep the whole mob under control.
I never liked conversion or flee as a solution. Preference for crowd control would be long duration freeze (like FA), assassin skills (CoS and MB), stun (eg. smite and war cry) and confuse. Most of my characters will have at least one such means of crowd control... except for my defiant zealot who relies on high resists and defence (with healing from meditation/cleansing) to tank most monsters.
Gloams are highly irritating though with cannot be frozen, a very harsh lightning attack and mana drain. Most non-frenzytaur mobs are at least barely tankable but for gloams, I'd just string them out and take them out 2-3 at a time. Too dangerous in huge mobs for me.