Vengence vs. Elemental Auras

[Crystalion]

By FAR the most powerful realistic build was zeal/holy shock with a crescent moon phase blade.
...the coolest part about this build is that you have all the freedom in the world past those first ~46 skill points

Holy Shock at 20 points is already +100% damage synergy to FoH lightning (which supposedly ignores undead and demon resist entirely). With 20 points into FoH and adders you could probably get ~2000 pts of damage out of it fairly easily. Even ignoring resists the recast timer on that prevents it from being a time efficient primary killing spell in hell difficulty. But it's a thought.

Interesting that this build is coming back into workability--my first serious character in D2C was a Holy Shock Zealot. When the expansion came out he didn't look nearly as fun for hell difficulty. Of course at that time, iirc, HS did not add lightning damage to ranged attacks. If I made such a Paly now you'd probably find throwing daggers of piercing on my weapon switch.

Thematically it is interesting that Paly's get skills infusing weapons with weenie fire, soso cold and decent lighting; Assassins have a skill to infuse decent poison; Sorceresses can infuse decent Fire (and they trump bigtime by being able to do that to other players, hirelings, summons, minions). (I can hear some complaints that I neglected Necros? Poison Dagger doesn't really "infuse" the weapon, as it is an attack itself--not granting the user the option of how to deliver the damage).

IMO, the weakness of Crescent Moon, and Static in general, is that it only gives you a "discount" on the monster's HPs (due to Static cap and monster regen in hell) at the price of waking stuff up (which is usually no problem and other times really bad). Against a tough monster this can be a real time saver, but against a crowd regen can make it a relatively small bonus.

But if you can "touch" the monsters with PMH or keep them under the influence of poison or OW then the discount is quite substantial. This suggests Poison Javalin (long term duration area effect poison) or applying PHM or OW at range. However, afaik v1.10s, only Multishot, Strafe and Blade Fury are any good at touching monsters at range rapidly with effects. At only 30 charges, a multishot bow is a bit iffy in practice. So, imho, Amazons and Assassins are more likely to easily get the full "discount" from Crescent Moon.

Of course in normal, without a cap, Static Field is an awesome skill. For example, you can cast Confuse (charges available in shop) and toss out a static, which, at more than 1/12th damage puts the monsters into HR causing them to re-evaluate their action--as they are now confused they will attack the closest thing (i.e. monster). As you continue to Static the monsters have an excellent chance of killing each other (whereas normally, their regen generally precludes this before confuse wears off).

My base build for HolyFist is now clvl 52 with half a dozen or so unspent skill points (base theme is max Holy Bolt, max FoH, prereqs--literally I don't know any auras; some Paly, eh?). I had been planning to continue his silly xp factory anti-undead theme with Sanctuary and wrap up with points in Prayer to be party friendly. But I think I'll clone him off--having read your post--to try HS/zeal/FoH as well.

As a side note, as I've posted elsewhere, if you find yourself with a FoH 20 build (or BH 20), it is attractive to grab a Boneslayer axe (if you can) for its 200 charges of level 20 Holy Bolt (which is synergized by both FoH/BH) for massive shoot-the-undead damage (on a weapon switch).