Maldar, the Magnificent

[Crystalion]

Yeah, but when you're playing one-time only untwinked single player characters, Guls are worthless.  You can't use them in any decent runewords and the +5% to maximum poison resistance is totally worthless.  Anyway, I understood that in 1.10, you can get up to an Ohm from the hell helforge anyway.  Is that not the case?

Yes, I understand your self imposed restrictions. But that's a bit like saying that getting one of the new elite uber uniques from hell Baal is "unlucky" because your character's career is now over, eh? As to the Gul, yes, I remembered correctly. See: LL thread on Countess and Hellforge rune drops

Cool, yeah, I meleed with Maldar through all of normal and the first half of nightmare and found dim vision to be very useful while doing so.  The trouble is that its duration is cut by a quarter in hell, so if you're planning to use it there, you'll have to pump it up a bit.

Since I understand how to (notwink) put decent weapons into my hireling's hands, I found DV to be useful immediately upon getting it at clvl 6 (CoS is clvl 12 but that's still pretty early). By cutting down on the monsters beating on (me and) my hireling and using the clay golem (slows monsters when they hit him) at slvl 1 + bonus from rod and shield (weapon switch on summoning) I found that most battles were over before I could even think about "saving the day" with CE. Had things not gone so easily I would have socketed a Nef into my hireling's weapon (for knockback of blinded monsters to take even more heat off of him--I switched to a Blessed Aim merc as soon as I hit act2).

The problem with the build I'm curious enough to be doing, is that I can't tell ahead of time what mix of skill points into SM, Skelie and Revive is optimal. As such I've not put any points into any of them yet (I've 12 unspent points at clvl 24, and, iirc, 83 unspent stat points--edit: 92 stat points actually). I suppose it would be easier to do an -act5 clvl 33 or other "fake" clvl character to toy with it a bit first.

Still, my point was, after reading Maldar's tales, that using DV is really easy and fun (the special "attacks" of monsters going away is such a huge boon, as you've noted). Of course, at clvl 24, I've just gotten to the act4 River of Flame, so soon I'll be dealing with OKs for the first time. When CoS fails for an Assassin vs. these guys, Dragon Flight or Psychic Hammer comes to the rescue quite nicely. Eventually my solution would be to either imprison them and walk away ala Maldar, or to teleport my whole army into their face (with everything else blinded or imprisoned). For now I'll see if level 3 bone spear is good enough (as I doubt a ring of telekinesis would be as effective as PH).

Apart from "one time" difficulties as I advance through the acts, I'm not bound by Malderesque oath to complete all quests and get all waypoints, so I'm largely free to avoid trouble areas while I level up and get goodies. I think if I had to make a character purely to deal with OKs all the time I'd pick a Leap Attack Barbarian. I am, in fact, still considering whether I would enjoy making a leap specialist in any event.

One thought that crossed my mind reading your tales was whether Necro Terror Herding with DV/BP retention might not be an amusing way to kill a huge horde of monsters all at once (lay down a few corpses in the eventual "herd" area first and blow them up once everything is gathered). For example, herding a few "corpses" into the seal spawn area would make for a very nice CE, CE start/finish in the Chaos Sanctuary. Hmm. I'll have to go try this now.