Technical questions surrounding a build

[Crystalion]

#1: Might would be far superior to Blessed Aim. Most of the To-Hit equation is clvl/mlvl, so as long as you aren't roaming far outside the curve you'll be fine.

As I noted before, ~1000 +fire is huge. Ergo Might and the physical damage it is enhancing must be very large to compete with the benefit of greater to-hit chance. The to-hit equation is equally balanced in importance between lvl vs. mlvl and AR vs. DR factors. Unless actual numbers are crunched, I think this is a very open question.

mercs are ITD

Hmm. I see my mercs miss quite a lot. Are you saying they only miss due to blocking? I certainly don't recall seeing any thread documenting mercs ignoring DR.

#2: The AI will hit whatever it was targetting once, and then target whatever has the highest threat level in your stack.

Yes, this would be a rationale for throwing a Clay Golem in a monster's blinded face just before teleporting in (i.e. the monster might *never* target me at all).

#4b: It was ~20% in 1.09, I don't see why that number would be changed.

If safety can be achieved without the use of a HF merc, then it seems pointless to use any HF or chill effect that might rob us of the primary goal: CE-able corpses.

#5: Both the monster and the merc will react instantly to your teleportation.

In practice this isn't true. As I've seen in Dragon Flight attacks, if the monster is engaged in doing something that isn't an "attack on me" then the monster clearly doesn't win the "teleport" quick draw contest (at least not that I've ever seen). Again, this suggests utility in putting a Clay Golem in the blinded monster's face before warping in, unless the monster is already slow (such as decrepified) and not going to get a hit off. In any event, having good bone armor is a possible answer if the monster sometimes gets a hit off.

hirelings are ITD so -monster def wouldn't help them at all

-X monster defense on my hireling's weapon, such as via Malice, supposedly lows the DR of a monster, per hit, over time. Since I don't expect the battle to last any length of time, I was just citing the effect for completeness. It is far more pragmatic to consider me or an ally using the other charges listed to lower the target's DR before the teleport (they are just standing there, blinded, after all). I'm sorry if my sentence structure fooled you into thinking I was suggesting that the hireling would be casting these things (although a Rogue hireling would helpfully cast Inner Sight, potentially--if you were getting Blessed Aim some other way this could be quite good).

With the current (bugged?) skeleton regen rates, they can survive this quite easily

Act Bosses get bonuses vs. minions, iirc, and tear through them like wet newspaper. Still, if the skelies aren't bugged, I'd love to hear they can survive. The whole tactic is to get corpses for CE for fast kills, so act bosses are a bit off focus, necessarily.

#10: Glooms...

If monsters are immune to Dim Vision or immune to fire, then this whole scheme is not well suited to them. This isn't one of those: do this and the *whole* game will bow to your might type ideas. Are Glooms immune to DV?

#11: LEs in 1.10 are much much less of a problem.

Well, I'm proposing being in the face of a monster that is getting hit several times a second. I don't think much of my chances, without uber lightning absorb gear, if that monster is a LEB, even with v1.10s making LEBs more reasonable. Call me paranoid.

RS is vastly superior to Skeleton Mastery

I want a lot of "swingers" and I want them to hit (because of the Enchant factor). This suggests skelies and revives over mastery. So I'm glad to hear the current wisdom is in that direction anyway.

I also don't recommend putting points in either revives

Again, Enchant is so uber, I just want as many bodies as possible to deliver it. I'm not super pleased with revives, but they do fit the bill... Imagine a mod where you could enchant a druid's flock of ravens. Now that would be nasty. :rolleyes: