12-05-2003, 11:38 AM
Hello
First of all, one of the major changes made to D2X in 1.10 is that the beginning of NM became HARDER. Most players don't go there until lev 4x, what is attainable in normal without repeating areas if you play solo in large games. I think you played solo in solo games, that's how you ended up so early in NM.
About the mercenaries: in Nightmare you'll have Thorns (damage returned; combat) Holy freeze (chill damage and slows enemies; defensive) and Might (more damage to all, offensive) to select from. If you judge that your skeletons do insufficient damage, the obvious choice is the might mercenary. I would adwise against thorns since the damage returned only works on melee attackers and they are not going to be your main worry anyway :).
About curses: I don't know how many skeleton mages you have, but Lower Resist help them tremendously. Note, that Lower has a very wide radius, whereas Amplify damage or Decreptify has a small radius. This allows you to cast lower first, cover all the enemies and up your mages' damage against them. Then you can cast amp/decrep to those who engage your skeletons.
My skelemancer uses Confuse as his main curse. It is very entertaining to watch the monsters fight among themselves while my skeletons kill them one by one.
I also enjoy this multi-threaded feeling the necromancer has compared to all the other classes. As the main thread you only have to deal with the production of your worker threads, and all the worker threads do all the actual killing for you :). I only wish they'd let you program the AI of your minions AKA Baldur's Gate, but in a server-side architecture one can understand why this is unimplemented.
It's good to have you back enjoying the game :)
Happy hunting
Caaroid
First of all, one of the major changes made to D2X in 1.10 is that the beginning of NM became HARDER. Most players don't go there until lev 4x, what is attainable in normal without repeating areas if you play solo in large games. I think you played solo in solo games, that's how you ended up so early in NM.
About the mercenaries: in Nightmare you'll have Thorns (damage returned; combat) Holy freeze (chill damage and slows enemies; defensive) and Might (more damage to all, offensive) to select from. If you judge that your skeletons do insufficient damage, the obvious choice is the might mercenary. I would adwise against thorns since the damage returned only works on melee attackers and they are not going to be your main worry anyway :).
About curses: I don't know how many skeleton mages you have, but Lower Resist help them tremendously. Note, that Lower has a very wide radius, whereas Amplify damage or Decreptify has a small radius. This allows you to cast lower first, cover all the enemies and up your mages' damage against them. Then you can cast amp/decrep to those who engage your skeletons.
My skelemancer uses Confuse as his main curse. It is very entertaining to watch the monsters fight among themselves while my skeletons kill them one by one.
I also enjoy this multi-threaded feeling the necromancer has compared to all the other classes. As the main thread you only have to deal with the production of your worker threads, and all the worker threads do all the actual killing for you :). I only wish they'd let you program the AI of your minions AKA Baldur's Gate, but in a server-side architecture one can understand why this is unimplemented.
It's good to have you back enjoying the game :)
Happy hunting
Caaroid