Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

for the rabies, at high levels, hell is very easy, why or at what points are you not impressed?

Well, I am impressed with Rabies overall.

So the discrepancy here is probably because I was unclear in my full statement, which was:

I'm not very impressed with the damage output of either fully synergized Rabies or of the nutso mats in Hell difficulty unless you either have a lot of patience and some clever method of crowd control or alternately some other powerful attack... YMMV

So, first off, YMMV. ;)

Secondly my statement is qualified by:

1. patience and crowd control, or
2. some other (i.e. non-Rabies) powerful attack

What I didn't make clear is that these qualifications are consequences of two facts of life for high level Rabies (in Hell):

1. the damage is applied over ~dozen seconds, and can't be sped up
2. some critters will be highly resistant or immune to Rabies (also in werewolf form you can not easily use charges of Lower Resist)

Take, for example, the Hell Zombie Garden (Pindle's area)... you're in a tight space, and these guys hit hard, so you either want to control them (avoid getting hit in some way) or kill them very fast. Unfortunately they are 90% poison resistant and have many thousands of HP. A Holy Bolt Paladin (build) will also not be able to CC very well (where the wolf has lots of HP the Paly has lots of block, typically speaking, so both can tank, of course) but the Holy Bolts will tear individual undead up in a second or two.

I would, of course, also say a Holy Bolt Paladin doesn't impress me in Hell, unless they have some other powerful attack (because so many monsters are not undead).

Naturally both Rabies and Holy Bolt builds totally rock the parts of Hell that aren't immune to their specialty element. The same is true of Fireball Sorcs, etc. etc.

In party situations weaknesses can become either more or less of a problem. While the party is likely to handle poison immunes just fine (so a pure Rabid build would work just fine in Hell, partied) there is the issue of killing speed... some parties will kill so fast, the poison is largely irrelevant (for example, in Necro or trap Assassin parties, one often finds CE suddenly ending most battles after the heavy hitters have taken down a couple of corpses, which might be only seconds after encountering a new batch of monsters).

Make no mistake though, I am impressed with Rabies in terms of normal/nm and, in terms of efficiency (for skill point investment) in any difficulty level, (it is especially efficient in Hell for those that didn't invest in PC and wait to get Carrion Wind at clvl req 60).

Rabies seems like one of the very notable skills in the game for a player to "easily" get far in the game without a lot of uber equipment or fancy tactics.