Technical questions surrounding a build

[Ahvae'el]

If Enchant helps AoE Assassin spells, in your example Fists of Fire's splash damage, then would it not also apply to PS Chaos Ice Bolt/Chain Lighting and CoT Nova/Charged Bolt charges? That would be SICK. And very likely unintentional on Bliz's part.

Buena suerte.

[Guest]

Of course the question of whether Summon Resist cuts down on a FG healing (absorbing) from fire is not one I know the (current) answer to.

i have a slightly modded game with rogue mercs having resist auras, with a fire resist aura all summons show as fire immune. right, that wasn't of much importance, but a salvation aura should give all summons tripple immunity.

fire golems don't though(i haven't checked under many resist configs, so i could be wrong) get fire immune from summon resist, i'm guessing their resist property(100-absorb=fire resist) overrides the summon resist one.

it wasn't asked, but: if absorb works the way i guess it does(taken damage*absorb amount) if your fire golem would have 100+ resist he'd absorb less damage, possible all the way to nothing the higher his absorb is, since (resist amount-100=absorb) means the more absorbed fire damage the inherent fire resist gives, the more that is inverses by his fire absorb. if it works that way that is, or it could be the other way around :D

[whyBish]

Forgoing my natural tendencies towards defensive tactics & thorns, I have built up a little summoner necro. Giving up any chance of positive resists in exchange for + summoning skills is worth it. Skeletons are essentially a moving bone prison that last longer, and do damage ;)
One point in CE is enough until you have maxed out SM/RS/?RSM?. Unfortunately I wasted one point in all of the pre-reqs for revive. A bit of lucky shopping got a +3 summons 1 Fire golem wand (to tank for the merc until he gets the first kill) (F.G. is level 12 with + summon skills, and there is room for improvement in the +skills still, with no charms found yet and a couple slots only at +2). The perfect wand would be + 3 summons with fire golem and summon resist.
Bone prison was worth the pre-req points, particularly in the case of NM lister, hell Blood raven etc.
Confuse is a handy one point curse mid-game, but by hell is too short (without skill boosters, not sure how much you would need). Wasted a point in I.M. (since I was missing having thorns), but the skels can really tank, and I was only intending I.M. for use with duriel (should've bought temp wand).
At about 250 mana it takes about 3 globes to get the army up to full size, but after about 3 skels are raised the corpses are piling up anyway, so there is no rush (and pots can be used at leisure).
The main problem in hell is getting the first parts of the army, which is where the fire-golem becomes very helpful, in tanking for the merc.

[Crystalion]

fire golems don't though(i haven't checked under many resist configs, so i could be wrong) get fire immune from summon resist, i'm guessing their resist property(100-absorb=fire resist) overrides the summon resist one.

Various Golem tidbits and questions...

0. Golems seem to have a base of 0 resist, with no difficulty modification, except BGs which have 50% resist poison

0a. yes, this means BGs with summon resist of slvl 6 (50%) achieve immunity to poison (doesn't display as such)

0b. btw, though BGs now work "right" w.r.t. life stealing/IM etc. and thus are wimper than ever, it is still kinda neat that
you can drink healing potions and have them immediately healed (25% effectiveness, even if you're at full HPs)

0c. Salvation can give 100%+ resist all quite easily, so a Paly with Stone runeword body armor could probably summon a clay golem and make it triple immune. Naturally a Paly/Necro party has potential here. There doesn't seem to be a new uber item/runeword with Salvation (or any of the other resist auras?)


1. Iron Golems made from an automod resist all Paladin shield socketed with perfect diamonds can achieve poison and elemental immunity. Of course, if you're going to have 100% Salvation, you could use some form of emeralds in a regular shield (e.g. 2 perfs and a regular) instead for quad immune. Summon Resist also "cheapens" the requirements. Perhaps you want to go over 100%, given Conviction bosses and also Ruvanal's psuedo-healing discovery.

1a. IGs made from 2h weapons reportedly lose their base damage (taking only the 2h weapon damage)

1b. gambling circlets/coronets is nice in general... you might re-consider "wasted" gambles for their potential to be made into useful IGs

1c. presumably, since it is easy to buy daggers with ITD, this would be a great candidate for enchanted IGs, to largely ignore the AR/DR debate for massive +fire delivery. Another thought, since Eths are pretty common, is to socket four of them into a weapon (which will also help, apparently, v1.10, vs. bosses etc.). Even though Eths are common, if your IG is dying very much, shop buying ITD weapons is going to be more reliable. If IGs can be made out of claws, then perhaps the Anya shop red-pindle-portal reset method might be the most time efficient (for ITD acquisition). Not sure.


2. ?are IGs recreated at caster clvl for new games, or forever stuck at their original mlvl assigned when summoned long ago?


3. Fire Golem resists...

3a. the fire resist of 100-absorb is, afaik, a personal aura, and so acts as a bonus to fire resist (which will be equal to the summon resist, if any). Assuming absorb works as I once understood it to work, this calls for further comment...

3b. afaik absorb% will calc before resist, remove some damage, and add it to life (now, when your life is possibly full and the overflow gets discarded). Thus, if a hit doesn't kill you, having no resist and 50% absorb is psuedo-immunity.

3c. If a level 1 FG absorbs 36% and has no summon resist at all, for a base of 0% fire resist, then the aura presumably gives 64% resist fire... a 100 fire hit would then probably do: 100 - 36% = 64 pending fire damage; 36 (wasted healing); 64 * (1 - 0.64) = ~41 points of damage. If we repeat this, the 36 healing slows down the damage to a crawl, but doesn't eliminate it. Therefore I will conduct such a test, first trivially turning off Golem regen in monstats.txt, to see if the result agrees with this theory.

3d. if the theory is correct, then failing to have summon resist or a salvation (perhaps the resist fire aura from a paly, being stronger, would overwrite?) is bad, because the bonus to fire resist is dropping as the absorb goes up. In other words, Fire golems at slvl 20 and 88% absorb can die *more* easily to fire, because their resist (sans SR or Paly help) to fire is only 12%, so the damage that makes it past absorb pretty much hits them full force. If you don't see this yet, imagine having an slvl 1 FG with a mod so that they had only 0% absorb at that point... they'd have 100% fire resist therefore, and would be immune. Immune. Period. No possibility of a huge fire hit killing them. I can test for this, of course, when I test for 3c.

[Crystalion]

If Enchant helps AoE Assassin spells, in your example Fists of Fire's splash damage, then would it not also apply to PS Chaos Ice Bolt/Chain Lighting and CoT Nova/Charged Bolt charges?  That would be SICK.

Some weeks ago I tested enchant with a bunch of fire damage skills in the game. IIRC the principle that emerges is that "physical" melee and ranged attacks that carry +fire carry enchant. Exploding arrow and Freezing arrow are very interesting special cases for +fire and +cold respectively. I'm pretty certain that no Sorc/Druid/Assassin "pure" fire spell carries any adders.

This leaves Assassin Fists of Fire, Dragon Tail, and Druid Fire Claws to be explored. I do not recall how much I studied those or what conclusions I reached. FoF and DT are the most interesting, because of the potential to emulate the huge win of Exploding Arrow (you get the enchant on the blast AoE, plus, if you hit, the enchant on the arrow).

This is, of course, why I still, even though v1.10 nerfs them, refer a lot to the potential of the special Exploding Arrow bows (for players and hirelings).

My vague recollection is that FoF didn't benefit in v1.10 and that I didn't satisfactorily resolve the DT tests. If Blade Shield weren't broken (3/128 instead of 32/128 damage) then that would be an interesting thing to look at. While Multishot and Exploding Arrow are uber with enchant, especially with piercing, Blade Fury and Blade Sentinel aren't bad.

[Crystalion]

Forgoing my natural tendencies towards defensive tactics & thorns, I have built up a little summoner necro.

Fun, isn't it?

I stated a no-twink skelemancer the other night, taking an easy 2.5 hours to make clvl 12 and the Inner Cloister. I was trying to see, if I no skill points for curses and just one for poison/bone (bone armor--which I probably could also have skipped) if wands would make up the difference enough that my "army" points would work well. So far it has been a very easy and fun build to play (I'm at, iirc, 1+1 SM and 9 RS, 1 CG). This indicates to me that continuing in this vein with the eventual "hope" of getting the army enchanted is pretty reasonable.

[Ferengi]

Necro armies have always been easy for most of the game, it's the bosses in Act 4/5 that cause problems. Everytime I've read this, I've wondered why you include the Enchant, but not the Conviction "neutral" assistance. It seems to me that with that dual support, a skellie build is a good candidate for clvl 40 hellforge mules.

Something I remember about my mob leader build, I eventually found that I really didn't need teleport. Instead of constantly trying to drag 30 minions around, I found it much better to simply be recreating the army from the new corpses appearing at the forward line of battle. That immediately put them were they were needed, plus it meant that the nuisance of watching the minion HP or lifetime was eliminated. It means putting that lazy sorc to work, but what is teleport for anyway.

Rogues with the right equipment are rather powerful, my difficulty was getting them tough enough against the elemental attacks of Hell. My most successful Normal diff merc was always the Act3 Ice Wolf however (even after I used that second hydra bow too) in terms of killing ability.

[Crystalion]

I've wondered why you include the Enchant, but not the Conviction "neutral" assistance.

Excellent point. The answer is simple though: I'm personally very biased toward single human play. I don't have much difficulty twinking or blessing every 10+ minutes, but escort duty is something I'd find awkward without a (admittedly small) team. But you are entirely correct, Conviction is a wonderful neutral (aka non-partied) assist. Now that Holy Freeze does damage it isn't as good a (pure) neutral assist as before so having an assistive Paly around to smite champs and bosses senseless and convict everything for you to help your enchanted rushee kill even faster seems like a nice team tactic.

Team assistance is a really really big subject. Part of the reason I don't go there as much as it deserves is that I do not forsee having the satisfaction of testing out any theories or techniques I might come up with.

Besides which, I find it difficult to imagine that anything could beat having team mates gather mobs together and kill a couple for the "rushee" necro to use for CE mass slaughter. Such a plan ought to kill so fast that the real problem would be the pure logistic overheads for gathering herds and traveling between them.

[Ferengi]

3 person teams are pretty easy to organize (or were) locally for me. But I know 2 other serious D2 players in town.

As for herding, outside of Cows, I've never seen in done in a fashion fast enough to be useful. In Cows, I've seen a bonewall suck in every cow in nearly half the level. That necro didn't need party members, he just used whatever corpse got created by anyone. If only he hadn't insisted on casting them next to other players....

"using an enchantress as a bot" :o

...well, why stop at one? :P

It's true, I'm a reformed bot user [I needed to learn javascript so I picked bots as the teaching vehicle]. That's one of the reasons why I think any new level requirements will be ineffective. Actualling testing "uber" builds gave me a far different perspective on the game (i.e. very few published builds actually turn out any good in practice). My goal was the character that could kill anywhere, anytime. As a twinked Zon and Druid, I could do that. I could never get the Necro though, which is why I read these posts.

[librarian]

Heiho,

I'm a bit in a hurry, so only a short answer to the most simple of your questions

>> 2. ?are IGs recreated at caster clvl for new games, or forever stuck at their original mlvl assigned when summoned long ago?

Since blizz fixed the IG-Bug so your tin soldier meets you in every game till he dies it is the same mechanics as in 1.09
That means he will be recreated every time you join a game, and the skillboni of the gear you wear while joining will define his quality.

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... some further miscannelous thoughts

#4 from your first post
HF won't be triggered with teleport. Once activated, it will always pulse with its own timer regardless the movement routines (and I think also regardless of using tps or wps).

#6 KB along with your merc doesn't seem a good idea to me (like the other's have written before), he will knock enemies out of his own range and the range of your other minions.

#7 works more like running very fast, but it is hard to tell along with lots of minions which one will be focussed then first

#8 I think even with Blessed Aim the AR of your pack will be too poor (considering that the 4xAR Bug is gone), so a -xdefense weapon on the merc is IMHO a better idea

#10 the Gloams and the Healers in Act3; except of very few classes all normal monsters can be affected by DV (not Oblivion Mages and Suicide Minions, but I should reread that)

#13 I heavily dislike crossclass stuff, they destroyed an important part of the game even in 1.09, and it is worse in 1.10

______________


Golems
3.FG
Yes, you're right here, SR is contraproductive for your Fire Golem. 'T has not changed, same in 1.09.

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