Poison Necro in Players 8 Hell: Uh oh.

[Ignatz]

I spent the last few days tinkering with the Necro. I built 12 of them and one sort of stood out. By sort of, I mean he killed things so fast that Act 5 Players 8 Hell felt like, oh, I'd say Act 1 Players 1 NM.

I hesitated to post this topic, since the poor, malnourished Necromancer has been the D2 stable boy since 1.03 killed off CE. I've wanted to be able to play the Necro and not feel like a second-class citizen for years now. And in 1.10, it appears that not only can he sit at the adults' table now, but he poisons the feast, imprisons the guests, and blows up the dining room. Just for good measure.

That said, meet Skullballs:

Skills (with +skills items):
20(35) in Poison Dagger
20(35) in Poison Explosion
20(35) in Poison Nova
15(30) in CE
16(28) in Golem Mastery
1(16) in Lower Resist + all prereq skills
1(16) pt in all other P&B spells
1(13) pt in each golem
1(13) pt in Summon Resist

Stats:
106 Str
Base Dex
400 Vit
Base Energy

Outfit: (total skills increase: +12/+15/+15)
Bramble Armor
Boneflame Succubus Skull
Harlequin Crest
Arachnid Mesh belt
Trang-Oul's Claws
Mara's Kaleidoscope
SoJ x2
Death's Web Unearthed Wand
2 X Socketed unique poison jewel
1 Grand Charm +1 to each tree

A typical clear of a group of baddies goes like this:
1. Bone Prison most of the screen (enough to lock 'em all up)
2. Cast Lower Resist, de-immunizing 90% of poison immune enemy types
3. Cast Poison Nova
4. Cast CE

It doesn't sound all that impressive, right? Except that but Bone Prison at lvl 16 pretty much won't get knocked down before its timer runs out, making you just about invulnerable. Enemies, even ranged ones, seem to auto-target the bones now as soon as they go up. And of course, my Poison Nova does 38-39k damage. Yeah, that's just about 40,000 damage, (on the lying character screen, anyway). Regardless of the actual duration and actual damage per second, my PN does enough damage to kill just about anything in less than ten seconds in any mode in LoD. In Players 8 Hell I killed Shenk in 3 castings, which took about 8-10 seconds. I killed all of his minions, all of those really, really, really annoying Slingers and Quill Rats that spawn there now, and every other straggler on screen in that same ten seconds. Then I trotted down the rest of the foothills, full cleaning it in about 8 minutes.

After a while I stopped casting Bone Armor and stopped casting Fire Golem, even. Didn't need 'em. And in some areas, I found that casting CE after the poison was just a waste, since everything died nearly as fast anyway. Keep in mind that I only bothered with Players 8 Hell, since PN kills everything in one casting in any players 1 mode.

A couple other points of note:
- I still die pretty often, since it seems like every ranged attacker in the game now can knock off about 300-400 hps per hit. For instance, I have yet to be able to kill a Quill Rat pack in Act 5 without dying about ten times. And that's with great defense and 430 vitality.

- Playing with those four skills requires FAST fingers. I've never played a character that made D2 feel so much like an action game. Everything hurts so much now that missing the Bone Prison hotkey just once often gets me killed.

- This character is really, really fun. And I tell you it feels downright weird to play a Necro and kill at a good clip.

Anyway. What my testing boils down to is this: I killed fast enough soloing players 8 that I could have matched several 1.09 cookie cutter builds in terms of speed. Skullballs doesn't kill as fast as the MS or FA Zon, but faster than the WW Barb and any non-Nova Sorc builds. But that's comparing it to 1.09. And I hear those cookie cutter builds don't work so hot in 1.10.

As a last note, Skullballs' listed damage for Poison Explosion is 266k - 287k (but of course, that spell's radius renders it utterly useless).

Ignatz

Edit: Incidentally, I know his equipment is neigh-perfect. However, even with only +12 or so to Bone Skills, easily arranged with White runeword or a million other ways, he still kills quickly. The Bramble armor is a big, big benefit, but even with Trang's set and a couple SoJs he was doing quite well.

[Ashkael]

Well, you have to take into account the fact that most of your Necromancer's gear is pretty much godly and not so easy to get. Your average player on Battle.net does not have access to all that gear.

Also, PN's damage is not that great if you take out some of those +skill items, and that leads me to something that is bothering me about this patch: the fact that most necro skills are not that good at slvl 20, but require a significant boost from +skill items to get more powerful or to a decent level for Hell. And let's not forget that you are wearing a Bramble armor, which adds a +100% to poison damage bonus. Try removing that armor and see if PN's killing speed drops.

Regarding CE, I think it needs to be toned down a little bit. Let it scale, but allow it to do less %-damage in Hell difficulty; maybe 20-30% of the target corpse's orginal hp. As I see it now, the Necromancer in 1.10 can obliterate everything with CE. All he needs is to generate the first few corpses for CE to work. As you have found out, PN is a nice, mana-efficient way of doing this.

- Playing with those four skills requires FAST fingers. I've never played a character that made D2 feel so much like an action game. Everything hurts so much now that missing the Bone Prison hotkey just once often gets me killed.

You know, in 1.09 you have to be quicker than that to be able to unleash the Necromancer's full killing potential. He can kill faster than most Barbarians in 1.09, but it takes a lot of mouse-work, mana, and nice equipment.

[Pren]

The fact of the matter is that it is entirely his gear. Game balance breaks down when you have characters with such ridiculous items. The problem is that, blizzard balanced items for single player, but designed the game for multiplayer... a bad combination.

Poison still stops monster regeneration, right? I imagine that that is the biggest reason this build kills so well. The regeneration is butchering everyone.

[lemekim]

The fact of the matter is that it is entirely his gear. Game balance breaks down when you have characters with such ridiculous items.  The problem is that, blizzard balanced items for single player, but designed the game for multiplayer... a bad combination.

Poison still stops monster regeneration, right? I imagine that that is the biggest reason this build kills so well. The regeneration is butchering everyone.

I imagine that without stopping the regeneration with poison, the poison nova would not even be able to kill anytyhing, since a typical monster on players 8 requires about 10 seconds to regenerate from almost dead to fully healed.

[Ignatz]

Getting a +8 to PN White bone wand is not hard to do at all (shop shop shop). Then you stick a vanilla +2 skills ammy on, and get another +2 from armor, rings, charms, whathaveyou, and you're already up to a very fine killing speed. Heck, you can snatch up a good +skills shrunken head without much trouble. The gear doesn't matter much at all (see my PS), so long as you get get at least 10 to skills.

I tested lots of equipment setups (listed the most broken, of course), but the only thing that really matters is the +skills. The Bramble armor does make a huge difference, and that can be hard to make. But, if you're willing to trade a bit online, the two hard-to-find runes probably wouldn't be hard to find at all.

I found killing speed even with Trang's on, only (+25% poison damage and -50% enemy poison resists, +5 to skills) and nothing else, your killing speed is still quite respectable. And setups that approximate those mods, again, are not hard to find/buy.

[lemekim]

Getting a +8 to PN White bone wand is not hard to do at all (shop shop shop). Then you stick a vanilla +2 skills ammy on, and get another +2 from armor, rings, charms, whathaveyou, and you're already up to a very fine killing speed. Heck, you can snatch up a good +skills shrunken head without much trouble. The gear doesn't matter much at all (see my PS), so long as you get get at least 10 to skills.

+8 to PN white bone wand is not hard to get; it's impossible to get. The highest you can achieve is +6. Since white doesn't give any native bonuses to poison nova, you have to find a plain or 2 socket +2-3 poison nova wand. And it's not nearly as easy as it sounds. I scoured probably a hundred games before I found one with +2 poison nova when I needed it. And it took me another 100 games to find +3 skill one.

But yes, +10 skills should not be that hard to get. Still, I think the real reason why it kills better is simply because it stops monsters regeneration; which otherwise makes things twice or more times harder (or sometimes even impossible) to kill.

[Ignatz]

Oops! True, you can't get +8, it's +6. :P Still though, it isn't all bad news: you can get +6 to Poison Dagger, Poison Explosion and Poison Nova, or more likely, something in-between. Still, even a +3 Poison Explosion mod will add +30% more PN damage (which makes the wand give in total 90% more poison damage — darn good.)

Heck a theoretical white could be +6 PN and +120% damage to PN. That would translate into thousands of poison damage.

As for the monster regeneration, I'm sure that does help quite a bit. But who's arguing with that? Poison has to have an edge to balance the inherent downside of its duration-based damage.

In fact, maybe that's the solution: Instead of nerfing PN, you just bring down the monster regen rate a little bit. Kill two birds with one bone. (sorry! had to make that one) I mean, monster regen can be fun, but it's at silly levels right now. The reason that's bad (in my mind, anyway), is that it kills off a lot of fun variants. I mean, how far can a melee Sorc go? Or a singer Barb? Or a Paladin, for instance? * :lol:

Ignatz

*that's called flamebait.

[Pren]

I agree that that would be a great way to bring this 'imbalance' into check. We really need to feedback mob regen being way too high. Even creatures in normal difficulty, that have high resistance or lifetapping attacks can become unkillable. It's pretty absurd. A meleer with a weapon of vileness or a small charm with poison damage goes from being unable to do damage to ripping something to pieces.

And on the matter of imbalanced skills, if you look closely, you will find people shrieking about every class having some different horribly imbalanced ability when you've got +10, 15, 20 to skills... heh.

[LucianDK]

have you considered to use blackbog's sharp? You get decent mods for a dagger mancer, and a healthy boost to all poison skills. 4 to nova and explosion, and 5 to pdagger.

If only using lower resists to deimunize enemies, you may want to consider using blind as an alternate curse, especially with your problem with ranged attackers nailing you. In hell it have 11 seconds duration at lvl 20 i think. Lvl 30 dim vision brings it over the crucial 15 seconds mark, less is just a wee bit too short. And trang gloves give +2 curses.

But it could be an idea to raise lower resists too, because of undead, when not being outright imune as several undead types, they have VERY high inate poison resistance, close to 100%. Plus you can incur extra damage if you put enemy resistance under 0.

Before the monster stats sections of the arreat summit was erased, i believe many non poison imune undead had around 95% resistance in hell.

And undead IS a 1/3 of all enemies. Or perhaps more close to 1/4, since demons is so prevalent compared to them and animal types.

And it could be a good idea to go for a lowering resistances build, as i had detailed in another post.

It is possible to get -100% poison resistance from items alone. perfect death's web, Trang totem, and 5x perfect poison facets, one socketed into the wand, another the totem, and 3 in a 3 socketed helmet.

And you still have the armor slot open for bramble.

And the poison facets is important, since they also add to poison skill damage.

Potentially, with a perfect bramble and items, you can get up to 250% enchanced poison skill damage!

I have tried such a build, and with just pnova and lower resists, i was able to clean the chaos sanctaury in hell 8ppl and only dying twice, and that was on the river of flame, towards the sanctuary.

I didnt try worldstone keep, as the serpent magi there have way too high innate poison imunity for LR to negate it.

Blind works like a charm to keep frenzytaurs and other nasties from charging and butchering you, and have a good radius too, compared to terror which is just horribly useless with a TINY radius, barely able to hit a monster with it, and not at all if its moving fast, plus a lvl 99 character has problems making monsters in hell act5 flee, too clevel/monster level dependent.

But diablo may be a better boss to eliminate for a pnova user, as baal is a lot more anticaster oriented. Less room to maneuver, cramped surroundings plus his tentacles and summoned clone giving for deadly crossfire.

Plus you have to get relatively close with pnova to hit stuff with it.

But you rule as long stuff is mainly melee monsters. Only oblivion knights is a problem with their bonespirits, and if a bosspack spawns extra fast.

[lemekim]

Oops! True, you can't get +8, it's +6. :P Still though, it isn't all bad news: you can get +6 to Poison Dagger, Poison Explosion and Poison Nova, or more likely, something in-between. Still, even a +3 Poison Explosion mod will add +30% more PN damage (which makes the wand give in total 90% more poison damage — darn good.)

Heck a theoretical white could be +6 PN and +120% damage to PN. That would translate into thousands of poison damage.

As for the monster regeneration, I'm sure that does help quite a bit. But who's arguing with that? Poison has to have an edge to balance the inherent downside of its duration-based damage.

In fact, maybe that's the solution: Instead of nerfing PN, you just bring down the monster regen rate a little bit. Kill two birds with one bone. (sorry! had to make that one) I mean, monster regen can be fun, but it's at silly levels right now. The reason that's bad (in my mind, anyway), is that it kills off a lot of fun variants. I mean, how far can a melee Sorc go? Or a singer Barb? Or a Paladin, for instance? *  :lol:

Ignatz

*that's called flamebait.

Again, the +skill to poison dagger/explosion would not help Poison Nova, since only the base points into skills help the overall damage. So +6 poison nova dagger would be great, but any +skills to other skills make no difference there.

Still, I think that monsters regeneration IS a tad too high. Right now, you have to either kill at a rate that is significantly faster then the regeneration, or use prevent monsters heal / poison items, which essentially makes all skills that can utilize PMH or poison in their attacks 2 times more powerful (in my book, if an item is REQUIRED, it's either overpowered, or in this case, the regeneration is overpowered). Thus any variants that cannot use poison/PMH are essentially screwed, because right now if the variant that does not use poison/PMH is able to kill as an untwinked char in hell in players 1, it suddenly becomes overpowering when twinked to very high levels (But that's both the regeneration fault, and the new items).

By the way, have anyone noticed that on Arreat Summit, Bone Spirit recieves 4% bonus synergies instead of the 6% as in the beta? Somehow I did not get the impression of Bone Spirit being that overpowering in beta, especially considering that you need a LOT of mana to spam it, it requires 100 skill points for maximum damage, and Bone Spear does almost the same damage at level 30, while costing 1/2 as much and being able to hit multiple targets.

[GenericKen]

Is everybody absolutely sure that poison disables regen in this patch? I recall several instances of poison not doing so in what I was pretty sure was 1.09.

As to those complaining that CE will be overpowered in 1.10, I do wonder as to whether they had played the game in hell difficulty.

Note these two collumns in difficulty.txt in the mpq:

MonsterCEDamagePercent StaticFieldMin
(Normal) 50 0
(Nm) 35 33
(Hell) 20 50

[LucianDK]

those numbers doesnt fit with CE, CE says it does 60-100% of monster life in damage.

[OneInTen]

Unfortunately those numbers are a case of the lights being on but nobody being home. In other words, they exist, but they dont appear to affect the game in any way.

Maybe it will in the release version?

[jms]

I wouldn't count paladins out just yet. :ph34r:

There was a thread started over at AB by Weave and added to by many others about Hammerdins being a force to reckon with in 1.10. Just to summarize, maxing Concentration+BH and its synergies--Vigor and Blessed Aim--leads to ~5k dmg per hammer with concentration active. Add on some plus skills and whatever favorable runewords are running around these days and...

Can you imagine a 1.10 Necro+Pally combo clearing Foothills with Vigor being flashed? 5 minutes tops.

[Ignatz]

It's a fast, high damage spell even in Hell right now. But it's no more powerful than several sorc spells, and CE requires corpses, isn't "aim and fire" (being dependent on the corpse location), interacts poorly with cold skeleton magi (and other cold damage), and is awfully mana hungry.

I think it's in a very good place right now. It's a great killing tool that's definitely situational and only mildly flexible. That and there are two separate immunities that can halve the damage.

Besides, Bone Spear and Spirit have turned out to be fairly disappointing as Arty necro tools.

[Ignatz]

Are you saying that the difficulty-based damage reductions of CE aren't being used in the beta? That it's doing 60-100% in Hell and NM, too? That doesn't sound right...

[OneInTen]

I'm saying that it's what I've heard - people are reporting killing everything with a couple of CEs even in hell.

I haven't personally verified it, so take it as heresay. :P

[Siluro]

I'm saying that it's what I've heard - people are reporting killing everything with a couple of CEs even in hell.

I haven't personally verified it, so take it as heresay. :P

CE does kill everything in 1-2 casts, except fire immune or stone skin boss packs (inc. minions).

I've recently been mucking around with a lvl 99 necro, using almost identical gear as Ignatz, and a similar skill layout (although a different playing style). I can't recall, but only assume he has modest life, resists and defence. However, his survivability is almost unmatched, since he is rarely the target of a monster's attention. Revives form the front line, and liberal casting of Attract (usually the moment I spot a distant monster) keeps things under control. With his 30-40k (or so) Poison Nova, recruiting revives has never been easier :P. Progress is predominantly made using LR and PN, though if they're is a corpse available amoungst a large pack, CE and Amp will hapily take care of things. Attract, I might add, seems to act like a beacon for monsters, drawing them in from 2 or 3 screens away once cast. So that's useful and dangerous at the same time.

He can run an 8 player Hell Baal run with ease; the only sore points were the poison immune Balrog group in the Throne Room, and 8p Baal (takes quite a while to whittle him down!). I ended up having to park the Balrogs because my revives couldn't hurt them enough to battle regen, and of course, even with LR they are immune to poison nova. I tried several times, before resorting to parking them, to go and fetch some new revives (eg. skelly archers from the Frigid Highlands, moon lords or claw vipers from CrysPass or Glacial), but to no avail. Lister's posse was vicious, but I was safe as long as I had something between me and them (go clay golem!), though they have a huge life pool (oh, and can't attract/revive them).

So he's quite a powerful char in his own right, albeit in ubergodlyomg gear. Now, when I paired up with my brother using a pally (god-like aswell :P), it gets worse. We cleared the Cow lvl alarmingly quick, thanks to Amp/CE and the pally for corpse creation and rounding. Literally one or two CEs, and bam, anything between 10 and 100 cows drop dead. Sickening.

[Occhidiangela]

Try setting up that Necro at about CLVL 70, which is what will be pretty achievable, and not uniques, and see how your killing speed fares. Level 99 is not a valid test character, not for balance, but of course fun is fun. :) I would expect a 99 level character to waltz through a great deal, particularly of tricked out with the worlds best items.

Take the 99 Necro, assign points, stats and skills, at level 70 (as I have done with the test zon) and use just what you can find and shop for.

That may give you a better sense of its power.

Even so, a +2 skills wand and +2 circlet and +2 shrunken head is probably easy to find.

Two SoJ's? Not likely.

So, at 26 . . . have a look and then assess. :)

[Dyntheos]

You can buy +2 wands, and a +1 skills head or sigons or +1 tree head is fairly easy to come up with. You can gamble the +1 skills ammy, and maybe the +1 Circlet, or even get a circlet imbued.

That's pretty much it for count on + skill items.

I've been playing a necro from scratch and he's 68 atm, and I tell you +2 skill items are not something to count on. You can't gamble the circlets or ammy's till 90 (72 with a diadem) so your pretty much stuck with +1 gear, and a +2 wand which the vendors sell.

So all up you are REASONABLY looking at a +5 to all skills setup.

Now bring all these godly skills levels down to 25 please. Anything else is just not realistic. THEN see how things kill.

Currently with 25 in SM, RS and CE my necro kills pretty well in 8 player NM. Yet to go to hell (working thru act 5 NM atm) so I can't say how a summoner will work in Hell with CE as the damage skill.

All these hacked up character mean nothing to me at the moment. My necro has all rares except for his tearhaunch booties, hell his armour is 4 Pskull'd Ancient Armour.

So PLEASE no more of these: "I haxored up this level 99 character with all the best most impossible to create (runewords) or find (elite uniques) gear and I think the (insert character class here) character is unbalanced"

Of course these things are unbalanced, because they exist in fantasy land and not the reality of a built from scratch, use the items you actually find, character.