Diablo II single player questions

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Why's that? I thought anything that increases damage would be useful, especially in Hell. Or is it rendered obsolete by Fanaticism?

In this case I suppose two good combinations would be to have Zeal with Fanaticism to maximize physical damage and Vengeance with Conviction to maximize elemental damage. With a Holy Freeze merc to top it off there should be no enemy that's immune to attack. Use Vengeance on normal enemies and switch to Zeal against an enemy that's resistant to some of the elements. Does this sound like a good build, or would you take something like Holy Shock over Conviction and/or Fanaticism?

If you need to get damaged, does this mean that if you successfully block the enemy gets no damage? If this is the case then it may not be as useful as I thought.

 

I've never used Decrepify extensively as I was too impatient to get it and then invest points in it. But the last time I used it (it was level 6 or 7 because of +skills) all it did was slow down monsters. Perhaps it has a synergy?

I used Iron Maiden though. It was quite powerful, but at Hell it lost much of its effectiveness because the monsters seemed to have much higher life than the ones in Nightmare and Normal (especially the big, hulking ones in general). Perhaps with a Thorns mercenary it can be useful again, but I wouldn't recommend it. Iron Maiden was only ever useful against common monsters.

Might is not completely useless, but I guess if you have no other way to do damage besides physical it can get redundant. I don't play Paladins much but the Might merc was well received by my Necromancer and Druid.

I played Druids and Necros almost exclusively.
The Druid is basically just a Necro who has nukes (damaging spells) instead of curses.
Druids are basically three types: Caster/Summoner, Shapeshifter/Summoner and Caster/Shapeshifter/Summoner. All are viable, if you prefer power to variety go with just two combinations.

The Elemental Spells are actually pretty good and could rival a Sorceress' spells, but instead of the "evocations" the Sorceress uses the Druid has cast-and-forget types. Think fireballs vs earthquakes. There are two types: Fire (fire+physical) and Wind (purely physical, stuns). Pure Wind is not practical for beating the game with (too random). Fire spells synergize with each other, so if you invest heavily in them they can remain useful even in Hell.
Some fire spells have a synergy with the Shapeshifting skills.

The Shapeshifting tree is very solid for beating the game with. Werewolf (speed and accuracy) or Werebear (sheer power and HP) is nice, but I don't recommend getting both. You cannot cast most spells while shapeshifted, but you can summon stuff.

Finally the Summoning tree is pretty solid. Spirit Wolves (can teleport... not too useful in normal) and Dire Wolves (eats corpses) are not as strong as the Bear, but they synergize with each other (so you can consider putting points in all of them) and there are situations where the Bear would not be as practical as the wolves. Ravens are useful for their blind ability, but don't invest more than a point in them (although you could, ravens need to be resummoned every once in a while... after you summon your n-th raven for the n-teen thousandth time, the process can get tedious)

The Summoning tree also has the spirits (basically they are units which grant useful auras) and vines (utility summonlings - one poisons, one gives life from corpses and one gives mana from corpses). I usually just put 1 point these and let the +skills do the rest, although I remember the poison vine having a synergy with something. It's not very useful by itself but the synergy could be useful

They really should make "synergize" a word. Sorry for the lengthy post.

 

Decrepify = Slow + Weaken + Amplify Damage

It's the chops!

 

The reason why Might is useless is that both Concentration and Fanatacism do exactly what it does, only better. Dont waste more than 1 point in Might (you need it for other auras).

If I was you, I'd either use Vengeance and Conviction or Zeal and Holy Shock. But dont try to use all four of those skills on the same paladin - choose a main attack and aura and stick with it. You dont get enough skill points to max out all of them. Another option is, as you said, zeal and fanatacism (my favourite prior to 1.10), use a holy frost merc to deal cold damage.

Other useful skills are holy shield. Sacrifice is a synergy for zeal, and resist lightning aura is a synergy for holy shock and vengeance. Salvation (the aura that provides resist cold, lightning and fire I think) provides a small damage synergy for all three elements for vengeance. PS, you know what synergies are right?

Another famous build to consider is the Hammerdin. I personally dont like them but they are VERY powerful if done right. Hammerdin use Blessed Hammer and Concentration. Concentration is the only aura that increases Blessed Hammer's damage. Blessed Hammer is a magical attack that spirals out from you, doing magic damage to everything it hits (hard to resist) and +50% damage to undead. Its synergies are holy bolt and vigor I believe (could be wrong, dont quote me on it).

EDIT: A little illustration of common builds. BTW, these all assume that you will play all the way through to level 100 on hell difficulty. If you will only play on normal, then you can easily get away with sub optimal builds. By builds, I refer to creating a character with a certain skillset. By choosing only 4 or 5 skills to max, those skills become very powerful. Levelling up too many skills weakens your character in the long run, thats why I dont recommend zeal + vengeance + conviction + fanatacism all on the same character.

So.... Avenger might be:
Vengeance 20
Conviction 20
Resist lightning Aura 10 (plus passive bonus to lightning resist)
Resist fire Aura 10 (plus passive bonus to fire resist)
Resist cold Aura 10 (plus passive bonus to cold resist)
Holy shield - the rest

While a shock zealot might be:
Sacrifice 20 (damage synergy for zeal)
Zeal 20
Holy shock 20
Resist Lightning 20
Holy shield the rest

 

I just started a new game today and went with an Amazon while planning to focus on the bow skills (with the passives as well of course). However, I'm really disappointed in the early going (level 10) by the damage that the bow does, against some tougher foes I've resorted to Jav's. Does the bow damage really increase much as you go? It's also irritating because I just got a unique buckler and since it's the first one in the early game I wanted to use it, lol.

I'm also intrigued by a spear amazon because I heard somebody mention a one handed spear. I didn't think there were any 1-handed spears, and that it was just javelins, is this the case? Because I'd love to make a character who can go in with a spear, shield, with a nice dodge ability.

 

You can use a javelin like a one handed spear with a shield.
Just don't have it set to toss.

 

That's what I thought, but does this mean it's as effective as the individual curses (in other words, would it be the equivalent of stacking the 3 curses if that was possible)?

I think I would rather go with power. The triple-tree variant will be more fun at first but by Hell I don't think any one tree will be powerful enough to see me through. The Shapeshifter/Summoner seems like more fun, but I'll need multiple types of attacks in Hell so I'll probably go with a Caster/Summoner and focus on the Fire element. I like the fact it does both physical and fire damage, always useful against immunities and high resistances. As for the summons I just noticed that you can summon multiple wolves but only one bear, so I guess the wolves will be more powerful if I invest enough points into them (that'll be a problem, since I won't be able to max all the synergies for both the elemental attacks and the wolves, but I'll see how to deal with this)

Speaking of Conviction lowering resistance, does it also lower physical resistance, and if that's the case can it actually break physical immunities? If it can then Zeal and Conviction suddenly looks like a VERY good combination. I've been experimenting a bit with Zeal (got a +2 Zeal scepter) and it's really powerful, much more so than I thought. I haven't reached a high enough level to try Vengeance, so I'm still unsure which one to make my main attack. Especially since Conviction has so many synergies.

Don't worry, I know what synergies are
How good is Holy Shield though? Is it worth investing points into it, or am I better off relying on Conviction or Fanaticism? I don't want to invest lots of points into more than one aura, since you can't have multiple ones active.

 

The javelin skills provide enough damage that you don't need a super-powerful base weapon. My character is pretty damn powerful, just attacked the blacksmith straight up no potions and killed him easy, had to use a couple on Andariel. I made a semi-interesting build in that I invested some points into energy early on and just use jab or powerstrike as my main attack... never run out of mana.

 

I can help you a bit with that. For some reason Blizzard made it so that the Bear will always outdamage the wolves (even if you max those out) unless you invest a lot of points into the Bear itself (Bear has +damage to wolves synergy).

The Summon Grizzly features a +damage bonus. This can synergize with your pets depending on how much points you actually spend in it.
For example putting points in Summon Grizzy grants the bear itself HP, damage and +damage bonus per level. These values rise even with +skill items. But if your Summon Grizzly actually only has 1 point then only 1 point's worth of the +damage synergy will benefit your wolves.

So to make Dire Wolves more powerful than the Grizzly you'd need around 40-50% of your total points in Summoning. This is acceptable if you have additional plans for shapeshifting, but impractical if you're after an elemental build.

 

As far as I know it lowers defense by a certain percentage but doesnt lower physical resist. But at least you would be guaranteed to hit your enemies, you just wouldnt do as much damage as if you were using Fanatacism.

Its not an aura luckily, its a spell. You cast it, and it boosts your shield by quite a bit for a set time, and then you switch back to your main aura. Boosts defense, chance to block, smite damage, and greatly increases block speed. Most Paladin builds I see include it because of its usefulness in keeping your character alive. I wouldnt think it would be really necessary until late in nightmare difficulty though, so just keep playing without it and see how you go. if you start getting owned, invest a few points into it.

 

It's also very useful because it's one of the few runewords that allows you to circumvent the immune to physical problem from monsters in hell, by adding Lightning damage. And that damage actually scales with monster HP (Static Field).
Note useful past 50%, but it's a start.

 

First, I found a Stormshield! Woohoo!

Now, a ton of stuff to get to.

Decrepify - Two points here that I didn't see mentioned of why you wouldn't want to use decrepify except against bosses: 1.) Decrepify only affects one creature, whereas amplify damage is area of affect. If you want to cast decrepify against a pack of creatures, you'd need to target each one individually. Amplify damage is a much better curse against packs of enemies. 2.) Amplify damage is -100% resistance to physical damage (so if the creature has no resistance to physical it takes double damage), whereas decrepify is -50% to physical damage. The advantage of decepify is against bosses and tough singular foes, as it makes them move at half speed, and all of their attacks do half the listed damage. (The big advantage of decepify is it greatly reduces the damage YOU receive, as the enemy is moving slowly -making it attack less frequently - and the attacks it performs don't do as much damage.) It's not that one curse is necessarily "better" than the other, as they both have situation-specific uses. Obviously, since you're going to be fighting packs of creatures a lot more than bosses, you're going to use amplify damage more, but it's worth investing a least one point into both skills.

Zeal/Might/Holy Freeze - To any and all who are arguing that might is useless, and holy freeze is underpowered, let me simply say this: My current paladin uses holy freeze as his primary aura, and has a might mercenary accompanying him. He uses zeal as his primary attack and averages approximately 2,600 damage per zeal swing (not per zeal cycle - per swing in the cycle). This means that I have the potential of dealing 13,000 damage per zeal cycle. Low damage? Not if you use the synergies you mentioned! Holy freeze has resist cold as a synergy, and zeal has sacrifice as a synergy, both of which increase damage output considerably. NUFF SAID.

Druids - you can cast summons when you transform into a wereform, but you cannot cast elemental spells. So the trees are not entirely mutually exclusive - you just cannot do both elemental and shape shifting. There are a great many shapeshifters than have summons accompanying them, and the vines and spirits are useful for all types of druids. Most druids are either shape shifters or elemental druids, but both types do invest points in the summoning tree. I personally think that shape shifters are easier if you are starting from scratch and don't have access to some high end equipment. (Elemental druids don't have great damage output without having a bunch of +skill items. You really need to get a couple of the elemental skills up to around level 30 for them to be effective in hell difficulty, and since you only can invest 20 hard points... that's a lot of +skill equipment.)

 

@Aldeth

I meant Might was useless as an aura to invest more than one point into. I frequently use Might mercenaries (or holy freeze mercenaries) but I'd never invest more than one point into it.

Holy Freeze is not useless, I like it myself, but it doesnt do as much damage as Holy Shock. It just doesnt, no way of getting round it, although the tradeoff is the slowdown effect which can be very nice. I mean, the simple truth is that had you invested the same amount of points into resist lightning and holy shock you would be doing more damage on average. No two ways about it. Of course, thats not all that counts in Diablo so its possible you would rather have your enemies moving in slow motion. Thats fine.

A mod that I was working on, which I never released, but really should, aimed to fix a lot of useless auras like Holy Fire and Might. By useless, as I said, I dont mean that they are useless at all, rather that you would never invest points into them. Oh, and Sanctuary. Sanctuary become a favourite of mine because it added magic damage and knocked back undead.

In fact, if I remember tonight I'll upload whatever I have of it tonight. I seem to remember I gave up on it because I encountered a bug that caused all rune words to stop working. I cant remember whether I fixed it or not.

 

I will concede that if you are going after high physical damage, you're better off going with fanaticism than might (especially when the speed bonus is factored in). I've never tried a zeal/fanaticism combo with a holy freeze mercenary, because I was always of the opinion that if you synergized holy freeze, it would do more damage, combined with the might aura from your merc, than if you let the merc provide holy freeze, and you went with zeal/fanaticism (because fanaticism doesn't synergize with anything).

And you have just shown why I prefer holy freeze. While it is listed in the offensive aura tree, it is just as much a defensive aura as it is an offensive aura. A maxed holy freeze slows enemies by more than 50%, and enemies that move less than half the speed they were moving before also attack at less than half the frequency they do if they weren't slowed.

Finally, you are aboslutely right that both holy shock will exceed the damage of holy freeze no matter how you synergize on a point-for-point basis. But there's two points that can be made on the side of holy freeze (in addition to it's defensive capability) that helps it out a lot:

1.) While holy shock has higher average damage, the damage range is all over the place. A level 20 holy shock can add as much as 900 damage to your attack - or it can add 1 point. Conversely a level 20 holy freeze does between 185-190 points of cold damage per attack.

2.) The damage differential isn't nearly as severe once you add in synergies, as holy freeze gets bigger synergy bonuses than holy shock gets. It's not enough for freeze to overtake shock in terms of average damage, but it makes the difference a lot less, as shown below:

Unsynergized, holy shock has an average damage 5.0 times higher than holy freeze. However, holy shock receives a +12% damage bonus from resist lightning, and a 4% damage bonus from salvation for a total of +320%. On the other hand, holy freeze receives a 15% damage bonus from resist cold, and a 7% damage bonus from salvation, for a total of +440%. When you run those numbers, you'll see that holy freeze ends up with a higher damage of just 1.9 times that of holy freeze. It's still a significant difference, but not as big as it looked at the onset.

 

Grats on the Stormshield. Do you guys happen to be wearing any "+chance to find magic items" gear?
It's been a while since I found anything better than a few nice rares.

Actually you can because Fireclaws synergizes with the Fire skills, so an Elemental/Shapeshifting/Summoning Druid is viable. I just don't believe any Druid should be without Summoning though unless you have a very specific role for him in mind.

The elemental skills are powerful even without +skill gear, just don't make a pure elemental tree Druid. Elemental skills do good damage, but have limitations and varying degrees of randomness. This is what sets the Druid's spells apart from the Sorceress'.

I read somewhere that one of the redeeming quirks Might has over Fanaticism is that Might is 100% effective on you and all allies. Fanaticism is 100% effective on your character, but only 50% effective on allies.

 

Oh, heck yes. Both dmc and I are running necros with well over 200% magic find.

This is true. However, fanaticism usually still wins out because it gives you an increased rate of attack (which also effectively increases damage).

I found out an interesting thing about the Countess when doing some research last night. Most people who do Countess runs are after runes. However, there are some very odd drop mechanics at work with the Countess. You get at least 1, but as many as 3 runes every time you kill her. The one you are guaranteed is always between Rune #1 and Rune #9, so either a very low or relatively low rune. For the other two drops, the Countess will either drop at least a magic item, or if she fails to drop at least a magic you get a rune instead, and it is potentially a rune up to #20.

Therefore to maximize your rune finds, you have to take the counterintuitive action of killing her with a character that has very little magic find. The higher your magic find, the greater the chance of the Countess dropping a magic or better item, and the less chance you have of getting one or two additional runes. This also helps explain why dmc and I have been having such rotten luck doing Countess runs: When you run the Countess with more than 200% mf, the chances of her not dropping at least magic items are very low indeed, meaning dmc and I almost always only get the one crap rune you are guaranteed to get, and nothing else.

EDIT: This is the only instance I'm aware of where magic find has a positive or negative impact on getting runes. Normal drop mechanics operate in a manner that the game first decides the type of item to drop (short sword, leather armor, arrows, healing potion, key, etc), and then decides the quality level of that item (low, normal, magic, rare, set, unique), if the item is available in different qualities. The game will skip the second step if the item is not available in different qualities. (Things like keys, potions, and arrows are only available in white varieties, so there is no quality check. Things like jewels, rings, and amulets must be at least magic, so intesad of defaulting to a normal (white) item when all the checks fail, jewelry defaults to magic.) Since runes are only available in white varieties, magic find normally has no impact either on the odds of a rune dropping or the odds of it being a high, medium, or low rune.

 

The damage that fanatacism gives to allies is halved, but its still good. The attack rate and attack rating is not halved however. I seem to remember that fanatacism adds 17% damage per level anyway - even halved its still nearly as much as Might (10%).

As for magic find and the Countess....

I'd be surprised if magic find affected that at all, since thats not the way the treasure drops are calculated.

Treasure drops first figure out what kind of item is to be dropped, ie whether its a rune, or a jewel, or a weapon, or a bunch of arrows, or keys etc. Magic find isnt involved in this step, since we dont know if the item can even be magical (ie no magic arrows).

If the item is a rune, it works out precisely which rune to drop (its a little more complicated than this). Again, magic find has no effect here, since runes cant be magical.

if the item is a weapon or armor, then magic find is involved because they can be magical.

I cant explain why you encountered better rune drops without MF though, it might be that I'm wrong and that MF takes effect earlier.

BTW, if you fight the countess on higher difficulties she drops better runes.

 

Sorry Proteus, I was typing my edit when you were typing your reply, so I repeated a lot of what you said. You are completely right in how items usually drop. Your explanation is almost identical to mine that I was typing before I even saw your response. The source for my information was dii.net - I'll try to find the page and post a link. The point of the description on that page was that the Countess drop mechanics are unlike the drop mechanics of nearly all other creatures in the game. (There are a few instances of forced drops, like the Hellforge always drops gems and runes, and a few others.)

I cannot find the exact page. However, I did find this link which says that your odds of getting runes are worse the more players are in the game (because it increases the odds of something other than a rune dropping). So dmc is doubly screwing his odds of getting a high rune when he does Countess runs in that he has high magic find AND he is playing at the players 8 setting.