Diablo II single player questions

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Two days to get my bone necro through Act I (all players 8). Fun build so far, but it is kind of annoying to drink soo many mana potions. Majority of the points have been in teeth, but with one each so far in amplify damage, raise skelly, skeleton mastery, skeleton mage, clay golem, and golem mastery i think... Along with one for corpse explosion and bone spear.

I don't have any slots for healing potions, it's all mana and haven't died yet, so I'd say it is doing fine thus far.

 

so, a bone necro with summons? a hybrid of sorts?

i have trang ouls wing if you need it(the shield)

 

You really cannot hybridize a bone/summoner, as both require a lot of points to become effective. The most skill points you can conceivably earn is 110, assuming you do all the side quests and hit level 99. Since it's unlikely that you will ever reach level 99, an assumption of 95-100 skill points is usually a more reasonable amount to consider (which would mean you would finish hell difficulty between levels 85-90).

dmc and I have already beaten to death the skill setup for a summoner necromancer, but a necromancer that specializes in the bone skills - usually called a bonemancer - is certainly a viable build.

Bonemancers usually pick 3 bone skills to max out. One is always bone spear because it flies through the object, and therefore a single spear can hit multiple targets. The other two bone skills are typically up to the player, although Teeth is popular as it is an offensive spell you can start using from level 1. (Some cheesy bonemancers max out bone wall - yes, it does synergize with bone spear - and then cast iron maiden on creatures that try to hack their way through the wall, killing themselves in the process.) All the bone skills give the exact same 7% damage bonus to bone spear, so really it is up to player preference which two other than bone spear you work on.

Bonemancers also always pick up corpse explosion. CE doesn't synergize with anything, but is so damn useful that nearly all necros invest at least a few points in it to get the radius up to an acceptable level. Finally, they usually max out one summons, which usually means getting a beefy golem. Clay golems are the most popular, although some people prefer iron golems. The golem and your mercenary serve as protection for your character, as it is your character that will be doing most of the damage.

Most bonemancers do not invest much in curses. They usually throw a point in amplify damage to help them out in the early going and as a prerequisite to decrepify (which is still useful against bosses), and iron maiden is useful for when your golem and merc are getting pounded on, but most curses are not going to help out the bonemancer a heck of a lot. Amplify damage and decrepify - the two most popular curses for a summoner - don't get a heck of a lot of use, because the bone skills do magic damage, while amplify damage and decrepify lower a targets resistance to physical damage.

As you can see, with 3 maxed out bone skills (60 points), 5-10 in Corpse Explosion, 20 in Clay golem, and about 10 or so prerequisities and one point wonders, there's really nothing left in the way of skill points to develop summons any further. Some players try to keep corspe explosion down in the 3-5 skill point range, and only invest 10 or so in clay golem so they can max out a 4th bone skill and make their bone spears even more powerful (which is certainly doable if you're OK with a weaker golem).

 

I figure that some of those skills are nice to have right now, just because +skills make them semi-useful. Bone Spear is going to be maxed out, and I think the amount I have in teeth (12 or so) is probably going to be it for a long time. I don't like using a guide for this kind of game, and I know where I have gone wrong, but just feeling your own character is a lot of fun... Except my Amazon, I have no clue who I even beat normal with that, haha.

 

I know what you mean about guides. One of the things casual players like about Diablo is that you really don't need a plan to make it through Normal or even Nightmare difficulties. Pretty much any build will work just fine to get you through level 70 or so. It is only those interested in going through the game on Hell difficulty where too many poorly chosen skill points can really hinder your character in the end.

I started Hell difficulty with my Mereorb sorceress last night, although all I did was kill some stuff in the Blood Mor. I did end up finding a few more +skill items in nightmare, including the unique gauntlets, Magefist, which gives me another +1 to all my fire skills. It turns out that it changed the math a bit on my calculations for using Tal Rasha's set. I have the three set items currently equipped because I really like the resistances that it provides me. (My resistances are in the 40s and 50s at this point, and seeing as how I don't get hit much I think that is good enough.) However, against creatures that have no fire resistance, I would actually be better off going back to the skill setup with Hexfire and the Harlequin Crest.

My cold attack is a little more powerful with Tal Rasha's set up (as I have one more point now in both Frozen Orb and Cold Mastery), but now I'm really undecided about which way to go. My plan is to keep going with Tal Rasha's set, and see if it gets to the point where I start slowing down and need those extra skill points to move through areas more quickly. (That or I eventually find the damnable amulet for this set, and then I know I have the equipment I need.)

The other thing I realized upon equipping the partial set, is that my Meteorb has now become a magic finder without even working towards that goal. Tal Rasha's armor comes with +88 mf, and I have socketed it with a ptopaz to get it up to +112 mf. Once you equip a third piece of the set you get a partial set bonus of +65 mf. I have a few other pieces of equipment that provide some magic find, so without even trying my total mf is in excess of 200, and I don't think I'm carrying around a single mf charm in my inventory. I could even go higher if I wanted to equip her with Chance Guards and Goldwrap, although I am not overly keen on either of those ideas. I really like the +1 fire skills and extra mana regeneration rate I get with Magefist, and while my belt is just a rare, it is quite nice in that it provides resistance to three different elemental attacks (I forget which three off the top of my head, although if forced to guess I think it doesn't come with poison resistance.)

Finally, there was also some debate on my part on whether to follow the meteorb guide's advice and go for max block, or do what I did and work on maxing life. The argument presented in the guide is that since you only get 2 life per point spent in vitality, that it is better to sink a bunch of points in vitality to get your block rate to 75% and block most incoming attacks. My argument is that might be a good idea if you just stand in one spot and hold down the right click until everything is dead. For someone like my sorceress that moves around a lot - and frequently runs to reposition herself in battle - she's still not going to get hit much even without a good block rate. And you still have to consider that many of the elemental attacks you will encounter are unblockable, and the only way to minimize that damage is to have decent resistances and life pool. Anyway, my sorceress is currently level 71 and has 816 life. I will get 12 more life per level up (2 per vitality point spent and the automatic 2 you get for levelling), so I do not regret my decision. With a life pool of that size, I can take a few hits on hell difficulty and survive.

EDIT1: I never really saw what the big deal was for getting block to 75% for non-melee characters. For something like a paladin, barbarian, or shapeshifter druid, getting your block rate to 75% is a great way to minimize damage. You're constantly within arm's reach of all monsters and all those points you sink into dexterity have the added benefit of improving your attack rating. Each dexterity point is worth 4 points of attack rating, and while 4 is not a lot on its own, that 4 is multiplied by all your +% to attack modifiers on your skills, meaning that each point usually equates to a lot more than just 4 attack rating.

For non-melee characters, their attack rating is of no consequence. Since they don't get +% attack modifiers on their skills, the only way they are can melee even occassionally is to have an ignore target defense weapon. So if you can stay out of harm's way in melee, and many elemental attacks are unblockable so it doesn't even matter if you have a shield - never mind what your % chance to block is - the only types of attacks your block rating will help you is blockable missile attacks - things like arrows, spears, quills from quill rats, etc. And there's just not enough of those type of enemies in the game IMO to invest an extra 150 points in dexterity that could otherwise go to improving your vitality.

EDIT2: I think I have another worthwhile mf area for this character. My favorite mf area is the pits, and my sorceress will frequent that area, just like my necro did. However, there is another level 85 area in act 1 - the mausoleum. I never ran that with my necro because there's a lot of doorways and narrow passageways that would cause choke points for my army to move through. Futhermore, there are ghosts in the mausoleum that were physical immune, and while I could break the physical immunity with amplify damage, it still took a while to take them out. So it was neither quick nor easy for my necro to do the mausoleum.

For a sorceress on the other hand - fireballs, meteors and frozen orbs fit through doorways just fine. And just like the pits, there are no dual immunes in the mausoleum, so I won't run into anything that will slow me down much. You also get to take out Blood Raven - who has pretty good drop odds - on the way in. Depending on your luck, you may also run into the superunique Bishbosh (he's the unique fallen shaman) in the Cold Plains area who has an excellent drop rate on the way to the graveyard. It wouldnt' be worth it to search the cold plains in an effort to find him, but if he happened to spawn on your way to the graveyard it certainly would be worth stopping to kill him.

 

The nice thing about staying with Tal Rasha's partial set is that the high MF means you have a better chance of finding the amulet and completing the set. Also having a better cold attack means you can make better use of Frozen Orb, not just against fire immunes but to slow down groups of enemies and prevent them from getting into melee with your sorceress. Even if Hexfire/Harlequin give you a slightly more powerful attack against some enemies, the partial Tal Rasha set you have is better balanced overall.

I don't remember which way I went with my Sorceress now. I also thought for a while about max block, especially because Hell dolls were giving me a lot of trouble, but IIRC block doesn't work against their death throes anyway and I had no problem with most of the other attacks. Besides a Sorceress never stands still - you're constantly moving, freezing things, throwing a Meteor then repositioning yourself so it hits your enemies full on... blocking while constantly moving and teleporting about is pretty inefficient. You don't want to reduce the number of attacks that hit you (there's so few of them anyway), instead you want to make sure the attacks that do hit you don't instantly kill you. For that reason I'd go for more life instead. Having life at around 1000 can do wonders for your survival on Hell.

 

That factored into my thought process as well. However, now that I think about it, there is a third option that I did not calculate that may be worth considering. When I switched to Tal Rasha gear, it's not like I threw away/sold all my other equipment. They are all still in my stash. I could equip Hexfire on my weapon switch and switch weapons depending on my attack. The issue is whether or not Hexfire alone is sufficient to do this, because I cannot have the Harlequin Crest on switch, and I also would lose my wonderful +1 skill shield if I switched. (Although I guess there are a few fairly cheap runewords that offer +1 skills that I could throw on switch.) The ideal fire set up is HQ + Hex. The ideal cold set up is TR. The question becomes is Hex without HQ still better for fire than TR is.

You see the problem in comprehensively answering this question of ideal gear is twofold:

1. Whenever you have equipment that gives -% enemy resistances, you will always reach a point where the damage ratio will flip in favor of the -% enemy resistance direction, regardless of how big the initial damage difference is. Take this extreme example. Say my damage with HQ and Hex was 10000, and with TR, it was only 5000. The damage output would be as follows:

0% enemy fire resistance: Hex/HQ = 10000, TR = 5750
25% enemy fire resistance: Hex/HQ = 7500, TR = 4500
50% enemy fire resistance: Hex/HQ = 5000, TR = 3250
75% enemy fire resistance: Hex/HQ = 2500, TR = 2000
90% enemy fire resistnace: Hex/HQ = 1000, TR = 1250
100% enemy fire resistance: Hex/HQ = 0, TR = 750

So the real question is when does the flip occur, and what percent of enemies am I likely to encounter who meet that criteria? In the above example, Hex/HQ is clearly superior, because there probably aren't too many monsters in hell difficulty that have around 90% fire resistance, and you'd probably be better off using Frozen Orb against them anyway.

With my current setup, the flip occurs right around 50% fire resistnace. Enemies with less than 50% fire resistance would take more damage with the Hex + HQ setup, while they would take more damage with the TR setup if they had more than 50% resistance. In theory, I could go on diabloii.net and look up the comprehensive monster list, and see what the relative percentage of monsters on hell difficulty have significantly less than 50% fire resistance, about 50% fire resistance, and significantly more than 50% fire resistance and then based on those ratios I could figure out which weapon setup would be better and in which cases it would be about the same. I have no intention of undertaking such a time consuming task.

2. The second issue, equally difficult to calculate, would be to check how much more damage my Frozen Orb is doing, and whether or not the increase damage output of Frozen Orb exceeds the damage lost from Fireball and Meteor. That's pretty much impossible to calculate for a number of reasons. First of all, there is the same -% resistance issue that you get from Cold Mastery. Secondly, the damage listed on screen for Frozen Orb is per shard, and I don't know how I would calculate what the average number of shards hit a given monster with the casting of Frozen Orb, and that would be necessary to answer the question. At best, I could calculate what the average number would have to be to make up the damage, but it would be a meaningless number because there is no way for me to know whether or not a given monster would be hit by more or fewer shards than the given number. (Unless the calculated number turned out to be really big or really small. If it turned out to be 50, I know there's no way the average monster gets hit by 50 shards. If it turned out to be 2, I know almost all monsters get hit by more than 2. However, I am quite certain that the calculated number would not be near either extreme.)

Correct. Exploding dolls are unblockable.

And I will get it up to around 1000 by the time I run into dolls in the end of Act III. Figure I'll get about 10 levels by then, that's 120 life. Plus the extra 20 life I'll get for the first quest in Act III, and I'll use all 5 stat points from the Black Book quest on vitality as well, so that's another 10. So that's another 150 life easily.

Stygian Dolls just suck though. They don't do as much damage as people think - it's about 500 points, and like corpse explosion it's divided evenly between fire and physical. So having a respectable fire resistance and any PDR equipment can reduce it to what initially appears to be a very survivable 300 or so points of damage. The problem is they attack in packs, and a stray frozen orb (or barbarian whirlwind, or paladin zeal cycle) can take out a whole bunch at once. The problem isn't one blowing up, it's a half dozen blowing up at the same time.

 

Thing is as a Sorceress you have no defense anyway against half a dozen dolls blowing up - not max block, not 2000 life, nothing. For one or two blowing up, you can survive that with 1000 life but not with max block. That would be my rationale. It's not a perfect defense but at least it means some of the time you'll survive when you wouldn't otherwise.

Frozen Orb is a difficult one to try to calculate, because as you pointed out the number of shards that hit varies so wildly with each casting. I think you're worrying too much about the ideal setup (though I understand that's part of the fun ). Switching isn't such a good option because you would lose on the shield and Hexfire by itself won't be as good as either Hexfire+HC or Tal Rasha's. I would personally stick to Tal Rasha for the reasons I outlined above, even if Hexfire is very slightly better at Fire attacks. However I was relying more on Frozen Orb and Fireball to get me through, whereas you seem to rely much more on Meteor, so my option may not be the best for your style of play.

 

To be honest I still believe that the Necromancer class is the only class that has the ability to invest points in everything and still remain powerful, relying on spells like Revive and Corpse Explosion in particular (which can work fine with only +skill modifiers). He has two class-specific items (wand and heads), he has a "layering" ability that rivals the Druid's/Assassin's (Summons+Curses+Bone Spells+Poison Spells) and he just works so well with many of the game's features (sadly this is also the reason why he won't be coming back in D3).

Granted, such a character would have to be played as if it were your "main" character. No room for +MF gear here.

 

I don't agree with any Necromancer build working. You need skeletons at a good level with a good level of Skeletal Mastery, no matter what. Once you've got enough points in there you're not left with that many to invest in the other trees. I can think of two main types of Necromancers doing really well, the Summoner and the Bone Necro, but I can think of a half dozen builds that would make it to Act 3 or Act 4 at the latest before they started having serious problems, never mind getting them as far as Hell difficulty. If you started spreading your points over skeletons, golems, curses, poison AND bone, you'd end up with something like 15 points in each group of skills, nowhere near enough to survive the more difficult stages of the game, not to mention bosses would take half an hour each to kill as you take away their health 20 or 30 HP at a time.

 

Not exactly. The Curse Trees would need only a point each with +skills, so you should be concentrating your skill points on skills which actually have synergies (poison, bone) and probably skeleton mastery. You would not be relying on skeletons for damage until you develop your gear, they'll serve as distractions until then ("they" would actually be just one skelly warrior and one mage). There are other Necromancer skills to fall back to. Poison Explosion, Corpse Explosion, the unsung curses (Dim Vision, Terror, Confuse, Attract)... Not to mention you can just hire a good merc. And once you get to level 30, Revive and Bone Spirit.

Bone Spirit can take care of bosses and troublesome uniques while you keep a safe distance. One should probably get it to 20 or work a bit on its synergies, as it's the only skill that works should revives+corpse explosion+curses+poison fail. Your own character would be weak until he nears Act 5/Nightmare, when he finally gets the chance to start looking for +skill items.

Although far from being the best build, it should be the only take-all-skills one that would work. Not a particularly great build, but decent if all you want to do is finish the game with it.

 

If the only requirement is to place at least one point in each skill, and there is no requirement to have your skills evenly distributed between trees, then the easiest character to do this with is the barbarian, because in a typical build you practically do that anyway. In a typical whirlwind build, you'll want at least a point in berserk, which means you'll have one or more points in every combat skill. In the war cries tree, the only optional skill is the last corpse skill - the totem one - I can't think of what it is called. All barbs want at least one point in find item, which means they would have already placed one in find potion as a prerequisite.

That leaves the masteries tab, and this is the only one where you would have "wasted" points, because you wouldn't actually have to invest a point into all six masteries. Realsitically, you'd at least decide whether or not you were going to use a one handed or two handed weapon and put a point in each relevant mastery. I actually do something similar to this. If I don't have any equipment and I'm starting from scratch, I first decide whether or not I'm going to use a shield or not. (For me, the answer is I'm always going to use a shield with a barbarian.) However, since I'm starting from scratch and I have no idea what my end game gear is going to be, I'll put one point each into sword, axe, and mace mastery, so I can use whatever weapon I find along the way.

Of course, there's no real reason you'd want to do this, other than to say you were able to do this. The challenge of the game is to win it with a finite number of stat and skill points. Skill points are in the most limited supply, as you only get about 100 of them over the life of your character. Spending points on a skill you do not intend to use is just foolish.

Why? You have two slots to boost skills - your weapon and shield slots. Everything else can be devoted to MF.

EDIT: Finished Act I Hell with my sorceress this weekend, currently level 76. No new equipment to report on, although the find of the weekend was an Ist rune, dropped by the unique skeleton in the mausoleum.

I do like the Mausoleum - it's really easy, and I can run it quickly. The only downside is that it is not always easy to get there in the first place. Without the benefit of having a pre-generated map, there's nothing I can do to speed up the process of finding the entrance to the cemetary. Following the paths isn't the best bet, as there is a path that goes to the next area, a path to the cemetary, and finally a path to the hole, which is the extra area in the cold plains. It takes a while to get to at times, but if you're willing to make the time investment, it's an easy run. I also have to look up what the area level is for the crypt. If it's not significantly lower than the mausolem (I know it's not 85, but is it 80-anything?) then it might be worth running isn't you're already over there. That said, I still do the Pit as well, and there really isn't anything that I need to fear there either (although the same cannot be said of my mercenary - he died in level 2 of the pit to an archer pack that spawned cursed, extra fast).

Finally, I have learned that you don't need to kill everything. In fact, there are some monster groups that are definitely worth skipping over. There's no need to fight every boss ghost pack that you find in the Countess Tower. They will rip your merc to shreds in a couple of seconds. Just teleport right past them. You're there for the Countess and her runes - no need to kill everything else on the way.

 

Just finished replaying BG2 last weekend and popped in Diablo II last night. And got my Necromancer, Kangax (yeah, yeah, tribute to the lich) to level 13. Got a rare ring from a drop and won a rare chain boots from gambling. Sorry, couldn't remember the names of the items. Will try to document them tonight.

Anyway, one of my characters from a long long time ago, a barbarian around level 40 something had actually a complete set that is necro specific. Not exactly a high level set but good enough for Kangax. Is there a way for the barbarian to pass these items to my necro? Btw, I'm not on battlenet, just plain Diablo II v1.10 without internet connection.

 

The easiest way is to download ATMA
Its a singleplayer char muling utility, also has a drop calculator and dupe detector.
Only problem is it can be tempting to start stashing away everything you find because you "might use it one day..."

The other options, if you feel atma is cheaty somehow, are to either
install on another pc if you have a lan,
make a tcp/ip game, join with one char,
drop items,
leave,
rejoin with other char...

Or do the same thing on one PC using an app that lets you run multiple copies of D2. Im sure you can find one googling..

Id suggest atma
Just be wary it does create the potential for duping, but thats what the dupe detector is for


Edit- also, installing 1.12 will let you run the game without the cd with some file copying, and not many other changes as far as i know.
I was very pleased with this as my almost 10 year old D2 cds are probably gettin a bit rickety

Edit 2- There is also GoMule for mac users.

 

you can use PlugY for the muling, as you can have a large(practicably infinite) shared stash

 

Aye, I've also read good things about PlugY, but have yet to try it.
When i reinstalled d2 a month or so ago i was under the illusion the 1.13 "content patch" would be out sooner rather than later, and when it is id like to run mod free.

Still, I am pretty tempted by some of the other plugy features, like being able to "respec"... we'll see

 

well, you can just uninstall the mod if you want to. i am also going to go vanilla if the content is worth it i guess

 

Is there any announcement of when the 1.13 patch is coming out? I'm not thrilled at such a prospect, considering it would force me to start over with all my ladder characters, but that isn't the worst thing in the world. Unlike most people who start their first ladder run with a Skellimancer or a Meteorb, I usually do my first ladder character as a barbarian - high survivability combined with find itme ability usually yields decent items and a fast run through the game.

 

In typical blizzard fashion, "when it's done".
Last i heard it was delayed due to the legacy team working on a patch to fix a Warcraft3 hack, but progress had resumed.. so, hopefully within the next month.. *crosses fingers*