What is better? Beast or Heart of the Oak for a summoner?
Hoto will give you more skelly’s, resistances and cast rate. This is good for HC and acting like a sorc and telly’ing to meph. It’s the ‘safer’ option.
Beast gives you Fanat which boosts your skellies damage and AR. Their attack speed does not increase as it is fixed in the animation of the skelly. They swing faster but the time between swings is not changed.
For overall DPS of the ‘whole group’ Beast is the better option. For safety and telly speed HoTo is the better option. It really depends how you play. If I had my resists set from other places I would probably use Beast. If I lacked resists Hoto is your best option.
Skelly’s stay the level they are summoned at so the best option is to summon using Arm of King Leoric then swap to whatever option you need. If you use beast I would definitely do this as that’s a lvl difference of 5 between summoning and ‘running’ skills. Hoto I may not worry about that.
Yea. It definitely hurts my resists, but killing seems faster. Did make an iron golem out of a beast, which was awesome until he disappeared 
Thank you for the advice. The king leoric got me 2 extra lvls on my skellies before switching back to beast
Hi,
definitly it depends on your end game GEAR … BEAST provides better boost than the HOTO but the cost is that you loose some +skills and RES … so till you get the anihilius, hellfire torch and other end game gear i recommend stay with HOTO … when you reach enough of RES and get you few +1summ skillers then just go for BEAST and PRIDE for merc :))) i hope it help
just one more thing - make iron golems from INSIGHT RW - that gives you mana regen about 600 -780 percents regarding the aura lvl on INSIGHT roll
Yea. I have low end annilus and mid level torch. Enigma, shako, +3 boneflame with 52 all resist, arachnid sash, 2 sojs, maras, 40% MF chanceguards. 4 summoner charms, gheeds, a bunch of mf sc. Might merc with Pride. Switch is 4/6/4 call to arms and spirit shield. Insight IG. Put on king leoric, presummon skellies, switch to beast.
Just a note on Pride for the merc weapon. You are using a big stick that sacrifices the damage the Merc does to increase the damage the skellies do. As most of the time when you engage things your merc gets you a kill and then you CE everything, this seems a poor idea to me. Your skellies do nice damage yes, but when it comes to who gets you that first kill and who does the most damage to bosses, it’s still the merc (ideally because you slapped some CB on him.)
Once the army gets up and going the skellies have much faster run speed then the merc and the iron golem packs quite a punch to because he is being made out of elite polearm insights. I always start off in stony field, run cows first. Merc hardly ever gets to things before my army does.
But it doesnt matter with telestomp
Hi … maybe you have right i have to test it but the pride boost all minions and when you have let me say about 15 skllies+30 revives + enigma you can spawn them at one place to attack 1 enemy … then i think the pride bonus can beat the merc … concentration aura lvl 20 provides + 345p physical dmg boost and you have to take this boost consider even for merc …
Base numbers of completely high end gear:
Might merc with Infinity - 40K DPS
Lvl 43 skellies summoned with Arm, then switch to Beast - 32K dps Skellys
Might Merc with Pride - 24K DPS
Lvl 43 skellies summoned with Arm, then switch to Beast - 47K DPS
So basically you take 16K-ish damage and move it from your Merc to your Skellies. IMO that ins’t a good option, the merc is one target damage for that 16K while skellies split that 16K over 14 Skellies or a little over 1K damage each. Personally, I would rather have all that damage on the merc but it does seem to equal out.
I guess it all comes down to personal playstyle then. For me, I am not teleporting on top of mobs and my minions are getting to mobs way before my merc ever does. When I am fighting bosses, I teleport on top of them so all summons are hitting and when you add in revives, that is a ton of added dps from concentration, so pride still wins for overall dps.
Forgot to add, I also use mages so that’s an additional 8K damage from the mages (maybe it will boost to 10K with the patch!?!) if I used infinity. That’s only 4K extra damage with Pride.
Yes I do think it’s playstyle and without mages you are probably good either way.
Yea, I’m not using mages. I really hope they give them the much needed damage buff though, and I’ll probably respec back into them.
Rondel has right … at the end its allways about your play style … there is no 1 perfect option beyon all others
Rondel how you can meassure your DPS ?
I rely on this calculator, it’s not perfect but it’s easy to use.
https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/y801066v#4