Even at level 40+ Skeleton Mage and Lower Resist, the necro’s merc has to kill something so he can corpse explode the pack. Mages are going to need much more damage to accomplish anything in Hell.
Another issue is since you can only have one curse going at a time, skeleton mages and skeleton warriors don’t work well together. This won’t be much of an issue if a solo mage build can be made to work, but right now warriors are much better.
It doesn’t make sense for a necro to summon only 16 mages in hell. Sure in nightmare 16 mages would be fine because of skill points limitation while you are leveling but not in hell. As a summon necro you would want to summon as much as you can that includes the warriors too. When you use summon necro to its full potential, they can easily clear out uber tristam.
Sure, but Warriors want Amplify Damage. Mages want Lower Resist. Without LR, Mages are just flicking matches at the enemies. (Even with it they are pretty bad.) Warriors are so much better that everyone who has both summons will use Amp, meaning Mages simply got tougher this patch without actually being able to kill anything. My necro uses 12 skeletons and that’s enough for P1 Hell, but 12 mages won’t be. If we want the option of Mage Only summons, the Mages need to get stronger.
Well isn’t how Warriors + Amplify or Mages + LR is similar to how Cold/Light/Fire Masteries works with their respective tree? I believe it was the devs intention to have some sort of thing as dual element/physical damage for necro summon similar to how sorc have trouble progressing through hell with just a single element.
Not using the warriors allows you to test the mages. As to real use the mages are there to compliment the warriors not replace them. The mages add a source of extra ranged elemental damage.
They have improved the mages if people chose them over one spear or extra pts in golems etc. the key is damage is not always the reason people pick things.
I agree on that part, that is you can rely on skele warriors only, whit amp and CE, you should be able to rely on skele mages only, whit LR and CE. You see you use the SWs to make the first kill and then, you CE everything. You support this whit amp or decrep, and might aura merc, and maybe even fana aura from Beast. You should able to do this whit only mages, but whit LR, and rn you can’t, so they need more juice. On the other hand, you will want a massive army. A big group of warriors and mages and revives. Now which of them you’ll buff? Warriors whit amp or decrep, or mages whit LR? Mages benefit from amp too, but their dmg realy shines when supported whit LR.
As Dbrunski said, maybe the change was not intended to be endgame viable whit pure mages, because most of the changes were not intended to be. They are just for early game lvling, and play thru.
The mages do seem undertuned still, but as other have said the idea is not to replace warriors, but make mages worth using since you already leveled skeleton mastery.
Warriors do more damage by far due to aura stacking and amplify, but mages could do well once you get an infinity so that you can amplify and conviction at the same time (conviction also makes it easier for skeletons to hit). Conviction and amp duo also buffs both aspects of corpse explosion.
This means in one build you have effective physical and elemental damage.
So, mages again are best alongside warriors, but are still underwhelming.
Why? We know why. Because corpse explosion exists and that is where the real damage from the summon necro comes from. Summons can never deal the damage we would like so long as corpse explosion is a cruch all necro builds lean on.
The problem with such thinking is the fact, that the primary resource in this game are skill points. Dumping 20 into mages gets you literally nothing that could not be obtained otherwise at a much lower cost.
The issue with bumping mages senselessly to some more sensible level is that it would make the summoner even more powerful.
I pondered this recently, and I think that in the perfect world - magi would be fire only, synergized with fire golem and lower resist - where fully synergised LR would break most fire immunes. Necro is quite fire-dependant already and Trang-Oul was, as lore claims, a dragon. Even the set gives firewall.
Mage damage can be fairly low if LR reliably obliterates fire resistances - which would work in the same manner as Amp+Skeletons do now.
Either way - poison mage needs to go.
Eh. Honestly. After you are done with mastery, warriors, explosion, and one pointing the useful curses… what else are you going to outnpoints into? Golem Mastery, Clay Golem, fire golem, or Mages.
Golem Mastery is pretty useless unless you’re going to make an expensive iron golem. Who cares if your clay golem dies. You’re fire golem has an explosion when he dies that deals damage.
Clay golem hard points are mostly a waste.
So… fire golem or mages? In terms of damage, mages do deal more damage than fire golem. They can’t be resummoned easily, though. Mages and Fire Golem both conflict with the physical aspects of amplify/warrior aura stacking.
So. Damage? Mages. Utility? Golem Mastery. Wasting skill points? Clay or Fire Golem.
My scaffolding is:
20 skeles, 20 mastery, 1 ce, 1 amp, 1 decrep, 1 clay, 1 resist, 1 golem mastery and then I go for Poison Nova/Explosion/Dagger in this order. Even weakish poison nova is an effective replacement for mages and poison explosion is pretty effective replacement to CE in larger player count games.
An interesting choice. Full-screen corpse explosion woukd seem to be objectively more powerful, but poison nova is also viable. In your build, mages don’t fit at all, and I certainly understand why you want them, since you are using LR.
I think most go with CE because the damage is simply massive and will carry you through hell and into farming, with just the flat 20 points. the 40 skill points that you put into nova synergies, can be dumped into mages to pick up that damage. Hell, you can pick up mages AND fire golem at that rate.
In my experience - it is very rare for CE to make sense at 20 point investment. Base point + moderate +skills goes a long way to make it a viable skill. Albeit I guess for pure farming it might make sense? But - once CE gets used, it is a mop-up operation really. Getting the first corpse is the issue.
Anyhow - as I said - 40 point investment into Nova/Explosion gives me a good damage source ( certainly stronger than mages ) and some utility from poison explosion. Bone tree also kind of work, but at a higher mana cost. PE is one per 2 seconds reapply to make first corpse drop. Then boom/boom, done next.
I’m going to give that a go to see how powerful it is: 60 points in the poison tree, 20 into LR, which leaves about 20 points after pre-reqs that I can dump into anything that will be a meatshield that helps kill stuff. Mages/fgolem should work best since LR helps with that, but obviously I don’t have enough points to max skeleton mastery and raise mage. Offhand, IIRC raise mage gives you nothing more life and more mages, where as mastery gives you both life and damage. Thoughts?
Edit: Counted wrong… after maxing those 4 w/reqs you only have 8 skill points left at level 85. Not enough to diversify. I’d suggest if Poison Nova is to be an acceptable alternative to CE, it needs at least one fewer synergy to work. Perhaps have Poison Nova and Poison Explosion as synergies to each other (bump values, but remove Dagger from those skills), but still let Dagger benefit from those?
Your experience is lacking then. CE is insanely good and more points equals more radius, which increases kill speed massively.
Points in amp are even justified to get more radius, then you do 1 amp then CE chain reaction and all mobs (including offscreen) are dead because so much AoE damage.
Try it.
heavily disagree. as a summoner you have more than enough skillpoints to put into a golem, revives, a spell or mages after maxing out raise skeleton and mastery. clay golem = bosskiller; iron golem = aura; fire golem = extra fire melee damage + aura, mages =extra ranged elemental damage and extra meatshield.
Not to mention you can use a Beast runeword or Pride for even more skeletal warrior damage unlike the mages.
Since no one cares to actually do the math and calculate the extra damage (what a crazy world, in which we verify our claims, huh?!), i will do it: for level 20 mastery, level 20 skeleton mages and compare it to 20/20 raise skeleton.
the formula for the skill level the mages attack has is: skeleton mastery + ((raise skeleton Mage-2) / 2). for 20/20 that would be 20+((20-2)/2)=29
here are charts for their projectile damage: Raise Skeletal Mage - Diablo Wiki
melee skeleton damage: 124-127
Poisen Mage: 727.5 over 4 seconds, 182 over 1 second
their buff was +750% damage and reduce length to 4 seconds. in 2.3 their damage would have been 97 over 300second.
Cold Mage: 107-111
Their buff was damage +50%. 2.3 damage: 71-74, 29 sec frozen/chilled (nightmare cuts duration in 1/2, hell 3/4)
Lightning Mage: 30-205
Buff 5%. 2.3 damage: 29-196
Fire Mage: 121-125
No buff
without auras the damage has been doubled if you pick Skeleton Mages. however, merc might, beast, pride, oath, etc benefit the melee. mages might be a good pick for poor players that want to deal more damage or at ladder reset. considering you already max out mastery, its relatively cheap.
Aura effects:
Merc at lvl 98/Might (lvl 30): Dmg +330%
Pride/Concentration (lvl 16-20): Dmg +285% - 345%
Beast/Fanatiscm (lvl 9): Dmg +95%, AR +80%, IAS +29 (though that is neglegible, since minions have that pause in between attacks)
Oath/Heart of Wolverine (lvl16): Dmg +125%, AR +130%
Total amount of Dmg buff: +895%
on top of that comes amplify damage’s x2 of total damage
Poison nova requires a good LR and 60 points. corpse explosion is 1 points in amp damage, is physical, and only takes 20 points (viable with less).
Mages damage scales off skill level and skeleton mastery level (points in both skills raise the skill level of the necromage bolts that they cast).
The heavy skill cost of a good poison nova means you can’t afford skeletons. If you pick up a shoddy poison nova, your better off just picking up more minions to tank and help get the first kill for corpse explosion.
Essentially, to optimize poison nova you are using a ton of skills and then there are gear considerations to further optimize it (like Bramble and Trang offhand) that further decrease the power of your summons.
If you were dead set on poison nova (meaning you’re a poisonmamcer and not a summoner) then clay golem is your tank of choice for Slow and large health pool.
necromancer is already strong, mages serve for the time you gain experience and are perfect as targets for elemental attacks
Milox, thanks for getting the numbers out, I’ve been trying to explain that ‘concept’ for a while but I always felt the per mage damage didn’t make it sink in for people. What your numbers does illustrate is why the mages will never be considered as strong as warriors. The base damage is about the same but the modifiers differ drastically.
Physical damage has one skill, amp damage, that lowers resists. The rest of the skills increase the damage dealt. This means we have no upper limit to the damage potential of physical damage. Elemental on the other hand only have options that lower the resistance and that has a hard floor at -100 LR. No matter what we can’t make the mages stronger than lowering the resists to -100 LR.
Poison A while ago I ran a skelly/PNova hybrid like Uzurpator is doing; It was a fund build. Then I made a full poison necy with 1 pt in revives and realized there is no reason to drop 40 pts into skellies. The revives give you all the meat shields you need when running a Pnovamacer even at 1 pt + skill adds.