So, I recently built a summon necromancer on ladder season 2. Currently I have level 18 revive, level 39 skeleton mages, level 40 summon skeletons and level 42 skeleton mastery. So, we have a zoomancer some would call. I am curious which merc would offer the best damage output with the group.
Act 2 might with amplify damage.
Act 2 Thorns with amplify damage
Act 3 enchant with lower resist. Basicaly +400% AR +352 fire damage to all
can you share your builds link please?
Go act2 might.
Wonder what peoples will say about thorns.
Forget the other. This is for a mage skel build and it’s an average at best build because mages does low damage. I’ve seen a youtube video recently and the guy conclusion was that even if the mages were doing 2x the damage, it will still not be as good as the normal skeletons. In fact, you should have invested mage points in golems IMHO.
Sure enough str for gear rest into vitality
Summon tree
summon skeleton 20
summon skeleton mage 20
skeleton mastery 20
1 point in every skill in the rest of the tree
Bone and poison
1 teeth
1 corpse explosioin
1 bone armor
Curses:
1 in each curse to reach lower resist
Gear
Weapon: Arm of King Leoric
Shield: Bone flame
Armor: Trangs
Gloves: Trangs
Belt: Trangs
Boots: Marrowwalk
Helm: +2 necro skills, teleport charages, 19 all res, 27 life
Amulet: +3 summon skills, 76 life
Ring: Stone of Jordan
Ring: 30 fire resist, 66 life, 22 mana (other irrelvant stuff)
Necro Tortch, Ani, mixed small charms + life and + res.
gives me 15 of each skeleton, 18 revives and 18 points in every skill in summon tree. 13 to each curse and level 9 corpse explosion nothing fancy. For the time being I have been putting remaining points into fire golem.
I dont have the gear you have but I am going to have a similar build eventually. I plan on going with Bramble Armor and a Fanatacism Bow. I’ve also thought about going with a might Merc, Putting a Concentration Polearm on him and using Bramble.
Thorns definatelty works. Might not be the fastest but i did s p1 chaos sanctuary run just amp damage thorns merc and 15 skeleton mages.
Might merc is your go to merc for the Summoner. Thorns was a good option back in 1.09 when skellies did no damage and had no real life Now skellies can actually do damage, and survive thus your best option is to up their damage.
Thorns is a good utility but it only works on physical damage dealers, it does nothing to casters or ranged attackers. For this reason alone Thorns is a great ‘extra’ aura to have but might is good against all enemies not just the melee attackers. Thus why people are talking about using bramble on your merc to add the thorns aura.
As your going to be amping as your main curse, might on top of your skellies is the best all around aura to have. The enchant merc seems nice at first but amp will not up the extra fire damage, while amp layers on might enchanted skellies gives you the best result from your skelly swarm.
Mages are ‘controversial’ but you won’t get the extra damage out of anything else, even golems. Sure people invest in golems as a store all for the extra points but the only real benefit you get for that is making sure your IG made from Infinity doesn’t die. By lvl 88 you can get maxed skellies, mages, mastery and CE with 1 pt in all curses. If you shoot for lvl 99 you get 11 more points to do something with.
Being main summoner necro, pretty sure that act 2 Might merc is the best choice.
Take into account that your main source of damage is Corpse Explosion (which when maxed, covers almost the whole screen), not your summons themselves. Therefore, when you encounter a group of monsters, your main objective is to get the first kill asap. Once you get the first kill, you finish the rest of the group in seconds with a couple of CE shots.
So what you usually want to do is teleporting to the edge of the group of monsters (with enigma or telestaff/amulet) so your summons focus single target all together. Might aura provides much more output damage for your summons to get that first kill than Thorns aura would.
Enchant is not worth it neither. AR of your skeles is usually pretty OKish and does not require much buff. Applying enchant to every minion takes time. And 352 fire damage on hell does not sound that good considering the amount of immunes around. Theoretically, you can get benefit from enchant damage if for some reason you’re focusing on farming an area which contains a lot of monsters with physical immune (like ghosts), but this is an edge case.
Been running a Summoner w/A1 Fire Merc, an absolute blast to play. I really don’t even need the Revives much, unless I bump the difficulty up.
Viable option are:
Honestly I’d use a Pride on a Might merc
Forgot about Pride, thanks mate.
Its off topic, but as a hardcore necro do not sleep on dim vision. Usually by mid 80s to late 90s, my dim vision has a larger radius then my amp. I shoot for around 10 yard radious on dim, but the higher you go thr more comfortable youll be.
Dim vision literally shuts off some of the most dangerous mobs in the game. Souls/gloams? They dont tunnel when blinded, nor shoot their lightning. Most mobs just stand still and die. Mobs dont cast spells when blind, i.e no more reviving shamams, teleporting imps, ect. Not only does it make some of the most dangerous mobs exponentially safer to deal with, it makes some of the annoying mobs to deal with far less annoying.