If it helps you any, I have +5 necro skills (all skills) gathered up on mules so far, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find a Sigon’s shield or something until we can get you a necro shield. And the added blocking will be nice, too.
Since the patch came out I have played ladder almost exclusively (with the exception of a night vol and I spent laying in wait for DClone. Alas, no luck).
I have some myrmidon greaves to imbue, but the str req is 208, and I doubt any asn will be having that sort of str any time soon. I’ve got +15 str from DShell and +20 from TGod’s, which helps get my str over 250. Mebbe an imbue of those will give them a req -20 or something, I dunno. That’d lower the str req about 41 or so.
BTW: I’m gonna try something with the paladin–I wanna up the hell out of Zeal, conviction and um…the one that gives the green glow to the floor that weakens the monsters and lowers their armor class. The green-glowy one lasts longer as you put more into it and conviction affects the paladin and party immediately. Thus, I can (just barely, right now) switch between the two; the green one for weaking the monsters as hotkey 1 and convition as hotkey 2(so it’s almost like having two auras active at once) Combine that with zeal (for multi attacks and upped attack rating) and a couple of health/manna leech items, and you’ve got a character built to go into the middle of a crowd (except those damned skeletons) and just soak up damage while beating the snot outta them.
And hell, if it doesn’t work, getting a character up to level 72 is no big deal: it’s the finding of the gear that’s an issue, and I’ve already got that!
One question–isn’t there something that converts fire damage into health? A rune? A unique? Something? I know I’ve seen it somewhere before.
And any party with three paladins (one on fanat. one on convict and one on thorns) a sorc who specializes in that big meteor strike thingie, a druid(?) who does some sort of ice storm thingie, a bowzon with some item that makes multi-shots into explosive arrows and a necro who can raise dead monsters AS THEMSELVES (a zombie minion of destruction, say) almost makes me feel sorry for Baal. Almost. Three hits or so and he’s down!
Congratulations are in order. Some barbarian named Stol is ranked 153 on the barb ladder. Although he is not ranked on the overall ladder yet, I am sure that that’s just a matter of time.
If you want to take your SP character into a TCP/IP game, I can give you Blackbog’s Sharp and Trang-Oul’s Scales along with the full Sander’s Folly except the cap.
ED, are you playing SP? If so, I highly recommend getting ATMA (A Tenshu Muling Application). It’s the most wondrous piece of software ever, and will revolutionize your SP experience. You can find a link over at dii.net, or I can get off my ass tomorrow morning and link to it.
BurnMeUp, I’d love for you to join us. My sorc just can’t solo any further… She’s literally a pure fire sorc. As in, I’ve spent zero points on lightning or cold. The upshot is that with synergies, she does insane damage (level 50something, and her fireball is minimum 3000 and meteor min 6000), but the down side is that she’s absolutely, totally, pathetically helpless against fire immune monsters (which are now showing up with distressing regularity).
Quoth the Wolf of Valhalla:
The green glow to the floor that lowers monster armor and resist is Conviction. Perhaps the third one you’re thinking of is Fanaticism (increases party damage and attack speed)?
Meanwhile, the Sorceress meteor-thingy skill is called Meteor (fancy that), the Necro skill to bring back monsters is Revive, and I’m not sure of the druid ice storm (Hurricane, maybe?). I’m not familiar with any way to get multishot exploding arrows; weapons like Kuko Shakaku that fire explosive arrows only work if you’re just using “attack”, not multishot. At least, such was the case in 1.09. And Fire Absorb will heal you from fire damage done to you; with over 50% absorb you’ll be immune and then some. The most significant source of fire absorb is the unique amulet Rising Sun, which gives up to 74% depending on level, but I gather that it’s rather hard to find.
And ATMA would wonderously enhance my SP experience, if there were a version that worked on Mac. So far as I know, there’s about a half-dozen ways to mule single-player, and all of them are PC only.
Well, there we go. A bit over an hour of playing, and the Necromancer Tachor is 8th level. And he’s apparently lucky. Some monster in the Cave dropped Gull. There’s a nice monster for you.
I’m certainly not going to refuse gifts. Especially not with a first time realm character. It’s going to take a bit to find any decent equipment on my own, though getting Gull in the first hour of playing has me wondering what will drop next.
I haven’t created the dagger Necro yet, since iampunha convinced me to start with a summoner. We’ll see how much playing time I’ve got free.
For my SP characters, I’ve been using ATMA, as Munch mentioned above. Great program. My paladin is on a quest to collect as many of the uniques and set items as he can find. And with ATMA, I can keep them all, nice and safe.
Ah, well. Time for bed. I still have another day of work before the great T-day weekend.
What you are looking for, my friend, is Dwarf Star unique ring. It does 15% fire absorb, and boosts maximum fire resist by 5%. I have 2 of them.
I’m currently building up my Cold sorc. I have Blizzard maxxed out, and Glacial Spike almost maxxed. I’m on lvl 45, and Blizzard does almost 1900 damage.
Whoever else plays on USWest, my current account name is Gunther104. Look me up and let me know you’re a doper, and I’ll see if I can help you out with some good items.
What he is also looking for is The Rising Sun Amulet, which not only gives +2 Fire Skills but does fire absorb per level. Alas, this being ladder, I don’t have 15 of those on mules to hand out.
Who_me?, kudos muchly appreciated, especially as I started that barb a few days into the patch. My asn, in the beginning, was at one point number 40 on that ladder, but she just couldn;t do what the barb can do. And I’d be even higher on the ladder (I died a few times), but my connection is … well, really flaky. Were I on a T1 I’d be lvl 90 by now. Yes, it is that bad. Let’s just say I know how to start around looking innocent while hellfire is unleashed on everything around me.
Got a ladder character? And if not, want to start one? Preferably something good and tanky, but Yeti and I will take any help we can get. My account is sonorhC (that’s Chronos backwards), and Yeti’s is YeticusRex2.
Had a pretty good session tonight, meanwhile. With the volcanic amulet I found and the couple levels I put on, my fireballs are now over 4000, and with a skill shrine, meteor can hit 10k damage. And I found the Atma’s Wail embossed plate… Too heavy for a sorc, but I’m not exactly complaining.
Erm, if the str req is too high, and you have a Hel…
Myself, if there’s a sorc and a zon in the party, I’d go for something like a paladin. Barb would also be excellent, but the aurae can make things go by a lot faster.
It occurs to me, Chronos, that it would take minimal effort (as long as your +skills, at least some of them, are +skills rather than +firetree) to make a dual elemental sorc. You should be going for fast cast with your fireball anyway, so why not add something like Chain Lightning to your arsenal, and dump a few points into static field to whittle down nasties? Even in Hell, where things sometimes seem geared specifically against a single player, static takes down enemies’ HP to 1/2 with two shots.
Been doing mostly Hell Baal runs tonight, and I’m about 60-odd mil from lvl 89, at which point I should be (barely) visible on the overall ladder. There’s an absolute horde of lvl 89 chars, but most of them got to 89 and seem to have stopped playing for now, so if I can get that pesky level (getting about 6-10 mil per run depending on how much gets killed) and then get a mil or so xp past that, I should jump up about 100 places. I wish I were kidding. It literally looks like everyone got to the same place and just stopped.
Hopefully, very soon we’ll have a party of mighty Dopers braving the dangerous territory known as Hell. The best part of this would be having the trust of your party members. In open games, you never know who you can count on and who’ll run when the going gets tough. We can also match skills to do more damage and for better survivablility.
There’s also the fact that in passworded games we won’t have the mad rush for drops. Last night, while doing NM Baal runs, just as Baal gets slivered, a necro bonewalled him in and took the entire drop. The only reason this worked as well as it did was because the barb tanking had to back off a second to heal.
My new favorite character is now up to level 60. She did Shenk by herself (the hard way…from the bottom), got into a three person game, got Anya and the Ancients, and did the Soulstone quest and the save the soldiers quests alone. Afterwards did a few Baal runs and shut down for the night.
She’s doing massive amounts of damage in Nightmare, and has never had a problem at all. I think in a couple more days of playing, she’ll head into hell.
Teine, I made a PD necro and leveled him to 30. While he was enjoyable to play, I found that his damage scaled very poorly. I combined PD with Dim Vision and Terror to make my backstabbing easier, and I found nevertheless that he wasn’t working.
It also takes several levels of PN before it becomes viable, even with the synergies, and getting those levels from A4 and A5 normal is very slow.
Give a PD necro a whirl if you like, but be prepared for advancement to slow to a crawl and your damage to suck rocks for several levels.
My current druid, on the other hand, is exceeding all expectations. At level 34 he is tearing up Act 5 solo in four person games without breaking a sweat. My only concern is that his elemental skills will scale badly, very badly, later on.
I had a point in Lower Resist. However, it is suboptimal for crowd control. And I didn’t have the runes to make Bramble.
In order to stay alive and viable, I pumped Dex, with a touch to Strength so I could wear light armor and a touch to Energy to bolster mana before I could supplement it with gear. Even though my blocking rate was fantastic, this is no way to stay alive. I tried crowd control cursing (Terror and Dim Vision), and when that didn’t yield terribly good results, I switched to Lower Resist and Bone Wall/Prison. I even added a Holy Freeze merc to slow crowds down even more.
Neither combo failed outright, but I just couldn’t pull off reasonable advancement. And in party games, my necro got his ass handed to him repeatedly, so he had little choice but to play the role of curse bitch.
A quick damage calculation reveals that a PD/PN necro may very well be viable at extremely high levels, and experience has demonstrated to me that it works fine at lower levels, too. But without well-tailored gear and/or skills that I lack, it’s very slow going for quite a while.
Bosses are another issue entirely.
If I picked up some new toys, I’d definitely give it another try. Until then, Trimegistos will be on mule duty.
Monster104, I’ll put you on our friend list - “/friends add Gunther104”…
BurnMeUp, what is your D2 Account name?
When you get on SDMB//Cecil game, you know you’re with Dopers because the comradery is always there, nobody here will punk your character, and we share our found items that we know will help the overall strength of our party. After all, we all share a common goal – moving up and maxing out on items…
I don’t think we’ve pitted anyone here yet for pulling the “bone wall” snatch and grab trick…
I can see why you guys knock crafted items–generally not as good as imbues–but I find that a half-decent roll on caster armor can sustain a character through Nightmare. Also, the recipe to make a prismatic amulet gave me +20% resist all and 24% magic find!
Has anyone experimented with re-rolling coronets or circlets in the hopes of getting a really good pair of mods? Is there any chance that this will result in a rare, or am I stuck gambling/imbuing if I’ve got my heart set on a rare?
