Merc Doom runeword weapon

[Celandro]

I have looked everywhere and cant find a discussion of the pros and cons of the various polearms that you can make Doom out of. I'm currently missing just the Lo rune and the weapon, so nows the time to figure this out!

Our choices:
Weapon (speed, avg dmg non eth)
War Pike (20,105.5)
Cryptic Axe (10, 91.5)
Ghost Spear/Great Poleaxe (0, 86.5)
Giant Thresher (-10,77) Thresher (-10,76.5)
Man Catcher (-20, 67)

I cant find IAS tables for act 2 mercs anywhere. The other 2 equipment slots Im using for him is Leviathan and gaze.

So whats the way to go?

[Azonian]

I have looked everywhere and cant find a discussion of the pros and cons of the various polearms that you can make Doom out of. I'm currently missing just the Lo rune and the weapon, so nows the time to figure this out!

Our choices:
Weapon (speed, avg dmg non eth)
War Pike (20,105.5)
Cryptic Axe (10, 91.5)
Ghost Spear/Great Poleaxe (0, 86.5)
Giant Thresher (-10,77) Thresher (-10,76.5)
Man Catcher (-20, 67)

I cant find IAS tables for act 2 mercs anywhere. The other 2 equipment slots Im using for him is Leviathan and gaze.

So whats the way to go?

heres the site i used to find ias breakpoints for act 2 mercs

http://diablo2.ingame.de/tips/calcs/weaponspeed.php?lang=english

[RTB]

Great Poleaxes and Cryptic Axes make great Doom weapons, check their breakpoints here (http://diablo2.ingame.de/tips/calcs/weaponspeed.php?lang=english).

[Celandro]

Thanks to both of you for the url.
Without further ado, heres the dps table with the breakpoint it hits with just 45IAS as well as the next breakpoint. The breakpoints after the 1st are very far away

Weapon BP1(IAS f dps) BP2 (IAS f dps)

War Pike 37% 7.5 352 54% 7.0 377
Cryptic Axe 35% 7.0 327 56% 6.5 352
Great Poleaxe 37% 6.5 333 65% 6.0 361
Giant Thresher 44% 6.0 321 75% 5.5 350
Man Catcher 27% 6.0 279 52% 5.5 305


We can easily see that man catcher is completely out of the question as the other 4 are all ~20% better, so the question is how much DPS to concede in order to attack faster, and wether to use items that give IAS or not. Im not a huge fan of the war pike as it is very slow, making it much worse against packs of monsters. The main problem with the tables above is it does not show how well it does against easily killed monster packs. The problem boils down to how often an additional swing would be required to kill off a monster compared to using the bigger slower weapon. No point doing 5K damage 2 times to a 6K hp monster when you can do 3K damage 2 times much faster.

Anyhow heres my conclusion by additional IAS
0 IAS: Giant Thresher or Great Poleaxe
15 IAS (jewel): Cryptic Axe
20 IAS (Andy visage): Great Poleaxe
30 IAS (2 jewel): Giant Thresher

Note: DPS calc was: (25 / Frames) * Average Damage

[Battleseed]

In my experience, speed > damage. You want the merc swinging as often as possible. I tried the slow hard hitting weapons and the merc would die a lot more, especialy in boss fights. Did much better with fast weapons that constantly leeched. After all, I only need the merc to keep the boss busy, not do the killing for me.

BTW, if your going with Doom scatch the spears off your list. Doom wont go on them anyway.