Skeletal Mage/Mastery damage tables

[mike20599]

There used to be a table somewhere that listed the damages of skeletal mages based on how many points you put into mages/mastery. Does anyone have a link?

[EuroJamie]

Is this what you are looking for? (http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/necromancer-summoning.shtml)

[mike20599]

Oh cool thanks. They didn't have that on the Arreat Summit before did they?
Well I've been trying to decide which would result in more damage output, putting those 19 extra points into skeletal mages or into a bone spear/spirit synergy.

[EuroJamie]

You'd need to post your skill distribution so far, as well as the sort of build you are aiming for...

[mike20599]

So far I have:

20 Raise Skeleton
20 Skeleton Mastery
1 Skeletal Mage
1 Clay Golem
1 Golem Mastery
1 Summon Resist
1 Amp Damage

I was thinking of going the summoner route with some bone spear to occupy my time after I amp and wait for my guys to kill stuff.

[Daimyo]

The best 20 point investment you can make is corpse explosion. It has no synergies, which saves you points, and it's a true stand-alone wonderskill. Nobody appreciates the destructive force of corpse explosion until they see it at level 30.

[EuroJamie]

Bone spells are pretty useless in the later stages of the game unless they are fully synergised, and given the points you have invested in the summons tree, you will not be able to do so with this character.

Having said that, you have the basis for a very nice summoner here. I would suggest you get some points into the Decrepify curse, as this is invaluable against bosses. Dim Vision will also come in very handy against ranged attackers, particularly gloams etc.

After that, you have a bit of scope to customise the build to suit your needs. You could experiment with some of the other curses, adding points to the ones that you find particularly useful.

A very popular and effective route here is to put points in Corpse Explosion. Fully maxed out and combined with AD, this can wipe out a screen full of baddies with a single mouse-click. It will exponentially increase your killing speed, especially in Hell. If you're looking for an offensive skill to use while your minions get stuck in, this is the one for you.

Putting points into mages is a controversial choice - some like them and some don't, however they do complement your point placements up until now, so you might want to explore this option. Just don't expect them to be as effective as your skellies, mind you.

Good luck and enjoy :thumbsup:

[mike20599]

Thanks for all the info. If you max Corpse Explosion, doesn't that have an insane mana cost?

[EuroJamie]

At level 1 it's 15, increasing by 1 every skill point, so a level 20 CE would cost 34 mana.

It's kinda pricy if you look at it in terms of cost-per-cast, relative to some other skills. However, you are doing 60-100% of the corpse's original life in damage (50:50 physical/fire) to every monster on the screen. When a high-level CE is applied to high-life monster corpse, it can kill everything in site, so I'd say it's cheap at twice the price :)

[mike20599]

Yeah sounds pretty good, but in an 8 player game, it doesn't do 8*monster HP in damage does it?

[Necrochild313]

Yeah sounds pretty good, but in an 8 player game, it doesn't do 8*monster HP in damage does it?

Lets just say if it did everyone would play strictly necro ;)

No, the damage does not scale, however with amp damage it can still be devastatingly effective when your pack of skellies are wacking away as well.

Don't forget that +mana after each kill items can cause CE to actually GAIN you mana, this property is found on some commonly used items anyways like homoncolus and death's web.