Lord of Mages , versions 1, 2 and 3

[rickcarson]

Here are some things I've been trying to hack into vaguely guide shaped form. My latest one, and the previous versions, going back to April-May.

Feel free to comment, leave suggestions etc. Any sections from the older one I pull out I plan to change the formatting on.

Oh, I'd also like to know how to change the colour of text, and other pretty heading tips that anyone has. Cheers!

Oh, and I meant to give Mad Mantis and others some credits as well, but its nearly 4am so I'm heading off to bed rsn!

[rickcarson]

"Lord of the Mages"

This is a 'themed' guide for the Necromancer, and is aimed at cheap PvM play. The depths of my ignorance about PvP are exceeded only by my lack of items that traders would not laugh at. I know that the LoM builds as outlined here are strong enough to get you into Hell, and to be able to do Pit Runs (the theory being that with enough patience you can leverage the gear you get from Pit Runs to achieve any other goals you may have). Other people have reported even greater success with them, as far as Hell Act 4.

I have also tested them through Normal in single player Hardcore mode, so I know they are 'self starting', they can deal with all areas of the game, and do not require any twinking or assistance from other players to help them over the rough spots.


Disclaimer:
I use the male pronoun almost exclusively in this guide when referring to Necromancers, because the character is depicted as male.


There are a number of reasons to play a Lord of the Mages (LoM), but the most frequent objections are why play a LoM when you could have played a Skellimancer instead?


Variety, the build provides a rest from the 'cookie cutter' Skellimancer type Summoners.
More powerful at low levels (<25) than a Skellimancer (might be a factor in Hardcore, depending on your long term goals).
The only character type in all of Diablo II which can easily deal out five or with a stretch all six types of damage in the game.
Able to handle some areas of the game and types of terrain much better than a Skellimancer does.
More passive (and hence 'safer'), less 'tactical movement' required.
Not reliant on hand to hand combat, so can enter Hell and Nightmare at lower levels than other characters.
More 'in theme' for a Necromancer than a Skellimancer.
Mortally offend all Skellimancers everywhere by using favourite minions as cheap cannon fodder.
Offend everyone else by using something other than an Act 2 Mercenary.
Just so you don't think this is completely anti-social, the LoM is also potentially much more party friendly, with a huge range of excellent defensive options, and an excellent offense that won't 'get in the way' of other players.


Depending on your goals some of those reasons will be more valid than others. It is by no means an exhaustive list.

It strikes me as odd that a Skellimancer really excels in outdoors environments, where he has lots of room to run around. Whereas in the dank, dark underground environments (which... you would think were the natural habitat of a Necromancer) he really struggles.


Disclaimer:
If you want to play a Necromancer primarily using Skeletons, I suggest reading either Nightfish's excellent guide, or Gvandale's equally excellent 'Skellimancer bible'. This guide presumes familiarity with those documents, and is intended as a contrast to them, not a contradiction.

In addition, although I may highlight the difficulties and drawbacks of being a Skellimancer, that is not because they are 'bad'. After all, when your arch nemesis is the dreaded 'doorway'... how bad could it be?


A third type of build often proposed is the 'Overlord' type build, which combines Skeletons and Mages. In 1.09 you could build a very good character very cheaply.


The 1.09 Uber Overlord


20 pts Skeleton Mastery
1 pt in all other summon skills
1 pt in all curses


Of course this relied on +skills to get the minion count up (with a mere +5 to all you had 20 minions), and took advantage of a number of other features of 1.09 which no longer apply; such as minion life scaling with extra players (near unkillable skellies!), and Revives not being braindead.

Very few people played this build in 1.09, but whenever I did I had numerous comments along the lines of "OMG - thats the most powerful necro build I've ever seen". Unfortunately it was had such a strong defense that it got me out of the habit of using Corpse Explosion, I lost all sense of urgency.

The 1.10 LoM as presented here is heavily influenced by this 1.09 Overlord. Especially with regard to a number of things, such as a callous disregard for the welfare of his Skeletons, which are used in this build almost exclusively as defense, not offense. In this respect, the LoM regards the Raise Skeleton skill as being heavily nerfed, almost crippled, by Blizzard in 1.10 (fewer minions (past level 3 in the skill), which have a lot fewer hit points than they used to)


However, in 1.10 I believe that the Overlord style build is severely weakened. Contrast it with the 1.09 Overlord outlined above, to get the same results in 1.10 you would need to spend an additional 38 skill points (!!!) to maximise both Raise Skeleton and Skeletal Mage.

Now 1.10 wasn't all bad for a summoner, but it is the biggest nerf I can think of that noone ever complained about.

For a number of other reasons, I never recommend adding Mages to a Skellimancer (the one point as a prerequisite to Revive should be plenty), and I certainly never recommend adding lots of Skeletons to a LoM (the one point as a prerequisite to Skeletal Mage should be plenty).

The intention is not to use this build to 'transpose' into an Overlord. Even if you wanted to build an Overlord instead of following this guide you should follow the guides for a Skellimancer through normal and nightmare till at least level 50 or so.

As you read through this (especially if you have played a Skellimancer) you will no doubt get to certain points and think "lol - what a n00blar! Doesn't he realise that if you do X (or don't do Y) your Skeletons will be teh sux??!!11!!". In fact, I do realise that. Its not that I'm ignorant (but thanks for asking :-) but rather that I do know, but don't care.


Disclaimer:
In this build Skeletons are useless, weak, pathetic cannon fodder *on purpose*.


In a Skellimancer or 1.10 Overlord build your Mages exist solely to serve and support your Skeletons. In the LoM build the exact opposite is true, your Skeletons exist for the sole purpose of serving and supporting your Mages.

Differences between LoM and other summoner builds:

With an Overlord you will often find your Mages 'getting in the way' of the Skeletons.
With a LoM, you should never find yourself thinking that. If you do, you will be much more successful by adjusting your playing style, and focusing not on the skeletons, but on supporting the Mages.
With a Skellimancer your main (possibly even sole) curse is Amplify Damage.
With a LoM you will almost never cast Amplify Damage.
A Skellimancer would never cast Terror.
A LoM would quite happily cast Terror, or Confusion, or Dim Vision. (etc)
A Skellimancer would never cast Bone Prison.
A LoM would quite happily cast Bone Prison.
An Overlord will often find his Mages in hand to hand combat.
A LoM will hardly ever find his Mages in hand to hand combat.
A Skellimancer or Overlord is happy to be outflanked and having fighting going on all over the screen (one of the reasons they love the great outdoors is its one of the few places where it is easy to get all your Skeletons involved in combat).
A LoM likes to fight one battle at a time. If he gets outflanked there will be much swearing and cursing (sic).
To try to get all the Skeletons in the combat, a Skellimancer or Overlord will cautiously circle (or orbit) around the melee, so that the Skeletons which are orbiting him will detach and get sucked into the combat (it is this very process which causes their Mages to get into hand to hand, but is considered a small price to pay for the benefit of maximising the number of Skeletons in melee).
To try to get all the Mages involved in the combat, a LoM will slowly edge closer to the combat. A LoM's minions often separate into two groups, the cannon fodder which are in the melee, and the ranged attackers, which all target the nearest monster. When that monster dies, there might be some Mages on the back of this group who are out of range of the next closest target, so they stop firing. If this happens you take a step or two closer to the melee, the ones not firing will move towards you, then stop and start firing when they come within visual range of the melee.
An Overlords Mages and other minions are often spread out.
A LoM Mages are often bunched (as described above). In addition, the cannon fodder is often bunched as well, since you will renew their ranks from the corpses of things already slain in the melee.
An Overlord or Skellimancers minions tend to spread the damage out over a large number of creatures simultaneously.
A LoM's minions tend to all focus on the one monster at a time, killing it quickly.
One of the worst things that can happen to a Skellimancer's minions is Iron Maiden.
A LoM might not even notice that Iron Maiden has been cast on his troops.


Philosophy of the build - There are two different approaches to building a Lord of the Mages.
The first is to take the approach of maximising your ranged damage. This will logically lead you to focus on Mages, ranged attacking Revives and an Act 1 Mercenary.
The second is to take the approach of doing as many different kinds of damage as you can. This will logically lead you to focus on Mages (Fire + Lightning + Cold) and an Act 1 Mercenary (possibly with a big PEmerald socketed bow for Physical + Poison).

In both cases they end up drawing many of the same conclusions, but there will be subtle nuances (such as the type of bow you equip the Merc with). They will also vary in what tertiary skills they use.

As Gvandale notes, the basic summoner is quite modular. This is certainly true of the Lord of the Mages. 41 points (48 if you include Lower Resist) and you have maxed the primary skills of the build. If you enter Hell at level 70 you will have 77 skill points, and hence another 29-36 skill points to face down Hell, which is certainly enough to maximise an attack spell (the 'secondary' skill) and either have a synergy half maxed, or develop some 'tertiary' support skills.

Different kinds of characters have different 'problems' to solve. One of these problems for a minion based Necromancer in Hell is how are they planning to start their army? This is what the 'secondary' skill is intended to address.

A LoM who spreads their skill points too widely, or uses anything other than an Act 1 Mercenary (unless they are very rich and can give their Act 2 Merc really good gear) will not have a sufficiently well developed attack spell, and hence will have problems 'getting the ball rolling' in Hell.

To me there are 3 main obvious choices for attacking spell:

Poison Nova
Bone Spear
Bone Spirit


There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these. Poison Nova works well with Lower Resist, which you were already going to use because of your Mages. (Contrast this with the standard Skelies + PNova, which has a bit of 'an identity crisis' when it comes to choosing curses) There are a lot of gear options at the high end to increase your Poison Nova damage, or to reduce monsters resistance to Poison (example: Trangs Gloves)
The two Bone spells (and I will lump them together into a single category - just pretend I'm talking about your favourite one here and ignore the other) on the other hand both do Magic damage, which is how you can do all six types of damage. Their advantage over Poison Nova is that they have a longer range, and also their synergy (Bone Prison) is a lot more useful (*especially* to a LoM, whose ranged minions all fire through the Bone Prison (and your cannon fodder you didn't care about anyway)) than Poison Nova's synergies (some people love Poison Explosion, if you're one of them, obviously that disadvantage is an advantage for you). The disadvantage for the Bone spells of course is that they are unaffected by Lower Resist. The corresponding advantage though is that hardly anything is immune to magic damage anyway.

Poison or Bone, the eternal question. They are different, but all good for their various reasons. Pick one, and stick with it. Initially I'd had concerns about Poison nova, since many people say it can't kill on Hell without lots of +skills. They must be talking about the later acts, because when I tried it with my fairly bad gear it killed fine (~3 casts) in Act 1... and hence is sufficient for the task (which is to kill some fallen and start raising an army).

The 'tertiary' skills are intended to 'round out' the character. They include things like Revives and the AI curses.

So the basic outline of an 1.10 LoM is this:


20 pts Skeleton Mastery
19-20* pts Skeletal Mage
20 pts 'secondary' attack skill
20 pts synergy for the above
1 pt (26 total) in every other skill


Of course, that is not the full spread (110 pts) for level 99, and you would probably drop off certain skills, such as Fire Golem, and whichever half of the Poison and Bone tree you weren't using. Feel free after level 88 to keep putting points into your synergies or Lower Resist.

Even so, probably throughout the life of the character you will never feel like you have an overabundance of skill points. Skill points are very very tight for this build, which is one of the reasons to not spend more than one point on Raise Skeleton, and simply to rely on +skills to give you extra cannon fodder in the early and late game.

There are two ways around this

A wand or fetish with +s to Lower Resist, Attract, or Revive, saving 7, 3 and 4 points respectively (a wand you can make into the White runeword, the shield you can make into the new runeword (splendour?) which gives +1 skills.
Marrowalks Boots for Bone Prison synergy - save 20 points (but then have to use Bone Wall for defense, rather than Bone Prison) - only applies to Bone spells as your back up attack skill.


* You should always plan to end Skeletal Mage on an even number after +skills. If you have 5 +skills, only put 19 points in (lvl 24 is better than lvl 25, but 26 is better than both, etc). If in doubt, you might want to 'hold off' and only put say 18 points into this so as not to find you have wasted a point later on in the game.

Skeleton Mastery is the main factor determining how much damage your Mages do. Every *second* (even) level of Skeletal Mage counts as a level of Skeleton Mastery for determining the damage your mages do. Odd levels increase the casting cost but provide no other benefit (except a miniscule increase in defense).


Commentary:
This reliance on Skeleton Mastery is just one of the main reasons why most Skellimancers think Mages suck. At high levels Raise Skeleton is worth more than one level of Skeleton Mastery, so most Skellimancers will (and should) focus their points on improving Raise Skeleton, having one point or less in Skeleton mastery. Then they put a point into Skeletal Mage, and of course it does little or no damage. It would be like putting a whole lot of points into Strafe or Multishot, and then using a low quailty short bow, and then concluding that Multishot and Strafe suck.


Interestingly, because Raise Skeleton doesn't start getting good until you put a lot of points into it, at low levels the LoM skeletons (plural because you start with a +1 wand for free, and shopping for a +2 wand is cheap (~5000 gold) and easy), are better than they would be for a Skellimancer. It isn't until the Skellimancer has maxed Raise Skeleton that they start catching up. Of course, in the early game a Skellimancer will be using Amplify Damage, which covers a multitude of sins.

Similarly, you rely on +skills to get you to level 3 in Skeletal Mage early on. Increasing Skeleton Mastery at the expense of other skills will ensure that your Mages do a lot of damage, and can take a lot of beating, both factors greatly reduce the necessity for any kind of defensive effort to 'protect' the Mages. Certainly in Normal difficulty, the Mages can go toe to toe with almost any monster, and win.

Skill Progression:
Level 2: Raise Skeleton
Level 3-11: Skeleton Mastery
Den of Evil: Skeleton Mastery
Level 12: Skeletal Mage
Level 13-21: Skeleton Mastery
Radamant's Book: Skeleton Mastery

At this point, you have maxed Skeleton Mastery and have 11 more skill points to spend at level 30. Here are three examples of how you might spend them:

Example 1:
Level 22: Teeth
Level 23: Corpse Explosion
Level 24: Poison Dagger
Level 25: Poison Explosion
Level 26: Clay Golem
Izual 1: Golem Mastery
Izual 2: Summon Resist
Level 27: Blood Golem
Level 28: Iron Golem
Level 29: Held
Level 30: Revive + Poison Nova
(In this example, I then went on to Max Poison Nova before spending points on Skeletal Mage. I also got Lower Resist from a White I made way back when I mistakenly believed that LR effected Bone Spear damage. A disadvantage was that by Act 3 Nightmare my army was struggling. Once I stopped putting points into Poison Nova and put them into Skeletal Mage things got a lot easier. On the other hand, killing bosses was relatively easy (compared to other LoM builds i tried). Worth noting is that when I Revive monsters, I have a strong preference for ranged attackers. Also that at low levels of +skills, say 2-3, Clay Golem is quite weak, your Iron Golem may be a much better choice (for the slowing effect, just shop a weapon with +1 cold damage))

Example 2:
Level 22-30: Skeletal Mage
Izual 1 & 2: Skeletal Mage
(In this example, I Maxed Skeletal Mage as a matter of priority, which gave me a large powerful army that crushed everything in its path except for two monsters... Diablo and Baal. Both of which provided a stark contrast to the ease with which I'd mowed down everything else. What makes them different, is their area attack elemental spells. Conspicuously absent from this version was Summon Resist. I didn't need it at all in Normal or Nightmare except for those two bosses, and even then I'm not convinced it would have made a great difference. To beat these bosses I swapped out my army gear, and picked up my snipers rifle to get a level 7 (after +skills) Bone Spear. Baal can be easier to beat than Diablo, since there are ranges at which he will stand there shooting his mana drain at you, while you stand outside of the range of it and just throw BS at him. Diablo is much harder to beat like this. Also AWOL from this build: Clay Golem (Gumby), Revives, and Lower Resist. After finishing off Skeleton Mage, I started working on Bone Spear, which is maxed out at roughly when I hit level 60. In Nightmare I liked Confusion, in Hell I preferred Attract. My single point in Bone Prison was handy as well. If this build had a motto, it was that no problem can't be solved by throwing enough Mana at it... and you can buy mana pots from shops)

Example 3:
Level 22-27: Prerequisites for Lower Resist
Level 28-29, Izual 1 & 2: ??
Level 30: Lower Resist.
(This is theoretical... you could spend the four spare points on Skeletal Mage, or get Poison Nova, or get Revive. It wasn't until after playing four or five LoM that it occurred to me that Terror might be a really good spell to use for active defense. If I was going to use no other minions other than Mages (for extra style points, or difficulty, or bragging rights) I'd have to be more active, using either the AI curses to distract the monsters, Terror to make them run away, or Bone Prison to give them time out. Again, the question for this variation is going to be 'how do you deal with Diablo and Baal?')

So we find that there are a number of 'optional packages' (mini modules?) which we can 'plug in' to the build at various stages or in different order (different combination of how this is done providing hundreds of 'different' builds). None are 'mandatory', some you might pick up as miscellaneous pluses on gear.

Revives: 4 pts
Gumby + Golem Mastery + Summon Resist: 3 pts (2 with Revives)
Poison Nova: 4 pts
Bone Spear: 3 pts
Bone Spirit: 4 pts (1 with Spear)
Bone Prison: 5 pts (3 with Spear)
Decrepify: 3 pts
Lower Resist: 7 pts (4 with Decrepify)
AI Curses - Dim Vision + Confusion + Attract: 3pts

I know it is possible to get through Normal and Nightmare with only the Bone Spirit, Bone Prison, and AI Curses packages (and the AI package I didn't add until Act 4 Nightmare). Early on I did occasionally dip into alternate gear packages, but then settled down into Gravenspine (desperately pining for a decent White... White is 100% amazing for this build) and a Splendour in a Grim Shield, so no random +skills. Normal Diablo was kind enough to drop a Tarnhelm, which I stuck a PTopaz in, and I wore a 4 PTopaz armour. All up, I had over 250MF, so naturally I was showered in amazing uniques, right? (Actually, I think I did find one unique... an axe... oh wow. :rant: )

So between levels 22 and 30 we have seven different obvious variations:
PNova + Revives
BSpear + BPrison + Revives
BSPirit + BPrison + Revives
PNova + Lower Resist
BSpear + Lower Resist
BSpirit + Lower Resist
More Mages

And of course a combination of Mages + one or more of the packages.

You could have a whole account full of LoM and never play the same variant twice.

[rickcarson]

I want to introduce you to a fundamentally different kind of Summoner, unique in many respects to 1.10, unfortunately, it is also (in my view unjustly so) the most controversial build a Necromancer can have. It is, of course, the "Lord of the Mages" (LoM).

Even the mere mention of the name brings Summoners of all persuasions out of the woodwork to unite in their derision. So why persist? Is it because I'm a contrarian with a mile wide stubborn streak? (Well... yes actually)

It is well known that you can beat Hell with a Skellimancer, so why bother with anything else? Is there a need for the LoM at all? Is there a niche that it can fill, or is it just a 'joke' build?

In short, yes.

Oh wait, I meant 'yes there is a niche to fill'! Not the other one! :rant:

Any discussion of the LoM inevitably comes back to the comparison of Skeletons (or Skellies) vs Mages. Some people say 'well, why not have both and get the best of both worlds?'. The various permutations render the following combinations:


The 'optimal' Skellimancer (focuses on physical damage - might be more accurate to call it the Amplify Damage Mancer) - uses Skeletons + Amplify Damage + Might Merc + Corpse Explosion
The 'sub-optimal' Skellimancer (as above but whose primary curse is something other than Amplify Damage, and/or may not use a Might Merc)
The Lord of the Mages, (focuses on *ranged* damage) - uses Skeletal Mages + others (many possible permutations which I hope to go into later)
The Overlord (focuses on summons, everything that synergises from Skeletal Mastery, maxes Skeletal Mages and Skeletons
The Zookeeper (focuses on Revives - may be an obsolete build in 1.10???)


There are a lot of 'shades of grey'. Also due to the nature of the beast (that not many skill points are required for each of the above), one build might transpose into another. For instance someone might start out as a Skellimancer, and after spending a mere 43 skill points (20 Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery, and one each in Teeth, Amplify Damage and Corpse Explosion) they are 'done' (just add Might Merc and stir).

A 'natural' thing to think at that point as you ponder what else to do with your points would be to want to start working on Skeletal Mages, since you have already spent points on Skeletal Mastery... and so you transpose into an Overlord. Or you might decide to start working on Revive, and transpose into a Zookeeper(??).

Or you might be a successful LoM and be thinking 'gosh, I'm sick of casting Raise Skeleton every 30 seconds or so, if 3-4 blockers is good, more must be better, right?' and then likewise transpose into an Overlord.

One of my more controversial opinions is that building an Overlord is always a mistake. Although it looks like 'the logical' thing to do, the more I play as an LoM (and I have extensive prior experience as both a Skellimancer and an Overlord) the more convinced I am that the proper care and feeding for Skeletons and Mages requires fundamentally different support skills and tactics.

One fo the things which makes Diablo II a great game is its replayability. One of the things that supports that is that the different classs (and different builds within those classes) have certain fundamental 'questions' that they need to 'answer'.

For a Summoner, the fundamental question is 'how do I bring the full might of my army to bear?'. Actually, thats the end result of a series of related questions, eg

Q: How am I going to achieve my goals? A: By killing monsters
Q: How shall I kill monsters? A: By dealing damage to them
Q: What is the mechanism for doing that? A: My minions will be my proxies to deal damage
Q: What is the best way to use my minions to deal that damage? A: By bringing the full might of my army to bear
Q: How do I bring the full might of my army to bear? A: .... (fill in the blank)


The 'optimal' Skellimancer focuses exclusively on dealing a particular kind of damage - physical damage. By doing physical damage, he can get the most out of one of the best skills in the game: Amplify Damage.

The following skills do physical damage:

Raise Skeleton
All Golems (except Fire Golem?)
Revive (if the monster does physical damage)
Poison Dagger (by proxy - it makes it easier to hit, hence dealing more damage in hand to hand)
Corpse Explosion
Amplify Damage (by proxy - it increases other sources of damage)
Iron Maiden
Decrepify
Confusion (by proxy - getting the monsters to beat on each other)
Attract (by proxy - getting the monsters to beat on each other)


Its pretty obvious that because curses do not stack to get the most out of Amplify Damage you don't consider Iron Maiden, Decrepify or Confusion. Attract is the sole exception to this rule, and many people report success with it in combination with Amplify Damage.

Damage from the Golems is quite low, so that really cuts down the list to this:

Raise Skeleton
Revive (if the monster does physical damage)
Corpse Explosion
Amplify Damage (by proxy - it increases other sources of damage)


The key is to 'mini-max'* ie go overboard on one aspect of the character, in this case dealing physical damage. And to complete the going overboard, you add on a Might Merc, and whatever additional auras that increase physical damage as you can beg borrow or steal.

* Technically speaking, this isn't mini-maxing (minimise the impact of your worst case scenario), which to be totally correct would be to take a jack-of-all-trades approach, but maxy-maxing (maximise your best case scenario), but the phrase is commonly used - along with such wonderful phrases as 'munchkin' and 'monty haul' to mean abusing one aspect of the game to (and beyond) the breaking point.

Interestingly, skills like Poison Dagger, which silently dropped off the list there, stage a come-back with certain Skelimancer variants, such as the Fishymancer (a Skelimancer that swaps into Crushing Blow alternate gear for super fast boss killing).

Another aspect of the Skelimancer that causes confusion, is the difference between the 'poor mans' Skelimancer, and the rich mans Skelimancer. You will often hear people on the forums talking about how Hell is 'boring', and equally if not more often you hear cries for help... to which the inevitable reply goes along the lines of something like:

> "only n00bs don't have Enigmas and 10 Summoning Grand Charms!"

(Recently the Runeword 'Beast' has been popping up on this list of 'must haves' - an obvious extension of the more physical damage principle (Fanaticism aura))

The guys who are struggling with Skelimancers are usually too low in levels (Skeletons' attack % is very sensitive to your level relative to the monsters level) and don't happen to have 20 points worth of +skills gear lying around.

Even with roughly 30/30 in Raise Skeleton / Skeleton Mastery, Hell is hard going(!) The difference pops up in other places as well. In disgust I deleted my 'uber' 1.09 Overlord after his first run in with the Diablo Clone, even though his relevant skills were in the low 30s he got his bony white butt handed to him, whereas other people with skills in the low 40s have reported being able to kill the DC in approx 2 minutes.

[rickcarson]

Lord of The Mages
Draft Guide

Motivation:
-----------
Why bother? Because I like doing things differently. I am deeply contrarian in both my playing style, and pretty much everything else in life :-)
Why bother with mages? After all, everyone knows they are 'teh suxors' in Hell, right?

I've played about a dozen different Necromancers in 1.10, mostly revolving around Skeletons, though with a few Bonemancers and Cursebiotches thrown in with the mix. My main softcore MF character is a Necromancer with lots (for me) of +skills gear, and max Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery, with near max Skeletal Mage. What got me started on the track of the Lord of the Mages, was that I noticed during a particularly long and fruitless session of Hell Countess rune finding runs (you know the game is mocking you when she drops an entire runeword, but its 'Malice') that even when I wasn't casting Amplify Damage on the physical immune ghosts, they were still dying fairly quickly. My Skeletal Mages (which I'd assumed were purely decorative) were actually doing damage!

However the more I experimented with Skeletal Mages as support for my other minions, the more frustrated I got. There is something twisted and Diabolical in the coding of the game... whether by malice or chance combination of detection ranges, line of sight code, and the algorithm that determines how Skeletal Mages orbit around you... they seem to have an uncanny knack for parking their skinny butts in *exactly* the perfect spot to block off the rest of your army while they toss off their little balls of snot! Aaarrggh!!! So frustrating!

Recently I had quite a large paradigm shift. I'd started a Hardcore Ladder account to try out different strategies in preparation for the next Ladder season. I chose to build a Skeleton based Summoner as my Hardcore Ladder Hell Durimule, and while I was levelling him up and thinking about what to do once I'd spent my first 43 skill points (max Skeleton Mastery and Raise Skeleton, one point in Clay Decoy (sorry, Clay Golem), one point in Bone Armour, one point in Amplify Damage)? Why not put points into Skeletal Mages? Because they suck as support minions... ...but what if they weren't the suppot minions, what if they were the main minions?

NB: this is a crucial paradigm shift required to make this build work. The temptation to dump points into Raise Skeleton and other skills like Amplify Damage is quite strong, but must be resisted!

Two things struck me at that point:
(1) I was finally bored of 'cookie cutter' Necromancers (after loving them since 1.0 this is fairly disturbing)
(2) This was the perfect time to also start a Lord of the Mages, because I could compare their effectiveness vs Skeleton based Summoners since I'd be playing them both at the same time and could alternate back and forth between them.

I confess it was not a fair test. Since I didn't really believe the Lord of the Mages would work, I gave the Skeleton based Summoner the 'first pick' of other Necromancer gear which my other characters found. The Lord of the Mages only got hand me downs (and mostly not even that). This is how bad the gear situation was for the Lord of the Mages - at one point he was actually using *Weaken* as his curse because it was the only free curse on his gear! ...I'm still shocked and appalled by this myself... I feel... tainted... violated... ;-)

Note that both builds are Hardcore Ladder with little or no twinking and no rushing (Durimule's employed to avoid Maggot Lair and collecting Khalim's icky bits). Basically full solo clears, including bosses.

Executive Summary:
------------------
So far I'm having lots of fun and the Lord of the Mages is killing faster and more safely than the Skeleton based Summoner. In fact, I haven't even bothered sticking the 'mandatory' one point into Bone Armour yet as the Lord of the Mages! The hardest part of the game is the level 3 durance, as the meteors and hydras are death on a stick (death on two sticks even!) for the Mages. Much like any other build with reliance on minions, this build has some difficulty with Act Bosses (Duriel is easy, Meph, Diablo, and Baal moderately hard but still a lot easier than council + vampires).

Comparison of 1.10 with 1.09:
-----------------------------
In order to understand how a Lord of the Mages works in 1.10, its useful to consider the differences between 1.10 and 1.09. I'm certainly not the first one to think of this build, and even though I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, I'm not convinced that I'm seeing further than them! So please refer to pre 1.10 guides for better ideas on how this build works. (Particularly if you want to build a Lord of the Mages and have limitless resources (Windforces flying out of your butt etc)) When considering the differences between versions, it might pay to keep in mind the following (+/- is for whether the change is good or bad for Necromancers)

General
- Minion life no longer scales with more players
- Monsters have more hitpoints
- Monsters deal additional elemental damage
+ Synergies introduced to even playing field (makes Normal & Nightmare much easier than 1.09)
- Semi random 'guest monsters' in Act 5
- Missile enemies much more powerful (eg guest monsters with piercing)
- Several new one hit kill combos (eg fire enchanted bosses, gloams)
+ Several boss powers toned down (eg lightning enchanted not quite as scary as it used to be)
+ Can buy mana potions

Note that neither of the pluses here is particularly newsworthy for Lord of the Mages, the only new summoning synergy of note boosts Raise Skeleton (in effect it is self synergising off itself *and* Skeleton Mastery), and they were never really scared of Lightning Enchanted bosses anyway (that is what minions are for, to soak up the stray lightning).

Necromancer Specific
+ Raise Skeleton damage dramatically increased
- Quantity of skeletal minions dramatically reduced
- Durability of minions dramatically reduced
+ Synergies for Raise Skeleton, Golems, Poison, Bone Skills
+ Minions and Bone Barriers no longer enemies
- Monster bonus elemental damage pierces (bypasses) Bone Armour (can occur even at low levels eg Duriel's bonus damage from his (un)Holy Freeze Aura)
+ Clay Golem (Clay Decoy) dramatically improved defensively
- Resurrected monsters less powerful (? or just less of a brick)
- Increased mana cost of minions at higher skill levels.

Again, none of these really has much effect on a Lord of the Mages. Clay Golem helps a little if you spam it against Act Bosses, my expectation is that based on the above list that a Lord of the Mages will play pretty much like it did in 1.09, until you get to Hell, where it will be about 1/6th as effective as it was in 1.09 (Mages will kill at half speed because of doubled monster hit points, and you will have 1/3rd of the number of Mages that you would have had in 1.09).

Also compared to the amazing tankage that minions had under 1.09 (where they scaled with the number of players), your minions will be like unto tissue paper in 1.10.

Also 1.10 is a lot more dangerous for a character that is expecting their minions to keep the damage away from them. Piercing missile attacks will go straight through your minions and hand out the hurting when they get to you.

With that in mind, the next step is to consider the three different minion skills which are linked to Skeleton Mastery. We'll briefly consider their good points, and their downside, and then compare them with each other.

What is wrong with Mages:
-------------------------
The most common complaint is that in areas of restricted terrain the mages often get in the way of the Skeletons, eg forming blockages in doorways, stairs and narrow corridors and tunnels.
Skeletal Mages also frequently get killed by the smallest, most trivial monsters - the Mage 'spots' a Fallen through a wall (you've cleared out every other monster and it got raised by a Shaman or something), you blithely carry on your merry way but the Mages stick to that area because they are 'in combat'. When you get far enough away to trigger the teleport, the game checks to see whether they are 'in combat', and if they are it kills them.
You also cannot perform the 'Diablo shuffle' to recall your Mages. If your merc is doing something silly you can get them to 'heel' by hopping from one foot to the other, they will run back to where you are, then redecide what to do (usually they choose to head back into the fray). To a lesser extent this works with Skeletons and Golems, but not with Mages, who tend to just keep attacking their original target.
Also as someone pointed out in the forum, although Poison damage goes up, so does duration - so in effect the Poison Mages are not much better at level 50 (1/2 point of damage per second) than they are at level 1 (1/3 point of damage per second). Feel free to unsummon your Poison Mages - I will not be offended!
Ice Skeletal Mages can also slow down attackers, which makes up a bit for their ow defensive value, but they have a much lower damage than Fire or Lightning.
You can try to micromanage your Mages damage types, but I find its not worth the effort.


Whats wrong with Revives:
-------------------------
Interestingly with the cost to summon other minions raised at high levels, Revived monsters are comparatively cheaper than they were in 1.09 they also give you the ability to turn the 1.10 monsters strengths against themselves, eg by raising your own ranged attacking piercing guest monsters. They are also the only minion for the Necromancer whose summonable quantity scales on a one for one ratio with your skill points.
Revived monsters will not teleport to your position, if you run too far ahead they all fall over dead.
However, they are even more likely to die to the repositioning problem than the Mages are. In fact, with Revived monsters you do not even need to have an enemy present. It is quite annoying to pop through a waypoint, Revive some monsters, pop back throught the waypoint, go to Malah to get your mana back... only to discover that half your zoo has died!
Revives are much more likely to die to these problems than they are to be killed in action or timeout.
I personally find these faults rather annoying, so with my Lord of the Mages I only put a single point into Revive, and let bonus skills do the rest (My zoo consists of 3 monsters which are there purely in a support capacity as decoys for the Mages, though if I find good ranged attackers I will raise them)
it was actually a fairly tough call whether to stick the point in or try to pick it up as a bonus skill on Necromancer specific equipment. A wand with +1 to Lower Resist and Revive will save 10-11 skill points(!)

What is wrong with Skeletons:
-----------------------------
Where Skeletons are good: open terrain areas where you are fighting on multiple fronts. The key is to get all of your Skeletons involved in the combat. However even some outdoors areas (such as the Act 3 Jungles) have terrain that forms choke points (eg the log bridges), which limit your Raised Skeletons ability to all be participating in the combat.
Where Skeletons are bad: restricted terrain areas that mean only one or two of your minions can attack. This is particularly bad if one of those minions attacking is your Clay Decoy (hint: resummon him on the other side of the fight, preferably next to some ranged attackers). Also if your merc is unable to get to the fight (a well equipped mercenary can deal a lot more damage than a Skeleton).
When fighting only one group of monsters, if you hang back from the combat you will often find that half your army is wandering around on the other side of you from the combat. When that happens you have to employ 'tactical movement', circling around the combat to try to get the troops into the action.
Tactical Movement is quite a gamble however for the following reasons. Firstly, you are out there on your own - all the closest troops will already be fighting some other monsters, so none will come to your aid should you get in trouble. Secondly, if you wake up a group of say Gloams, or other ranged guest monsters with piercing, even casting a quick Clay Decoy is not going to save you.
An interesting implication of this is that a good way to get your Skeletons involved in the action might be to use Poison Dagger and get involved in the ombat yourself.

Doors:
------
Possibly the greatest bane of a Skeleton Necromancer is however, the humble door. Doors form choke points which are bad for your army, and often even if there is no pileup at the dorrway, it is hard to convince the Skeletons to proceed through the door, without going through first yourself. Of course, that will activate the monsters in the next room, and any of these which don't target you will target the Skeletons coming through the door, leading to a situation where you are surrounded by one group of monsters, and another group of monsters is blocking your troops from coming to your rescue.
It is worth contrasting this situation with a Lord of the Mages, who is quite happy for there to be a pile up at a door - for the simple reason that virtually all of the Mages will be firing missiles at the targets in the doorway, and only a few of the monsters are able to attack. The worst case for Skeletons turns out to be just about the best case for Mages.

Why Mages:
----------
This is a question we see frequently in the forums. And it is a valid point, given that there are minions as good as Skeletons, why would you bother with Mages?
As noted above, Mages and Skeletons are at their best and worst in completely different environments. About the only place where they are both bad is the maggot lair (particularly the twisty bits, a long corridor is fine for the Mages because they do not block each others fire). If you hate the Arcane Sanctuary as a Skeleton based Summoner, you may love it as a Mage based Summoner.

Inevitably, any discussion of this nature though will turn to the question:
"which does more damage, Mages or Skeletons?"

Comparison of Skeleton and Mage based Summoners:
------------------------------------------------
This section starts by comparing how well these two skills integrate with the rest of your build, then considers the tactical implications of the skills, and finally brings it all together with some 'paper napkin' rough calculations.

Auxiliary Skills: Curses
-------------------------
Conventional Wisdom has it that Amplify Damage for Skeletons is better than Lower Resist for Mages. A quick check of the numbers and I think its reasonable to say that in this case, conventional wisdom is right. Not only is Amplify Damage a lot cheaper (only one skill point spent as compared to seven for Lower Resist), but it also conveys a larger bonus at level 1 than Lower Resist does even at level 20!
(We will put aside the otherwise intriguing question of which curses a Mage based Summoner could be using instead of lower Resist...)
Advantage: Skeletons

No other Necromancer skills favour one build over the other to any large degree.
(Amplify Damage also works better with Corpse Explosion, but the Mages benefit more from other minions than the Skeletons do, so I judge that an even contest)
Advantage: Neither

Auxiliary Minions: Mercenary
----------------------------
As a Skeleton based Summoner you have two main choices. A Might mercenary (for more offense), or a Holy Freeze mercenary (for more defense). Some people have reported significant success with a Blessed Aim mercenary, though consensus opinion seems to favour Might over Blessed Aim (I think it is worth investigating - note that the most significant factor that determines whether you hit (and whether you are hit) is your level compared to the monsters level, and your minions (other than the mercenary) use your level in that calculation. If you are a high enough level for the area you are in, your Skeletons will hit, otherwise they will miss frequently. As a Skeleton based Summoner on Hell difficulty, I found that a good time to start progressing through Act 1 is about level 67-73.)
The Holy Freeze mercenary emphasises defense, but Skeletons in large numbers used properly are generally quite strong enough not to need the extra defense. Really the main time Holy Freeze is stronger than Might is against the various Prime Evils, particularly when combined with Decrepify and Clay Golem, you can significantly slow them down, otherwise you may find their area effect attacks wipe out your army too easily.
But... Might combines better with Amplify Damage than Holy Freeze, so your Skeletons general 'killing speed' will be a lot faster with Might.
Since Mages get no real benefit from any of the mercenaries, this category is fairly clearly in favour of Skeletons.
Advantage: Skeletons

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Attacks per second
--------------------------------------------------------
Mages seem to launch their bolts approximately as often as Skeletons swing to attack.
Advantage: Neither

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Time spent launching attacks
------------------------------------------------------------------
Skeletons need to move to attack, whereas Mages usually just switch to the next target without repositioning themselves. For any given combat, therefore the Mages will usually spend more time attacking than the Skeletons.
Advantage: Mages

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Attack Rating
---------------------------------------------------
Skeletons may miss because of attack rating, whereas Mages do not have an attack rating listed on the Arreat Summit, and by implication do not need attack rating and will not miss because of a lack of it.
Advantage: Mages (unconfirmed)

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Blocked Attacks
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Presumably attack from Skeletons may be blocked. I have not observed the Mages bolts being blocked, though it is hard to say whether this is the case.
Advantage: Mages (unconfirmed)

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Missed attacks because monster is no longer there
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Skeleton's attacks are sometimes wasted because one of their buddies kills the monster while they are in mid swing, or the monster is moving somewhere, whereas the bolts of Mages just keep going and will often hit another target (given a reasonably sized combat).
Advantage: Mages

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Number of Attackers that can attack a single target (eg against a tough boss)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mage's bolts can pass through friendly units, so there is no practical limit to the number of Mages that can attack a single target. Whereas there is a limit to the number of Skeletons that can engage a single target in melee. Additionally in order to reach that limit you often need to employ tactical movement. For most practical purposes it is unusual to get more than half a dozen melee units attacking a single target.
Advantage: Mages

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Range of Attacks
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One of the largest advantages that Mages have over Skeletons is that their attacks are ranged. Against bosses with Holy Freeze or other dangerous auras they may be able to engage from outside of the range of that aura. They can also attack over barriers that would block or impede Skeletons.
Advantage: Mages

Attacking Characteristics of Minions: Effect of +skills gear
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A simple rule of thumb is that for Skeletons a level of Raise Skeleton increases their damage by the same amount as two levels of Skeleton Mastery. Whereas for Mages, every two levels of Raise Mage is only as effective as one level of Skeleton Mastery. What this means is that each +1 to skills is worth 3X for Skeletons, but only 1.5X for Mages, where X is 'effective levels of Skeleton Mastery'. So Skeletons get double the benefit from +skills that Mages do.
Advantage: Skeletons

While I'm not trying to convince the 'great unwashed' that Mages are better than Skeletons, I am hoping to have at least shown some 'fellow contrarians' that it is not entirely one sided in favour of the Skeletons.

Damage Calculations:
--------------------
The appeal of Skeletons is that it is relatively easy to specialise in Physical Damage, and push it to the limit (some call this Mini-maxing, though technically it is not. (Mini-maxing is where you maximise your payoff in the worst case, whereas maximixing your payoff in the best case is Maxi-maxing)). If you do that your Skeletons could easily be doing over 1000 points of damage per successful hit.
The calculation is (very roughly) a base of ~250 damage at skill level 30/30, doubled for Amplify Damage, doubled again for the mercenary Might aura (NB: a level 17 might aura *triples* the damage, not doubles). (Plus the extra damage the Might mercenary gets from the Ampify Damage... the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts)
At around the same level (30/30) your Mages will have a missile level of 45 (its actually missile level 44, so you'd have to use 31 Mastery to get these numbers, not 30) and do the following damage; 152.5 cold, 267 fire, 232 lightning. Or roughly 220 average. Call it 350 after Lower Resist...

It seems unlikely that the disadvantages listed above for Skeletons (time spent repositioning, wasted attacks due to target movement, target defense, target dying and target blocking) will fully compensate for the ~3.5:1 difference in raw damage at high levels... at low levels (20 Raise Skeleton, 20 Skeleton Mastery) however the difference is somewhat lower:
Base Skeleton damage ~ 120 x 2 x 1.5 (a more modest boost from the might merc) = 360
Base Mage Damage ~ 110 x 1.3 = 143
Which is only a 2.5:1 advantage.

At even lower levels, you might not have the Might mercenary yet, so that would make it ~240:140, or 24:14 or 12:7 (quite a difference!). Of course, at such low levels you might not have lower Resist yet or be able to afford frequent castings even if you do have it, so the ratio is more like 24:11.

In the 'ideal' environment, the Skeletons have a large advantage in raw damage. However when in terrain that limits their effectiveness (doors, bridges, barricades, stairs, narrow walkways) the raw damage does not tell the whole story. This is where the ranged advantage comes in and really shines, and the larger your pack of Mages, the larger the advantage is. In a situation where only two minions can melee (ie a fight in a doorway or in the Arcane Sanctuary), if you have 8 Mages (available from skill level 18), that is a 4:1 advantage in favour of the Mages (!!!!) which will more than cancel out the difference in raw damage. (Actually, if you happen to have a couple of semi-decent melee minions, then it is 5:1 or more (when the Might merc can't get into the combat) in favour of the Lord of the Mages.)

This is why subjectively I felt that with proper support for the Mages, my *untwinked* Lord of the Mages was more effective in most situations than my *twinked* Skeleton based Summoner.

Key Idea: swap the support and killing roles of Mages and Skeletons
-------------------------------------------------------------------
As noted above, Mages are quite poor at supporting Skeletons.
However, if you swap the roles, a few Skeletons are very good at supporting a larger corpus of Mages. You will have to summon them a lot more often, because there will be fewer of them absorbing roughly the same amount of damage (maybe slightly less if the monsters are chilled by the Ice Mages), but if you view them as little more than decoys or 'bricks' then this is not worrying. Also, by not investing in Raise Skeleton, they are quite cheap to summon.

With a single skill point in each of Raise Skeleton, Revive and the Golem of your choice, with at least +2 to summoning skills from equipment, you have 7 tanks/decoys to support your Mages. (Astute readers will note that I have not included an Act 2 merc in those figures) Some may feel that because of this, this is not a 'pure' Lord of the Mages build, but note that the additional minions are intended purely to support the Mages, they have no other role in this build.


Comparison

Why only take Raise Skeleton Mage to 19 not 20?
Key Idea: understand missile level
Easy way to figure out ... ?
Key Idea: fight fire (ie ranged combat) with fire

[rickcarson]

Lord of The Mages
Draft Guide - part 2

Skills
------
Like most other builds, the Lord of the Mages realises that there are too many good skills, and not enough points to go around. In order to understand skill point placement for the Lord of the Mages, you need to understand something I call 'Missile Level'. Over at the Arreat Summit:

http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/necromancer-summoning.shtml#skeletalmage

There is a discussion of Skeletal Mage, which I can only assume either displays deep insights which I am unable to comprehend, or was written back when Iron Maiden was non-sucktacular (I no longer remember when *that* was). Skipping past the 'wonders' of combining Skeletal Mages with Iron Maiden, we get to a section on numbers and how the Skeletal Mages missile damage is calculated.

Unlike the skill description, we shall assume that the numbers were published when the writers were sober. :-)

The basic concept is that for any given combination of Skeletal mage and Skeleton Mastery, you can apply a simple formula, to get your 'missile level', and then you can look that up in the second table to find the damage the various types of Mages do. Poison is easy, just assume damage = 0 and you will be right. (Note: I'm not sure how the Poison Mages would interact with other characters skills, if when stacking they used the Mages duration but their own damage / second, that would be sweet)

The formula to determine the missile level looks like this:

('Skeleton Mastery'.lvl) + ((lvl < 4)?0:((lvl-2)/2))

Decoded, it means that every additional level of Skeleton Mastery increases the missile level by one. That's pretty simple.

The second part of the formula says that every second level of Skeletal Mastery also adds one to the missile level.

There's a 'complicated' bit about not getting a bonus unless Skeletal Mage is at level 4. So in other words at level 2 it skips giving them a bonus.

So if you have level 24 Skeleton Mastery and Level 24 Skeletal Mage your missile level is:

24, plus half of 24, minus one. Or 24 + (24/2) - 1, Or 35.

Something I noticed looking at the damage table is that increasing your missile level by 50% approximately doubles the damage. (Except, of course for Poison Mages... whats that? Flogging a dead horse? But my dear, we're *Necromancers*, we're *all about* flogging dead things!)

Ahem.

So when we consider the extra effect that adding extra points of Skeletal Mage, we don't need to consider Skeleton Mastery, because the effect is 1:1 for Mastery, but only 1:2 for Skeletal Mage.

This has some interesting implications. For instance, we can see by comparing the columns for Skeletal Mage 4 and Skeletal Mage 5 that there is *no* increase in missile level! In fact, the only difference is that the mana cost goes up by one, and the defense goes up by ten. It is no great stretch of the imagination to decide to hold that skill point, and wait till you have two to spend and go straight from 4 to 6.

Because you get additional mages every third level, and you get increases to missile level every even (second) level, you could draw up a chart that looks like this:

Skeletal Mage Level
Level Good / Bad Why
1 good Extra Mage
2 good Extra Mage
3 good Extra Mage
4 good Missile Level Increase
5 bad no bonuses
6 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
7 bad no bonuses
8 good Missile Level Increase
9 good Extra Mage
10 good Missile Level Increase
11 bad no bonuses
12 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
13 bad no bonuses
14 good Missile Level Increase
15 good Extra Mage
16 good Missile Level Increase
17 bad no bonuses
18 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
19 bad no bonuses
20 good Missile Level Increase
21 good Extra Mage
22 good Missile Level Increase
23 bad no bonuses
24 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
25 bad no bonuses
26 good Missile Level Increase
27 good Extra Mage
28 good Missile Level Increase
29 bad no bonuses
30 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
31 bad no bonuses
32 good Missile Level Increase
33 good Extra Mage
34 good Missile Level Increase
35 bad no bonuses
36 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
37 bad no bonuses
38 good Missile Level Increase
39 good Extra Mage
40 good Missile Level Increase
41 bad no bonuses
42 really good Extra Mage & Missile Level Increase
43 bad no bonuses
... etc ...

This table is pretty easy to draw up since it repeats: every sixth level there is a 'double plus good' level; and on either side of it there is a 'bad' level; and all the others are good because they either give you an extra mage or more missile damage.

Now as you're levelling up you don't really need to worry about this, but because of it you might choose to not put 20 points into Skeletal Mage, but only put 19 points into it, depending on your intended gear and how many +skills items you will have.

For example, if I have +9 to skills, there is no gain between putting 19 points in (total of 28) and putting in 20 (total of 29).

Skill Point Allocation:
-----------------------
From the above we know that for a Lord of the Mages to get good missile levels, Skeleton Mastery is twice as important as Skeletal Mage. So we always want to maximise Skeleton Mastery, so 20 points here. We also know that we want to increase our Mages damage but not to overspend, so 19 to 20 points here.

Skeleton Mastery 20
Skeletal Mage 19-20
Raise Skeleton 1*
Revive 1*
Clay Golem 1
Blood Golem 1
Iron Golem 1
Golem Mastery 1
Summon Resist 1*
Total 46-47

*we will rely on skill bonuses to increase these. A moderate (+2) bonus is all that is required to get a sufficient number of minions to be decoys for the mages. Seven blockers (eight if you include a melee mercenary) is plenty.

Supplemental Skills
Bone Armour 1
Teeth 1
Corpse Explosion 1
Lower Resist 1 + 6 prerequisites

This is another 10 skill points. At that point you could be level 50, and considering what additional skill or skills to put points into to be effective in Hell.

Here are some ideas:
(1) Pump Iron Golem
(2) Poison Nova
(3) More points in Lower Resist and some other skills
(4) Pump Corpse Explosion (mungo make big boom)
(5) Pump Clay Golem for a better defense and Boss killing
(6) AI curses to shore up your defensive line
(7) Pump Bone Prison (so you can spam it)
(8) All of the above
(9) None of the above (there are no guarantees of effectiveness in Hell, sorry)

Apart from Poison Nova, I've tried all of the above with a Skelemancer or Bonemancer with varying degrees of success in Hell. Your mileage may vary.

Lower Resist and Corpse Explosion are very party friendly spells, the spellcasters will, as they say, 'love you long time'.

Levelling Up and Skill Point Placement:
---------------------------------------
Your primary goal is to maximise Skeleton Mastery and then Skeleton Mage, in that order. But you also need to keep up a defensive line so that the bad guys don't 'sack the quarterback'. One way to do this is to just keep spamming a low level summonable much like the way the Amazon skill Decoy can be used. Clay Golem is good for this, and if you have the corpses handy, so is Raise Skeleton.

A low level Iron Golem is much more robust than a low level Clay Golem, so can be a good way to shore up the defense.

As you are levelling up Skeleton Mastery, you are improving your Raise Skeletons, though not as much as you would be if you poured all the points into Raise Skeleton.

Lets compare a few scenarios. Assume our intrepid Necromancer has, at level 14, just given Radamant a dirt nap. With 15 points at his disposal, here are some different scenarios:

(1) The rabid Skelemancer
Raise Skeleton 14
Skeleton Mastery 1

(2) The rabid Lord of the Mages
Raise Skeleton 1
Skeleton Mastery 13
Skeletal Mage 1

(3) Skelemancer plus a Mage
Raise Skeleton 13
Skeleton Mastery 1
Skeletal Mage 1

(4) The untwinked Lord of the Mages
Raise Skeleton 1
Skeleton Mastery 11
Skeletal Mage 3

Scenario Skeleton Damage Mage Damage Total Damage
1a 19 x 6 0 x 0 114
2a 27 x 1 27 x 1 54
3a 17 x 6 3 x 1 105
4a 23 x 1 23 x 3 92

Isn't it interesting that on an individual basis the Lord of the Mages minions do the most damage. Of course the Skelemancer has the weight of numbers, but they must always be trying to bring those numbers to bear, otherwise their advantage is lost.

Now if we add into the mix a fairly low level set... the 'Infernal Tools', equipable at level 5, which gives +2 to necromancer skills...

Scenario Skeleton Damage Mage Damage Total Damage
1b 34 x 7 0 x 0 238
2b 31 x 3 33 x 3 192
3b 30 x 7 7 x 3 231
4b 27 x 3 29 x 3 168

A dramatic improvement from 2a to 2b! Note also that 4b suffers because its level of Skeletal Mage is now 5 - a 'bad' number. If they could get an extra point of Skeletal Mage from somwhere they'd look a lot better.

By looking at scenarios 1 and 3, its fairly easy to see why Skeletal Mages get a bad rep - to the unsuspecting Skelemancer it looks like their damage is 'teh sux' - they are 'better off' putting the points into Raise Skeleton and not bothering with Skeletal mages at all.

On the other hand, notice that by pumping Skeleton Mastery, we are getting a boost to both the Skeletons, and the Mages, and our problem then becomes somehow getting hold of some gear that increases our level of Raise Skeleton and/or Skeletal Mage so as to increase the size of the forces at our command.

Note that the absolute cheapest way to get +2 is to run out of town and tag a skills shrine! A +2 to Raise Skeleton Wand is fairly easy to shop for.

But wait... we *start* with a free +1 to Raise Skeleton Wand! So what happens to our first scenario (no other bonuses to skills) if we didn't throw that away?

Scenario Skeleton Damage Mage Damage Total Damage
1c 22 x 7 0 x 0 154
2c 27 x 2 27 x 1 81
3c 17 x 6 3 x 1 105
4c 23 x 2 23 x 3 115

Which is quite an improvement for 2c and 4c.

The point of this exercise was to show that once you include the effect of equipment it is very easy for the Lord of the Mages to close the gap with the Skelemancer *irrespective* of any other inherent advantages which Mages might offer over their melee compatriots.

For the Izual quest reward I put the points into getting level 1 Summon Resist, but did not notice any great leap in the survivability of the minions.

For one of the bosses I thought might be particularly hard I picked up Clay Golem to use as a decoy (I'd had it on gear, but had switched out for 'better' gear but no golem).

Attributes:
-----------
Naturally following the discussion on skills we consider allocation of attribute points.

In order to determine the way to spend attribute points you first start with your gear. The conventional wisdom is something like this:
Strength: enough for your gear
Dexterity: nothing
Vitality: everything else
Energy: nothing

I depart from this in that even in Hardcore (actually, especially in Hardcore) I have become quite fond of blocking. To me 75% blocking is just like taking my life total and multiplying it by four.

A lot of people writing guides about minion based builds talk about not needing blocking because 'nothing ever gets near you'.

I must be playing a different game than these people, because when I go to Act 5, or anywhere with lots of ranged attackers, on the higher difficulty levels, I find that lots of attacks go straight through my previously impervious defense.

I think this is because a lot of ranged attackers have been granted the Amazon skill 'Pierce', which gives them a decent chance to get their attack through to you and damage multiple targets.

Gear:
-----
Blah blah Shako blah blah Homo blah blah.

Oh wait - I *do* have something to contribute, that is different from all the other guides out there.

If you want to see a discussion of the relative merits of gear which has a cost on the scale of the GDP of a small nation, I suggest you look elsewhere (actually, my suggestion is much less polite, but could be paraphrased as "write your own smegging guide if you're that rich").

At the lower end of the scale, particularly when you're starting out, as noted above additional points in the skills you want add a lot to your effectiveness as a Lord of the Mages (or pretty much any kind of Necromancer for that matter).

The standard solutions to any problem is of course, to lie, cheat and steal (in this case: trading, twinking and shopping). You can shop for wands, but not fetishes.

As a Necromancer we have not one, but two little used (and cheap) cube recipes that can help us, by giving us a random chance for the skills we want.

They are from:

http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/cube.shtml

Recipe (1)
1 Magic Shield (any type) + 1 Spiked Club (any quality) + 2 Skulls (any quality) = Magic Shield of Spikes
ilvl=30. The shield will always have the "of Spikes" suffix (Attacker Takes Damage of 4-6) and has a chance at getting a prefix as well. The type of shield is retained, and any type of shield (including paladin shields and necromancer shrunken heads) works as input.

Note the iLvl=30... I think this means that any Necromancer skill might be rolled randomly on the head!

Recipe (2)
3 Chipped Gems + 1 Magic Weapon = Socketed Magic Weapon
This adds sockets to a magic weapon. The original magic weapon properties will be removed (rerolled) when the new weapon is created. If you use this formula with a weapon that is not normally socketed such as a Javelin, this recipe will create a new magical weapon without any sockets. ilvl=25 magic weapon with 1-2 sockets.

An oldie, but a goody. You can use it on Necromancer wands, and it will regenerate the random skills, give it random bonuses, and sockets too!

Even though the iLvl is only 25 I thought I'd seen some of the level 30 skills pop up on them... maybe I was mistaken and it tops out at the level 24 skills?

There are two more weapon recipes that do give an iLvl of 30, using higher grade gems.

This can also help your shopping, as you can turn cheap readily available ingredients into things which have a decent chance of topping out at the maximum sell value for your act.

To really get the benefit of this form of gambling, you need to have a variety of different types of low level necromancer, that way there is an excellent chance that at least one of your characters can use the item generated.

Ideally you would want to pick up some of the Supplemental Skills on gear, *and* get bonuses to Skeleton Mastery and one other of your minions, but the odds are not good for that.

But it is failry easy to get something useful, eg a curse, a golem, or corpse explosion. That was how I was using Weaken, it was the only curse on the gear I was wearing at that level.

Keep anything you cube or find which has a big bonus to Bone Spear, since that is one way to beat Act Bosses, by having a set of alternate gear with +5-6 Bone Spear you can spam your way to victory. (Some dodging required)

I found that I was chopping and changing the gear on my Lord of the Mages on a level by level basis, depending on the area and skills. I continually tweaked the 'formula' for how many melee minions I should have depending on how fast they were dying (which depended on how good at melee the monsters were).

//TODO:
Strategies
Style of Play

[rickcarson]

Rick: I am one of those who "would bother reading it!" (in your own words), and would like to make some comments out of my own exp with this build.

Thanks. Your experience is extensive, and impressive. However, I do think that you are really talking about an Overlord build, rather than a Lord of the Mages.

The key difference is whether the Mages are 'an extra string to the bow', or whether they are the main purpose of the build.

And what I say is not to indicate that the Overlord is a 'bad' build. I have beaten Hell with one Overlord, and use another for Pit Runs (when I can be bothered, runs in general bore me silly).

I do think that most people when they experiment with Mages do it in the context of an Overlord build, but the Overlord build is 'designed' to make the Mages look bad.

I am coming to believe that adding Mages to Skeletons is a waste of 19 points, which might be better spent elsewhere.

Conversely, adding Skeletons to Mages simply transposes you into the Overlord situation, in which case see above.

BUT Mages 'on their own' (I use my 4 Skeletons as blockers, and don't care about the damage they do, I also use Gumby and Revives) are pretty good... and I'd go so far as to say that Mages on their own are better than the Overlord build.

In order of power I would rank them like this:
(1) Skeletons (only)
(2) Mages (only)
(3) Skeletons + Mages

The hybrid tries to do both, at excels at neither.

- my personal exp with summoners could be different (or very different) from many others', because:

1) I run Diablo on 3 PC's at the same time if I play the game on my own. This means, my solo chars (not just summoners) can get 2x exp per kill, but have to handle 3x difficulty of the game. Recently, I have almost exclusively played the game this way, due to TPPK in public games and/or because my friends all quit.


I recently played offline HC for a bit, and I fiddled around a lot with the /players setting, so the difference isn't that big.

A bigger difference would be that I solo the game, even when there are other players in the game. I do that to skip out large portions of Act 2 and Act 3 (and sometimes even Act 1).

I find pubby games really annoying now because of the constant spamming of adds.


2) I play HC most of the time, so my summoners have to be able to take dmg. A personal standard is that all of my HC chars must be able to take 2+ hits anywhere anytime in the game. So, basically, only lag or illegit PK can kill them in HC. I only lost a lvl 12 summoner (purely my mistake) in my last 3 years with Diablo.


The biggest killer in HC is overconfidence.
A good example was the LoM I lost to normal Diablo. He had utterly crushed everything in players 8 right up to Diablo, and put most of his points into vitality, belts of full rejuvs etc. But I was just a fraction slow when he hit me with the stream of death.
(I hate dying *and* hearing the potion glugging sound going off at the same time)


3) Ladder and non-ladder (including SP) are perceivably different in terms of game difficulty. Surely, you can simulate players 8 in SP, but SP just feels a bit easier than ladder (maybe only to me).


I haven't played much Ladder. It is really different because you get all these mid level enchantresses wandering around giving 2-5k enchants for free... which makes me very nervous about pks...


As you can see from here, when I said in my previous post that you would have serious trouble killing Hell Diablo with a dedicated LoM,


Normal Diablo was a pain, but doable.

I don't remember exactly how I beat Nightmare Diablo, but I have recollections that that was the first time that the Revives had actually stepped up. I suspect I LRed and PNed him to death, while the Revives did some major tankage, since he kept wiping out all my other minions as soon as I'd pop out of the tp.


I don't mean you can't really kill him at all in SP, or in a one-player game, or if you use unusually good gear, or if you rely on non-summoning skills (e.g., you could drop metereo's if you turn your necro into a vampire, or use offensive psn/bone skills if you put spare pts there). I only meant that a dedicated LoM will have troube quickly dealing out enough dmg when you need enough dmg to dispose dangerous enemies.


A dedicated LoM has enough skill points floating around to be able to 'find another way'.


This is not a myth, it's a truth.


Well, obviously I'm going to beg to differ :-)

In order to make a fair comparison, we have to compare warriors and mages at the same skill levels with the same level of SM under the same game environment. Most necros should have no trouble eventually getting +10 to summoning.

Given lvl 30 SM -

==lvl 30 warriors:

life = 544 in Norm, 849 in Hell
dmg = 309-312

==lvl 30 mages:

life = 301 in Norm, 363 in Hell
relative skill lvls = 44
psn dmg = 217 with duration = 450 s
cold dmg = 146-149 with duration = 44 s
fire dmg = 256-260
lightening = 44-405

These numbers clearly indicate that warriors have much better hit points (more than 2x in Hell), and considerably do more dmg than any type of mages.


Life is a red herring. Mages are not supposed to be in hand to hand combat. That is what gumby, your 3-4 (weak) skeletons, and the odd Revive are for.

If your Mages are taking damage, you're doing something wrong (probably playing an Overlord)


Well, it may be a bit unfair to say mages are "much" weaker, but regardless, mages are weaker than warriors, and deal out less dmg than worrriors do.


Not so fast my friend.
First up, you didn't consider Attack Rating. Skeletons often swing and miss.
Secondly, often Skeletons are standing around not attacking. (Prime example: Duriel's lair... it is actually really hard to get all your Skeletons involved in that battle! Even though they have nothing better to do, no other monsters to distract them, nothing between them and him... no excuses in other words)
Thirdly, often after they make a kill they run back and try to 'tag you'.
Fourthly, at any kind of choke point, your number of attacking minions
Fifthly, Skeletons will often run out to the end of their leash, spot the monsters, wake them up and be unable to attack them, and then run back to tag you (a Mage in that situation would have started lobbing missiles)
Sixthly Skeletons actually need to close the distance to get into combat, whereas Mages can just start lobbing missiles almost straight away.
Seventhly often Skeletons will get blocked by your Golem, Merc or other Skeletons, and hence not be attacking. Whereas Mages can fire straight through other minions.
Eigthly Skeletons spread their attacks widely. Mages all tend to target whatever is closest, hence they may create the 'first corpse' a lot earlier.


To say the least, this is a personal preference, and a personal preference-based suggestion.


Well, I hope I've laid out some strong reasoning for that preference. :-)

Anyway, being trained in Philosophy has its disadvantages, as I will now prove by arguing your case the way you should have actually argued it ;-)

Reasons to Prefer Skeletons?
+++++++++++++++++++

Amplify Damage is better than Lower Resist.
(1) Much cheaper in Mana
(2) Also improves Mercs/Golems damage
(3) Stacks with might aura

People could argue the point, but in order to do a real apples vs apples comparison, its easy. Simply compare Amplify Damage vs Lower Resist in the case of Corpse Explosion. Amp wins.

The only thing that Lower Resist has going for it is that unlike Amp it can boost the damage on some of your skills, eg the Poison ones.

Oh, I guess if you're playing in a party, depending on your party make up Lower Resist might sometimes be better for the party (Tesladins, Sorcs, Trappers)

Second reason to prefer Skeletons is that they can benefit from Auras on your party and on your Merc. Oh, and certain high end godly gears (eg Beast runeword?)


6 of 6 warriors survived, whereas 3 of 4 mages died! Obviously, if he had had only mages, he could have had serious trouble dealing with 3x difficult ancients at lvl 34 in barely twinked low-end gear.


Well, I don't remember the ancients being a problem at all. I probably lost a good chunk of the army, but I don't think it was the Mages, since they tend to stand back, I probably lost Gumby a few (50 mil) times though.

My army was definitely strong enough afterwards to push on to the last way point - if it had been a tough battle I would've had to go recruiting, and I don't remember that.

As for different numbers of Minions being alive/dead at the end of battles, I've recently had a couple of Battles with NM Baal. At the end of one, I'd only lost a single Mage (no big deal, plenty more where that came from!) In another one, I'd lost every minion *except* the Mages. Go figure.


On the other hand, without warriors tanking, most mages won't be able to live long enough to handle tough enemies.


Well, there are also Revives, Gumby and a merc to consider as options.
Not to mention Bone Walls/Prisons, and Confuse/Attract/Dim Vision.

Keeping the Mages out of melee should not be a problem.


Based on my exp, warriors and mages complement each other very well. That's the reason why my current summoner has max'ed both skills early on.


Of course, the opportunity cost of maxing all three skills (including Mastery) is that you could have been developing a back up skill of some kind. Eg Mages + Mastery + Free LR + cheap blockers + PNova is strong. Maybe even stronger than Skeletons + Mastery + Mages + Amp + cheap blockers.

If you notice, in the second scenario, the 'cheap blockers' are probably a bad thing. Whereas in the first scenario they are most definitely a good thing.

Someone who uses CE a lot might prefer Skeletons, however, they might also prefer Mages - since they can get a corpse faster...


=================
- Minions block minions
=================

All minions (merc, golem, revives included) can block other minions. But without mages (or mage-type revives), this will almost never be a real problem that you have trouble dealing with


I find it happens all the time with Skeletons, but hardly ever with Mages.


- you'd just need to move around to force them to reposition themselves. With mages (and/or with mage-type revives), this will sooner or later become a problem that one can't always easily handle.


Which is one of the reasons why I think that Skeletons + Mages is weaker than just Skeletons.


For players like me, who use mages almost all the time, this problem is something that has to be dealth with properly.


Or, you could make it go away entirely, by not relying on Skeletons :-D


My summoners kill Norm Diablo using:
3) decrepify: who said its useless till NM? My first curse on D is always decrepify. Because of this, my necros don't go kill D before lvl 24.


I find that my Skeletons are that much stronger if I don't waste points into curses (I try to pick up Amp off gear) that they can kill and tank big D better without Decrepify


Regarding skellies - they can't *consistently* survive Norm D's fire/lightening attacks for more than a second or two, until your necro is in his 40's.


Again, if you focus your points more, they can beat him consistently earlier. The more focused your points, the earlier you can overrun him with Skeletons.

Norm Diablo is a problem for Mages, but should be a push over for Skeletons.


=======================
- Choose a Merc for LoM
=======================
Rouge merc (fire or cold doesn't matter) - she'll need a decent bow to reliably deal out dmg in Hell. With a high-dmg, fast bow (eaglehorn, WF, etc), she can be equivalent to more than 2 or 3 fire/cold mages.


I like the Cold Merc. I've got her loaded with an un-upgraded Skystrike(?) I think so she does approx 100-500 damage, plus the occassional Meteor.

Her advantage is that she usually avoids melee, and does ranged *physical* damage. Actually, I'd like to see what she could do vs bosses in crushing blow gear... :-D

My Act 2 Mercs tend to die a lot vs big bosses before they can do much CB.


Norm Act2 Prayer merc - a very good choice until you replace him. When he has reached high levels, his aura will significantly extend your mages' life, as well as the life of every1 in your party.


IMHO a complete and utter waste of time. Defiance is 10x as good. Mages don't need life extension as they don't take damage.


NM Act2 HF merc - will add safety to your entire party, and is a very nice choice. You'll have less corpses to explode though.


There's usually not a shortage of corpses. I wonder why people keep saying that about the HF merc... do they keep CEing till there are none left? Even after the battle is over??? Do they have infinite mana? Do they just get bored and CE so they feel like they are contributing something??


NM Act2 Might merc - he can easily deal out 3k to 5k max dmg in combat after he has reached high levels, depending on what wpn you give him. If you need the highest possible physical dmg from your merc, this is your only choice.



Act3 cold merc - he can actually freeze enemies, which may be nice. But note: his dmg in Hell is just too low to allow him to actually kill a few Hell monsters. If you don't need frozen monsters, then this is not your merc of choice.


I raised up an Overlord with an Act 3 Cold Merc into Hell. He was really good, and could kill stuff in Hell. BUT he shattered *everything* which made starting an army just to darn painful.


Which merc is best for LoM? I think it'd be based on personal perference. Most of them have some use. So, it'll be up to you the player.


Definitely the Act 1 Cold Rogue by miles. For a cheap bow, try picking up one with 3-4 sockets and slap PEmeralds in. :-)

If (and only if) your attack skill was Poison Nova you could create your own pile of corpses faster than the Act 3 Cold Merc could shatter them, so then he would be an excellent choice as well.


=============================================
- Where to go next after you have built a LoM
=============================================
LoM only requires 20 SM and 20 RSM. You'll have lots of "spare" skill points. Here are a few options for allocating those pts:
1) put them in an offensive skill in psn/bone tree, so you'll have a hybrid build (instead of LoM).


I don't really see that as a hybrid... what would you do otherwise? Just leave the points unspent?


2) put 19 into RSW to have 20 RSW, so now you become a more typical summoner (no longer just a LoM).


Yes, but then you've turned into an Overlord, so you might as well have started with the Skeletons first, so you might as well just not use Mages at all.


3) put a few in summon resists, a few in revives (or max it?), a few in CE, etc. - all up to you (but not in RSW or psn/bone). You'll end up with a weaker summoner than a typical warrior-based summoner.


No, Overlord is weaker.

For LoM I assume 1 in Revive, use +skills for extra monsters. I prefer to bring back ranged attackers anyway though.


4) however you like. Feel free to experiment! Any summoner is fun, even in 1.09.


1.09 Summoner is simple:
20 in Skeleton Mastery, 1 pt in all Curses, 1 pt in all summons, let +skills do all the work.

[jordy666]

nice guide :thumbsup:
im stoked on trying this build.
after my furysin and wandazon of course :uhhuh:

[Mad Mantis]

Overall I would say that you have done a good job. :thumbsup: As was to be expected I have a few points of criticism.


You spend a great deal of space comparing Skellies to Mages. I understand that this is important to you, but wouldn’t it be easier on the reader if you condensed this info? Most people who will read this guide can accept the fact that a Mage can be effective.

There seems to be a lot of repeated info. This is expected since you have posted several version of old guides, but still it is a point of criticism.

What I didn’t quite get from the guide is if you were depending solely on the secondary attack skills to get corpses, or if you only use these as a complement to your Merc. A Merc assisted by curses can kill a Fallen in Hell. That should get the ball rolling.

Something I found unnecessary was the focus on damage potential. This is a purely personal opinion and will not count for the majority of the populace, but you could scrap some of this.

The formatting leaves something to be desired.

As stated by you, the strategy section is missing.

And finally a small suggestion. I like the potential you have given in the skill distribution for variants. Maybe you could work this out a bit and state some templates for different kinds of LoM. I am a sucker for variants.

[Leuchovius]

Nice! :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

A bit on the long side, though. Could use a bit of cut and paste. And you really don't need to spend so much time justifying LoM. Just tell us how to play, what works and what doesn't.

[rickcarson]

Overall I would say that you have done a good job. :thumbsup: As was to be expected I have a few points of criticism.


You spend a great deal of space comparing Skellies to Mages. I understand that this is important to you, but wouldn’t it be easier on the reader if you condensed this info? Most people who will read this guide can accept the fact that a Mage can be effective.

There seems to be a lot of repeated info. This is expected since you have posted several version of old guides, but still it is a point of criticism.

What I didn’t quite get from the guide is if you were depending solely on the secondary attack skills to get corpses, or if you only use these as a complement to your Merc. A Merc assisted by curses can kill a Fallen in Hell. That should get the ball rolling.

Something I found unnecessary was the focus on damage potential. This is a purely personal opinion and will not count for the majority of the populace, but you could scrap some of this.

The formatting leaves something to be desired.

As stated by you, the strategy section is missing.

And finally a small suggestion. I like the potential you have given in the skill distribution for variants. Maybe you could work this out a bit and state some templates for different kinds of LoM. I am a sucker for variants.

Its not so much that I care about the Skely/Mage debate, but rather that it keeps popping its head up all the time, I kind of don't want to talk about it at all, but then I kind of want to preemptively nuke it into the ground :D

If I was writing this as a web page or book, I'd move the Skely stuff to an appendix.

If I'm trying to attack anything, its not Skelys, but rather Overlords. Which is more than a little ironic, since one of the things that got me started on this whole train of thought was finally Patriarching a 1.10 character... an Overlord!

The offensive skill does two things, one is to generate corpses (in conjunction with the merc), the second is to handle bad bosses. In the Bone variant, i would use Prison/Spear to lock down and take out annoying bosses, and spot removal of things like Shamans (Shamen?). Hence the concept that there was no problem that couldn't be solved by throwing enough mana at it. For sure it plays like a really bad Bonemancer, but then it is compensated by the Mages doing most of the heavy lifting.

Generating corpses is really only an issue in Hell, and I make an issue of it because I had some bad experiences with standard Skellimancers making the transition from NM to Hell. Which are also one of the reasons I prefer the Act 1 Rogue - in Hell all you need is to get two or three bosses clumped together and its lights out for your Act 2 merc.

[Mad Mantis]

If I was writing this as a web page or book, I'd move the Skely stuff to an appendix.

Good idea.




The offensive skill does two things, one is to generate corpses (in conjunction with the merc), the second is to handle bad bosses.

So it is more of a personal choice to complement the build rather than an absolute necessity?

[prion]

rickcarson, you go in-depth enough in your skellimancer vs overlord vs LoM discussion that I think you could write up a separate article covering just that. Then you could reference it from your guide and shorten the guide considerably.

[rickcarson]

rickcarson, you go in-depth enough in your skellimancer vs overlord vs LoM discussion that I think you could write up a separate article covering just that. Then you could reference it from your guide and shorten the guide considerably.

I thought about it. Its a good idea, but due to the nature of the forums,

one of the posts might be buried, quickly forgotten and then lost (eg Gvandale's Skelimancer Bible)
it would be misinterpreted as an attempt to start a pissing match 'my build is better than yours' etc.


The key idea is to show that to play a LoM requires entirely different tactics to make it work to its best advantage.

I might try to morph it into a 'this is how to get the best out of your mages' section. Of course, then I'd have the problem of people popping up and saying 'why are you doing that, you n00blar!, don't you know how to use your skellies properly??!!11!!'

Bit of a no win situation. :scratch:

[Summoned]

One way to "reorganize" the mages/revives is teleporting. Since I play SP, it's REALLY hard to get an Enigma armor, so don't even ask. Staffs of teleport seem to pop up once in a while, so those are what I buy. At level 2, there are about 37 teleport charges, each of which costs a lot more than the staff itself... So I figured, wouldn't it be cheaper to just use a staff, sell it back, and then buy another one?

One main problem for me in this guide is that there aren't gameplay tips. It can be just stand back, cast lower resist, and watch the show for normal and the early parts of nightmare, but once you hit act 3 great marsh, things start getting hairy (ehm... gloam lightning bolts, ouch, blizzards, more ouch, hydras, meteors with way more impact range than the patch of fire... :scared: ).

The spear cats of act 5 are BUGGED (that's bugged capitalized). Their attacks will ignore your minions, as in doesn't even damage them, but will hurt you. One reason I know they're bugged is that the javelins will disappear after hitting you, no matter how far away you are, so it's definitely not a piercing feature. On the other hand, their act 2 counterparts have been fixed since 1.09 (if you recall, those spear cats in the Canyon of Magi used to pierce your minions/mercenary without damaging them, that is, if you even played through the area in 1.09).

I'd also recommend an act 3 mercenary (fire or lightning, ice shatters, ice bad) if you really like mages. Yes, they probably do much less damage than the mercs from the other three acts, but like you said, it's a theme build.

[rickcarson]

One way to "reorganize" the mages/revives is teleporting. Since I play SP, it's REALLY hard to get an Enigma armor, so don't even ask. Staffs of teleport seem to pop up once in a while, so those are what I buy. At level 2, there are about 37 teleport charges, each of which costs a lot more than the staff itself... So I figured, wouldn't it be cheaper to just use a staff, sell it back, and then buy another one?

One main problem for me in this guide is that there aren't gameplay tips. It can be just stand back, cast lower resist, and watch the show for normal and the early parts of nightmare, but once you hit act 3 great marsh, things start getting hairy (ehm... gloam lightning bolts, ouch, blizzards, more ouch, hydras, meteors with way more impact range than the patch of fire... :scared: ).

The spear cats of act 5 are BUGGED (that's bugged capitalized). Their attacks will ignore your minions, as in doesn't even damage them, but will hurt you. One reason I know they're bugged is that the javelins will disappear after hitting you, no matter how far away you are, so it's definitely not a piercing feature. On the other hand, their act 2 counterparts have been fixed since 1.09 (if you recall, those spear cats in the Canyon of Magi used to pierce your minions/mercenary without damaging them, that is, if you even played through the area in 1.09).

I'd also recommend an act 3 mercenary (fire or lightning, ice shatters, ice bad) if you really like mages. Yes, they probably do much less damage than the mercs from the other three acts, but like you said, it's a theme build.

Once you get used to playing with them, Mages (on their own) need surprisingly little reorganisation. It can get hairy if you get flanked, so teleport would go well in that situation.

Revives of course... well... I find them somewhat frustrating, but when I raise ranged attackers they work allright since the same maneuvering which works for the Mages, also works for the revives.

That said, if I had an Enigma... :D

Thanks for the info on the Act 5 Spear Cats.

The Act 3 Ice Merc should actually be a viable choice for these builds, since they back up the Mages with the Necros own attack spells, that means you don't have to worry about corpse's turning to ice chunks.
I've haven't tried Fire or Lightning in (by my rough count) over three years (certainly not since the XPac).

Do not underestimate the Power of an Act 1 Rogue! With a good bow she can lay all kinds of smack down. With the 1.09 Overlord as outlined the Rogue was my secret powerhouse killing machine :D

The 'theme' of the build is to have so much ranged offense that you don't need any defense. Its pretty much the same reason why you don't see soldiers running around with swords these days. If you can gun them down before they get to sword fighting range... why would you bother?