The way of the Warrior: New ways to use summoner better, and which build now?

[semisonic9]

Or is there a way to combo both builds, the Evangelist and Fishymancer? I was looking to a summoner cuz I'm tired of rushing with hammerdin, and I thought a sumoner with a decent-sized (40+ is overkill to me) army woul ddo fine as well. I also may duel him from time to time, just to check him out.


Problems with the Evangelist build:

Ouch, tough to get resists if u carry the bow, and if u go with the Rogue then u lose out on the might aura, taking a a lot of damage out of your skellies, and diminishing ur power vs. non-melee attackers.

Also worried about fcr with Enigma, to tele fast enough I'm gonna need at least 65 fcr (think that's the bp, check me on that?)

Lastly, Res is gonna be real tough with no res on enigma as well.


Problems with Fishy:

Not rich enough for beast yet


Anyone with any thoughts or experience with these builds, that would be helpfull. He's in the 40s now, I kinda need to know soon if I need to pump some Dex or somehing to equip a bow.

[Aron Figaro]

Personally I still believe the best build is the Overlord. Max RS, Max SM, Max Mages, 1 in Revive so you get plenty of those after +skills, too. Wield a nice shiny Arm of King Leoric, or my personal choice, Cairn Shard (mostly because I don't have Arm, but I REALLY don't like that Bone Prison idea either). I got to Hell at level 68 and didn't really have much trouble killing, except for getting the ball rolling. Now I'm ten levels higher, and except for the random pack of !@#@ing Might, Extra Strong, Fire Enchanted archers...I'm fine. :)

[Myrakh-2]

He seems to be wanting a build where is actively using a weapon, not just a standard skelemancer like you're describing.

As for the Bonetrap: I found that these are no longer a problem once I put Gull on switch, since then you no longer have any incentive to keep the Arm equipped while killing stuff. As such, I can really recommend Gull as a cheap way to avoid getting bonetrapped.

[Mad Mantis]

Or is there a way to combo both builds, the Evangelist and Fishymancer?

Try looking at the Commandomancer guide in the [ Essential Necromancer Information ] (http://www.rpgforums.net/showthread.php?t=232935) sticky.

[rickcarson]

Some have suggested ditching Edge later on for Bramble.

Personally, I'm in favour of combining them, ie use Edge *and* Bramble.

Also put them both on the merc. Solves your AR problem, and a lot of other problems too. The more I looked at it, the better it seemed to be to have the Act 1 Merc.

Might is a good aura, but until you level up your merc it really doesn't add much (which is why a Thorns merc sucks). Holy Freeze merc is better at low-mid levels, but not so great at high levels.

Also Might doesn't add as much as you think it would to your skeletons, because they will already have a chunk of ED. And if you're adding things like Fanat then the might ED and the Fanat ED add instead of multiply.

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Anyway, part of the whole point of Edge is that it is much better than Might in certain situations.

Example: Might + Amp only ever adds the same amount of damage, and only when your skellies are all in combat, if some are mucking around, then it will not be at full strength.

Whereas the effectiveness of Thorns + Amp changes depending on the number of monsters you are facing. Especially when your forces are outnumbered and taking a pounding. On the other hand, if there's only one or two monsters, then your horde of skellies is probably going to stun/block lock them so much that they don't even swing, so they never even take any Thorns damage anyway.

Here's a rough rule of thumb: if you outnumber the bad guys, then Might is better. Whereas if the bad guys outnumber you, then Thorns is better.

Its just common sense really. Note that even when I was running around with a large army of Revives you do occassionally have them all disappear in one go, which means you're basically back down to the merc + golem. Now normally of course, this would be a bad thing. But when I was using Thorns this wasn't a problem at all, because I didn't care if the Golem was outnumbered, since they'd all die just as fast anyway.

Edge + Revives is the best of both worlds, since you have a large army to go stompy with, but also you do well with the small numbers too, and its cheaper (in skill points) than any other halfway decent summoner. Because of the strength of the solo golem + Thorns, it is also very fast to get an army up and running quickly.

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Rather than doing the Overlord thing outlined above, which is a bad build (either a vanilla Skellimancer would be better, or instead of maxing mages max Revives + Skellies for a much bigger army), you could go for a large army.

But then if you have a big army, you will more often outnumber the enemy than otherwise, and a strong core group of skellies means that even if the revives disappear you can still keep going. So for Skellies + Amp + Revive I'd favour the Might merc.

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If none of that made sense, or if you disagree then you need to go back and find *gvandale's* (not fishys) analysis of the skellimancer. Nightfish wrote up a good guide, but it is gvandale that did a really good job of explaining why it was better than all the other skellimancer variants available at that time (such as Holy Freeze + Decrep, and other variants that are starting to creep back in on the forum, despite being clearly inferior to the fishymancer).

[Kyo]

Or is there a way to combo both builds, the Evangelist and Fishymancer? I was looking to a summoner cuz I'm tired of rushing with hammerdin, and I thought a sumoner with a decent-sized (40+ is overkill to me) army woul ddo fine as well. I also may duel him from time to time, just to check him out.

Problems with Fishy:

Not rich enough for beast yet

Hi Semi - What makes the Fishmancer/Skellimancer so popular is that it not only so affective but you can basically play this necro*untwinked* ie no speicalised gear required to be successful.

Therefore this idea with you must have "beast" is not quite right. You can easily get enough equip along the way to probably solo the game yourself. I think the sudden hype and questions about beast have probably mislead you into thinking that it absolutely essential. Beast/Faith etc will help make your skeletons a lot better at fighting because of fanaticism aura but it more a luxury than anything else. My recommendation is stick to a skellimancer (see below)


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Personally I still believe the best build is the Overlord. Max RS, Max SM, Max Mages, 1 in Revive so you get plenty of those after +skills, too.

Aron - Maxing RS, SM, MAGES and 1 revivies is basically a skelemancer. Although Nightfish doesn't recommend mages it still probably the most logical choice to choose from as they can be affective and having all those extra minions (imo) sure is fun besides there not too many points left to make other choices IMO. (unless your going for the bug)

Overlord - Is a necromancer that focus almost entirely all his SP in just the summon tree. Ie max RS, SM, MAGES, GM, Revives and probably what left into fire or iron golum. A few points in curses and bone armor. Do a search and look up Poison_Trooper aesir build IIRC. Perhaps MM can get it from somwhere and sticky it as it could be worthwhile and a intresting read in concepts.

hope this helps

Kyo

[Mad Mantis]

Do a search and look up Poison_Trooper aesir build IIRC. Perhaps MM can get it from somwhere and sticky it as it could be worthwhile and a intresting read in concepts.

That got lost in the last forum wipe. The thread is still there, but when you open it there aren’t any posts in the thread.