How to deal with Doorways? ex. Catacombs

[Decapitron]

So I have a summoner so I rely heavily on my minions.

However, I have a VERY tough time dealing with the catacombs or other places that there are a lot of doorways.

I dont have any items that allow me to teleport, and I am sure some of you are in the same boat.

any strategies to help me out?

thanks!

[Myrakh-2]

I'm mixing a number of things when it comes to doors, but I'll try to sort them apart...

First: I just stand there and let my minions deal with the crowd. It's not that much of a problem, since corpse explosion doesn't really need that many corpses...

Often I cast Gumby into the room --- not to clear the entrance, but to draw monsters that aren't blocking the entrance into the crowd. Might just as well take full advantage of the CE :-)

Depending on the situation, I might run into the room before the entrance is blocked, using Gumby as my personal bodyguard and trying to run to the far end --- this might encourage the skellies to teleport into the room. If they don't, they'll still try to follow me as soon as a gap opens up.

This requires that you "know what you are doing", of course --- since other than Gumby you'll have nothing to work with. I'm not doing this if I judge the situation to be too dangerous, since once you're in you're in --- most of the time there is no way out until the situation is under full control.
Occasionally I have to keep zig-zagging through the room until my skellies have worked their way in... it's not always that easy to make the safe/unsafe decision in a split second, seeing only a small part of the room...

I'm also a TO user, so I can use firewalls to help getting the corpses to explode, provided I'm not dealing with fire immunes.

[robochan]

...

any strategies to help me out?

thanks!


You could use Terror to scare the monsters out of the doorway, opening a path for your minions to go in and conquer.

Alternately, you could use Attract on one of the monsters in the back of the pack to take the main pack's attention so your minions can clobber them from behind.

OK, now that sounded kinda dirty.

[Cdnexpat]

As a desperate last measure I sometimes go in the room, open a portal, go back to town and then step back through with my army. I pretty much always did this with Baal. It isn't pretty and I'd love to see some better suggestions but when I was stuck that's what i'd do.

[vendrox]

Often I cast Gumby into the room --- not to clear the entrance, but to draw monsters that aren't blocking the entrance into the crowd. Might just as well take full advantage of the CE :-)

Yeah that's by far the best stat. Plant him far inside the room and walk in.. Just toss a gumby in the right direction..

And I actually use gumby instead of them AI curses. IE. om a group of ranged attackers :) Might be a bit tricky vs. Gloams, but you gotta take the right angles ^^

[AnimeCraze]

Tele charges. It works like a charm. Naj staff costs about 2000 a charge, IIRC.