Necro Nihl Runner

[Kanon]

Hi,

I play in Europe with my lvl 89 ladder necro and I started running Nihalak, but I have a few questions to ask you:

1) Usually I have 14 skeletons who survive nearly everything in the game apart from Iron Maiden, but still, when some vipers are present in the Halls of Vaught, I see them going down one after the other in seconds. If my merc is there, he dies too (and he's got 90% res all).
2) What's the percentage of drop of the key? Does MF count?
3) Is there a method to know where Nightalak is in the Halls of Vaught (N-S-W-E)'

Thanks a lot!

[Lord Penguin]

Those tomb vipers are bugged and anything that walks in the cloud will take a nice amount of physical damage PER FRAME(alot per second). So skells is not a good choice there at all. Alot of nih runners go no merc for the same reason. You need 45 damage reduce(non % non magic) to counteract that bugged damage.

The drop percent is not based on mf. The rest of your questions not sure but do a search and youll find it.

[WingBlade]

2) What's the percentage of drop of the key?

I beleive it's a 33% chance every run - well @ least that's what I recall from last season... 3 bosses that are able to drop keys have the same percentage i think.

[Lord Penguin]

could be right but ive run countess close to 1oo times and gotten 1 key. My luck is much better with nih.

[Hp_Sauce]

Your skeletons can't be helped. The poison clouds do something like 50 physical damage per frame while their moving in them (hence the machine gun sound). There are 25 frames per seconds so your skeletons are taking 1250 damage per second when they walk through a cloud. I'm not 100% sure but I bet if 2 clouds are stacked on top of each other the damage is doubled, etc.. Since you can't add DR to your skeletons they will just die.

Your Merc can be helped with some Sol runes. Something like Griswalds armour with 3 Sol runes and you will notice a huge difference in how long he lasts. You can go bigger of course, it reaches a point where it's personal taste, how often do you mind reving your merc, or feeding him potions, etc. Poison resist means nothing against the Vipers...

The above also applies to yourself. The poison clouds will erase your Necro in a second if you aren't careful, so the more DR on him the better.

I donno, not really what you asked, but I figured you should know.

3) No, he's randomly located.

-hps

[AnimeCraze]

3) You can read the wall signs. There should be a thread on how to do this in the Community forum.

Edit: Here it is.
http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=415467

[PhatTrumpet]

I beleive it's a 33% chance every run - well @ least that's what I recall from last season... 3 bosses that are able to drop keys have the same percentage i think.
It's actually 1/33 per drop roll. Each key boss has more than one drop roll per kill, so it works out to about 1/12 per kill in a single player game.

[MoUsE_WiZ]

3) You can read the wall signs. There should be a thread on how to do this in the Community forum.

Edit: Here it is.
http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=415467
Wow, thanks for that.
Just got my barb running, that's a huge time saver ^^