Necro relying on revives/CE/amp, suggestions for appropriate gear?

[Doppel]

Hi, I always liked to summon revives, a lot of revives. The biggest drawback imo is the 180 second duration. I've obviously made some pure summoners before, and apart from not making use of skeletons (not sure on a golem or not) this one will be no different. How i want to make this necro stand out a little bit more though is actually maxing Corpse explosion and Amplify damage, just for the increased radius. :thumbup:
Ok, i realise that this necro obviosuly won't be as effective or balanced as pretty much all regular summon builds around here, still one cast amp one cast CE (or two) to mass genocide an entire screen of monsters sounds fun to me, coupled with filling the screen back again with revives of course. :)
This is kinda the skill placement i have in mind:
20 skeleton Mastery. (i like this to have as a requirement)
20 revives. (can be lowered depending on suggestions, although i do want to shoot for around at least 20 revives with all gear on, useful or not)
20 Corpse explosion (i like to have this as a requirement)
20 amplify damage (can be lowered)
1 Summon resist (think 1 will do)
1 lifetap (just so useful, although maybe i don't need it when one i wear marrow walks?)
Together with pre-reqs that gives me a total of 90 skill points used.
Some questions. Is it worth it to get myself a maxed Clay Golem plus maxed golem mastery in exchange for a lesser amount of revives and a tinier amplify radius?
Is it worth it to put a point into every other curse i will probably barely (virtually never) use? (and in what instances might they become useful)
Now onto gear and merc, any suggestion (preferably both cheap untwinked and expensive twinked options) is welcome. Thank you :coffee:

[Liriel]

It's useless to have more then 1 point in curses and revives.
Better max skeleton, mastery, ce, mages.
1 point to all curses, revive, summon resist and bone armor.
With +skills 1pt ap covers the whole screen and you'll get ~30+ revives that is way enough if you look and their 180sec duration.
What about golem, 1pt clay ftw. With +skills he gets 10k+ life and more then 50% slow on attack that means that with decrepify act bosses stop casting and just attack in slow-mo.

[moneymango]

I believe it would be pretty hard to get 30+ revives with only one hard point. You would have around 25 i believe, depending on how many GC's you put in your inventory. 25 is more than enough though. No point in maxing curses as Liriel said. Since you dont wanna make use of skellies i geuss you could put the extra points into making a weak backup P&B skill.

Also attract is a nice curse as it cannot be overridden by other curses. So if you cast attract and then amp both will be active.

[billking]

Liriel assumes that you are rich and have a lot of +skills gear.

Amplify Damage range starts as less than Corpse Explosion, but gains 2 radius units per level. Corpse Explosion starts 2 units ahead but only gains 1 point per level. If you're rich and have +15 to all skills and an additional +4 to curses (perhaps through Enigma, Shako, Homunculus, Arachnid, 2x SoJ, Mara's, necro Torch, Annihilus, Trang-Oul's Gloves), then your maxed CE has a radius of 35+2=37 units, which means you want slvl 18-19 or so Amplify Damage after items for it to match... and since you have a total of +19 to curses with that equipment, 1 hard point is more than enough.

However, that gear is for the extremely rich. If you're poor and you know you always will be, you might want more hard points in Amplify Damage to ensure that the radii (that's the plural of radius) match up. It all depends on what you can afford.

As far as Clay Golem goes, no, it's not worth it. PvM isn't about tanking, it's about killing and killing quickly so that you can find the runes/magic items/etc you need. Clay has a lot of HP, but as a skellimancer you are not hurting in the PvM defense category. It's overkill, don't do it.

edit: I think even a dozen revives is plenty in almost all situations. Even if you don't have AMAZING gear, you should count on achieving this goal without spending more than 1 hard point in Revive.

[Liriel]

You don't need to be rich to buy all that realy.

If you go shako, eni, mara/3summon amu, hoto, homu/boneflame 3sk, trangs, arach, marrows, torch, anni, summon sks you'll do pretty well with 1pt revive/curses. All that gear is rather cheap.

[billking]

If you go shako, eni, mara/3summon amu, hoto, homu/boneflame 3sk, trangs, arach, marrows, torch, anni, summon sks you'll do pretty well with 1pt revive/curses. All that gear is rather cheap.
If by cheap you mean 20-27 high runes, then yes, it is cheap. I didn't even count the charms.

My idea of cheap is items that aren't even on price guides; in other words, essentially zero high runes. That means Trang-Oul's Gloves. You can normal score those on the cheap or find them yourself. Everything else is pretty hard to come by. Getting even one high rune means either tremendous luck or many, many hours of play time.

Here's a price guide (http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=709580) to enlighten those unfamiliar with prices. It's not perfect but it gives you an idea.

[Doppel]

Thanks all, and yeah its more like billking said, i won't be using pretty much any "valued" items, just the regular stuff you can find by doing a couple of mf runs and cheap (but therefor not "bad") runewords.
I know like Liriel said that making a regular skelemancer (with highly valued gear in mind) is so much more effective, (i made quite a few, at one point a faith wearing one, because i was bored, did pretty well btw) but keeping in mind that i'm in no way trying to max for example skele damage i think this revive/ce/amp build will be "hell viable" for practically no hard to get gear. (relatively of course)
My goal is simply to wipe out as many monsters with as little as possible (thus a nice big ce and amp radius)
I won't be spending much points on Clay Golem then (maybe a few for distraction).
Anyways, what merc do you guys suggest? Probably an act 2 merc or something, or maybe a bit more imaginative then that? (Maybe just a cheap hard hitting act 5 merc?)

[billking]

Act 2 Might mercenary. Obviously.

With absolute bare-bones equipment I'm assuming you're going to be going for the Golemlord's prefix (+3 to Summoning tab) for your amulet/circlet/wand, and get virtually no +skills for CE or for Amp. In that case, shoot for an slvl 11 or 12 Amplify Damage. Maxing it is by no means necessary.

Regardless of how twinked your necromancer is, I recommend keeping Amplify Damage radius as close to CE as possible when all equipment has been obtained. If you do this faithfully, when you set up the CE with Amp, you will see the radius ahead of time, which is handy because it's hard to see what monsters are effected by CE when it goes off. Put too many points in Amp and it's not a reliable predictor anymore.

[DH Amazon]

Biggest drawback with just revives is that they got lost when you run around,
so pretty soon you are alone with Gumby. So making quite strong Glay might be good idea.
One point is enough with good items, but spend little more with bad items. Just test at field until its strong enough.

Rogue merc is nice if your golem can tank. Harmony (vigor) merc is nice, so you can run fast. And its strong enough to make corpses in new area.
Act5 merc is nice too, but quite hard to get decent weapon for him.

I have made similair build as your initial, except without revives. I mean max amp (lvl39 was overkill, but you have plenty of points anyway), max corpse exp. Then 10 in glay 10golem mastery etc.. One in all curses. 1-point revives. And with very good merc, kills very fast.
I did it 'very cheap' only +15 all skills, no skillers.

First attract one then amp with huge range is nice, keeps weak merc alive.

edit:
You all suggested around 10-20 in curse tree, 21 in poison and around 10 in summon tree. Where should he put those rest 40-50 points?
You have so many extra points, so spending 10-15 extra to revives or 10-20 extra to golems doesn't matter.

[Doppel]

Good advice about the radius, thanks. (never thought of it like that, really good)
I think i will be outfitting my merc with an insight, a big ce and revives can deplete mana quite fast. But for bosses its maybe better to outfit him with a high CB percentage polearm, any cheap suggestions here?

edit (didn't see your post DH Amazon :))

yes, scattering minions is indeed a rather huge drawback (apart from the limited amount of time they have, which makes it a bit more exciting though), was thinking of using a tele charges from an item (naj's puzzler on switch or something, hmm, might be using the entire set, its cheap as hell anyways, lol).

[Grumpy Old Wizard]

I'm not so sure how your build is going to work out relying only on revives and CE but it doesn't hurt to try it. I really don't see the point in maxing amp because you'll have plenty of time to cast it a few times on a big crowd while your revives do their thing. Dim Vision is a great curse that can shut down gloams and archers. Yes, I would get a clay golem because it is a recastable minion and will help against bosses for sure.

If you aren't going to use bone skills (aside from CE) to help your revives kill you may need to grab a weapons and join in the fray against bosses. A crushing blow setup for yourself would help.

You can shop for a teleport staff in act normal to hold you over until you can get a tele amulet or Naj Staff.

[billking]

You can shop for a teleport staff in act normal to hold you over until you can get a tele amulet or Naj Staff.
I think a hotkey set to Town Portal is just as good and a few thousand times cheaper. In case of emergency, just hop into the portal and hop back out. It's basically teleporting in place, which is just fine for a necro on a budget.

[stephan]

It's also a few thousand times more annoying. You can easily repair the charges with the gold and sold item you find on your way.

[Doppel]

Teleporting won't be a problem, even untwinked i can easily find myself something with tele charges and pay for them when i need to.
I guess this necro would be well build for huge areas, like chaos runs. But then i probably better take an act 1 merc if i get there. (or equip the act 2 merc with a low damaging but still useful polearm). Any cheap equipment i might keep in mind to equip my merc(s) with?

[dcrunk]

yeah act 2 merc and with all those revives just strap him with a good obedience runeword in a Thresher. Or I've been using a similar build and on the cheap is a good strength runeword in a decent pole... and you should be ok for first kills with a cheap setup as some have suggested.