Meleemancer Guide - Preliminary version

[Ghoulz]

After seven years of inactivity, I found my old discs a couple of weeks ago and decided to revive my Hardcore Meleemancer. Unfortunately, it's been a long time and I've forgotten a lot. The first act was a breeze (with the exception of some Ghostly Champion Tainted), but the second was harder; the Unraveler packs are problematic when mobs are blocking a door and sometimes there is no angle to cast Dim Vision on them, and I just have to draw the mobs out of the room. Eventually, I reached Duriel, but I died so fast I had no time to quickly save & quit. Here is a picture of my items, stats and skill distribution (in green) before I died.

How do I approach Duriel? Were my items and build not ideal? Should I use Bone Prison and let a Rogue kill him? Would it be more effective to apply Iron Maiden than Decrepify if caged? In other matters, are FHR and Damage Reduction really useless?

I had sigons and even I had issues with him. You shouldn't even bother trying to go head to head with him in normal with lowly gear with such a character. A premature melee necro is pretty meh. And FHR is really important, especially with a 2-hand weapon.

The only thing I can think of is invest into clay golem a bit(if you intend on using it), get an act2 merc with blessed aim, and whip out decrypt(if you have the mana to keep it going). He should be slow enough to where to can let him focus his attacks on you and you should be safe enough and he'll eventually go down.

[Mad Mantis]

How do I approach Duriel? Were my items and build not ideal? Should I use Bone Prison and let a Rogue kill him? Would it be more effective to apply Iron Maiden than Decrepify if caged? In other matters, are FHR and Damage Reduction really useless?

Sorry for the late comment. I completely forgot to reply.

Duriel is massively annoying. He's the boss I absolutely hate. There are two massive problems with Duriel. The first is his freezing aura and the second is his annoying charge attack. You'll have to deal with both.

Your Necro is using a maul and lacks IAS so you aren't going to be doing too many attacks per second. Especially because the freeze cuts into your attack speed. Being glacially slow means you are not going to be the damage dealer. It's going to be crowd control and Merc support for you.

As Ghoulz already said, keeping Duriel slowed via Decrep and Clay will massively increase your life span as well as that of your Merc. It will also keep his more annoying attacks down. This will be your main focus during the fight. Secondly you're going to be looking after your Merc's health with pots and perhaps short bursts of LT. It's not the most exciting strategy, but it works the best for me. Try and get your Merc a weapon with CB to speed up the fight. I favor an Act II Merc.

I don't know if it still works in the current patch, but Act II Mercs used to be able to attack over BP's if they had a weapon with a range bigger than 2. If that is still the case you can add a BP to the strategy outlined above.

Boxing him in and using IM is not my favorite tactic. I've had mixed results with it where sometimes it works really well and the other time he bulldozes through it and kills me. If you are quick with the traps you should be able to do this eventually.

If things really don't pan out you can always run circles around the room, fire off a few BSpears, drink pots and portal away when things get too hairy. I've actually beaten him a few times doing this.

[Charan Jaydemyr]

Hi there!

MadMantis, I just want to say your Meleemancer guide is just incredible. I waxed a little nostalgic talking to some friends earlier and wondered what sort of hits I'd get if I searched for 'Meleemancer' -- your guide is the first stop, and deservedly so. I think I wrote the first one for this site back when it was Diabloii.net, focusing on the Meleemancer in vanilla D2. It wasn't anywhere near as technical as yours but it did introduce a play-style a lot of people hadn't heard of. I went by the name Dark-Schneider back then. I think it was even translated into a few different languages. Strange days! I think a fellow called Lord Rahn updated the Meleemancy guide extensively, but that's a long time ago. I took the base philosophy of the meleemancer (conjured armour+debuffs+melee, essentially) and applied it to other games, with varying degrees of success. Guild Wars probably yielded the best results, and by then 'Meleemancer' was no longer a term restricted to D2. There was no need to write a guide for what was essentially an accepted play-style: N/W.

I do know I never had the time, bravery or some might say madness to attempt a post-Runeword Diablo 2 Meleemancy guide. I just remember seeing 'Passion' and thinking, wow, if only I'd had THAT back in the day. I eventually threw it onto a phase blade for my bladezon (Tankazon, as some called it) and had a blast with that until she died in HC at level 78 or so. You'd think I'd know better than to try to melee Oblivion Knights with Iron Maiden; even with Berserk, it was somehow a two-hit suicide.

I wouldn't have replied (or indeed re-registered to reply) had I not seen that you are still active here, still carrying the torch and all that. Great work. Really.

PS Duriel was the first Diablo 2 critter to force my original Meleemancer to moonlight as a Bone-spear thrower. Freeze aura is beyond painful.