Poison summoner?

[philthygeezer]

Considering this build:

IMG: http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/u...onSummoner.jpg

Build specs here: Poison Summoner build

Main Skills
20 Skeleton Mastery
20 Raise Skeleton
20 Poison Nova
20 Poison Explosion
1-15 Poison Dagger as levels allow
1 Corpse Explosion
1 Amplify Damage
1 Decrepify + prereqs

One point wonders:
1 Clay Golem
1 Golem Mastery
1 Summon Resist

Like a fishymancer with poison skills maxed as far as possible. Call it the philthymancer...

What do you think? Trangs gloves are about the only thing I've got that are nice at the moment. The pic is at level 79 and I'd keep stuffing points into poison dagger after that. At level 79 I'm doing about 1889 poison damage over 2 seconds, + 25% more for trangs gloves. Heart of the Oak and White may come in later but I've got a Gravenspine working +2 skills at the mo.

Would I be better off maxing corpse explosion? Am I making a huge mistake by ignoring revives? They drive me a bit nuts because they disappear when I outrun them and they only last 180 seconds.

Oh yeah: Merc is a might merc to increase skellie damage.

Thanks all!

[shazbot]

I have a poison/summon hybrid at lvl 90. He clears Hell Chaos solo in about 5 minutes, and can run the pits in 3. It's pretty fun.

Your poison damage is really, really low. Do you want to kill mainly with skeletons and CE and just use poison as a backup to drop that first corpse? Or do you want to be primarily poison and use the skellies as a meatshield/way to take down poison immunes? If the former, keep skellie mastery maxed, and if the later, max poison dagger for the synergies, and worry about mastery latter.

I kill mainly with poison, and do around 8k damage. That's with a torch and 2 pnb skillers. Before I got those, it was around 5k damage, which was respectable.

There's a good guide linked in the forum stickies. http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=235354

I'm not so sure about your build. You need to get Lower Resist, for one. What the strat should be is you cast LR first, shoot a nova, then cast amp as your skellies hit, and then cast LR again, shoot a nova, and repeat until you get a corpse, then cast amp and start CE'ing.

Another 1pt wonder is bone wonder/wall/prison. Nova is kind of close range, and sometimes I get hit, and it's a nice way to be protected (against archers also).

Revives are nice for Baal's throne room. Since the venom lords are immune to poison, so what I like to do is revive council in the wave before. I don't use them elsewhere.

Your gear could be better too. What are you using? I recommend Trang's shield and then Trang's belt, helm, or armor to get the 3 piece bonus. It'll give you a lower poison resist -25%. And then, if you can afford it, a Death's web, which is a 40%-50% lower resist. If not Death's web, then Blackbog's sharp is very good as well. (What realm do you play on? If East, I have an extra one I can give you. Keep a summoning wand like Arm of Leoric on switch for when you raise the skellies, and nice shrunken head with +2/3 to skills.

But for the most part, you would need more +oskills to be effective. +10 at the min I think. I find that with 8k damage, I actually don't use CE that much. Things pretty much drop immediately.

Hope that helps.

[philthygeezer]

I reskilled and went for the bone spear/corpse explosion build (mouseman?). Came up with a +3 bone spear +1 CE +3 impair vision wand for white runeword.

I stuck a point in RS and got 3 skellies that get killed pretty easy in Act1 Hell. Should I dump another 12-20 points into RS, or would that be a waste?

The key thing was to have a weapon that could kill fast when the skellies/merc couldn't.

Perhaps the following build?
1 sm
20 rs
1 gm
1 sr

1 teeth
10 ce
20 bs
20 bw
20 bp

Would the skellies still be far too weak?

[SeCKSEgai]

When using bonespear, you typically need a ton of points for synergies. Between synergies and CE, you really don't have points to spend elsewhere.

The nice thing about the explosion mancer type is that all you really need is merc to tank, skellies are unnecessary.

As for the previous idea,
With strong poison and solid gear, you typically don't need summons at all.

[minuses]

Actually 1 point revives will get you though well considering them to be good meat shields. You should get your poison damage up more. If you want to build a summoner then make summon/ce.

[philthygeezer]

Thanks again for advice, all.

I repec'd a non-ladder char with maxed poison nova/synergies, CE, AD, decrep, gumby and synergies, and all the leftover points into RS and then SM. I have Death's Web and Trang's gloves on that char as well. He kills pretty well and the skellies are mainly meatshields. The Merc has to do the work for CE to take care of poison immunes, but not bad overall!

So I've started a ladder char wit 16 RS and 2 SM, now building up PN and synergies. I'm using a prayer merc to keep my cohort healthy while the others get sick. . Should I bother switching to a might merc in hell? The meat shields keep them off my back while I'm poisoning and waiting for the first drop to CE, and if I switch to might my skellies could drop like flies, causing my to use up CE corpses just raising them back up...?

[MYK]

Considering this build:

Thanks all!

This is a pretty cool build I was thinking about quite a bit, except mine is a bit different:
Main Skills
20 Skeleton Mastery
20 Raise Skeleton
20 Poison Nova
20 Poison Dagger
+1 Poison Explosion
+1 Corpse Explosion
+1 to each curse and make sure to skill at least one in revives.

Why?
-Maxed SM/RS gives you your army.
A 40 point Poison Nova is pretty good for crowds, especially if you have lots of +skills around.
20 points in Poison Dagger gives it a nice AR bonus, great for stabbing bosses, the typical weak point of a lot of poison/skelemancers.

How?
-Roll through, cast Amp or LR+PN as you see fit.
If it's a boss, use a "Strength" dagger and stab it while you Decripify+Clay Golem for victory.

Why not?
-Poison Explosion has a small radius, doesn't last very long and it uses bodies you could have exploded with CE. I'd rather speed up my boss killing, you will already be a crowd bulldozer.
-Pure poison... The necromancer class lends itself well to hybrids. Hybrids have more useful skills. Lots of skills are fun.

My mercenary choice is split between Might+Insight or Thorns+Insight.

[Ghoulz]

It's slow enough if your not using good gear with -% poison res. Not fully investing in P-nova seems pretty slow.

It's capable of killing alot faster than skeletons ever could. There's not too many perma immune monsters that a merc and some mild skelys couldn't handle.