Fishymancer + Merc untwinked gear questions

[darknessproz]

Are we allowed to post links from other forums? If we were, i could post a link which shows why treachery is an excellent armor.

[FredOfErik]

Depends on the site I think.. Some of them are a big no no, while others are perfectly OK (I think).

[Red Wine Lips]

It hasn't been clarified in this thread so I thought it would be of purpose in case you didn't know. If you summon your army with prebuff gear, say +8 to all skills, and then switch to other setup with +5 skills, you lose one skeleton, but the ~10 you have left have stats from the time they were summoned with +8 skills.

So as it's been suggested, you could do some gear switching after you've summoned your army to get other attributes. If your runs are long it could be a nice addition, but losing skeletons is the tradeoff there. Possibly. If your skill levels are just right, ie. just one skill level away from an additional skeleton, you can get rid of +5 skills and only lose one skeleton. Or get rid of +2 skills and lose nothing. Checking how many skeletons you lose in the swapping and comparing it to the gain is appropriate, I think.

Now I shamefully have to mention my blog because I've discussed this matter in the 5th entry, but as it's lengthy I'll just quickly summarise. You could spend an hour or two and get an end-game prebuff shield from Normal Act 1 (Fallen camps are the most densely populated spots, Dark Wood and Underground Passage are pretty good hunting places). Finding 0/2 socketed necro shield with +3 Raise Skeleton isn't that difficult a task and runes for Splendor shield (+1 to all skills) are easy to find. That and your magical Golemlord's wand could be used on weapon switch to summon the skeletons and then you could switch back to the discussed Spirit sword and your current Rhyme shield for corpse exploding and general survival.

Going over things for nth time, my 2 cents anyway.

[edit]Slightly ninja'd[/edit]

I have made a spirit sword as I summon and keep 10 skeletons with both weapons, so the added benefits seemed much better on the spirit sword. I might go back sometime soon and find a necro shield with some os like you've suggested, seems good

The thing to note is people have different opinions about it. Life Leech, Resists, Damage Reduction, Defense, Faster Hit Recovery, IAS...

I think a nice simple combo would be Rockstopper Helm, Shaftstop Armour, and weapon with leech. But it really depends on what gear/runes you find.

Good luck hunting!

Thanks Yes I guess it depends what I find. Runes don't seem to be a problem, finding armour to put them in does sadly.

Eventually you'll want to be running at p7-p8, but that requires really good gear. I'm talking something like Beast, AoKL, mass graverobber GCs, etc. etc. At those psettings CE is only doing like 40-50% of the damage ( unlike p1 where it is 90%+ ) so you'd be wanting to get your skellies to that level where they can dish out serious damage. Its far into the future though.



If you already have a homonculus, I don't think it's worth the bother of getting a spirit- It has the same +skills ( and less to curses ), and the fcr isn't really required.



I think, for might mercs, treachery can be better than defense ( ebug stone/duress is miles better for defiance mercs ) but to be honest, I just haven't been impressed by treachery as a merc armor. Eventually you want to try out both and pick whichever one suits you. If you're running countess, the runes are not terribly hard to find.

Also, I don't really see a need to have insight for summon necros. You can go for eth obedience instead, or find a bonehew, or other high damaging weapon.

I don't have a homunculus yet, but I want to use one when I find one. I'm not having trouble finding runes, just finding decent armour to put them in

I'm just using insight until I find a bigger better hurt stick to put a better runeword into. It's a cheap, semi effective, temporary fix

Running NM meph: yeah, I think it would be beneficial as I've got the feeling your current Hell runs are rather slow.

Shield: Rhyme is a very nice shield - but why in a towershield? You do know it can be made in necro heads w. staff mods?

Merc: I must admit, I'm also in the defense doesn't really matter-camp. But that's and OT discussion, and I'm sure you guys could google a thread w. the math behind it to figure it out.. What I can say for sure: LL has a huge impact on merc survival - and so does DR%. But my absolute favorite merc is a prayer merc (normal/combat) wielding insight. The meditation aura from Insight synergizes the prayer aura, which gives huge life regen at high lvls - for both you, your summons and your merc. I basically use this setup on all chars. However, I do play HC, and w. an SC fishy I would probably go for might aswell.

Is NM Meph really worth running on a fishymancer with no teleport as of yet? I'm really not sure. My hell runs are rather slow unless I'm on players 1 in which case CE just blows up entire rooms of poor creatures.

Rhyme is in a tower shield so that I can achieve max block without *too* much dex. Taken straight from Nightfish's fishymancer guide

I'm still uncertain on merc gear. I'll worry about it more when I find some decent base items to make runewords in, or some nice unique drops.

[Hairless]

Nightmare bosses have a better chance of dropping Exceptional Uniques, and it's much easier to run them. Imo it's only worth doing if you have a character specifically designed for the task, ideally a sorc so you can just tele and rinse and repeat. In SP you can generate a nice map which makes tele fairly irrelevant though, like for Meph a map where the entrance to level 3 is just around the corner from the level 2 waypoint.

I find os armours drop quite frequently in The Pits, at least on higher p settings.

[Red Wine Lips]

Well... I just found a Sur rune from a normal mob (archer I think) while running hell countess. Beginner's luck? I have no idea what to do with this

[pharphis]

Keep it and later on when you find another to make a ber, you'll be closer to enigma/infinity/BEAST for your character. Beast gives fanat, so yippee for your skellie damage!

I would like to also mention that if you farm for heads in normal, and get a cracked/damaged/crude/whatever, you can "reroll" it with an eld (el?) rune and maybe some chippies or something, and it will reset the ilvl to 1, and reroll the staffmods. I'm not personally sure if it can get 2 sockets at level 1, however.

Good luck!

[BaronScarpia]

Congrats on Sur!

I'm on a limited clock today, If I read the previous page I won't be able to play D2 today. Just passed by to say I'm running pits with duriel shell, tal mask and normal pole insight - and he's doing ok. (The mobs are kinda merc-ing for merc). I'll look for a lem and test treachery later (after reading the previous posts).

[Red Wine Lips]

Keep it and later on when you find another to make a ber, you'll be closer to enigma/infinity/BEAST for your character. Beast gives fanat, so yippee for your skellie damage!

I would like to also mention that if you farm for heads in normal, and get a cracked/damaged/crude/whatever, you can "reroll" it with an eld (el?) rune and maybe some chippies or something, and it will reset the ilvl to 1, and reroll the staffmods. I'm not personally sure if it can get 2 sockets at level 1, however.

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice and the tip I'll probably go hunting for a necro head sometime tomorrow if I have time.

Congrats on Sur!

I'm on a limited clock today, If I read the previous page I won't be able to play D2 today. Just passed by to say I'm running pits with duriel shell, tal mask and normal pole insight - and he's doing ok. (The mobs are kinda merc-ing for merc). I'll look for a lem and test treachery later (after reading the previous posts).

Thanks! I'll give treachery a try myself as soon as I find an armour to put it in Using a crafted blood helm and an insight polearm on my merc at the moment, still abysmally bad armour though.

[Hairless]

You may also want to consider the Runeword Bramble since you have a Sur. This is exceptionally good if you become a Poisonmancer with Skellie backup. Basically if you drop a few points from Skeleton Mastery you can max out the poison skills (Poison Nova being the one you generally use). With Bramble and the gloves from the Trang Oul's set you will do massive poison damage, and the Thorns Aura from Bramble will make enemies hurt themselves whilst they bash away at your skellies.

[FredOfErik]

Eventually you'll want to be running at p7-p8

Nah. The general tactic while area running is too aim for bosses. Their drops doesn't change with the players settings and running on high player settings also is kinda stupid with a fishymancer as the CE dmg doesn't scale..