Gvandale's poison / summon hybrid build v2.0
This is my build (what I did) in my Poison / Summon Hybrid Necromancer. There is nothing listed here that you MUST do, merely, how I did it, and was very successful.
update: This is merely a revision to the original, added / fixed item section, merc section, and gameplay tactics section.
Skills
Summon Tree (29)
20 Skeleton Warrior (max this first)
1 Skeleton Mastery (+++)
1 Clay Golem*
1 Golem Mastery*
1 Summon Resist*
Poison ‘N Bone Tree (64)
1 Bone Armor
1 Bone Wall
1 Teeth
1 CE*
20 Poison Dagger
20 Poison Explosion
20 Poison Nova
Curse Tree (8)
1 Amp Damage
1 Weaken
1 Terror
1 Decrepify*
1 Dim Vision*
1 Iron Maiden (pre-req)
1 Life tap (pre-req)
1 Lower Resist
* denotes 1 point wonder (see leveling section)
The listed skills above will take you into hell, and at around clvl 90 (depending on when you do your hell skill quests). At this point, you should pump your Skeleton Mastery for the rest of the game…
***adversely, you can max mastery instead of a poison synergy (they both give the same bonus) to get greater skeleton’s, but I love having more dmg from my poison, as my skeleton’s do just fine as is. The option of maxing mastery over a synergy would be better suited for a player with ‘lesser’ gear (see below).
GEAR
Expenisve Gear listing
Helm: Shako
Armor: Bramble / Enigma / Chains of Honor / Skin of the Vipermagi
Amulet: Mara’s
Weapon 1: Death’s Web (2/2 is optimal)
Shield 1: Darkforce Spawn (+3 pnb a must) / Homonculus / 4 socket shield w/ poison facets
Weapon 2: Arm of King Leoric
Shield 2: Darkforce Spawn (+3 summon tree a must) / +3 Boneflame / Homonculus
Ring 1: Soj / BK Ring
Ring 2: Soj / BK Ring / Wisp Projector
Gloves: Trang Oul’s Gloves*
Boots: Silkweaves / Marrowalks (boost bone armor / skel mastery)
Belt: Arachnid Mesh
*If you are a non-ladder player, be careful, as the 1.09 trang’s gloves do not have the +25 poison dmg mod on them, and will not give you the 3 piece +25/-25 bonus.
Less Expenisve Gear Options
Can’t afford the above mentioned items? Understandable on a few of them. Remember that you don’t have to wear 100% unique / rune word godlies to be good in pvm.
Mod’s you want to look for on items is going to be negative poison resists, then plus poison damage, then plus skills. Of course resists are going to be important, so don’t forget those!
A great secondary option is the Trang-Oul’s Set. Wearing the gloves / belt / shield will give you a –25/+25 poison mod, and Fire Skills from the Sorceress tree. This is a great alternative way of dispensing with poison immunes. Adding the entire set will give you phenomenal resists, the –25/+25 poison mods, the fire skills, insane run / walk, and a decent amount of plus skills. It will still leave the weapon / rings / amulet open for other items, and I would just see the above for those options.
Charms
Charms are a great way to find not only +skills, but also important mods like faster run/walk, faster hit recovery, resistances. The ideal situation would grant us
8 Poison ‘n Bone Grand Charms
1 Annihilus Small Charm
7 Small Charms (mix of resistance / life / mana / etc)
Do what you can, just realize that this space can be of great assistance.
Socket Options:
Shoot to have high resistances in hell, so you can socket everything with poison facets.
The most important attribute you should look for is the negative resists mod, then the plus to damage. If you are seriously lacking in resists, load a ‘um’ in the helm / armor, or a p.diamond in the shield.
Mercenary
Typical to a summoner build, I suggest a Act 2 Offensive Mercenary hired in the nightmare difficulty. This gives him, you, and your skeleton’s the MIGHT aura. Sexxy.
Goals to hit with your mercenary are:
- Keep him within 3 levels of your own CLVL
- Give him a big damage weapon. I do not suggest letting him use the Reaper’s Toll due to the chance to cast decrepify. You definitely do no want your merc overriding your curses.
- Try to get ethereal items. Etheral weapons will have more dmg, and armor’s will have more defense. The beauty is that the items don’t lose durability when equipped on a merc.
- Crushing blow is a item mod that will help your mercenary take down bosses with the quickness. Not all that important on regular monsters, but high HP bosses / champs / etc will bow down quickly to the power of CB.
- Plus skills items will raise the level of his Might Aura, thus boosting the dmg output of your skeletons.
- Here are some great options for gear for your merc:
Helmet
Crown of Ages
Rockstopper
Shako
Crown of Thieves
Guillame’s Face (Great for boss battles, as the CB works wonders)
Tal’s Mask (hella life leech)
Armor
‘Duress’ Runeword (Great for boss battles, as the CB / OW works wonders)
‘Stone’ Runeword
Leviathan
Duriel’s Shell (either regular or upgraded)
Shaftstop
Weapon
Bonehew (shael / amn)
Hone Sundan (ethereal upgraded is the best weapon) (shael / shael / amn)
‘Doom’ Great Poleaxe (ethereal) – Great for the Holy Freeze. Bit of a pain to res your army w/ all shattered corpses though. Take off his weapon if you need to do this.
‘Breath of the Dying’ (ethereal) – Sick damage!
Arioc’s Needle - +4 skills will raise the dmg on his Might Aura
Stats
Strength: Enough for highest required piece of gear. (100’ish)
Dexterity: Block or no block?
Vitality: Rest
Energy: base
Strength: You basically want to plan out to take your item with the highest strength requirement (usually armor) and subtract the bonus’ from items on strength you get. That is the total number you need here.
Dexterity: I would put some value on the blocking aspect, in case you ever want to roam around some PVP, or even for harder areas of hell. I liked the block on this build as it definitely saved my butt a few times.
The blocking formula is: (EquipmentBlock% × [Dexterity – 15]) ÷ (CLevel × 2)
Vitality: The more here, the more life you have. What could be wrong with that.
Energy: Raising a good sized army may strain your minimal mana amount, but drink a potion! There’s no need to spam poison nova, so don’t worry there. The occasional spamming of CE may tax you, but again, they added blue pots to vendors in 1.10 so take advantage of it.
Leveling / Gameplay Strategies
Start off by joining a public game, something with a good bit of people. Example: “a3 all q” or something where you know you’ll get a1 all to yourself. Your going to melee your way through the first few levels, until your skeleton’s can hang on their own.
Start off with your first point into amp damage, this will make you and your 1 skellie own. From there, add to skeleton warrior, only breaking to fill in the important 1 point wonders (as mentioned above).
Once you have your skel's maxed out, and all your 1 pointers filled, start stacking the poison nova, then explosion, then dagger.
The reason I suggest maxing out your skeleton warriors first is because they will provide more then enough killing power to let you get through normal / nm while you pump your poison. If you go the poison route, the first 20something levels will be extremely difficult, as you will only have poison dagger (nice, but you’re not building a melee guy) and the poison explosion (which has nice dmg on paper, but gets whiddled down over the duration, and it has a crappy radius).
Use an a1 rogue (fire) merc until nm when you get your might merc. Our very own HOSv.1 suggest a normal a2 prayer merc to help your skellies survive. It’s all completely personal preference, because that merc is going down once you hit a2 nm.
Our forum’s very own ‘LYTE-HAMMER’ mentioned this trick, but in a4 chaos sanctuary. To keep your merc alive, take his weapon off. His dmg will suck, but he’s really only there for the aura. This will keep IM from wasting him.
It is important to have decrepify by the time you fight Diablo in norm. Decrep and your golem will make him move slower then crap while your team picks him apart.
For stats, I jacked strength to 60 immediately. Then I went on a 2/3 ratio between dex / vit from there on out. I got to about mid-levels when I finally raised my strength up some (enough for end game) then I kept on my 2/3 until I hit 75% with homo. Then it was all vit.
Dont forget to use Corpse Explosion. It should be around level 15'ish, which gives it a good radius. Poison Explosion looks good on paper in terms of dmg, but the time duration is horrible, and it’s bugged where it occasionally will not ‘hit’ the monster.
To raise the first corpse, there are a few options.
-Use the fallen zombies in Pindleskin’s garden to raise them before they awake
-Just amp a quill rat / zombie in a1. Then team up with your golem / merc to beat the snot out of him!
What the hell is ‘pre-buffing’?
Pre-Buffing is when you use as many +skill items to raise your warriors as to give them a large amount of life / dmg / defense. You do this by adding a high +skill item / shield on weapon switch and just switching back to your other gear to do the fighting. Now, you will lose some skeleton’s in the transfer from 1 set of weapons back to the original, but the ones left alive will be of the same life / dmg / defense as when you summoned them.
Which curse do I use, Lower Resistances or Amp Damage?
This is the fun part. One would think you would use LR primarily, right? WRONG. For a couple of reasons. First of all, your gear can easily total –100% poison res, so why use lower res? For monsters with insane poison res. So what to do? Well, you should run up, LR a pack, PN them quickly, then AMP them.
See, LR is only calculated at the time the POISON impacts the target. So while the poison is seeping in, they can be AMP’d for your skel’s to really get busy.
Magic Finding
I’ll format this as a Q and A session to make it easy…
Q: Is this build good for Magic Finding?
A: Yes. This guy will annihilate the Pit’s and the Masoleum which are two easy areas to treasure hunt in A1 Hell. They also have the highest TC rating for an area in the game.
Q: What’s a good number for MF?
A: Generally speaking 300% is a great number to hit. This is easily attainable while keeping good –res / +dmg mods, and +skills.
Q: What would you suggest for a MF setup for this build?
A: Using a clvl of 85, here is what I would go with:
Shako (p.topaz) = 74%
Enigma = 85% (1% per clvl)
Death’s Web
Trangs Belt / gloves / shield
War Travs’ = 50
7% mfsc’s x 13 = 91
2x sojs
Mara’s
That’s a grand total of 300% mf, while keeping the –25/+25 from trang’s, res and +skills from mara’s, +skills from SOJS, -res/+dmg and +skills from D.Web, etc. etc. etc.
My Character Stats on B.Net
GVANDALE on USEast SC Ladder
Clvl: 83
Base Stats / After Items Stats
Strength: 90 / 116
Dexterity: 161 / 187
Vitality: 224 / 245
Energy: 25 / 71
1609 Defense
75% Block
830 Life
504 Mana
Gear:
Helm: Shako (5/5 p.facet)
Armor: Skin of the Vipermagi (32%, Upgraded to Wyrmhide, +3/-4 P. Facet)
Weapon 1: Death’s Web (2/2/48, +5/-4 P. Facet)
Shield 1: Homonculus (P.Diamond)
Weapon 2: Arm of King Leoric
Shield 2: Homonculus
Gloves: Trang’s Gloves
Blet: Arachnid Mesh Belt
Amulet: Mara’s Amulet (+27% Resist)
Rings: SOJ / Bul-Katho’s Ring
Boots: Silkweave
Charms:
+4 summon gc’s
+2 pnb gc’s
1 gheed’s
1 1/19/14/8 Annihilus
11 / 8 light res sc’s
9 poison res sc
75/75/75/71 all resistances
My Merc:
EMILIO
Lvl 81
1667 Life
75/75/75/75 Res
4k Defense
805-3167 Dmg w/ aura active
‘Stone’ Wire Fleece (ethereal)
Guillame’s Face Helm
Bonehew (310% shael/amn)
This has been an insanely fun build, and he’s been tweaked quite a few times. I’ve gotten more enjoyment from this build then any other in the 5 year’s I’ve been a d2 addict.
So I hope you fare well with it if you decide to give it a try!
g
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