Fastest necro cow runner?! (High rune farming)

Hey everyone! I’ve got my sorc at level 89 for

Key farming (and soon to be gambling at lvl 90), my 85 smiter just cut his

Teeth on his first torch without any major problems. now back to my jack of all trades: level 87 necro.

It’s currently a pure summoner I used to get through the game to get to get decent stuff for my other chars, but I think it’s the perfect canvas for a pure cow runner specifically looking for runes.

What I love about cow running, especially with a necro is you don’t need res, or even really def, and I’ve seen plenty of viable builds.

I’ve still only got mid level stuff: I’ve only found an

Ohm,

Vex and 2 ists, (3 of which went into my smiter’s amazing Exile), otherwise I got just some mid runes and maybe half the useful uniques in stashes.

So now Im thinking of respecing my necro as a focused cow farmer, my question is what? Obviously

Corpse Explosion is central, but pre 2.4 I had lots of points into

Clay Golem and revives for bosses, but they don’t help at all with cows...
I was thinking a

Bone Spear? But I’ve also seen a straight up poison necro solo cows fast enough to rival a javazon!

What do you think? My aim is to clear cows as fast as possible on the highest players amount as possible. I’m still missing a few things:
Torch-might take me a bit to get a necro torch, but I’ll get one
Anni- single player offline, so I need to find and soj first...

Arachnid Mesh - I’m still waiting for this to drop...
Skiller charms - so far no necro ones, I’m waiting for a grand charm to drop from diablo or

Baal, then I’ll re roll it to necro

Look forward to your feedback on what’s the best necro for cows! Let’s call him the necro dairy farmer!

I had a necromancer summoner. Then I saw the

Bone Spear build. I dropped my glasses and made a necromancer with a

Bone Spear. I was not at all impressed by this for mass Destruction. But, this is just my experience. I dropped my glasses and reassembled the necromancer summoner - he easily passes almost any location, including the cowshed. On YouTube, I saw an assembly of a poisonous necromancer who cleans the cowshed perfectly. But, I can't collect it myself yet - I can't find

Death's Web (which they say is the rarest item in the game) and stones + poison, which is vital for it. So the test of this build is still in my dreams. A lot of torches fall if you clean the magical shelter, clean the chests there, and not just

Teleport to the "cosmonaut" - this became a discovery for me recently. If there are a lot of them, then there is a better chance to get at least one good one, even if not in one day. For example, yesterday there fell a +1 stick to necromancer summoning skills. There are also a lot of precious stones falling there.

Sorry I don’t know what your talking about in the second half of your post-magical shelter, cosmonaut, precious stones?

What do you mean?

precious stones could be

Perfect Gems? Other than that, I want to try whatever he is on!

Nate wrote: 2 years ago

Sorry I don’t know what your talking about in the second half of your post-magical shelter, cosmonaut, precious stones?

What do you meaning?

Skiller charms is good to look for on the way to

The Summoner ("astronaut") in

Arcane Sanctuary, clearing the entire location. There are also a lot of stones for "cooking" charms. Although, it is much easier to find. While I'm looking for the keys, a lot of charms are falling to me there.

Arachnid Mesh also fell while collecting keys -

Nihlathak gave it (he gave it to my friend as well).

@Nate Poison Necromancer

Low level, budget, summons/mercenary not required (they slow down the run, in fact), dissolving/melting cows in /players 8 with ease.
The build just needs +Skills, Faster Run/Walk and Mana.
You can absolutely run cows with zero defenses. And this is coming from a Hardcore player.

Well, you could use a poison necro, but usually you would need some good gear for it in order to clean cows fast.
So based on your statement regarding your equip I would stick to

The Summoner, but max out CE (revives and golem both only need 1 point).

When searching for runes Cowruns are fine, but be aware that kill speed is always more important than player settings (e.g. its better to do 5 runs on P3 than only 1 on P7). Also to mention here, as far as D2R hasn´t changed this mechanic and I´m not aware of, player settings bonuses in game are based on either "same area" or not, giving a higher drop bonus when players are close together rather than running in a different area on their own. This means, since in SP all players are counted as "outside your area" you wont get drop benefits from even player numbers (2/4/6/8), only the uneven counts stack up to a bonus of the drop rate. So basically even player numbers in SP are only interesting if you aim for exp.

You mentioned that you have no skillers yet, while a Baalcharm is really hard to be turned into the +1 skill +45life you are most likely aiming for, I think it would be more helpful to first of all get a set of clean skillers, but at least are skiller. Those can be found best in Nightmare

Flayer Jungle (A3). But be aware that charms are magic and therefore require MF for better drop chance.

I’m also thinking of shopping to find a +3 psn Bone with +3

Poison Nova

Wand, but is this even possible?

I figured it’ll be much faster than finding a perfect White base or a good unique

Wand

Yeah, you can shop that

Wand from a vendor in Hell. It's probably the best option before

Death's Web.

So long as you max

Corpse Explosion (and DO max it, the radius is EPIC) and use

Amplify Damage, it doesn't really matter what you go IMO. When I ran summoner, the biggest buff to my clear speed was an Obedience on the a2 merc. That was around about the time I started making Iron Golems out of Insight, mind you.

Now I'm running

Poison Nova and it's still all about the corpsplosions -- I make green cows but always switch to amp + CE for the finale!

So I reckon you have broad liberty to decide how you most like to arrange your initial corpse pile -- Bone magic seems like a solid choice if you're so inclined. Especially if you are doing low /players#.

My summoner is 90, don't like mages so only max RS and SM. After one point assignment to relevant skills I maxed PN and PE with some points on PD. It's by far the safest build with incredible kill speed with AD and CE. And the best thing is, it can farm everywhere even with budget gear and with end game gear Ubers and DC are not an issue.