Has anyone felt this way like me: hell diablo been buffed?

Has hell diablo been buffed in the new patch? I was just running

Chaos Sanctuary with my lightning sorc. My Infinity merc wears a near perfect v-gaze, and a wrymhide Treachery. When I spawned diablo he already has

Fade proc on, and his resistance is all capped. No lower res curse on him I checked. He basically can't survive in diablo's fire for 3 seconds! Diablo sometimes burns him down quicker than my lightning takes diablo down (which takes about 3 seconds also). I have no recolletion of my merc with

Fade proc on fragile like this before. Diablo usually couldn't even hurt my guy down to half health when I killed him. Has anyone felt the same way? Or is it always like this? What do I do to make my man survive?
I obviously can't raise his fire res any higher.

Should change to an

Eth andy and e fort for your merc with Infinity, stop worrying about the

Fade procs and increase your mercs armor and attack speed for more life steal will fix your merc.

FREE_LOOP wrote: 4 years ago

Has hell diablo been buffed in the new patch? I was just running

Chaos Sanctuary with my lightning sorc. My Infinity merc wears a near perfect v-gaze, and a wrymhide Treachery. When I spawned diablo he already has

Fade proc on, and his resistance is all capped. No lower res curse on him I checked. He basically can't survive in diablo's fire for 3 seconds! Diablo sometimes burns him down quicker than my lightning takes diablo down (which takes about 3 seconds also). I have no recolletion of my merc with

Fade proc on fragile like this before. Diablo usually couldn't even hurt my guy down to half health when I killed him. Has anyone felt the same way? Or is it always like this? What do I do to make my man survive?
I obviously can't raise his fire res any higher.

Use

Teleport to position yourself and your merc ontop of Diablo: his electric fire thing starts at his hands and doesn't hit you if you're hugging him closely.

Also, Treachery is very popular for the DPS, but it provides very little defensive stats. IMO, you shouldn't expect your mercenary to be able to survive "everything" if you aren't giving him a more solid defensive armor (Fortitude, Chains of Honor, Stone, ethereal

Shaftstop, etc.)

The issue is that bosses have a damage bonus against mercs. This is also seen when the merc gets destroyed by the very harmless hydras from the

Travincal council.

The upper limit of 75% of fire resist is not enough for your merc to survive Diablo's

Firestorm without proper fire absorption/higher resistances/life leech. Also, it is possible for you to raise the fire res EVEN MORE, at the expense of Treachery.

The solution is to get

Guardian Angel (to increase the upper limit of all resistances),

Kira's Guardian (to add a ton of resistance and cannot be frozen) and some weapon with a ton of life leech (reaper's toll). That should let your merc survive. This leaves your merc with 90% all resistances.

I will test if my merc can solo hell Diablo with this configuration, and I will let you know. Perhaps not.

Update, it did survive, this was half-way through killing diablo (got a

Dwarf Star ring)

However, it took like 10 minutes. Not having crushing blow really hurts the merc

With this configuration,

Firestorm to the face would take out about 1/5 of his life. Without

Battle Orders, that may be about 25%, still manageable with potions. This should help.

wale wrote: 4 years ago

Use

Teleport to position yourself and your merc ontop of Diablo: his electric fire thing starts at his hands and doesn't hit you if you're hugging him closely.

Also, Treachery is very popular for the DPS, but it provides very little defensive stats. IMO, you shouldn't expect your mercenary to be able to survive "everything" if you aren't giving him a more solid defensive armor (Fortitude, Chains of Honor, Stone, ethereal

Shaftstop, etc.)

hey! thanks for the tips! I will definitely try that. I don't expect him to survive everything though, I just expect him to survive that fire damage when he has capped fire resistance. I just find that he has been a tough guy against physical damage even though he has low defense so I decided to put more weight into high res. And about that, I just found out that there has been some bug about his

Fade proc. Apparently sometimes my mercenary will appear 'faded' like his whole body blurs, but he doesn't actually have

Fade proc when I check his resistance. Maybe that's the case , the 'fake'

Fade, where he died instantly in diablo's fire damage. Maybe my newly built lightning sorc just killed everything so fast that he doesn't even got a chance to get hit to get

Fade proc.

I just find it insane that he died there so quickly (for multiple times!). It never happened when I was running cold sorc with the same merc build (except with Insight instead of Infinity). Perhaps my cold sorc just killed diablo quicker because of the precast blizzard and the diablo didn't even had the time to cast that fire thing.

Aegis200 wrote: 4 years ago

The issue is that bosses have a damage bonus against mercs. This is also seen when the merc gets destroyed by the very harmless hydras from the

Travincal council.

The upper limit of 75% of fire resist is not enough for your merc to survive Diablo's

Firestorm without proper fire absorption/higher resistances/life leech. Also, it is possible for you to raise the fire res EVEN MORE, at the expense of Treachery.

The solution is to get

Guardian Angel (to increase the upper limit of all resistances),

Kira's Guardian (to add a ton of resistance and cannot be frozen) and some weapon with a ton of life leech (reaper's toll). That should let your merc survive. This leaves your merc with 90% all resistances.

I will test if my merc can solo hell Diablo with this configuration, and I will let you know. Perhaps not.

Awesome, thanks! Good to know boss does extra damage to merc. 90% all res sounds really tempting. Yeah he's easy to die to the council

Hydra too, so I'm always extra careful about his health when I'm running

Travincal. I basically just need him to survive at this point to provide that

Conviction aura. I would definitely try more surviving build at the cost of some dps.

If your merc's main job is to proc

Conviction and be sturdy, yes, this setup will work for sure. Mine only dies in

Travincal if I let a

Conviction elite live for long enough to take his resistances down (happens 1/2 times every 200 runs).
Just get the weapon with the largest life leech you can.

Aegis200 wrote: 4 years ago

If your merc's main job is to proc

Conviction and be sturdy, yes, this setup will work for sure. Mine only dies in

Travincal if I let a

Conviction elite live for long enough to take his resistances down (happens 1/2 times every 200 runs).
Just get the weapon with the largest life leech you can.

well his job is to provide

Conviction aura, not to tank one xD. So his only choice of in-slot weapon is Infinity really.

I see, makes sense, still I would still recommend the setup, but keep an eye on him in case his health goes a bit too far down

Aegis200 wrote: 4 years ago

I see, makes sense, still I would still recommend the setup, but keep an eye on him in case his health goes a bit too far down

Thanks for the help!

Also, as a light sorc to kill Diablo faster, switch to

Charged Bolt and

Teleport directly on top of him.

Charged Bolt runs off the normal breakpoints, so if you aren't hitting the 117% breakpoint, it hits faster than

Lightning Bolt will. Each bolt will hit, and the average damage from

Charged Bolt is pretty much equal to that of

Lightning Bolt. Diablo drops dead in about 1 second for me in single player (and this is without

Griffon's Eye)

an upped

Eth

Duriel shell goes a long way in helping my merc survive

I noticed the

Firestorm hitting hard as well. Even my sorc with 75% fire res and 2.5k life doesn't survive standing in the fire and needs to tele out.

1/10 Diablo will kill my merc most the time he doesnt do any damage even to my weak skeletons