New spear bases for runewords in 2.4

I tried some options and here's the breakdown together with Fortitude +

Andariel's Visage with IAS jewel (the endgame setup) on your act 2 mercenary.

a)

Ghost Spear =

Stygian Pike =

Great Poleaxe, they are in fact identical to each other in all stats except for dmg spread. Literally the same DPS to a point. Except

Stygian Pike will always roll 4 sockets at

Larzuk, so a superior

Stygian Pike is a surefire way to make the best 4-socket runeword. This means that

Great Poleaxe will surely tank in value (was

Lo at some point, now ~

Ohm, soon a couple

Ist maybe) just because there will be thrice the population of this base now.

b)

Ghost Spear is the easiest superior base together with

Cryptic Axe to roll Obedience in, both will get 5 at

Larzuk. The dex req on

Ghost Spear is so high, however, that you would need a high level mercenary (lvl 91) or extra dex on gear unless the bug with

Hel not applying to mercenaries is fixed.

c) Pride's best base was a

Thresher/

Giant Thresher before, a

Mancatcher will be a bit better than both now.

d) Infinity in

Mancatcher is on par with Infinity in

Thresher, potentially halving the prices. Currently,

Mancatcher is assumed to be the best thanks to the fastest base speed. It will translate to 1 frame faster hits. The DPS is not better, however, even incl. the faster CB trigger. With that said your Infinity merc won't be the one doing any killing, he's just an aura on a stick. You don't have to care about the % ED nor the base. The cheapest Infinity is the best Infinity.

P.S. Insight is still only available on polearms and

Great Poleaxe and

Cryptic Axe are the best bases for it as Insight has no on-hit effects to make use of faster bases, less damaging bases.

TL;DR
It doesn't matter what you choose unless you really are a stubborn minmaxer. All of this means you just have a wider variety to choose from based on personal preferences/requirements and prices for bases should drop all across the board as there will be many more available.

Actually, for your (a) summary, they're not quite identical.

Stygian Pike has 1 less range than GP and GS do, making it the worst of the 3 (when looking beyond just mercs).

And an Infinity merc will still have to handle those immunes he can't break for you. So at least for that, ED and base do matter.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if at least Infinity (well, and Insight) ends up also becoming enabled in swords before long though, just to allow A3 mercs to actually be useful for a change. That'd really throw a wrench in pole pricing.

Range doesn't apply to mercenaries, they have fixed ranges. Act 2 merc has range 2.

EDIT: Added this is meant purely for act 2 merc.

Fair enough. I tend to look beyond purely merc use.
(clarified above)

Though I believe it was actually 3 final range for A2 mercs, due to the 0=1 indexing. Might be misremembering that though.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

And an Infinity merc will still have to handle those immunes he can't break for you. So at least for that, ED and base do matter.

Right, the ED will, the base really not as much, the balancing between them is real tight.
I think Infinity can break all light immunes in hell unless they have extra modifier like magic resistant or lightning enchanted on them as well. If they do, ED will help.
Fire druid and fire sorc will want the extra ED, druid less so thanks to his menagerie and physical component of his fire spells.
For cold sorc you are better off using Obedience. Fixed it in the first post for clarity.

At the 35 IAS, as was said many times before by others,

Cryptic Axe and

Great Poleaxe (and now the 0 base speed spears) will statistically win in terms of pure physical DPS over the -10 polearms and -20

Mancatcher.

Not sure about the range either (2 or 3 total), luckily it's the same for all cases, so we can disregard that.

Not quite. Infinity can break light immunities (or any immunities for that matter) up to and including 115 res. While that covers most light immunes, there are 7 mob types that naturally hit 120 or higher and hence can't be broken with Infinity.

See https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/ ... ightning_3 for reference.

Either way, more dmg = better.