Since Necrarch showed me this a few days ago, I've been timing how long it takes me to kill diablo with my poison necro with 2 different strategies. Thought I'd post my results here.Necrarch wrote: 2 years ago Poison Nova, as far as I remember, has a small cooldown so reaching 125 FCR seems less necessary than for Bone spells, and I believe the usual target is more at 75.
However, I was surprised yesterday to watch this :
Interesting to understand the difficulty a poison necro can have against bosses.
Strategy 1 was my old strat. In the past, knowing that Poison Necro was crap against bosses, I decided to gear my merc for boss killing with Obedience and Gface and usually make my IG out of something with CB. My usual strat was to Revive a big pack of Chaos Sanctuary trash including at least 3 or so Venom lords right before Diablo spawns, telestomp him, and win! The reason for the Venom lords is not scientific, but anecdotal. I've noticed that if you have 'large bodied' revives in your pack when you Teleport, your minions won't spread out and will all stay right on top of each other until you start walking around. If there's an enemy in range, they'll all attack basically in unison.
Strategy 2 was using the revived Venom lords to lock down my army so none of them attacked Diablo. This simulated not having an army at all without me having to unsummon and kill everyone, because Iron Golem is expensive. As reported in the video, locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.
However, and perhaps most interestingly, after timing a bunch of Diablo kills with each strategy, it turned out that using Strat 1, my traditional method of beefy merc + Revive army, I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2, Poison Nova with a locked down army, I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. So, even though the new knowledge behind strat 2 hugely multiplied poison damage dealt to bosses, it's not enough to be worth it. Friends that lift weights are still better.
This said, this is all only with my character's setup at P1. I would be interested in knowing what other Poison Necros have to say about this.
Winterkill
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