Uber duo strategies?

So, I see a lot of guides on solo ubers, most recommending a smiter.

What I don't see a lot of, are duo uber guides.
I would like to do some duo ubers with a friend of mine. We've both played diablo 2 on and off since the original release but neither of us have ever done ubers so I don't know if doing it in a duo makes it easier, harder, about the same, or what builds we should use for it.

I'm assuming one component would be a smiter no matter how you look at it, but I'm wondering if people have had other experiences?

What teams work?
What teams do not work at all?
Any particular strategies involved? Anything we need to consider?
Do the ubers get significantly more difficult with 2 players or is it about the same?
Tell me of your own experiences duoing ubers!

Imo, best duo early on is a sorc with a smiter. The soso can just tp around to find the ubers then drop a tp and the smiter can go collecting.

In any case having a teammate can always be helpful since they can give you BO with either CTA or being a barb and can cast

Life Tap for you if you don't have dracs or don't want to carry the

Wand with you. As for the difficulty... Ubers get +50% health and dmg for every additional player iirc (could be 25, been a while since I checked that). But... There's also a way around it, although I don't think even +400% health and dmg would be an issue even for a semi budget smiter. Anyway there's a way to "spawn" the Ubers and the mini ubers at p1. To do this simply open the portals and go find each uber, so that they appear on your screen or "spawn" while there's only one player in the game. Then ask your friend to join. This way the uber would "spawn" at p1 and your smiter will have an easier time. I recommend a sorc for spawning them since she can tp really fast and be relatively safe.

It's significantly easier. I just duo uber with one friend this week. You need one boss killer (smiter/kicksin for the cheapest build) + one support, e.g., barbarian. The boss got +50% HP and +6.25%dmg&AR, but you got +120%HP from the BO, and can still kill the boss very fast.

Any semi-geared smiter should be able to still easily handle ubers with 2 or more players as well. It isn't so much a matter of "does it work?", rather than "is it faster than the smiter just doing it alone?".

The main slowdown comes in because crushing blow doesn't scale. And since that tends to be your main source of damage against ubers, that is a rather noticable time loss. As a result, you want something in your 2nd class that can either add enough damage to make up for it (rare) or that can make up for the lost time somewhere else.

In terms of making that time up elsewhere, a sorc is probably your best option and my personal fav 2nd one in there. Not only can she scout for

Lilith faster than anyone but an Enigma barb but she adds rather significant clear speed for trash cleanup (more so than most Enigma barbs would).

If you're on a budget, then an Enigma barb is out anyways and you'd want one of you (preferably the sorc so the smiter doesn't have to switch) to bring a

Life Tap

Wand for the initial

Life Tap cast on ubers to keep the smiter alive. Dracs takes care of re-casting so you don't need to worry about that. Once you get an Exile on your smiter, you can drop that

Wand entirely and work towards one of you getting a CTA.

In terms of strategy, you can opt to do the above-mentioned P1 spawn though personally I wouldn't even bother. For

Izual and

Lilith, just send the sorc in first, scout for them, open a TP nearby/on top of them and have the smiter go to town while the sorc handles straggling trash as needed.

Duriel is usually next to the portal anyways.

Once inside

Tristram, either of you should be fine pulling meph out if you do it right as you won't get hit during the pull (i.e. the sorc won't get wrecked just for pulling him) but once you're on them, you want your sorc ready to

Teleport away. Mainly because if an uber switches to her and starts running after her (especially

Baal who just teleports to you), the smiter has to run to keep up which not only drops the damage but can make it hard for him to even stay alive because he won't hit for

Life Tap anymore. So when that happens, sorc just teleports to the other side of the map to drop aggro, smiter resumes smiting in Peace and sorc comes back.

That's basically all there is to it.


All that having been said, honestly, most teams would work as long as one of the builds is a solid uber farmer (smiters of course remaining the top of the pack). You'd merely have to make sure you don't kill your smiter (or equivalent), depending on what char/build your 2nd person in there is. E.g. if you're bringing a Necro and are thinking "hey, awesome, curses! I'll just

Decrepify and make the smiter do more dmg and take less!" then...well, you're overriding his lifetap doing that and are killing him and by extension both of you. The same goes for specific gear choices that you should avoid. Hit blinds target for example - while not functional and hence not applicable on ubers - will override lifetap on any trash, in turn once again killing your smiter if you have to deal with too much of that for some reason.

Good responses so far. Seems the general consensus is smiter + sorc.

How about Smiter + Summonmancer?
Summoner can keep

Life Tap up and his minions can keep all the scattered minions away while the smiter deals with the big bads?


Also as a side question, can you keep multiple organs stored up at once? so you can run multiple tristrams in a row without doing the minis?

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Also as a side question, can you keep multiple organs stored up at once? so you can run multiple tristrams in a row without doing the minis?

Yeah, you can have multiple of the same organ in your inventory at once. So you can do a run without doing the minis first.

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Good responses so far. Seems the general consensus is smiter + sorc.

How about Smiter + Summonmancer?
Summoner can keep

Life Tap up and his minions can keep all the scattered minions away while the smiter deals with the big bads?


Also as a side question, can you keep multiple organs stored up at once? so you can run multiple tristrams in a row without doing the minis?

Like the previous answers stated, the actual

Tristram is (usually) not the problem in the run, if the Ubers don't act like assholes and don't come out one at a time. The hard and annoying part is farming the minis. And that's where the Sorc with

Teleport comes into play.

PrincipalOShagH wrote: 2 years ago

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Good responses so far. Seems the general consensus is smiter + sorc.

How about Smiter + Summonmancer?
Summoner can keep

Life Tap up and his minions can keep all the scattered minions away while the smiter deals with the big bads?


Also as a side question, can you keep multiple organs stored up at once? so you can run multiple tristrams in a row without doing the minis?

Like the previous answers stated, the actual

Tristram is (usually) not the problem in the run, if the Ubers don't act like assholes and don't come out one at a time. The hard and annoying part is farming the minis. And that's where the Sorc with

Teleport comes into play.

This part I'm quite unclear about. why would the minis be harder than the actual ubers?
Having never done the ubers myself that sounds very backwards... I was under the impression that the biggest hurdles are

Lilith and

Mephisto, so one hurdle in minis and one hurdle in

Tristram.

Now keep in mind neither me or my friend care about clearing it as fast as possible, as long as we can do things safely and successfully. Time to kill does not matter. We'd probably be killing all the mobs on the way to the minis instead of just skipping past. teleporting around seems like the by far more risky approach...

BeaverPaw wrote: 2 years ago

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Also as a side question, can you keep multiple organs stored up at once? so you can run multiple tristrams in a row without doing the minis?

Yeah, you can have multiple of the same organ in your inventory at once. So you can do a run without doing the minis first.

Excellent news

I usually do ubers with my girlfriend, Allows me to go in with my normal Enigma

Smite setup while she lifetaps bosses and helps clear straggling minions with

Chain Lightning. Helps that we play in the same room so we are able to coordinate via talking(more like me yelling "cast

Life Tap!!")

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

PrincipalOShagH wrote: 2 years ago

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

[...]

[...]

This part I'm quite unclear about. why would the minis be harder than the actual ubers?
Having never done the ubers myself that sounds very backwards... I was under the impression that the biggest hurdles are

Lilith and

Mephisto, so one hurdle in minis and one hurdle in

Tristram.

Now keep in mind neither me or my friend care about clearing it as fast as possible, as long as we can do things safely and successfully. Time to kill does not matter. We'd probably be killing all the mobs on the way to the minis instead of just skipping past. teleporting around seems like the by far more risky approach...

Okay, then I might have misunderstood. Nevertheless, most of my deaths when being inexperienced actually came on my way to

Lilith and

Izual, because I got trapped or overwhelmed by mobs, especially the witches to

Lilith. Having a meat shield (or rather

Bone Shield with the Skellies could be one option to circumvent this.

In the end it's a matter of trying I'd say. If you're getting overwhelmed, there's plenty of people that can help you out.

//edit: A second thing to consider, is that

Smite sucks big time on your way to the Minis, since the knockback prevents consistent life leech, even with lifetap, until the enemy is back against the wall and can't be knocked back any further. That's why I recommend something like this skill distribution forums/uber-smiter-help-t459226.html#p1181514 with

Zeal as your main skill on your way to minis and

Smite for minis/Ubers. Luckily with skill bar not as annoying as before to switch between these two, when you suddenly find

Lilith.

I was playing duo ubers with my friend my zealot one point smiter and he summon necro. He just lefitaped for me

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

I'm assuming one component would be a smiter no matter how you look at it

Well yes Smiter is nice but you can swap him out. The real reason you use

Smite is the 100% chance to hit (or 0% chance to miss depending on how you look at it).

You can use another character with a high Attack speed and high Attack Rating, itemize to get Crushing blow chance + survivability (All resist, life etc.) and be just fine (or atleast ok).
Other things to add after that are Faster hit recovery, Faster block rate, Increased chance of blocking.

The reason Smiter is so popular is that he does all that well and that its easy to gear for.
(technically you also don't need a 100% hit chance skill, but it helps a lot not needing to build up your Attack rating super high)

Werewolf is ok, high attack speed and +%life when in shapeshift
Kicksin is also an option with high attack speed
Barb can dash out nice attack speed and easily get high resistance and life to survive. Shouts also help the other character ingame.
Or if you feel like you want to be the coolest and most original Über kids on the block you can go Bowazon. (Missiles have 100% to hit but lower effect on Crushing blow 1/8 health instead of melee 1/4).

So use whatever you want, but you might want to have a Smiter ready as backup if things go south.
(or just write here and we, Forum Heroes, will come and save you )

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Now keep in mind neither me or my friend care about clearing it as fast as possible, as long as we can do things safely and successfully. Time to kill does not matter. We'd probably be killing all the mobs on the way to the minis instead of just skipping past. teleporting around seems like the by far more risky approach...

I always clear the levels for fun when solo ubering, so I get that. But one thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to deal high elemental as well as high physical damage to do so; some mobs are immune to physical, and some immune to everything but physical.

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

I'm assuming one component would be a smiter no matter how you look at it

I've never played a paladin, but my assassin has never died against the ubers, it's really not that hard at all. So a smiter isn't the only way.

BeaverPaw wrote: 2 years ago

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Now keep in mind neither me or my friend care about clearing it as fast as possible, as long as we can do things safely and successfully. Time to kill does not matter. We'd probably be killing all the mobs on the way to the minis instead of just skipping past. teleporting around seems like the by far more risky approach...

I always clear the levels for fun when solo ubering, so I get that. But one thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to deal high elemental as well as high physical damage to do so; some mobs are immune to physical, and some immune to everything but physical.

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

I'm assuming one component would be a smiter no matter how you look at it

I've never played a paladin, but my assassin has never died against the ubers, it's really not that hard at all. So a smiter isn't the only way.

Ah, so it's not just "standard" immunities? I had no idea. since all the uber guides always just

Teleport past everything without killing it I never noticed... Excellent info to have in the back pocket.

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Ah, so it's not just "standard" immunities?

BeaverPaw wrote: 2 years ago

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Ah, so it's not just "standard" immunities?

Neat.
Are these particular immunities breakable? I'm guessing no.

Misanthrilist wrote: 2 years ago

Are these particular immunities breakable? I'm guessing no.

Not breakable with an Infinity merc aura, no.