Iron Golem Journal

I'm weird. I use suboptimal things like full Trang's and necromages because they're aesthetic. What I want is to be a mobile Castlevania, and that's the first thing I do every time I come back to the game. One of the things I do is use an

Iron Golem sometimes instead of Clay or Fire, mostly because I can't think of anything better to do with some of the trash uniques I find.

I'm going to start documenting what I make them out of and what they die to in this thread. If a unique or runeword performs surprisingly well, I might go put a note about it in the article for that item.

Right now, if I remember correctly, I'm running Ancient's Pledge, because all my characters outgrew it. When this one dies, I've got another one of the same that I'll run just in case I was wrong about what it is now.

Oh, my skills at present are: 13 IG (2 base), 2 hardpoints in FG, one each in CG and BG, 12

Summon Resist, 12

Golem Mastery. Planning to respec at some point when my gear is closer or at final, there's a few points in

Bone Spear for ex that would probably be better in the golems since skellies are capped and I have so many revives that they mostly get in each others' way.

Make a Beast

Iron Golem and cry when it despawns because of a bug

If I ever see a

Ber that'll definitely be the sixth or seventh thing I consider doing with it.

What I'd really like most is for Blizzard to give me a complete list of what stats actually work on golems, and for Indestructible to be added to that list. I mean, it still dies if YOU die, it's not completely broken.

Also +skills. I should totally be able to throw my old Bone on the Ground and make a golem out of it and get two more levels until something breaks it.

I've tried different methods to keep

Iron Golem from disappearing but they didn't work until I reached Enigma. After that, I didn't lose one. I'm only using Insight so it's not a big deal losing one but if I get enough rich I'd like to try Beast. It would be incredible with max summoning skills besides Fanat aura.

Yeah, I remember that being a problem, too. But the past couple times my main has been blessed with +3 summon/

Teleport ammys at some point in nightmare, so I've become much less afraid of it even though I'm too poor for Enigma and want to keep my lich suit anyway.

My favorite Iron Golems recently have been out of

Windhammer and

The Minotaur. Both were picked for crushing blow, since vs. bosses is the only time I feel my necro slowing down. Also, they are items I seem to find very often.

The Minotaur's target slow seems to be doing wonders for preserving the golem's longevity too. Diablo has yet to kill one.

I just wonder, did anyone try making a IG from a Beast or Infinity. I'd like to see it in action.

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

My favorite Iron Golems recently have been out of

Windhammer and

The Minotaur. Both were picked for crushing blow, since vs. bosses is the only time I feel my necro slowing down. Also, they are items I seem to find very often.

The Minotaur's target slow seems to be doing wonders for preserving the golem's longevity too. Diablo has yet to kill one.

Makes sense. 50% is the

Cap for slow on bosses and the like so you're fully set on that. Alternatively, you can always easily get that from a

Clay Golem but that'd be without the crushing and other benefits of course.

Thing is, once your golem hits and the 50% get applied, both Dia and

Baal tend to 'bug out' as their animations suddenly take more time than their AI will let them spend on a single attack. As a result, they actually abort attacks before they get executed and basically just do nothing anymore. Dia I believe can still get the occasional normal swing through but that's basically it.

Baal literally does nothing.

I have quite a story to tell about my last three golems.
First Ancient's Pledge was dumped intentionally after the initial struggle proved unproductive. He was surviving, but I was doing baby damage to dclone and he healed it all back after I went to replace my skeletons. (I'm running a Rogue with Edge, why can he do that?) A random unique just south of the

Frigid Highlands waypoint dropped

The Minotaur, so I decided to give him a try instead.

dclone killed

The Minotaur faster than I could blink. So, I threw out my other Ancient's Pledge. This also melted, probably because I was short a few minions. I tried fighting him the way I'd fight regular Diablo, with

Clay Golem and

Decrepify. No dice. I couldn't hurt him faster than he could heal while I was replacing my dudes.

You know what solved the problem? I only beat dclone because I'm wearing full Trang's. I had to switch to

Lower Resist and spamming my fire skills on him. My necromages and

Fire Golem put in work, too.

The aesthetic build has been validated.

Update: new IG is

Sparking Mail

007Bistromath wrote: 2 years ago

(I'm running a Rogue with Edge, why can he do that?

Because prevent monster heal doesn't work for mercenaries.
You either need to apply PMH yourself (just gotta hit him once) or you need to have other regen-stoppers that work for your merc (e.g. open wounds).

god that is awful and stupid

I love the idea of this
I myself was just delving into the curious world of IG.
I was very disappointed finding out I couldn't use lightsaber as an option.
Something about all that lighting damage sounded so good.
I am currently running him with a GFace and I love the boss damage on him.
Literally makes my boss fights 4x faster.

What about combination of a might merc with Infinity, Necro carrying a Beast and Pride IG? What kind of CE and skellie damage output could this setup provide?

Sparking Mail went down to the Council, mostly my fault for lame tp. Trying

Blackleach Blade next.

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried an IG from

Fleshripper?
Might make it quite the little helper against something like ubers, seeing how everything should apply to/work with IG (as opposed to merc PMH). Plus the slow adds a decent bit of extra defense.

I've never even seen one. I mostly make golems out of uniques that won't sell.

Out of curiosity, where are you playing? I would expect softcore ladder, as that's where most of your trades are.

007Bistromath wrote: 2 years ago

dclone killed

The Minotaur faster than I could blink.

Wow! And here I was thinking that made a very safe golem. Hopefully I'll be able to catch one of these D-Clone walks someday and test it out with my playstyle/build.

Were you using Urdars/variants as revives for Dclone or just straight skelly army?

I do have a

Fleshripper too, so if my

The Minotaur dies, I'll give that a go. It looks really cool!

I can't remember what revives I brought, exactly, some stuff from Worldstone 2, I think. They didn't stick around long. It was a struggle to keep more than a few skeletons in the fight very long.

Reason I ask is that

Blunderbore and variants deal Crushing Blow, which is huge for bosses. With a full

Revive pack of them, necros can even destroy Ubers. They make a much bigger difference than other revives.