poison necro-mid level question

so i am trying some poison-Bone-clay-

Corpse Explosion hybrid of a sort(don't like skelis!), haven't decided where to go heavy.
I've noticed the

Poison Nova is really weak on low levels, my question is what would you use for 30+ necro to cope with NM end of normal?
I'm mainly MF(235%) gear.

For leveling purposes:

Skellies > Golems
Explosion > Poison

In both cases, you picked the more difficult skill tree to level with (especially in Nightmare and early Hell). Poison is totally viable in the endgame; some builds are just more suited for progressing.

Clay Golem doesn't do enough damage, so you would have to rely heavily on your mercenary. I recommend leveling with Skellies/Explosion or Skellies/Poison, and using a token to reset your skills to Golems/Poison around level 80. At level 38,

Blackbog's Sharp is a game changer. You need Trang's in early Hell (the gloves, trophy, and one other piece for the poison bonuses).

I leveled a necro with poison only, and as ExplodeSheep reported, it is probably the worst way to level a necromancer.

However! If you are determined to do it, there are a few things that help a ton.

Trang-Oul's Claws is mandatory for the build and wearable relatively low level.

Trang-Oul's Wing is not mandatory for the build at max, with

Homunculus variants and etc, but it's really nice early on.

Make yourself a White

Wand with a +3

Poison Nova base that also has something else useful on it.

Also, for skill points, if you're going to level with

Poison Nova, go all in and dump points into the synergies. Both Bone and poison skills are highly reliant on synergies and splitting between them while leveling is going to be a drag.

For early game though, if you can get Infernal Tools set, you can use skellies to level up with just one point in them, in mages, golem, revives- so using whole summon tree as 1 point Wonder.
While doing same with curses (you'll need

Lower Resist) and

Bone Armor /

Bone Wall you should have many cheap options to handle normal. From nightmare on it should be easier if you don't rush hard.

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

I leveled a necro with poison only, and as ExplodeSheep reported, it is probably the worst way to level a necromancer.

However! If you are determined to do it, there are a few things that help a ton.

Trang-Oul's Claws is mandatory for the build and wearable relatively low level.

Trang-Oul's Wing is not mandatory for the build at max, with

Homunculus variants and etc, but it's really nice early on.

Make yourself a White

Wand with a +3

Poison Nova base that also has something else useful on it.

Also, for skill points, if you're going to level with

Poison Nova, go all in and dump points into the synergies. Both Bone and poison skills are highly reliant on synergies and splitting between them while leveling is going to be a drag.

Agree with Winter, Trang's gloves are mandatory. Trang's trophy only makes sense if you have three pieces of the set. And even then, if you don't have an army of skellies, you will really want the defensive stats of

Homunculus.

I forgot to mention I’m offliner.
Also, why is the poison thing so bad at low levels? Because of damage?
It is so crappy on lvl3. My merc does 5 times damage than that. Never happened that my merc is stronger than me.

Thinking of

Corpse Explosion combo anyway, so I might dump some there.

Infernal are only +1 skill, and I have a few set/unique necro +skillers.

So far I’m using upgrade

Gull… I can make White easy, but will probably need to find with a damn good +’er.

rikus wrote: 2 years ago

I forgot to mention I’m offliner.
Also, why is the poison thing so bad at low levels? Because of damage?

Thinking of

Corpse Explosion combo anyway, so I might dump some there.

Infernal are only +1 skill, and I have a few set/unique necro +skillers.

So far I’m using upgrade

Gull… I can make White easy, but will probably need to find with a damn good +’er.

Even offline, Trangs pieces are relatively easy to find. If you're offline and not using a higher level character to gear for you, then that is more difficult, but even then, you can get 3 piece set bonus of Trang's pieces using Nightmare (Exceptional) armor pieces if you're willing to farm for them.

Trang-Oul's Claws,

Trang-Oul's Wing,

Trang-Oul's Scales. One way or another, you'll need the gloves at some point.

As for why poison is so bad at low levels, it's simply that poison damage just doesn't scale well on its own. A lot of the Poison Necromancer's power comes from the ability to massively lower enemy resistances deep into the negatives and often to minimum -100, AoE, and

Corpse Explosion. Just looking at the base skills (so ignoring synergies), a level 30

Poison Nova on its own is only doing 420 or so damage per second. Blizzard, on the other hand, under the same synergy-less conditions with skill level 30, is doing around 1150 damage per hit. That's a big difference. Without the gear and skill points that let you push enemy res down a ton, the base damage of poison is quite bad, and it's just the way it is.

Honestly, slapping a White

Wand together with any ol'

Wand at this point would be a huge increase over a

Gull

Dagger.

I would also discourage you from putting many points into

Corpse Explosion itself at these low levels. Higher levels don't give more damage, just bigger radius and higher mana cost. And while radius is great, between +1 from Lore or

Wormskull, +1 amulet from crafted, found, Eye of Etlich, etc, +3 from White

Wand, +2 or so from necro head, depending on choice, even in leveling gear, you can have +7 to

Corpse Explosion, and with 1 hard point, that gives you a radius of 5. For leveling purposes, that's more than enough; much more than that and you're just having to fight the mana cost . I'd say points into

Poison Nova and synergies are going to get you further than a slightly larger

Corpse Explosion radius.

I see. Thanks. I actually haven’t invest on tree points to get to

Lower Resist yet.
How much is the damage add if you use

Lower Resist ? Like amp damage with phys?

As so many things, it depends on the mobs you kill.

Amp effectively drops phys res by 100% (regardless of skill level). In early stages, that means you're doubling your dmg (0 -> -100). On hell however, many mobs have up to 50% base phys res. If you compare it to that, you're going from 50% to -50% which means you're effectively tripling your damage with amp.

Lower Resist not only starts out at a far lower bonus (-31 at lvl 1, -62 at lvl 20) but it caps out lower on top of that. Even if you somehow pushed it to lvl 60, you'd still "only" get -70% out of it. Based on that alone, it is more comparable to

Decrepify than to amp in terms of the theoretical damage bonus.

There's quite a few mobs on hell which have 0 poison res still so on those, you really do "only" get say 62% more dmg (at lvl 20). Though for the ones that do have poison res, they do go up to 75 on normal mobs already in which case you're going from 75 to 13 which means you're basically doing 3.5 times your normal dmg against them.

Bottom line:
Often times, lower res is a lower comparable boost to dmg than amp is, on occasion it is actually significantly higher. Regardless of the comparison however, lower res is excellent for poison necros and something that I for one would consider a must have. After all, even in the "worst case" (i.e. 0 base res), you get a flat 62% more dmg at lvl 20. And unlike your synergies for

Poison Nova (which offer 200% extra damage each, summing together to 400%) or +dmg from facets, lower res (much like -res from facets) doesn't add to your base damage but it multiplies it. So if you get 400% from synergies for 500% of your base

Nova damage in total, a 50% lower res wouldn't give you a base 550%

Nova damage in total but 750% which is a massive boost to get from just one skill. The more +dmg you get to poison skills, the better lower res becomes because it effectively multiplies all of that (though it sums with other -res so the more of that you already have, the less relative impact lower res still has, up to theoretically 0 impact if you already push a mob to -100 res without it..but that's a bit tougher to achieve).

Ok. I think I got it.
last question is, which I haven’t considered on my build, should I invest points in lower res?

At least one, yes. Beyond that, it becomes a matter of how much +skill you already have and what else you'd

Sacrifice for it.

With higher lvls, you have a ton of skill points left over as a poison nec and can easily

Cap lower res on top of everything else.
Lower to mid levels, not so much.

I'd argue that it is always worth to at least get that 1 starting point into it to have it because that's a quick 31% boost minimum for a grand total of only 7 skill points (counting those to unlock it). Beyond that, it still scales fairly well for the first handful of points but quickly drops down to 1% per lvl or not even that anymore. Personally, while still lvling, I'd only get 1 point in it for the time being. With typical lvling gear (Spirit weap, Lore, ...) you can still fairly easily push that to lvl 5-6 with items, resulting in just under 50% dmg increase for minimal skill point investment. Would leave it at that until

Nova and synergies are all maxed out and you have your 1pt wonder golem + mastery/res and then finish up lower res after that.

The added bonus is that if you level in a group with elemental builds (i.e. literally any sorc, among others), you also buff their damage by the same nearly 50% base, quickly outscaling anything that you yourself could otherwise do.

“ The added bonus is that if you level in a group with elemental builds ”
Yeah not a viable ssf. But good to know

Oh, I kind of assumed you were using

Lower Resist already.

Yeah, absolutely, put 1 hard point into it. As Schnorki said, it makes a huge difference to your poison damage, and while leveling makes an ok bonus to

Corpse Explosion's fire damage too if you're too lazy to swap to

Amplify Damage. Which, while leveling, is generally how I am because enemies aren't that tough anyway.

I respecced, yes it does have a difference! I've put 2 just in case. still have NM and hell respecs. although on p8, some high HP mobs are slow.
also I'm clocking 318% MF! first time i ever got this high. finding uniques all over the place..so far 2 nagelrings, on 1 area(1 is 24%!)

hopefully this can continue with this gear as this really helps to gather some gear.
I'm guessing andy and Meph probably will yield good. but Meph wasn't so easy to drop for my nec.

For fighting bosses as a poison necro, it's better to rely on Merc/Revives than poison damage.

On nightmare,

Mephisto has 50 base poison resist, and while

Lower Resist will probably bring that down to 0 with a couple points in, doing 'full' damage is still pretty weak. Even with endgame gear to bring resistances below 0, poison is underwhelming vs bosses.

Given that you're not using skellies, you probably don't have a point in revives. It is a shame, because Urdars obliterate bosses with their Crushing Blow, and Merc can too with CB from easily acquired items like

Guillaume's Face, Obedience when available, and even

Hone Sundan at low levels with at least 1

Amn in it for life leach. Long story short, I did a bunch of testing on this issue with my personal necro setup and found that using

Decrepify with a geared merc and some revives out damaged

Poison Nova +

Lower Resist against all bosses in all situations.

I'm not sure if a

Wand can roll with +

Revive as an automod, but if it can, you may keep your eye out for one to save you the points.

Hey. As I’m a ssf p8 guy, I see that

Revive is unavoidable in bosses?
It takes me ages to kill with my merc and deceprify while my clay slows. Otherwise they’re all dead in seconds.

Or is there another way for poison nec?

Poison Nova necs just aren't meant to be boss killers. Their single target dps is simply too low for that. Given, they still tend to have a fairly easy time killing them..but it takes forever.

Though there are things you can do to optimize your dmg:
- Stop using decrep. The slow on bosses is entirely redundant to that of your

Clay Golem (assuming he's lvl 10 or higher). Either use amp for more of a bonus to your merc or lower res for more of a bonus to your poison instead. Which one of those is better depends on your and your merc's gear of course.

- Get rid of poison dmg on your merc. It interferes with yours for 1 frame per hit, needlessly lowering your own damage.

- Get your merc some crushing blow.

But yeah, odds are, you'll still be faster with just reviving a few Urdars instead.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

But yeah, odds are, you'll still be faster with just reviving a few Urdars instead.

haha, you write all that and then this

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Get your merc some crushing blow.

ya, Obedience is what he got.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Get rid of poison dmg on your merc. It interferes with yours for 1 frame per hit, needlessly lowering your own damage.

i didn't know it ruins it!
luckily Obedience doesn't have poison damage.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

- Stop using decrep. The slow on bosses is entirely redundant to that of your

Clay Golem (assuming he's lvl 10 or higher). Either use amp for more of a bonus to your merc or lower res for more of a bonus to your poison instead. Which one of those is better depends on your and your merc's gear of course.

well if i dont, me and them are al overwhelmed. and i'm barely on act 2 nightmare.
poison is very underwhelming to bosses. I'm past max

Nova, and points into synergies.

Try using a

Thorns merc,

Amplify Damage+

Thorns is pretty effective against bosses thanks to unit multipliers. A boss does 2x damage to a merc, which means double

Thorns damage, which is again doubled by

Amplify Damage. Bosses do 4x damage to minions (skellies, golems, and revives) so that's an even bigger boost to

Thorns damage.

Alternatively hold an Edge runeword yourself against a boss to give the team

Thorns

Primordial wrote: 2 years ago

Alternatively hold an Edge runeword yourself against a boss to give the team

Thorns

all good options. have you tried them yourself or this is just theory?