Beating Diablo with Poison Necro

I've just reached the find Diablo quest on normal with my Dagger/ Nova necro and due to the relative squishiness of him I'm having doubts. I beat him no problem with my lightning javazon, it was over so quickly that I didn't get a chance to see what his attacks are like.

So are there any known strats for beating D with a poison necro? I'm only level 30 so I only have 1 hard point and 1 bonus point in Nova. But his resistances are all high so I wonder how effective Nova would be; like maybe running rings around him casting Nova and spamming mana potions? I have 11 hard points in Dagger but that's futile and there are no corpses to explode.

So I think that means the last possible way is to use Iron Maiden + golem, is that the way to do it? I haven't invested many points, just 5 to Clay Golem and 1 into mastery and Summon Resist. Does that mean I am screwed?

Anyways, any help with my situation would be greatly appreciated and thank you for reading.

Even at max gear on hell difficulty, Poison Necro struggles against bosses unless he's using summons and revives and a good merc. I know that at your level, that's not much of an option, I'm just throwing it out there for context.

However, Iron Maiden and Clay Golem is an ok strategy. On normal difficulty, the relationship between Diablo's reflected damage and health aren't as bad as they are on Nightmare and Hell. Thorns aura would help that too, if you can throw together an Edge. The bow would be useful later, since it has vendor discount on it.

Running around and using Poison Nova probably would work eventually, but boy what a fight that would be!

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

Even at max gear on hell difficulty, Poison Necro struggles against bosses unless he's using summons and revives and a good merc. I know that at your level, that's not much of an option, I'm just throwing it out there for context.

However, Iron Maiden and Clay Golem is an ok strategy. On normal difficulty, the relationship between Diablo's reflected damage and health aren't as bad as they are on Nightmare and Hell. Thorns aura would help that too, if you can throw together an Edge. The bow would be useful later, since it has vendor discount on it.

Running around and using Poison Nova probably would work eventually, but boy what a fight that would be!

Thanks for the tips.

Actually, for any necro, Normal Diablo is probably one of the toughest fights : he easily kills skellies, is resistant, rather fast when he moves and his attacks hit hard.

Comparatively Nightmare is way easier as your guy is muc tougher. If you have one point in revives, it can be nice too as these guys are quite tanky.

Poison necros really aren't built to kill bosses.
They certainly can..but it takes quite a while, thanks to the fairly low actual DPS of Poison Nova (despite the rather high dmg per cast).

With that out of the way, a general approach to making diablo rather easy on any ranged/timed attacker is to just run around him in circles. Or rather stutterstep in circles. If you simply run away from him after he chases you down, he won't really be able to ever melee you and will instead cycle through his ranged attacks. The lightning you can simply stay ahead of by running in a circle around diablo. The fire 'cone' is even easier to avoid as you only have to take a few steps to the side. The only thing that will regularly hit you is the Ring of Fire which at that level probably hits you hard enough to have to use a pot after each one or at least every other one. You can Dodge that by ducking behind bits of architecture but if you're the only one there, his positioning may make that annoying (or..more annoying than just potting through at least).
Beyond that, just re-cast Poison Nova on him every 2 secs so it doesn't fall off and wait.

Alternatively, an ezmode approach as a necro is to use Clay Golem and Decrepify. Somewhat annoying for a poison necro because no lower res means even less DPS but combining Clay Golem slow and Decrepify is enough to effectively break diablo, making his various attacks take so long that he never actually finishes them and merely keeps aborting. Very rarely he might still sneak a ring through or a tiny shortened version of the lightning attack but that's usually it. Pretty much 0 risk at that point. Just re-cast Nova every 2 secs, refresh decrep before it drops off, done.
(Actually not sure off the top of my head what the needed Clay Golem level is for that, seeing how the slow scales with lvl...at higher lvl and some skill gear, 1 pt in Clay Golem is more than enough to get there. At lower level without any skill gear it may need a couple more.)