Summons for Poison Necro

I'm considering making a Poisonmancer as my next char.

With 60 skill points in poison I'm thinking about what to do with the remaining ~40 points.

I will mainly run cows and want to maximize kill speed.

For this, I'm planning on using Bramble (i.e. no

Teleport) with frw equipment. I'm even considering using a Harmony A1 Merc for

Vigor aura. Zoom-Zoom!

While planning my build, I found this guide about poison damage. Quite interesting!
https://maxroll.gg/d2/resources/poison-damage

I concluded that some standard recommendations are not viable for my build but I am not sure. Please share your opinions on the following thoughts.

The fact that poison damage is ignored in frames in which other damage is applied lead me to not go for skellies and/or revives. I don't think I will need body protection so I doubt they will positively effect my kill speed.

I will not go use

Clay Golem because I won't go for bosses.
I believe cow king will drop quickly against psnnova and CE.

My 2 favorite options are

Fire Golem (yes, I dare to!) and Insight

Iron Golem. I would love to make an Harmony

Iron Golem but afaik this is not possible. If there is way, please let me know.

Fire Golem has one big plus. It will be the ultimate cow magnate thanks to his aura. But the aura also inflicts damage every 25 frames (is this correct?), which discards the psn damage, resulting in effective 4% damage reduction of my psn

Nova. Not cool!

So...

Iron Golem vs

Fire Golem? I know standard is iron, does anyone have any love for the little fire chap?

Next up: How to allocate skills?
Some guides recommend putting extra points into

Iron Golem for the def. 35 added def does not sound like any value to me. Am I wrong?
Some guides recommend adding point to

Blood Golem for synergy.

Golem Mastery adds more life, right? So adding points in

Blood Golem is waste, isn't it?

Are any other golem synergies worth it?

If not, I would just add more points into CE for more range.

I welcome every opinion, esp. those that don't follow the standard recommendations.

Do you plan playing solo? If so,

Poison Nova is strong enough on its own, especially when geared towards poison damage (TO gloves, TO belt, TO shield, bramble, deaths web).

You may consider using minions as I do. Works like a charm!

If you want to play online, don't use skeletons, go the CE-route and get an Enigma and a levelled Insight golem. You will run into mana problems spamming maxed CE without this. Put 1 point into revives if you want some minions here and then. Go for an Infinity act 2 merc, this will push CE damage and helps killing bosses.

Fire Golem aura ticks once every 50 frames, you won't notice much of that.

Golem synergies are not worth it, generally speaking, except

Golem Mastery for

Iron Golem health increase.

I am using Bramble as armor for maximizing poison damage, Najs staff on swap for occasional teleport, 1 pt

Blood Golem (Clay for bosses), maxed skeletons, 1 pt to CE for clearing choke points, remaining into

Skeleton Mastery. Act 3 fire merc with Plague, FF, eth Monarch Spirit and Vipers. But I am playing solo 99% and didn't want to go the boring meta route. I just cast one or two poison novas, and every white mob on the screen is dead.

Corpse Explosion

Trang-Oul's Claws

Trang-Oul's Girth

Trang-Oul's Wing
Bramble

Death's Web

Naj's Puzzler

Plague

Skin of the Vipermagi
Spirit
Flickering Flame

vued wrote: 3 days ago

The fact that poison damage is ignored in frames in which other damage is applied lead me to not go for skellies and/or revives.

If you're playing online, it's actually worse than that. When playing online, any damage from any source will stop the poison tick for 8 frames. Yes, you read that right. So, any hit from a summon or your merc will stop the poison damage tick for 8 frames.

Pavke made a great post about this on Reddit, where he deep dived into monster regen (and by extension, poison damage) and tested it thoroughly:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/commen ... _life_for/

There is a big difference between Online and Offline Monster Life Regeneration!

• Offline: doing any damage stops Monster Life regeneration for 1 frame
• Online: doing any damage stops Monster Life regeneration for 8 frames
• Online: doing any damage at the rate of 8fpa will completely stop Monster Life regeneration
• This difference can enable some Uber kills Online while being impossible to do Offline
• This difference is present in all Online game modes, D2R and D2LOD
• Offline: doing any damage stops Poison Damage for 1 frame
• Online: doing any damage stops Poison Damage for 8 frames
• Online: doing any damage at the rate of 8fpa will fully stop friendly Poison Damage

tl;dr
If you want to maximize poison damage, consider not using any summons at all. Though, in the end, I'm not sure what is actually better in the grand scheme of things. The summon damage might not be amazing (unless you're a summoner with all the summon-buffing auras, of course), but it's also not exactly neglibible, so your mileage may vary if you compare playing with and without summons. Summons serve as distractions/tanks too.

I highly recommend the Insight

Iron Golem and

Golem Mastery. I've been using it and it's great. I also went with Obedience and might for my a2 merc for bosses.

For cows though

Nova and ce will be plenty,

Golem Mastery is my personal recommendation

Also, i stopped using Trang 3 piece set. It felt like overkill for cows.
I have a really solid deaths web and I went with arach mesh, 35 Spirit, Trang glove to get to the 75 fcr breakpoint and it feels REALLY good.

ShadowHeart wrote: 3 days ago

If you're playing online, it's actually worse than that. When playing online, any damage from any source will stop the poison tick for 8 frames. Yes, you read that right. So, any hit from a summon or your merc will stop the poison damage tick for 8 frames.

Holy moly! No

Fire Golem then. He would steal 32% of my damage!

Spectie wrote: 3 days ago

I highly recommend the Insight

Iron Golem and

Golem Mastery. I've been using it and it's great. I also went with Obedience and might for my a2 merc for bosses.

For cows though

Nova and ce will be plenty,

Golem Mastery is my personal recommendation

Thanks for the tip! I have an unused great Obedience lacking around somewhere.
How many (hard) points does your

Iron Golem have? 20 in

Golem Mastery are well spend, right?

Spectie wrote: 3 days ago

Also, i stopped using Trang 3 piece set. It felt like overkill for cows.
I have a really solid deaths web and I went with arach mesh, 35 Spirit, Trang glove to get to the 75 fcr breakpoint and it feels REALLY good.

I'm was considering such a build, too.
What are you using for cnbf? Or are you using

Teleport/Enigma and don't care?

How important is fcr for

Poison Nova? I try to balance fcr and frw for maximum clearing speed.

From someone that only played Summon Necro, but is thinking in respec to poison...
My guess is that fcr is not too important if you don't use

Teleport (or if you think that your

Teleport speed is already ok), as faster cast do not directly increase you

Poison Nova damage

vued wrote: 3 days ago

How important is fcr for

Poison Nova? I try to balance fcr and frw for maximum clearing speed.

I'm using Enigma, but fcr helps with lower res, then psn

Nova, then the corpse explosions. It's more impactful than you think.

It's obviously the most noticeable on

Teleport, but doing the lowest res,

Nova, amp, ce rotation goes much faster at that 75 fcr breakpoint in my experience

It's easy to try both and see what you like.
Bramble and deaths web should be PLENTY of negative poison.