Am I Insane For Considering This?

Okay, here's my problem: I just recently made a poison necro for the very first time, and I'm struggling with how to setup my merc. Frankly, I don't really feel like I need one on this character, which I suppose is a good thing. It might open up some interesting possibilities. I'm using

Death's Web for my weapon, meaning I'm really not mana hungry at all, so an Insight merc seems pointless. I know some people still run Infinity for

Corpse Explosion, but I almost exclusively use

Poison Nova, so, again, that feels somewhat wasted. An act 2 merc in general seems suboptimal as the only aura that would be of any benefit to me would be

Holy Freeze for the defensize utility, but the inconsistency with when it procs is annoyingly unreliable.

So, my thought was to instead:

1) Run with an act 5 merc, and stack CB, life steal, and attack speed to help with killing bosses. Figured maybe something like Death/Grief/G-Face/Fortitude for a setup, or something like that. Only downside to this is that I know the poison necro excels the most in cows, so how useful is this really going to be? Should I maybe instead be looking for a merc that would further speed up those types of runs? Which leads me to option 2.

2) And this is the possibly crazy idea: Make a Dragon act 5 merc. The setup would be HoJ x 2 and Dragon armor. For the

Helm, I could either run a Flickering Flame in a decent barb

Helm or either g-face or

Arreat's Face socketed with a 5/5 fire facet. Before anyone says this, I realize this would be missing out on the synergies for

Holy Fire that the paladin benefits from. Doing some calcs, the damage output for both the on-hit fire damage and the fire pulses is roughly ~15% of what it would be for a Dragon paladin, not including -res from gear or

Conviction. It sounds low, but maybe it's enough that it would speed up cow runs? The

Holy Fire aura would be level 46, so it's radius would be very far, leading to enemies getting chipped down before coming within

Poison Nova range.

Is this stupid? While I do have the runes for this, it doesn't change the fact that it would be outrageously expensive, and for an unknown benefit to run times. Has anyone else felt this challenge with a poison necro? Open to other interesting merc options people have tried before.

Thanks in advance for the input!

I'd go with a

Thorns aura A2 merc +

Fire Golem (to aggro bosses, since bosses do 400% dmg against minions) with as much +skills as possible (if you really dont need mana then CoH+Andy+

Arioc's Needle -however I guess hitting with Infinity would still help more than +4skills). This would speed up your only weakness, bosses.

i too have poison necro, and i have a5 merc with Grief / Plague / Flickering Flame and Fortitude. The Plague provides the

Cleansing aura meaning less cursing. I really like it, but the Dragon A5 merc seems cool. i really like mine, he chunks through boss pretty quick.

you dissing

Prayer aura?
once my damage was high enough to fuck shit up, freeze aura was not needed and love running

Prayer aura/Insight, gonna buy Cure when I can, but

Prayer aura is comfy as fuck. 20 at

Telekinesis and I don't have to drink any pot at all, just focus on killing stuff, my merc tops me up easy.

uuee wrote: 5 days ago

I'd go with a

Thorns aura A2 merc +

Fire Golem (to aggro bosses, since bosses do 400% dmg against minions) with as much +skills as possible (if you really dont need mana then CoH+Andy+

Arioc's Needle -however I guess hitting with Infinity would still help more than +4skills). This would speed up your only weakness, bosses.

Fire Golem is really bad for PSN mancer. Every time the FG's fire aura ticks (which is quite often), poison doesn't deal any damage.

I run A1 Merc with Harmony for

Vigor aura. Makes me move much faster which is very nice since I wear Bramble myself and have no

Teleport.

My golem is an Insight

Iron Golem.

Toren wrote: 5 days ago

Okay, here's my problem: I just recently made a poison necro for the very first time, and I'm struggling with how to setup my merc. Frankly, I don't really feel like I need one on this character, which I suppose is a good thing. It might open up some interesting possibilities. I'm using

Death's Web for my weapon, meaning I'm really not mana hungry at all, so an Insight merc seems pointless. I know some people still run Infinity for

Corpse Explosion, but I almost exclusively use

Poison Nova, so, again, that feels somewhat wasted. An act 2 merc in general seems suboptimal as the only aura that would be of any benefit to me would be

Holy Freeze for the defensize utility, but the inconsistency with when it procs is annoyingly unreliable.

So, my thought was to instead:

1) Run with an act 5 merc, and stack CB, life steal, and attack speed to help with killing bosses. Figured maybe something like Death/Grief/G-Face/Fortitude for a setup, or something like that. Only downside to this is that I know the poison necro excels the most in cows, so how useful is this really going to be? Should I maybe instead be looking for a merc that would further speed up those types of runs? Which leads me to option 2.

2) And this is the possibly crazy idea: Make a Dragon act 5 merc. The setup would be HoJ x 2 and Dragon armor. For the

Helm, I could either run a Flickering Flame in a decent barb

Helm or either g-face or

Arreat's Face socketed with a 5/5 fire facet. Before anyone says this, I realize this would be missing out on the synergies for

Holy Fire that the paladin benefits from. Doing some calcs, the damage output for both the on-hit fire damage and the fire pulses is roughly ~15% of what it would be for a Dragon paladin, not including -res from gear or

Conviction. It sounds low, but maybe it's enough that it would speed up cow runs? The

Holy Fire aura would be level 46, so it's radius would be very far, leading to enemies getting chipped down before coming within

Poison Nova range.

Is this stupid? While I do have the runes for this, it doesn't change the fact that it would be outrageously expensive, and for an unknown benefit to run times. Has anyone else felt this challenge with a poison necro? Open to other interesting merc options people have tried before.

Thanks in advance for the input!

I'd advise against 2 since every tick of the fire aura removes the poison damage for this frame, which could even lead to you dealing less damage.

How about dual Plague A5 or Plague A3 instead?

vued wrote: 5 days ago

I'd advise against 2 since every tick of the fire aura removes the poison damage for this frame, which could even lead to you dealing less damage.

How about dual Plague A5 or Plague A3 instead?

Oh, seriously? I had no idea about that mechanic.

Hmm. Might need to rethink this

Not insane, no. Boss kill speeds will be kinda eh, but aside from that, you should be fine.

vued wrote: 5 days ago

I run A1 Merc with Harmony for

Vigor aura. Makes me move much faster which is very nice since I wear Bramble myself and have no

Teleport.

My golem is an Insight

Iron Golem.

Same here. But I am using Skeletons (not playing online with this char due to the skeletons reducing poison a lot).

I already tried A5 Dragon Merc. It works, but he's not a good tank and the

Holy Fire Aura isn't that strong. A3 Dragon would be another option, much better than A5 if you want to use skeletons.

I would go for:

A2/A5 with lots of CB for bosses or Act 1 (Ice or Harmony) for safety or speed.

vued wrote: 5 days ago

I'd advise against 2 since every tick of the fire aura removes the poison damage for this frame, which could even lead to you dealing less damage.

It’s worse than that. If you play online, any damage stops poison tick for 8 frames (the frame on which the damage took place plus 7 frames after).

Great discovery and write-up by Pavke:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/commen ... ?rdt=44133

tl;dr

Pavke wrote:

• 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

vued wrote: 5 days ago

I run A1 Merc with Harmony for

Vigor aura. Makes me move much faster which is very nice since I wear Bramble myself and have no

Teleport.

My golem is an Insight

Iron Golem.

but your golem is either high lvl or cheap Insight to make a new golem every 5 second when he gets pwned by lightning or whatever, I tried that and the lvl 1 golem gets raped, and I preffer having 20 lvls in

Skeleton Mage instead of boring golem with aura. I wear

Fanaticism myself xD

Going to mention something relatively crazy, but have you tried the Act 3 merc? The lightning one is quite useful due to

Static Field. Give him Spirit, Griffon's (or some other FCR

Helm) and

Skin of the Vipermagi and he can actually cause some serious damage.

It's not supposed to be part of the build and it's not meta. I just think it's a nice option to try ouy if you don't really feel you need a merc at all.

ChristianKiss wrote: 5 days ago

Going to mention something relatively crazy, but have you tried the Act 3 merc? The lightning one is quite useful due to

Static Field. Give him Spirit, Griffon's (or some other FCR

Helm) and

Skin of the Vipermagi and he can actually cause some serious damage.

It's not supposed to be part of the build and it's not meta. I just think it's a nice option to try ouy if you don't really feel you need a merc at all.

it will beat up by a5 cb x 2 ,merc. there is no scenario you will need

Static Field but cb cant do.

From my view, you will only need a very tank merc that help absorb some damage. others arua thing is not fit.

No, you are not crazy.

I recommend to adjust your target and main char equipment to become 1 hit kill all.
cow is more about kill speed. You can farm better in 1p if you can 1 hit kill than 3p that need 2 hit kill.

People usually like 2 hit kill with 30% more cow. but in reality if you

Teleport 1 hit is better in farming speed . But it is tiresome for real player that need to reopen game over and over.
Harmony merc can help but not really necessarily.

Manic Pixie Dreamgirl for some crowd control maybe?

leskito wrote: 5 days ago

Manic Pixie Dreamgirl for some crowd control maybe?

Manic Pixie Dreamgirl or Insight + Cure

Prayer merc are 2 very solid options lately I've been finding.

My impression is that the poison necro shines most in rof/tcs and his main weakness there is killing big D. If you can equip an A2 or A5 merc to fight Diablo then that sounds like a good idea but it might be worth considering whether you can stack a bunch of cb on an A1 merc who might have better survivability in that situation.