Which merc survives Andariel?

Tornado_OLO wrote: 21 hours ago

varangium wrote: 22 hours ago

Can you try seeing if the barb can beat

Andariel with no help from you AND with you not standing in range of

Andariel to draw the fire? That's what OP needs.

He's not asking his merc to handle

Andariel 1v1 but a merc who wont die.
I suppose he will also attack her with

Chain Lightning.

That build can easily tank

Andariel.

But I did the try.
With

Chilling Armor and

Enchant up, he can make her < 75% hp.
Without, < 50%
He needs to do more damage to leech effectively mainly because that's hard to get a nice Plague roll with a nice cleasing aura and a > 300ed.

Thanks for testing. I think the issue is his CL is extremely underpowered, so I was trying to test under the conditions of minimal help from the main character, on both offense, and on absorbing blows from her.

If he has level 30 CL and 30

Lightning Mastery with +skills, but no synergies and no negative res, his CL damage is averaging 1.075k per cast, reduced by her 66% lightning res = 365 per cast, it will take him 164 casts to kill

Andariel on his own. He doesn't have FCR on his

Helm or shield. Assuming he is still hitting the 78 fcr breakpoint, that is 13 frames per cast, or 88 seconds, it will take him 1.5 minutes of constant casting to take her down. So he can help some, but not a ton.

So i think the reason why your merc dies is this - Blizzard doesn't want people to complete the game by sitting back and letting their merc handle the bad guys for them. How they enforce this is huge boss fight merc nerfs.

Against bosses, Merc does 1/4 damage and takes 2x damage. I believe the life leech is is also nerfed down to 1/4 (on top of 1/4 damage nerf and most sources say rounded in an unfriendly way). Then you have standard hell leech nerf to 1/3 AND

Andariel drain effectiveness of 33% and physical resist of 66%. Let's say your merc does 3k damage per hit, 3 hits per second and scores a hit 60% of the time against Andy, with 20% life leech. Your effective life stolen per second is:

3k * 3 * (1-66%) * 60% * 1/4 * 20% * 1/4 * 1/3 * 33% = 2 hp per second. So you can't leach your way to survival. It is pointless vs. bosses.

And then let's say your merc has 3k hp and Andy has 60k. She does 2x 170 = 340 damage per hit to your merc @ 1 hit per second. He does 9k * (1-66%) * 60% * 1/4 = 459 hp per second. Andy will take 9 seconds to kill your merc. Your merc will take 120+ seconds to kill Andy. Factoring in your CL damage it is about 60 seconds. This is why your merc gets hosed. Most people don't notice this because they can kill Andy quickly and also they get up closer and take some or all of her blows.

There are a couple of ways around this, but it's still tricky.
1)

Life Tap. Probably the easiest and most budget way to do this.

Life Tap doesn't get all the leech nerfs, so if your merc is doing 459 hp damage per second after the boss nerfs, with lifetap you can get back 230 per second. If you then combine with DR gear like

Vampire Gaze and shaft stop, you can take her damage down to 170/sec while you get back 230. You can't combine this with gear that has procs that overwrite lifetap. Note my Andy damage calc was a very rough estimate, I don't know her exact attack speed, and she has poison attacks in addition to the melee.

2) A crushing blow approach might work, since crushing blow is not nerfed for the merc (other than the standard boss nerf that makes it 12.5%). The posted video used Infinity on the merc, which has 40% crushing blow and also

Conviction lowers enemy defense which raises the strike probability. You would still probably have to combine this with significant DR gear if you want your merc to absorb the blows (unlike in the video).

Hone Sundan gives 45% CB and is cheap, but will strike less often due to the lack of

Conviction.

By my rough calculations, a 40% crushing blow on an attack that strikes 2/3 of the time @ 3 attacks per second, combined with your CL, you would take down Andy in about 20 seconds with a 459 damage/sec merc attack when CB doesn't hit. If you have 50% DR gear (shaft + v gaze) and 3k merc life, your merc would survive for 17 seconds, so he might need a

Healing Potion or town visit, but these are approximate calculations so in practice it could be fine if you tested it. If you go guillames face instead of v gaze on top of a 40% weapon CB it should take the kill time down to 15 seconds, but also your merc will only last 12 seconds.

3) The last potential way is with severe damage reduction. Reaper's Toll +

Shaftstop + v gaze. Reaper's reduces attack speed by 50% and physical damage by 50%, so it effectively increases your mercs time by 4x (ignoring poison, but you can use antidote potions to get 85% res). So if your merc can survive 17 seconds with 50% DR gear, it should be able to survive 68 seconds with reaper's on top. Also, reap

Decrepify causes -50% physical resistance on Andy, which will boost his damage by (1-66%+50%)/(1-66%) = 2.5x. So if your merc was doing 459 damage/sec, now he is doing 1.1k / second. If you were doing 750/second, total is 1.85k/second, and you should take down Andy in 32 seconds versus your merc's 68 second survival time (once

Decrepify procs).

Finally, you could combine CB and DR and go (ideally ethereal) reaper's toll +

Shaftstop + guillames. By my loose calcs, with your setup the kill time should be 20 seconds, but your merc should last 48 seconds. But includes tons of assumptions like 3k merc life and for the first few seconds before

Decrepify procs the merc will take damage at 4x the rate. If merc is 2k life, it's 32 seconds, so should still work. My act 2 merc without

Battle Orders is about 2k I believe.

I will test these when I have time, since I'm curious.

ceving wrote: 23 hours ago

varangium wrote: 1 day ago

You don't have any of the

Chain Lightning synergies, which means your damage is weak. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense, or at least a better balance.

The main focus of the build is: accidentally teleporting into an extra strong cursed champion pack of dolls with might aura without dying.

The consequence is: she is weak, way too weak to kill anything. I know. I also know how to be stronger. On SC I have a fire sorc: one

Meteor and three fireballs and Andy is down. But that sorc is stuck at level 96. She will never reach 97, because she dies too often while teleporting. Obviously this is no option for HC.

The question is: is it still possible to master the game with a merc, which does not die? Or are mercs in general too weak to survive a boss?

I also tried

• Act 5 with full Sazabi
• Act 2 with Cure, Insight and
  Prayer

But they all die.