Uber Smiter training

After months of desperate farming for a

Griffon's Eye (out of luck btw), I realized I'd collected enough gear to build a smiter. So when I dropped a pair of perfect

Dracul's Grasp I decided to start.

I like to take it easy and slowly learn how to play a new class.

It's my very first melee character and I need some advice.

- Is Enigma an absolute must-have to run Ubers? I have a good Chains of Honor on my java which I can use.

- I have the runes to make a Grief, is it necessary to make it in a

Phase Blade or I can use a

Berserker Axe in case I want to go for a barb one day?

- I also have the runes to make an Exile, is it necessary for Ubers or you can do it with a

Herald Of Zakarum,

Stormshield or a good pala Spirit?

- Skills on the switch: what is the best

Key setting? I assume you need an aura always active so the switch would be

Smite/Attack on your left button, correct? (After years of

Ice Blast on the left button it's hard for me to get used to a new setting)

- What is some decent nightmare gear?

Thanks in advance for your time

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- Is Enigma an absolute must-have to run Ubers? I have a good Chains of Honor on my java which I can use.

No, it is not. In terms of battle performance, Enigma is in fact far from the ideal choice as Fortitude or on a budget even Duress outperform it significantly on ubers. It does however obviously add free

Teleport which tends to shorten the time you need for both,

Lilith and

Izual as their zones are a tad bigger. Personally, I much prefer Fortitude on a pure melee pally. Plus you do have

Charge which makes for rather fast travel, offsetting the lack of

Teleport quite a bit. CoH is a great option as well, especially if you still need the extra res.

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- I have the runes to make a Grief, is it necessary to make it in a

Phase Blade or I can use a

Berserker Axe in case I want to go for a barb one day?

Theoretically, you could make it in a BA but honestly, I wouldn't. Neither for your pally nor for a future barb. PB IAS breakpoints are far (FAR!) superior to a BA (65 to

Cap

Smite with PB, 180 with BA, not counting fana). Now, with fana, you can easily

Cap

Smite with a BA as well but you do still get an annoying repair

Bill and really not much more dmg. 0 more dmg with

Smite in fact as weapon dmg doesn't matter (only the +dmg adds in) and relatively little more dmg on a future barb as Grief has no on-weapon ED to amplify the base weapon dmg difference.

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- I also have the runes to make an Exile, is it necessary for Ubers or you can do it with a

Herald Of Zakarum,

Stormshield or a good pala Spirit?

Exile is far from necessary. You want

Life Tap, that's about it. Drac's will do. That having been said, Exile (thanks to the higher proc rate) does make it far more relaxed and pretty much eliminates those "it just won't proc! ugh!" cases that still make you pot 1-2 times every other run. Additionally, Exile ends up giving you just ridiculous overall defense, making everything so much safer yet again. Personally, I'd never build a smiter without Exile but even so, it isn't necessary by any means.

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- Skills on the switch: what is the best

Key setting? I assume you need an aura always active so the switch would be

Smite/Attack on your left button, correct? (After years of

Ice Blast on the left button it's hard for me to get used to a new setting)

Correct, right button = aura. So your active skills, you keep on the left. Since you can keybind those the same as you do on the right though, it won't really make a difference (assuming you use instant cast). The exception to that is things you can't bind on the left which will inherently temporarily drop your aura, such as

Teleport if you do get an Enigma.

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- What is some decent nightmare gear?

Whatever you find along the way. Too many viable options to list but I'd say take a look at what low/mid runewords you happen to have the mats for.

+1 to whatever Schnorki said.

In addition, I recommend to skill

Zeal in addition to

Smite (I actually only put one point into

Smite and max out

Zeal), since clearing the mobs especially on your way to

Lilith and

Izual sucks big time otherwise. There is a post here detailing a good skill setup that has worked wonders for me: post1181514.html#p1181514

I'd suggest the opposite actually, especially with Grief.

1 pt in

Zeal with a decent smiter/phys pally setup and Grief annihilates any normal mob you find along the way whereas on the ubers themselvs, for that last bit of health (after crushing drops down in efficiency), you definitely notice the difference between 1 in

Smite and 20 in

Smite.

Thanks a lot guys!

I'll be back with more questions when I am ready for Ubers

For your shield, I wouldn't bother with Exile, you already have Dracs. An upped HoZ is good but a cheap and effective setup is a high resist elite pally shield with 4 pdiamonds. That's what I use in my HC smiter. The advantage with that is that you can stack enough resist to completely overcome Meph's

Conviction without having to switch to a

Salvation aura. If you can leave your

Fanaticism up, Meph goes down that much quicker and it's one less thing you have to think about or could forget. Duress is fine for armor and I've taken down Ubers many time while forgetting to switch back out of my Treachery prebuff. Of all the expensive smiter gear you can use, I think Grief is the only one that is really worth saving for and you really do want that in a PB as others have said.

Basicly any paladin is smiter. As you could see from comments above, some suggest 1skill point into

Smite, someone else suggest to max it.

This is going to be my S3 ladder Anni runner (CB & open wounds at 108% + prevent monster heal)
https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/er0106yy
- my plan is to get only annies from S3


on NL I have fully maxed zealot/smiter for ubers (

Smite aint maxed yet). Exile is kinda overkill. And upped HoZ do more dmg than Exile.
Because I have made all the RW in same bases (PB, AP etc) Its really easy to put wrong gear on my pala. So when I didnt had much gear I was swapping it and I have killed ubers with my cta+Spirit, random

Plated Belt, Treachery, without amulet or without rings. Just based on this experience the only thing which matter is lifetap on draculs.

My recommendation is to just go any pala build and then respect at lvl 80+ to final form. Unless u power level (baalruns) since lvl 1, then u can go straight for smiter build.

With zealot/smiter. I recommend to use quick cast and bind your

Zeal and

Smite to other button than left mouse - this way your character is moving and when enemy is in range he engage. So game style is pretty much stereotype after few runs. Hold one button on keyboard/mouse and press other button if u wanna

Charge.

The Flash wrote: 1 year ago

And upped HoZ do more dmg than Exile.

Just to avoid confusion here:
Upped HoZ does the same shield dmg as any Exile built in a

Zakarum Shield. Any dmg advantage with HoZ (which is relatively small) comes solely from the skill points.

Though you can't/shouldn't view that in isolation. Using HoZ over Exile means you want your

Life Tap somewhere else, typically meaning you're using Drac's. If you're using Drac's over

Steelrend or other alternatives though, you then lose damage/crushing in the process, quite possible (very likely/for many build variations) more than offsetting the gain from the HoZ skills and actually lowering your overall dmg with HoZ.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

Just to avoid confusion here:
Upped HoZ does the same shield dmg as any Exile built in a

Zakarum Shield. Any dmg advantage with HoZ (which is relatively small) comes solely from the skill points.

yes difference in dmg is small. And yes extra dmg comes from +skills

BaldurGK wrote: 1 year ago

- What is some decent nightmare gear?

I wouldn't go the Smiter direction at all unless he's somewhere around 85 and Hell A5. Play the game skilling Hammer build and use budget gear like double Spirit et al. Respec at

Atma when you have made all relevant quests and reached an appropriate level. Leveling and questing the pally once you focus on

Smite is no fun imo. Unless, of course, you try some hybrid thingy but i havn't tried that yet.

I second the affordable option of Spirit shield. Great for getting closer to 86% FHR breakpoint, and love the extra mana. I used that for many Uber runs, until I eventually found a HoZ and was able to upgrade it to decent defense (552). I think I went thru about 10 HoZ upgrades, all rolling close to 500 def until I finally got this keeper.

Will continue looking for a good Exile base, but starting to think it'll never happen for me (and I'm too cheap to buy one for 5+

Ber). The best I've found so far after over a year of searching was an

Eth Sup

Sacred Targe with 11% ED and 12 All Res. Pathetic!! And I can't bring myself to waste

Vex

Ohm (plus a good couple rerolls trying to get lvl 16

Defiance) in a sub optimal base. Some day I will have the pleasure of experiencing Exile though, mark my words (unless D4 is truly that much better and steals me away from D2R)!!

I would personally wait for an

Eth

Vortex Shield no matter what, just the fact you can sell it much easier makes it worth it. If you can't find one just use a budget Spirit or hoz until you do, if you want to go base hunting just drop all your MF and do cows, armor stands in LK also drop bases too.

I think the real question is, how easy and/or fast do you want it to be?

I agree with @pyropy: The most essential thing gear-wise is Grief. I use HoZ, Treachery, and Drac's. Other gear to get to CB, and a

Life Tap

Wand on swap. The biggest factor is IAS for your

Smite attacks. You'll want that to be very fast, which you can get with

Phase Blade Grief, Treachery, and

Fanaticism. If you can clear

Uber Mephisto's

Charged Bolt +

Conviction, the rest is cake. gl

I have a horror story from using a Grief

Berserker Axe on a Smiter (going along with Schnorki's point).

I had a WW barb who was using axes because they're cool. I often make suboptimal decisions intentionally for personal style reasons; this was one. He had a Grief

Berserker Axe.

Well, since WW isn't very good for ubers, I decided to build a cheap smiter on a really tight budget. Instead of paying for a new Grief, I just had him use the Grief

Berserker Axe from my barb. Easy!

Then, there I am, sitting on

Uber Mephisto. The hordes of his summons are ever growing. I am watching my health drop to nearly dead each time Meph attacks, only saved by my next hit with

Life Tap up. My crushing blow chisels

Mephisto down to the point where pure damage starts to matter, and this cheap smiter does crap pure damage. But, I'm staying up and I should be good!

Then, I get the 'low durability' marker on my screen from my weapon. The

Berserker Axe is near breaking from swinging a billion times with

Smite. Suddenly, I have a decision to make. Do I try to finish Meph off and risk my weapon breaking and immediate Death? Or, do I try to escape him and his horde without getting murdered, repair, and close on him a second time?

I chose the first. My weapon broke with a sliver of Meph's health left. I instantly died. And ended up dying another 7 or 8 times trying to get my body back. While I did eventually prevail, it wasn't pretty.

Now, there's ways out of this fate without NEEDING to make a Grief in a PB necessarily, but unless you're really attached to the

Axe idea, you ought to make your life that much easier and get Grief in a

Phase Blade .

One final thought, others might disagree. Don't roll your own Grief. Since you also have the runes for Exile, and you definitely don't need Exile, my advice is to use the

Ohm to buy someone else's "bad" Grief. People will sell bad rolls for

Ohm, since anyone with a

Lo is more likely to attempt their own instead of buy a bad roll. You don't need high +dam, just IAS. Save your

Lo for a Fortitude.

[edit]
This is advice if you want to be economical. If making rune words is part of the fun for you, by all means, go for it.

Thank you everybody again for sharing your thoughts, knowledge and experience.

This is what makes this game the best of all time. There's always something to learn from the best community

I personally use a

Shael'd

Heaven's Light for my smiter weapon. I initially grabbed it as a budget option until Grief. However it does just fine and kills plenty quick with a non-upped HoZ that I no longer see the need for a Grief.
~50 DClones and a dozen Uber runs with it.

I could use some advice on making my smiter faster for ubers since I'm doing a fair number of them.

Here's my setup for

Duriel/

Izual/

Lilith:

- G-Face with

Ral (that should probably be something else)
- Enigma
-

String of Ears
- Upped hoz with pdiamond.
- Grief
- dwarf
-

Raven
- goblins
- dracs
- cta/Spirit swap
- blue 30 all res ammy
- lots of charms/anni/torch

For the ubers I switch to Duress and use tgods for meph.


The big issue is teleporting and safety during teleporting. That's where most of the speed improvement would come from. I could maybe get to the 30% FCR BP and keep most of my res good if I swapped out my ammy and hands for FCR options and went Exile at the shield. Is this the route I should be considering? Or should I be looking at circlets? Going TP

Wand?

There are a lot of options here.


Edit:
Another option which I had only just now considered is using my

Nova sorc to gather the organs. I don't know how effective she is at

Lilith killing. Dclone is not a huge issue though.

Your build seems similar to what I used when I first started. Since, I've moved away from some of those pieces and to what I feel is a very fast and smooth uber destroyer. Not trying to start the Grief/Last Wish debate, but LW is my preference. The merc is a nice to have, I don't use him half the time and it doesn't make much difference.

build: https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/224ry01f

Collecting all three organs + the uber bosses is all done in less than 5 minutes with 100% success rate. Older video in here if interested. trade/uber-service-t1361514.html

azeroti wrote: 3 months ago

Your build seems similar to what I used when I first started. Since, I've moved away from some of those pieces and to what I feel is a very fast and smooth uber destroyer. Not trying to start the Grief/Last Wish debate, but LW is my preference. The merc is a nice to have, I don't use him half the time and it doesn't make much difference.

build: https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/224ry01f

Collecting all three organs + the uber bosses is all done in less than 5 minutes with 100% success rate. Older video in here if interested. trade/uber-service-t1361514.html

That looks pretty maxed. Do you have any advice on what would improve my times the most right now? It seems like you might vote for Exile and FCR.

-------------------------

I did do the minis with my

Nova sorc. It went quite smoothly except

Duriel, who kept stunning her.