Tips against Stygian Doll explosion

Hi

I have a L91 Lightning Sorceress (~1.7K life with

Battle Orders up)
I can farm all hell areas with no problem (even Terrorized and in players 3-4), except when I try Durance of Hate...
In there, I have to play with "double attention" and very carefully... one single Stygian Doll explosion leave me at almost no life!!!
If two explode in a short time or I'm not at full life I end up dying...

I'm accepting any tips to survide/

Evade those pesky monsters on the way to

Mephisto...

I try to keep distance and let my Merc handle them, but sometimes they take me by surprise or my your merc kill one close to me or I kill one by mistake or as "colateral damage" (when targeting another monster...)

It is an area that I don't even like to

Teleport (more than once I endupclose to a group and was killed, probably by the explosion of one killed by my merc...)

Since the damage is physical items with physical damage reduced like

Stormshield are useful. Also to avoid their explosion while teleporting it may be good to remove your merc's weapon.

If you can get your FCR to the 105% breakpoint, you can

Teleport faster than their attacks or explosions.

Typical tactic in doll-infested area is to carry a

Stormshield instead of your usual Spirit or Phoenix.
Always keep your CtA prebuff active, and

Energy Shield, if you have it.
Never

Teleport around blindly.
Also - if you are cursed, either wait for amplify to wear off, or just quickly tele to town and remove it. Amplify is the biggest danger with dolls.

Stygian Dolls deal little damage. You just don't want to kill them when they are closed because of their explosion.
They are scary because they will run into you in no time to be killed (by you or your merc) then kill you with their explosion.

As HC player, max block and 50% damage reduction are mandatory.
For me, I swap to A5 merc to get

Sanctuary Aura that will knockback Stygian Doll and yes don't blind tele on top of them!
To get the aura, my merc uses CS Lawbringer over

Azurewrath because it has less damage and has ctc

Decrepify that helps a bit for survivability.

Might not be the solution you’re looking for, but i just avoid those areas all together. If i want to kill

Mephisto i tele straight to the lower level.

Same same with the world Stone keep, i pretty much stay clear of those areas (world Stone keep also has those gloams, so it’s a hard pass for me)

I went with maxed out

Energy Shield build on my

Nova sorc and have ~2.6k mana. Can

Teleport into a group of dolls and kill them without too much risk once you get a large enough mana pool. Still wouldn't want to take on more than 5 or so at a time, and would try to split them up a little first if possible.

Also can help to be walking, rather than running. Whatever little defense you have from

Frozen Armor may help. Jm2c

Nate2.0 wrote: 4 months ago

Might not be the solution you’re looking for, but i just avoid those areas all together. If i want to kill

Mephisto i tele straight to the lower level.

Same same with the world Stone keep, i pretty much stay clear of those areas (world Stone keep also has those gloams, so it’s a hard pass for me)

Normally I avoid there, but I want to be able to do it sometimes (when it is Terrorized)

Gloams are a pain in the ass too.. but more manageable if you keep movind and shoting.

I used to avoid them before, but after some upgrades, and a litle change in playstyle when they spawn on the level, I can handle them now.

mockingbirdreal wrote: 4 months ago

Stygian Dolls deal little damage. You just don't want to kill them when they are closed because of their explosion.
They are scary because they will run into you in no time to be killed (by you or your merc) then kill you with their explosion.

As HC player, max block and 50% damage reduction are mandatory.
For me, I swap to A5 merc to get

Sanctuary Aura that will knockback Stygian Doll and yes don't blind tele on top of them!
To get the aura, my merc uses CS Lawbringer over

Azurewrath because it has less damage and has ctc

Decrepify that helps a bit for survivability.

Lawbringer is a great ideia
but not very pratical if your default Merc is Act 2 and you are farming other areas too (my case)

atari wrote: 4 months ago

Since the damage is physical items with physical damage reduced like

Stormshield are useful. Also to avoid their explosion while teleporting it may be good to remove your merc's weapon.

Great suggestion, I'll add that you can always make a normal 4os polearm Insight that doesn't risk your merc one-shotting them. There's a lot of good suggestions from people on here, like even

Energy Shield and even if you don't want to invest points you can prebuff with like a staff or orb w/o having to hard invest 4 points. Memory staff comes to mind, I believe you can shop a normal Act II

Battle Staff with 3

Energy Shield that can/will, if using larz, with 4os. I state this because battle staffs always max a 4 socket no matter the ilvl. A freeze aura is a blessing and a curse if you tell as it's going off it "wakes" the mobs up and even if they're slower attack speed can still hit quick enough at times. It was the meta, if not still is, for Act II merc auras. I tend to use

Prayer with Insight since they synergise and more recently using Cure alongside it for reducing curses and poison along with synergizing with

Prayer again allowing you very good HP recovery through a Merc. Lastly I'll touch on curses, like someone had mentioned, amp for instance can be pretty deadly so it's worth watching for and avoiding fighting some mobs while it's active Dolls, gloams, lancers, vipers, etc. The list goes on when it comes to respecting enemies and various effects on your character.

Battle Staff - Pure socket info

Max sockets by iLvl
Max sockets iLvl 1-25: 4
Max sockets iLvl 26-40: 4
Max sockets iLvl 41+: 4

You can find this info under the item data base because some differ, take for example

Gothic Plate, which is the best, IMO, 4os chest piece you can get before NM/Hell w/o a level requirement and fairly low str req. making it ideal for 4os Ptopaz IMO. It looks like this

Max sockets by iLvl
Max sockets iLvl 1-25: 3
Max sockets iLvl 26-40: 4
Max sockets iLvl 41+: 4
This item's qLvl of 32 is higher than these iLvl ranges. Therefore it'll never spawn within the marked iLvl ranges, unless cubed to iLvl 1.

The relationships between iLvl, qLvl, and aLvl are explained here.

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

Hi

I have a L91 Lightning Sorceress (~1.7K life with

Battle Orders up)
I can farm all hell areas with no problem (even Terrorized and in players 3-4), except when I try Durance of Hate...
In there, I have to play with "double attention" and very carefully... one single Stygian Doll explosion leave me at almost no life!!!
If two explode in a short time or I'm not at full life I end up dying...

I'm accepting any tips to survide/

Evade those pesky monsters on the way to

Mephisto...

I try to keep distance and let my Merc handle them, but sometimes they take me by surprise or my your merc kill one close to me or I kill one by mistake or as "colateral damage" (when targeting another monster...)

It is an area that I don't even like to

Teleport (more than once I endupclose to a group and was killed, probably by the explosion of one killed by my merc...)

If you go down to the bottom of this page, on the section of similar pages, the Undead Stygian Doll Versus Teleporting Sorceress is talking about similar issues as yours, and check that out, you might find something useful as well.

Use physical damage reduced gear.

Shako, Enigma/CoH, Verdungos/String,

Stormshield.

Shax wrote: 4 months ago

Use physical damage reduced gear.

Shako, Enigma/CoH, Verdungos/String,

Stormshield.

(already using

Shako )

Change your merc's weapon base to normal. I guess he uses Insight, so it's not a big problem to make another one in normal base, so that he doesn't kill dolls with a single hit.

Morder07 wrote: 4 months ago

Change your merc's weapon base to normal. I guess he uses Insight, so it's not a big problem to make another one in normal base, so that he doesn't kill dolls with a single hit.

Was Insight, change to Infinity recently
A "little" harder to replace by a normal one...
And lose a lot of damage unequip it
(Cannot self use my Infinity yet -

Eth

Stygian Pike)

Subzero Blizzard sorc here, level 92,

Energy Shield plus 3K mana. It works well however I think these bloody souls are a real danger.

Cube your merc weapon while doing Durance 2, then put it back next to stairs to l3 ?

I agree with the posts on running

Energy Shield, for a lightning based sorceress this is a very economical option as you can get a lot of soft skill adds from your current or future inventory set. Its more of a uphill climb for the other two types. I run a

Nova sorc (level 97) in HC that's with no block or DR which is very high risk I know, but having the

Energy Shield Makes it manageable, and she's fairly tanky too even with souls (when not in high quantities). Its worth considering it Basic Mana charms are pretty cheap to trade for and being lightning you have more flexibility with your skill point investments. The Only things you have to watch for with ES Is Blood Mana this is a curse Harpies and

Baal Can cast which subverts your es, and having decent poison resists as this also subverts your ES.

With the blood mana curse its important to note that it is only cast when your mana pool exceeds your life total, I personally run a 50/50 split between the two (Vit and Energy) and have mana charms to stack the energy end of the equation, this way when I am running areas I know I may encounter blood mana I can stash a few of the charms to adjust the total down and it doesn't get cast so there are ways around it.

Xanhast70 wrote: 4 months ago

The Only things you have to watch for with ES Is Blood Mana this is a curse Harpies and

Baal Can cast which subverts your es, and having decent poison resists as this also subverts your ES.

With the blood mana curse its important to note that it is only cast when your mana pool exceeds your life total.

Great info, side note, items like Cure (usually on a merc) or

Death's Hand for example giving 75% PLR are a few ways to help with poison, along with poison resist doing that also, poison is one of those things that requires knowing about to understand fully... lol kind of like

Smite. These can help with

Energy Shield s poison problems or simply carrying antidotes. >.>