Summon build

Always enjoyed lazy summon builds - and I heard there are now two very viable: druid and necro.

I was wondering which is better in terms of clear speed - I assume still necro due to

Corpse Explosion - amp maybe

Frenzy Merc with decrep can mitigate - or is might/ Pride absolutely needed?

In terms of gear I assume you want +skills as top priority. Always read Beast as weapon but was wondering if Faith wouldn't be another option - or even hoto. Not sure how the aura compares to +skills.

Lastly do you know if sunder charms work on summons and if -resist from facets or Doom would help?

You are correct in thinking Necro has a faster clear speed with

Corpse Explosion. They can also clear the entire game naked, so none of the gear you listed is needed, but it does noticeably increase your clear speed.

Summon Necro is always my first build in this game and it's really strong. If you play mostly solo then HotO is the best, there's real need for Beast. Yo can choose any Merc with aura support here but my choice act 2 Might merc with Pride. In addition, Hustle weapon

Iron Golem adds lvl 1

Fanaticism aura. And it's really easy to teach 300 MF without compromising summon strength.

Druid is also good. Not as good as Necro regarding kill speed/MF balance but you can summon when you need and Ravens could be used as range shooting weapons. Wolfs provide cold damage. Overall I like it. You can join the fight with Beast here.

1. during the time of playing for the Necro-summoner, I realized that the benefits of IG much more than from Clay even if only because you can constantly make it from cheap Insight, even though, because you can constantly make it from cheap, which will replenish mana, and a mercenary from act 2 with an aura might give in hand, if you have a low budget - Obedience He will tear

Baal to pieces more use than just a dummy with a bunch of life that only slows down the boss that Merc kills at the same speed that he slows down by

Clay Golem.... and in this case, I didn't even throw 20 in

Golem Mastery, only 1 point to

Golem Mastery and 1 to IG
1.1. it's just that you always have a couple Insight of ready-made ones in your stash I did from Insight any 4

Scythe I didn 't bother much. Do you know how many substitutions I 've made ? none, because the golem is made of a

Scythe normal base he lived with me all the time, and died only when I did respec someone likes to make them from ethereal bases to give them a translucent style and more dmg, on the contrary, I like it in its original version.

1.2. and if you want your

Iron Golem to keep slowing down bosses like

Clay Golem make it out of

Kelpie Snare there is Slows Target By 75% (the advantage is that it slows down not only bosses but in general everyone it hits) and also necessary for Fire Resist +50% because IG is immune to poison and lighting and he is afraid only of fire and cold, especially afraid, Diablo with him

Firestorm

2. the 2nd stage I had was that I gave the measure act 2 (with might aura) Pride

3. Stage 3 I had what I picked up Beast

4. The 4th stage for me was what I did IG from Infinity I managed to buy cheap Infinity on NON-

Eth

Colossus Voulge base and in this case, I did not spend any 60 skill points as the person above wrote, but only pumped by 20 -

Golem Mastery.

Raise Skeleton - 20

Skeleton Mastery - 20

Revive - 20 ( taking into - Why so many? It's one-point wonder. Better invest these 19 points in CE. You will spend more time keeping their count maxed than playing. this can be considered as an option if you want to increase the radius of damage from the explosion of corpses from 8 yards to 14 and do not waste time calling pets again and again, in my case it does not bother me, since it is initially aimed at increasing damage for the pet army. And if we talk about the fast speed of clearing locations, then it's better to do another character altogether, but I assume that we are doing a real zoo director

Golem Mastery - 20

Summon Resist to 71 get 72 with+1 BO (its 37 without BO with BO u get 38 lvl

Summon Resist 72%) - arround 15-16 skill points
All another (rest) on - Skeletal Mage

1 hard point to:

Bone Armor - 1

Corpse Explosion - 1 (varies with

Revive) you can put 20 here,

Revive get to 1, its at your discretion player opinion
and
I use only 1 curses is

Amplify Damage - for me enough

4.1. !!! - I also think it is very important to give a mercenary

Eth

Arkaine's Valor (mb on non

Eth important is 2 skills) with 2 skill or Chains of Honor for lvl up Might aura , my merc use

Eth

Arkaine's Valor
4.1.1 next stage I give merc Bramble , my case lvl 17 , better found and trade 21
4.2. yes, in this case you have to slurp bottles of mana yourself

5. And frankly speaking, I 'm just tired of it I just wanted something new , so I started experimenting with IG And I can say for sure that back to

Clay Golem I don't want to go back, I'd rather stop at one of the above stages

My things:

1.

Crown of Ages 1 os with

Um +45 all res / the alternative

Shako
2. Enigma / the alternative any + skill
3.

Boneflame with

Um / the alternative Homonculus
4. +3 summoning skill +24 str amulet / the alternative Mara
5.

Arachnid Mesh // the alternative any
6. Marrawalk / the alternative any
7. Bul khatos ring / the alternative any
8. Soj second ring / the alternative any
9. Beast hand / the alternative HOTO

By the way, another summon Necro option is making it hybrid with Bone skills, which is actually relatively easy with White rune word on a

Wand with

Decrepify and

Revive staff-mods. My first version was pure summoner with

Amplify Damage and

Corpse Explosion with 1p on

Decrepify. Then I got bored and tried some experimental stuff and ended up with this build.

20p

Raise Skeleton
20p

Skeleton Mastery
1p

Golem Mastery,

Summon Resist,

Iron Golem,

Amplify Damage completes the summon part.

20p

Bone Wall
20p

Bone Prison
1p

Bone Armor and the rest goes into

Bone Spear.

This will provide you enough

Bone Spear damage without compromising

Skeleton strength and perfect survivability with around 1k damage absorb on

Bone Armor. You only need to take care about your

Iron Golem if you make it with an expensive weapon, but mostly it has enough tankiness.

You should also consider that this build is almost always for lower player counts.

Just to offer a contrarian viewpoint here:
Go druid.

Not because necros are bad. Far from it. But because you specifically mentioned enjoying being lazy.

Both, necro and druid are perfectly viable across the entire game nowadays, from normal through to ubers. Both have things they're better or worse at than the respective other. But druids are most certainly the more lazy option.

Ideally, either one will get an Enigma and actively telestomp. No difference there. Same goes for BO re-casting.

Beyond that though, a necro will typically manually throw curses around. Corpse explode. Re-summon far more frequently than a druid usually needs to. And you need to go through the hassle of heading for "starter corpses" every game. As far as summoners go, they're actually quite involved.

Druids on the other hand join the game, get their summons up (no corpses needed) and that's it. For most things you do, your summons will rarely (if ever) die (at higher gear lvls at least) and unlike revives, they mostly also don't naturally expire so the only re-summoning you do is the occasional

Raven re-cast after their hits are used up. Though for most things, I don't even bother with ravens on my druid. Given, they're a large chunk of summoner raw dps but between blind overwriting decrep and the re-summoning I tend to just ignore them most of the time instead. Everything works perfectly fine without 'em.
So essentially, you literally just telestomp in and lean back until everything's dead.
(Yes, there are things like 1pt

Shock Wave you can do to help your summons [defensively in that case] but they're really not needed 99.99% of the time)

I like the druid idea
Else, I found a

Death's Web - any sensibility in combining poison with summons or is poison its own thing usually?

Poison tends to be its own thing. In part because other damage conflicts with poison for the same frame, effectively blocking it. Bring enough summons and you'll have stuff get hit by one summon or another most frames, effectively blocking most of your poison damage.
On bosses at least.

With enough mobs around it isn't a big problem but at that point, poison shreds through them quick enough anyways so your summons will end up being kind of a cute gimmick on the side and that's about it.

Schnorki wrote: 10 months ago

Just to offer a contrarian viewpoint here:
Go druid.

Druids on the other hand join the game, get their summons up (no corpses needed) and that's it. For most things you do, your summons will rarely (if ever) die (at higher gear lvls at least) and unlike revives, they mostly also don't naturally expire so the only re-summoning you do is the occasional

Raven re-cast after their hits are used up. Though for most things, I don't even bother with ravens on my druid.

Was just about to write this before reading other people's comments. But yes, I do like craziness of Necro's power of friendship a lot (still have to play full summoner Necro myself tho) but for the purpose of "not doing anything yourself" the pure annoyance of corpse hunting for essentially all of the summoning is just a huge pain in the back side as I saw. When Druid showed up in LoD it instantly became my favorite character to play with, even tho I wasn't using any particular build it was more of "force of the nature" for me in choosing skills willy-nilly. #TeamDruidFTW

Schnorki wrote: 10 months ago

Poison tends to be its own thing. In part because other damage conflicts with poison for the same frame, effectively blocking it. Bring enough summons and you'll have stuff get hit by one summon or another most frames, effectively blocking most of your poison damage.
On bosses at least.

With enough mobs around it isn't a big problem but at that point, poison shreds through them quick enough anyways so your summons will end up being kind of a cute gimmick on the side and that's about it.

This is quite accurate, as Schnorki posts tend to be. I actually run my Poison Necro with a decent investment into summons and have a fun little pack of 14 skeletons, an

Iron Golem, and revives when I feel the need. Mostly, they're around for show, though there are situations where they do add something of real value (tanking vs archers, tanking for merc vs Trav, revives vs bosses, etc). Having revives also allows me to do ubers at an acceptable pace. But the whole point about their damage conflicting with poison is a real problem. I've developed a rotation of teleporting into a bunch of enemies, dropping

Poison Nova, then teleporting back out of them to prevent my pets from engaging too many in melee while the poison ticks them down to enable

Corpse Explosion. It works well enough for me, but it's far from optimal.

So, if you're looking for a passive, lazy build, then any variant of Poison Necro with summons is the last thing you want! You're micromanaging curses, corpses, minions, positioning, CTA buffs, poison uptime, switching hotkeys like mad.... it's the most 'mirco' intensive character I have by a long shot.