Long hiatus...coming back.

[Mordeeth]

Long hiatus...coming back.

Greetings...

I have not played D2 in almost 3 years, and the call of the Neco is too powerful to resist. However, I need to ask some questions before I get started again.

I really want to avoid duped/hacked items. Are the ladders free of stuff that people hacked, or duped? If yes I would presume that the ladders are alot harder, or at this point is the present season mature enough that established player's have legit gear?

As far as character choice...welp I have always been fond of the Necromancer. So Necromancer it is! I been leaning towards the fishymancer since it can be played naked...so more MF to build wealth and outfit other Necromancer builds that I have always wanted to play. Are fishymancers effective in 8 player games?

Should I play in the current ladder or not? On one hand it should be cheater-free, right? On the other hand it might be alot harder since people aren't messing around with duped Zods or other high level runes and such?

 

[Jolokia]

I currently play ladder and I haven't seen any of the 'Iths' that were everywhere some years ago. That's not to say that hacked items do not exist - although I haven't seen any I guess they do exist.

There are a lot of duped runes, so you'll have to look quite hard to find legit high-runeword items. No one is forcing you to trade these runes though. There's also something special about making your rune word with self found runes :smiley:

Yup, fishymancers are great for start building wealth. Personally I don't find them effective in 8 player games - corpse explosion doesn't scale well and the skelly damage just doesn't seem to cut it. Bosses are no problem though, thanks to a healthy amount of crushing blow on your merc.

On players 1-3 (or so) fishies absolutely destroy everything in their path.

Good luck getting back!

 

[Ed from Russia]

Welcome back!

A Fishymancer is a great choice to start. They are great for solo PvM play and MF-ing. But many people don't like having them in multiplayer games because (1) they believe your minions cause a lag and (2) your skellies get in the way. (1) is only true for people with bad computers. (2) is a personal preference. I always like having a skellymancer around when I play a ranged character, but they can be useless when I play a hard-hitting melee character (because I kill much faster than all skellies combined).

Still, use these multiplayer games to level quickly. In Baal games I normally cast 3-5 skellies so they don't disturb anyone but still keep me safe.

 

[NumtyDoo]

I think for building wealth with a necro, and going semi-untwinked, the fishy is the way to go. I think the poisonmancer and bonemancer are both very item dependent. Poisonmancers need lots of -enemy resist to poison to be effective, and boners need +skills and lots of +to mana.

I agree with one of the above posts that an untwinked fishy is only good for a game with 3 other players or less. A fully twinked fishy on the other hand still kills great in an 8 player game. My fishy can insta-kill anything with a tele-stomp, so he can match up damage wise from a good melee character (I believe when I last checked the pet calculator my skellies with auras were doing 1450 each, double that with amp, and you get 2900 per skellie times 17 skellies and you get like 25k damage per second from warriors, and 9k per second from mages (assuming all fire/light mages and infinity on merc) and then you still need to figure in 20 revives and a merc. So as you can see, with twinking this build becomes insane). And having an infinity on merc and using amp helps with the scaling issue of corpse explosion.

These damages can be accomplished with great gear on other builds as well, but my favorite part about the fishy is if you get caught in a notorious bnet 10-20 second lag spike, your summons protect you and keep on fighting, when the lag ends, everything is dead and you are safe.

 

[tigercan]

Numty: Keep in mind that the OP mentioned that he doesn't want to use any duped runes/runewords, so Enigma for the "telestomp" and Infinity are probably both out of the question, although a teleport amulet would certainly still be viable

Mordeeth: If you really want to avoid dupes, hacks etc I'd highly recommend sticking to single player. We have a very active SP forum here and many of us play together in TCP/IP games so you still have that multiplayer action.
There is also a trades forum which is strongly policed and seems to be dupe free.
Another bonus is that the people you MP with from the SPF are a lot more mature than 90% of the people you typically find on b-net (OMG WTF no nigma! n00b lololololzzz!!!!oneone!!!)

Good choice on the fishy too.

 

[NumtyDoo]

You are correct. However, I did mention that I thought it was the most viable of the builds untwinked. Was just saying that if he chose to twink, it is still a very viable build. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

This build is still possible without dupes though, the only item that I traded for on my necro was the infinity on merc, and a bul kathos ring. Everything else was found or made by uprading runes. It did require me swapping out items between characters alot though. One character for pgems and two for runes, then trade 40 pgems for more runes, upgrade the runes, do this for a a few months and you get high enough runes to build what you want. I basically never threw away a single rune. Traded alot of skillers and socketables that I didn't want for runes too.

I do agree with you on the lack of maturity on bnet though. If your not a cookie cutter, your an "OMG noob". Only downside to single player (correct me if I am wrong) is that some of the items, recipes, runewords, and upgrades are not available outside of ladder.

 

[tigercan]

Oh, I'm fully aware of the power of the fishymancer untwinked. In fact, I Guardianed one myself not too long ago, with very minimal gear (+3 summoning circlet, +2 necro wand, Lidless Wall were the only items of note)

 

[illestkhmai]

You are correct. However, I did mention that I thought it was the most viable of the builds untwinked. Was just saying that if he chose to twink, it is still a very viable build. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

This build is still possible without dupes though, the only item that I traded for on my necro was the infinity on merc, and a bul kathos ring. Everything else was found or made by uprading runes. It did require me swapping out items between characters alot though. One character for pgems and two for runes, then trade 40 pgems for more runes, upgrade the runes, do this for a a few months and you get high enough runes to build what you want. I basically never threw away a single rune. Traded alot of skillers and socketables that I didn't want for runes too.

I do agree with you on the lack of maturity on bnet though. If your not a cookie cutter, your an "OMG noob". Only downside to single player (correct me if I am wrong) is that some of the items, recipes, runewords, and upgrades are not available outside of ladder.

Those runewords can be accessed through the RWM(runewordmod). Widely accepted by the SPF.

 

[maiku]

Greetings...

I have not played D2 in almost 3 years, and the call of the Neco is too powerful to resist. However, I need to ask some questions before I get started again.

I really want to avoid duped/hacked items. Are the ladders free of stuff that people hacked, or duped? If yes I would presume that the ladders are alot harder, or at this point is the present season mature enough that established player's have legit gear?

Unfortunately the ladder does have lots of duped gear and runes. To avoid these, be wary around HRs which people are trading or selling for cheap (like pgems or more common mid runes like Pul to Um), and be *very* careful if trading for high-end items like SoJs, Mara's, etc. Dupes have a tendency to poof at some point. There is no such thing as perm, temp perm, or perma perm. It's duper talk. You can assume that most flawed high-end items like 20-29 Mara's, Torches, and low-mid Anni's are legitimate, because people hunt for, horde, and trade these regularly. There's a large supply of them on the realms. If you find any nice items like SoJs, HoZs, etc, I suggest keeping them. Legit SoJs, Mara's, etc. are hard to come by. Cube your own HRs or find them (possible, I found two Ists, have gotten some nice Hellforges recently after months of terrible luck and poverty), trade for lower runes, and maybe set your sights a little lower than having a fully twinked character with "Infinity," "Enigma," "Bramble," "Exile," etc. To make one or two pieces of high-end equipment is pretty good already, considering a lot of people never find HRs and have to resort to dupes to twink themselves good.

Actually, I make most of my wealth through trading off socketables, perfect gems, jewels, and the occasional nice uniques I find. I usually convert these into low-mid runes and cube up gradually. I don't actively hunt for keys or do insane numbers of MF/rune runs. I found these are counterproductive for my time and playstyle, and probably would make me go nuts because I'd feel like a robot rather than a gamer.

As far as character choice...welp I have always been fond of the Necromancer. So Necromancer it is! I been leaning towards the fishymancer since it can be played naked...so more MF to build wealth and outfit other Necromancer builds that I have always wanted to play. Are fishymancers effective in 8 player games?

Fishymancer is great for loading up on MF. My Fishymancer is running with about 350% MF right now and has found me some neat stuff. Unfortunately, not so effective in 8-player games unless you're twinked twinked. I suggest running solo MF games or ones with a small number of friends.

Should I play in the current ladder or not? On one hand it should be cheater-free, right? On the other hand it might be alot harder since people aren't messing around with duped Zods or other high level runes and such?

Go ahead and play on ladder. It's a blast. I do. A lot of the people suck, but you can find good people who'll become friends and buddies to game with. Happened quickly for me, and I still game with a lot of the guys I met several months ago.

But unless you're willing to go with HRs en masse, might have to go with more reasonable expectations. So don't expect to have every Zealot twinked with a "Grief" or "Last Wish" and "Exile" or the latest "required" rune word mentioned in a guide for some "gg char." There's something really nice about characters who are always progressing and upgrading equipment rather than having the best equipment immediately and quickly losing interest in them. Have fun. This is what has kept me playing for several months, rather than burning out. There always seems to be some new twist or rock to turn over with a new char build, new rune word, or some strange idea I get in my head.