Necro summoner Tips

[Excalibur]

Hey guys,

I am currently building a Necro Summoner. He can either be a very boring character or a very fun one to play with. Personally, I enjoy seeing all those minions taking down everything... I have a few questions! I am 78 level and I have maxed Skeleton Mastery and Raise Skeleton. I am left with 39 skill points to spend. Where would you suggest in putting them?

Revive is definitely not an option
Skeleton Mages are not benefited neither by the amplify nor by the damage auras so they are quite useless
Golem Mastery and Summon resist have extremely bad diminishing returns
Glay Golem is already nearly invincible so any further points will not show any difference
Corpse explosion is not that good on p8 and I hesitate to spend points
Amplify damage is quite fine with one point and the +skills

What would you suggest the hireling to be? Mostly supportive (Pride?) or a high damager?

I was thinking of making bramble to the hireling for the thorns aura. With so many minions it should cause some severe damage or is it useless on hell?

Thanks!

Now that's an army...

 

[Drystan]

Whatever you do with the final lot of points is entirely up to you. You will get multiple positive responses for different skills. The simple fact is, you don't need them, so anything will be a bonus.

Option 1: My favourite: Dim Vision - HC perspective, it nullifies almost every enemy, before they even get a chance to attack. It removes the danger from piercing attacks, and I have Guardianed a couple of necros based almost entirely around Dim Vision alone.
While an amazing safety skill, it's not really required unless you're HC or really don't want any deaths.

Option 2: Corpse Explosion - You say that it's not effective on /pl8. Well, neither are skeletons. They still add damage though. What do you want the build for? Area running, re-spec later to a poisonmancer to run areas, try complete the game entirely at /pl8, or just defeat Baal? If you want to do Hell entirely at /pl8, it'll be very slow regardless. There is no need to run at /pl8, as you could easily defeat all of Hell right now, at level 78. Corpse Explosion causes a lot of damage, and is well worth the points, if you consider /pl8 unrequired.

Option 3: Bone Armour - Not as effective at protection than Dim Vision or other Curses, but still pretty fun. Novelty - you don't need the spare skill points, right?

Option 4: Mages! Who doesn't want extra skeles! Novelty.

Option 5: Golem, or anything you want - You don't need the skillpoints. You could already finish Hell. What do you want out of the character in the final stages? Do you want to respec, or take him to a certain higher level?

Option 6: Lower Resist? Do you want to MP with him, and be party friendly? Playing with a Conviction zealot? Or other skills to help party members?

Thorns is effectively useless on Hell. Monsters have much higher hit points, and their damage is comparatively low. They may do some damage to themselves, but compared to their total life, it's basically negligable.

Edit: On the moron, he/she is basically to boost skele damage. He can get a few kills, but boosting an army of skeles with Might, Concentration and/or Fanatiscism is too good to pass up.

 

[japanzaman]

Pride is by far and away the most effective weapon I can think of for summoner merc, though Faith can also be an interesting choice. If you can pump your skeles into the lvl 40 range, Beast is also an interesting weapon for your character. I'm also pretty sure thorns would be pretty ineffective on P8, so you'd probably be better by using some armor that just keeps your merc alive.

Skills are up to you. Most people opt for corpse explosion, though +skills tend to be good enough for me. You could also think about dropping points into bone armor/bone wall/prison for added protection. If you don't have any other use for them, then why the heck not?

 

[Cyrax]

Hi Ex,

Here's what i've done with my summoner:

Max skellies + mastery
Max CE
1 pt revive
1 pt amp
1 pt decrep
1pt bone armor + ~10 pts in bone wall (better returns then putting points straight into the armor) -> This makes sure i can take the accidental hit without getting in real danger, even if it's from a p8 minion of destruction.
Max golem mastery
Remaining pts can either go into the golem that adds life (blood golem) or more armor. Both aren't really neccesary, but still nice to have.

I switched golems from clay to iron. Made that one out of insight to get the mana regenerating aura. This makes sure i can CE all day long. And with so many points in mastery and some in the blood golem he doesn't die. If his life goes down below halfway it's because there's like 4 or 5 minions beating on him at once, usually with nasty mods. Still it takes good time to go down, so you have plenty of time to reposition with teleing or going back to town for a quick healing. (only needed like once every 100 or 200 runs or so)
Only way to lose him would be if i didn't tele around so he can get stuck and simply vanish. But since i tele everywhere that doesn't happen.

Merc is wearing infinity. This helps with CE damage for me. And also the aura lets both the merc and the skellies hit more often, so they do more damage. Other gear is guillaume's face for more CB (also on the infinity!) helps vs big hp bosses like Baal. And forti, which doesn't really need explaining i think.
Biggest problem for merc is the poison from wave 2. Usually there's plenty of potions on the floor to remedy that (either life or antidotes). Only other problem is bad positioning from him at the last wave at Baals. This is fixed by teleporting to reposition.

Another good merc option would be BotD. Tried this and if you do Baalruns, but skip Baal it's actually faster then infinity. With all the leech his survivability is higher then with infinity. Problem vs Baal is BotD doesn't have CB, which infinity has lots of and you really notice that. So no Baal -> BotD, Baal -> Infinity.

Mind you that the merc is doing most of the killing. Skellies are nice meatshields and do decent damage, but a decked out merc like mine is the real killer. Combine that with the bodies he drops which i CE. CE does pretty decent damage when a conviction aura is around. Only when things are FI, then it slows down a bit (like minions of destruction).

The 1 pt in revive is for the 3rd wave at Baal. When they have those hydras up you normally have to wait till they're gone before the next wave spawns. If you can revive the councils that spawned that last hydra(s), the hydras no longer need to disappear. This means you get the 4th wave to spawn faster.
Doesn't always work, since half the time the one that spawned the hydra was CE'd, but it can still save a decent amount of time given enough runs.

During running i only use amp. As you already stated 1 pt with +skills is more then enough. The 1 pt in decrep is to keep Baal in place. It's enough, even without the additional slowing of the clay golem.

Mages are fun, but effectively don't add much to the build. They might've if it was possible to have to active curses. But since you'll be using amp anyway, there's no room for lower resist. LR might be an option if you MP as Drystan pointed out.

I hope i didn't forget anything important. If you have any other questions, just let us know.

Edit: Seems like i did forget something. When clearing the throne, you do this at p1. Which is where CE really comes in handy. Clears full thronerooms in no time.
And it prevents wave 1 and 2 from resurrecting.

 

[Darkthrone]

For my summoner I only put points into skeletons, but I was purposefully aiming to have an (only) all-skeleton army (besides the obligatory clay golem). I only put a couple points into corpse explosion for fun. At level 82 he's maxed raise skeleton, raise skeletal mage, and skeleton mastery, and I've dumped a bunch of points into summon resist, until I think the diminishing returns started to hit. With all my gear and charms I hit level 39 raise skeleton and level 37 raise skeletal mage. The mages are more for fun than anything, but cold mages can be helpful. They do die quicker than the regular skeletons, but you should have no shortage of corpses on the ground to create more.

I don't even have any points in bone armor or bone wall or anything like that. Yeah sometimes I get hit, but it's rare, usually from something that has a pierce attack, like gloams or the bone spears from salamanders, but that's it; otherwise the skeletons form a nice death wall, and with the might aura from my mercenary and amplify damage, they are quite good killers. I currently have 6 points sitting there doing nothing, but I am happy with the build. I guess I could put them into bone armor or something. Or maybe the rest into summon resist. I don't have any kind of teleporting but I'm okay with that. With respeccing it's not that big of a deal if you want to change your distribution.

 

[pharaoh]

Max CE. Do it. Do it now. The benefit of more skills here is a linear increase in radius, which means each point adds successively greater area. This means you can do longer CE chains, where you cast CE, produce new corpses as a result, and repeat. I don't understand the "but it doesn't kill as well on /p8" argument against CE. News flash: no player attack, besides Static Field, scales with higher /players settings. If this is an indictment of CE, it's also an indictment of almost every other damaging skill. Take an average frenzytaur, with approximately 14k average life (depends on exactly what type). Now with CE doing 70-120% of that (average 95%), that's an average of over 13k damage, per cast. That's before Amp, Decrepify, Conviction, or Lower Resist. It's also split between two damage types. Show me another skill in the game that can deal 6.5k+ physical and 6.5k+ fire to everything over the entire screen, and possibly beyond, through walls, and with no chance of missing. Once again, this is before any debuffs. That's frickin' huge, and if that's not enough, there's no cooldown timer. You got corpses, you can pop 'em.

Other than that, I'd consider a point in Bone Armor plus some in Bone Wall/Bone Prison for the synergy. Do this if you're still getting hit by physical ranged attacks, and find it bothersome. Remember that javelins from spear cats pierce, so your army isn't a shield. If your curses (Amp especially) are low radius/duration, you might consider more points here, just so you don't need to spam it as much to cover an area (you can spam CE instead this way). I also like a point in Lower Resist (especially great if you ever play MP) and mages. Do mages benefit from the core build? Not really. However, they are helpful as an early warning system since they'll sometimes scatter to the screen edges and shoot at stuff you can't see. This also means they will draw melee enemies in closer, within range of your CE or attention radius of your regular skellies. I also like the fact that they don't timeout like revives do, meaning less micromanagement of your army. Of course, the #1 benefit to mages is more meat shields.

Really, once you have RS, SM, and CE maxed, and one or more points in each of Amp, Decrepify, and Summon Resist, it's pretty hard to screw the build up. Place those points wherever you like.

 

[Fabian]

You should always do what you find fun etc, and trying out novelty skills can certainly be part of that, but CE is one of the strongest skills in the game apart from the truly broken ones (Teleport, Find Item), and if you want a strong Necromancer, CE is going to be part of that.

 

[Excalibur]

Hey guys,

Thanks for all the tips. I read all of your suggestions and I can already see pretty much everyone saying that anything apart from Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery is a bonus. I guess I will decide once I complete hell on where to spend the rest of the skill points. Merc just seems to be quite expensive...

I don't understand the "but it doesn't kill as well on /p8" argument against CE. News flash: no player attack, besides Static Field, scales with higher /players settings. If this is an indictment of CE, it's also an indictment of almost every other damaging skill. Take an average frenzytaur, with approximately 14k average life (depends on exactly what type). Now with CE doing 70-120% of that (average 95%), that's an average of over 13k damage, per cast. That's before Amp, Decrepify, Conviction, or Lower Resist. It's also split between two damage types. Show me another skill in the game that can deal 6.5k+ physical and 6.5k+ fire to everything over the entire screen, and possibly beyond, through walls, and with no chance of missing. Once again, this is before any debuffs. That's frickin' huge, and if that's not enough, there's no cooldown timer. You got corpses, you can pop 'em.

What I meant is that CE is simply powerful on P1 where one corpse is enough for the rest to come down. On P8 you need like 4 corpses before they start dying.

Thank you everyone for your advice.

 

[Drystan]

So out of curiousity, what is his post-game plan? Do you want to keep running something with him, or retirement? Skelemancers/Fishymancers with enigma are decent area runners, as you can telestomp bosses and have the (merc)+(10+skeles) all stacked with Amp Damage.

Mercs can always get away with budget gear, but really shine if you can deck them out with high end runewords and setups. Having a merc also boost the damages of numerous skeles is a great bonus too. I do like skelemancers, but as said above, I love Dim Vision and blinding entire screens before they have a chance to even know where I am. ^.^ It's a more safety/HC crowd control than pure damage setup, so if you want to go area running, not the right option.

Good luck and have fun for the rest of Hell!

 

[Excalibur]

Well, I usually just "create" characters. Out of all the chars I have only few have a specific goal. This Necro is just like you said for retirement once he completes hell.

I really try to avoid Enigma as much as I can on my builds but a necro summoner definitely needs one. It certainly helps a lot with those dumbasses getting stuck everywhere but mostly helps with the revives so they won't disappear when you are far away from them. The teleport trick near the boss is also quite handy!

Thank you mate!

 

[Darkthrone]

The only issue I had with my army in terms of control was if I was running for a very long time sometimes the skeletons would disappear (like if I was running through the Barracks). Some would teleport to me, but others would just disappear. With something like Enigma that wouldn't be a problem, but I didn't find it that detrimental. When I ran into new enemies, my current army was enough to take them down and I could just replenish my army.

If you're looking for a very cheap method of wrangling your army, throw down a town portal and go through it. It's the ultimate cheap man's teleport for manoeuvring skeletons and other hirelings.

 

[Excalibur]

Yeah I was using the portal trick but it can be very tiring thing to do mostly because you can't re-enter the portal immediately. I had a circlet with teleport charges that came quite handy until i borrowed my amazon's mf enigma.

 

[Darkthrone]

Definitely agree that it's tiresome, which is why I never bothered; I let some of them disappear and then just made new ones.

 

[Excalibur]

I just finished him and returned the enigma back to my main character so I guess if I want to spend some time with him I will be doing the portal trick! I don't really like moving items all the time from char to char!

 

[wakiki]

I've been running Baal with a Necromancer who is now level ** and here are my thoughts:

1) Revive is a GREAT 1-point wonder. First of all, it allows you to get supertanks for your army. If you are up against an ugly physical immune succubus pack your skeletons will start to crumble. Now let's say you have 7 (+6 skills is very easily achieved; you will probably have more) revives to supplement your army 10 skeleton + merc + golem army. Now the monsters will be attacking 19 targets instead of 12...in other words, it'll cut your damage by 33%! Very useful. And these monsters are infinite tanks; they will not be killed by other monsters, only by the timer expiring or you leaving them behind.

Second, it has that use on the third wave. I find that I can skip the Hydra-waiting about half of the time.

Third, it can keep you safer. I like to revive skeleton mages and other ranged beasts so I can stand near them when CE'ing. That way if you get ambushed by Undead Flayers or something, you have tanks standing near you.

Fourth, it's just so much fun to see how monsters act when they are in your army! It's one of the coolest, most unusual skills in the game so you should just get it to play around with, not just because it's useful. You'll have fun learning what monsters are good to revive and what aren't.

So do yourself a favor and put 1 point into it. It's just too useful and fun. Not any more than that though.

2) I also like 1 point in Lower Resist. Those physical immune succubi were annoying me; CE doesn't damage them much with amp, and it took a while for my army to take them out. I decided to try 1 point in Lower Resist just to see if it was worth it, and respec back if it wasn't. It turns out that it's TOTALLY worth it. With Amp, it would take like 6 or 7 CEs to kill the succubi; but with Lower Resist, it's 2 or 3! It also gives you more tactics to think about so that's fun. (I.e. "I'll amp some nearby Flayers, then once they die LR the succubi and CE away.")

3) Here's what you should do with CE: add one point at a time and see how much more useful it is. If you like it, add another point. If you ever think to yourself "I didn't need to add that" then stop.

That's what I did with CE. It is now maxed and I'm never, ever going back to a 10-point CE. Now I can blast monsters from one pack with nearby corpses from another pack. It's just awesome.

4) If you are HC, split your remaining points between Dim Vision and Golem Mastery. If you are SC, just max Golem Mastery. DV is incredibly useful but you want your Iron Golems to survive as long as they can later.

5) Enigma is great, but you don't NEED it. I shopped a teleport staff from Drognan in NM and have been happily using it ever since. He actually sells these staffs often; I've never had trouble getting one. They repair cheaper than Spellsteal I think.

tl;dr: Get 1 point revive; 1 point Lower Resist (which means 1 point in every curse); max CE; remaining points go into Dim Vision and Golem Mastery; shop a tele staff from NM Drognan unless you are using Enigma.

 

[pharphis]

I think if you have an army you really don't need to max golem mastery. My insight golem lasts reasonably long during p8 nihlathak runs, and my golem mastery has ~10 points in it + some @skills. I only have merc and golem and it's a nasty area of the game, so I don't think it's necessary for a fishymancer at all.

What do revives have to do with the hydra wait time?

 

[wakiki]

The Council Members that Baal summons. If you revive the Council Members, often you don't have to wait until the Hydras go away. They still fire at you but Baal starts cackling right after you revive them. This works best if you have some leftover corpses from Achmel's pack. (It seems like if you kill everything super fast Baal doesn't remove the corpses.)

It's also really cool to have a bunch of Council Members summoning Hydras against Baal.

 

[pharphis]

I didn't know about that.

and ya, when you clear everything at the same moment (CE) he often leaves corpses

 

[Cyrax]

I didn't know about that.

Posted earlier in this very thread:

The 1 pt in revive is for the 3rd wave at Baal. When they have those hydras up you normally have to wait till they're gone before the next wave spawns. If you can revive the councils that spawned that last hydra(s), the hydras no longer need to disappear. This means you get the 4th wave to spawn faster.
Doesn't always work, since half the time the one that spawned the hydra was CE'd, but it can still save a decent amount of time given enough runs.

So much for posting useful information. If nobody is even gonna read it. :whistling:

 

[wakiki]

Actually Cyrax, I learned it from you in this very thread, and thanks! I was just adding the detail that the hydras stay and still fire on you but Baal starts cackling. Your post was not in vain good sir.