The Grim Reaper (Meleemancer using Grim's Burning Dead) if

The Grim Reaper (Meleemancer using Grim's Burning Dead)

Hello everyone. I'm just going to present this build to you and hopefully you can give me some good advice. This is basicly a Meleemancer. I will play him in HC when i get the equipment i need.

Anyway, here we go.

The Grim Reaper
Skills:
Dim Vision: 16
Attract: 8
Decrepify: 10

Bone Armor: 1
Bone Wall: 20
Bone Prison: 20

Clay Golem: 5+
Golem Mastery: 1+
Summon Resist: 1

Total: 91+

Equipment:
I don't have all of these items yet but this is what i think i can get in a future not too far away.

Treachery or Duress
Guillaume's Face (Don't know how to socket this one)
2xNagelrings
Metalgrid
Gore Rider
Crafted gloves with CB, i hope to get 20 IAS aswell.
T-gods or String of ears
Grim's Burning Dead (Perhaps i should upgrade this? And what should i socket it with?)

I will probably get some "survival" gear aswell (Rockstopper, res-rings and amu etc.) to switch when i need them.

What do you think about the skill and equipment i have choosen? Perhaps i have made a bad decision somewhere? All opinions are welcome.

 

I have a Reaper planned as well, he will have hells army following him though :badteeth:

You could go for Laying of Hands as your gloves, nifty ED bonus versus demons and the very small amount of CB on crafted gloves doesn't matter much since you'll be attacking at 2 APS at the absolute maximum.

You might also want to swap the nagelrings for a Raven Frost and something else if you can get your hands on it.

Grim's socket depends on what breakpoint you're after, if you don't need the Shael to hit the breakpoint you're after you could go for 'Amn', or if your AR is really crappy 'Eth' (Making the reduction 75%) or a plain ED jewel.

 

You'll get lots of style points for using the Grim Reaper, but I think not so many experience points. I think that you'll really struggle to kill anything much past NM unless you invest points into Corpse Explosion and use that. Good luck though - I hope it works.

 

I was just thinking last night before I fell asleep about how I'd like to make a meleemancer using the Grim's Burning Dead weapon. You stole my idea you idea theaf!

Actually it was interesting reading your plans as I never got much past the fact that I wanted to use that weapon.

I don't have any of the gear yet not even a Burning Dead so I wont be starting it any time soon. Let me know how it goes as I'm deffinetly going to try it sometime soon.

Necro's don't get much life per point in Vitality and no blocking with a 2 handed weapon will make for huge style points if you were to Guardian one of these.

-hps

 

HP_Sauce: Muhahaha, all your thoughts are belong to me!

Seriously though, i wont start this char any time soon. I still need alot of the gear but hopefully i will be able to do some runs with my Blizzballer (lvl 26 right now) and Wind Druid (lvl 82).

I also got a few other interesting chars in mind so the gear i find will dictate what char i will start next. Examples includes a Crossbow Necro, Enchant Zealot Sorc (using passion runeword), Rangerdin.

Yiuman:
Stylepoints is the main reason to why im planning to play this char :thumbsup:

I have however thought alot about CE. First i thought that i should loose Dim Vision and go with CE instead. But then i thought that Dim Vision will be a very important curse when it comes to ranged attackers, and i need all the crowd control i can get. Defensive spells are more important then offensive since i have no block and low life. Unfortunetly you need 16 points for it to work in Hell but i think it will be worth it.

Since my mana pool will be very small i won't be able to spam CE anyway so 1 point +skills will be enough i think.

Im not overly optimistic about clearing Hell but it will be alot of fun to try.

Corrupted:
Great advice, thats exactly the kind of opinions i seek. Those gloves never crossed my mind but you are right, those are probably alot better.

When i typed Nagelrings i actually meant Ravenfrost, it was just a temporary mind slip :grin:

Two ravenfrosts will give me nice AR but perhaps i will only need one. The problem is ofcourse that necros have no skill that will give them AR... I could also go with Angelic Amu+ring and a ravenfrost if i cant find a metalgrid and 2x ravens.

 

I have a Rangerdin on the go right now, he's only level 25 but killing well so far. I made a Kuku wielding enchantress on b.net a while ago. Her damage was phenominal until Hell when everything was fire resistand.

I really want to make a Lower Resist using Necro. I was thinking 20 in LR and then maxing mages but mages suck, so I donno what to do. I also can't find anywhere that tells me how much damage mages actually do.

MF'ing is so boring and I do it so rarely that by the time I find the gear I've forgotten about the builds. doh!

anyway, on topic.

Personly I think I'd go with the Tgods belt simply because there will be enough stuff to worry about so not having to worry about gloams would be swell, especially since bone wall and bone prison wont do squat for gloams.

I suppose the key to the build would be deviding. Split the pack up with bone wall, trap a few more with bone prison and then you have 24 seconds to fight 1 or 2 safely.

Again, bone wall and bone prison wont help much against ranged baddies so yes, Dim Vision will be quite important imho.

I'd love to keep talking bit I have to go to class now.

-hps

 

Hmm...Does Poison Dagger still add a passive, hidden bonus to AR no matter what type of weapon you're using?

 

Ah, i had forgot about that bug. Im not 100% it still works in 1.11 though. I would loose some stylepoints though... It is however something interesting to discuss. I will try to dig up some information.

HP_Sauce:
What kind of ranger are you building? Im thinking of using Holy Fire+Holy Freeze. I got a Kuku right now and hope to find a Wizendraw to use with Holy Freeze.

Im thinking of dividing the skills like this:
Holy Freeze: 20
Holy Fire: 20
Resist Fire: 20
Resist Cold: 20
Salvation: Rest (probably around 10)
Vigor: 1

And you are correct about that strategy, dividing packs and trying to kill them one by one will be the way to go. It will be slow but i dont mind as long as it is challenging in a fun way.

 

My 2c on the build as outlined above:

With Attract + Dim Vision + Bone Wall + Bone Prison that is a lot of defence.

You may find that you only end up using one of either Attract or Dim Vision, but not both of them. (Attract will allegedly take care of the ranged attacker problem)

I have an Iron Maiden necro going with a similar set of skills, except that I've maxed out Iron Maiden, and dropped Dim Vision. It works quite well... Normal Baal can bludgeon himself to death on my gumbies before the Amp runs out.

In order to have some 'breathing room' to slap down the various mind control curses (typically Attract, but even the level 1 Confusion has its occassional use past level 24) and Iron Maiden everyone else, I will sometimes slap down a Bone Wall between myself and the monster pack.

A point to note is that Attract works much like Bone Wall and Confusion as far as bringing in lots of other monsters, so I often find myself casting it a couple of times to 'lock down' the new arrivals, and that can be expensive on the mana. Also your merc may whack over the Attracted monster, so it pays to have more than one out at a time.

Casting order is Attract first, then Iron Maiden.

http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/necromancer-summoning.shtml#skeletalmage

That section has three tables, the second and third tables tell you the 'relative skill level' and damage per element for a particular 'relative skill level'.

Pros and Cons:
Mages are stronger in Normal and Nightmare, but weaker in Hell, because Hell solves most of the AI problems with Skellies, and monsters get big elemental resistance boosts.

Mages are much safer to play with in Hardcore. People who say that Mages require much defence to tank for them have not played Mages properly.

Skellies work with Amp (generally considered the best curse), the might merc, and there are very few Physical Immune monsters.

 

Very interesting points rickcarson. Perhaps the attract+iron maiden route is a better one. It does indeed sound more fun and wil speed up the kiling a bit. Another possibility is to use those 16 points from DV in CE but i think that IM gives more stylepoints.

 

Thank you rickcarson for posting that very easy to find link that was infact so obvious I never even bothered to look there. Sadly it appears things are worse even then I had imagined but I still might try.

I like the Iron Maiden idea except that it means that you the necro wont really be killing as much by yourself but rather the monsters will be killing themselves.

I don't like the CE idea simply because it seems like all necro's use CE and I don't really wanna make another CE'ing necro.

-hps

 

I believe Necrochild proved well enough that it no longer works in 1.10/1.11.

 

It may not even have worked in 1.09, so you might have to go back as far as 1.08 (1.07 -> unpatched LoD?) to get it to work...

The result of the testing was that even though it may have added a big chunk of AR to your Character Display (aka Lying Character Screen), that AR appeared to have no actual effect on your chances to hit.

People assumed it worked because the LCS told them it did... but noone had checked it out.

-----

As for the link to the battle.net table of mage damage, I did my own testing, and it turned out that even though the numbers suggest that Poison mages do so little damage per second that they shouldn't be able to kill in Hell, in practice they can. So what is going on there I don't know. Maybe someone fixed their damage, or there is some discussion about poison where a chunk of the overall damage is applied up front in the first frame or something like that.