Diablo II single player questions

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There's a difference between damage bonus from elemental mastery, skills and their synergies. In this case it's all multiplicative. Mastery is the same kind of multiplicative damage boost you get from Rainbow Facets. (Fire mastery + Fire facets are additive between them, you just increase the multiplier from mastery.) Alas, Barbarian weapon masteries aren't really 'masteries' the same way, you just get off-weapon ed% out of it.

Additionally, an Enchant sorceress double-dips into Fire Mastery. First by casting Enchant on herself - at +10 skills somewhere akin 1500 damage per hit. Then ANOTHER time when whacking something with her weapon since she's using a fire skill, multiplying the damage again by the mastery percentage. This is arguably a bug, but that's how it works.

Edit: Same deal with Lightning Mastery. Although Sorceress doesn't have any lightning melee attacks, she can wear a Dream shield together with a Dream helmet for slvl 30 Holy Shock. Together with +lightning tree charms and assorted +skills gear, we're talking several TENS of thousands of damage per swing.

 

could you not pair that with a good lvl of enchant, and a the passion RW for Zeal, for plenty of AR, faster hits(zeal) and a bit of extra fire damage?

 

I should be able to test it for myself once her level's higher. I'll report the results then.

It's something I read from other forums and even a few guides. Fire Mastery is a passive skill that works on a) any +fire damage bonuses the Sorceress has, including those from weapons, gear and charms and b) her skills. As Sir Rechet pointed out if a Sorceress casts Enchant on herself, Fire Mastery works twice on it fulfilling conditions a (as she casts it) and b (as she swings her weapon).
The other masteries work similarly.
I read about those double dream builds, don't seem to be much fun though.

I plan on letting her join rush games (I stumble across a few from time to time) so she should be fully functional in a few weeks (at LvL 53). The druids' summons can be difficult to kill with maxed out Oak Sage and Dire Wolves. I don't plan on using her all the time, only when the laptop's free.
BTW it's a laptop and not a PC. We keep it on most of the time to receive messages from the other side of the globe... might as well use it when its idle.

EDIT:
I have leveled her to 32 and currently have 20 points in Warmth, 5 points in Enchant and 3 points in Fire Mastery. The rest I have used on prereqs (firebolt and fireball) and skills like Teleport. So far, the calculator has been correctly predicting my Enchant's +damage (56-80 at the moment). 3 levels ago Enchant only added 39-56+ damage without Fire Mastery. The skill is a lot stronger than I thought - Enchant's damage has been increased by around 70% and yet Fire Mastery is supposed to give only +44% bonus damage.
I'm sure it's because synergies are being included in that calculation somewhere.

 

Also, don't forget that the first point in Fire Mastery is a lot bigger of a bonus than all subsequent points. IIRC, you get +30% damage from the initial point, and either +7% or +8% from all subsequent points.

My Fury druid is still near the end of Act II, Hell. I was down for the last few days due to the flu, and just started feeling better yesterday, but there was football and the World Series to be had so I didn't play.

I probably will forego doing all of Tal Rasha's Tombs, as I have A) no desire to face off against Kaa the Soulless, and his multishot lightning enchantment and B) many of the tombs will invariably contain a combination of burning dead and ghosts. Singularly, Burning Dead and Ghosts are not much of a problem, as I have means of dealing with both of them, but this character does not do well with them in combination. I need my WB form to deal with the Ghosts, and use a combo of Shockwave and Burning Claws to dispatch them without getting mana drained. However, Burning Dead are obviously immune to fire, so I have to switch back to WW form and use Fury to kill those. It makes for some slow going when you get combo packs, although I usually take out the ghosts first, as Shockwave works just fine in stunning the Burning Dead.

I SO WANT to see the message Diablo walks the earth with this character. I am extremely confident that this is the character to take down the Diablo Clone. I have everything I could conceivably want - a massively high attack rating, life leech to keep my wolf going, and a 20% each chance of crushing blow, deadly strike, and open wounds. Combined with a slow acting small poison charm, I should be able to keep that bastard from regenerating, which is key in taking him out.

It's not that DClone's regeneration rate is that much faster than anything else you encounter in hell difficulty - it works out to about 1% of his total life returned per second - it's just that DClone's life pool is so large at 64,000, that he gets back 640 life per second. However, when a creature is under the effects of poison or open wounds, it stops the regeneration completely. It's not just the regenerating and poison/open wounds cancelling each other out - the regeneration turns off for the duration of the poison/open wounds effect. Granted, the open wounds is much more important than the poison - it's just that having the poison should guarantee that the regneration never kicks in.

I have never bested the DClone. The closest I have ever acheived is a concentrate Barbarian that basically ended in a stalemate. The barbarian had everything this character had except the ability to stop the regenerative effects of the DClone. We literally couldn't kill each other. The DClone got back his life too quickly, and my barbarian had enough life leech to keep his life build nearly entirely full. We just stood there, bashing the crap out of each other for 10 straight minutes, neither one capable of doing enough damage to take out the other.

 

And I thought everybody had gone out on extended Trick or Treat trips.
I've never met DClone. I doubt I'd want to since my builds probably won't work on him anyway. I could probably just use my bear and creeper on him while hiding in the corner, but that would take a while. Lucky shapeshifting builds.

BTW, the D2item's calculator stopped being accurate when I got Fire Mastery to level 16 and Enchant to level 6. It was off by around 10 points.

 

DClone is not particuarly deadly, provided you have the following: a decent sized life pool, a decent amount of life leech, and 75% or more lightning and fire resistance. Without those, it's pretty much suicide. But those are not the only requirements to beating him - it's just a fool's errand to try to take him out without them.

Characters with small life pools have major issues with DClone, because he has an extra ability that regular Diablo does not have - he can cast Armageddon (the same spell he had in the original Diablo if you can remember). Armageddon rains meteors all around the screen, it's area of affect, and it's unblockable. Any character can avoid the pink lightning hose of death, and that fire trail spell he casts is largely avoidable (although it hits for a ton of damage if you are at it's source, because you get hit by ALL the fire trails). But you simply cannot dodge Armageddon, and if you don't have a large life pool to take it, and life leech to get it back, you're in big trouble.

That's why sorceresses have a tough go of it - it's not because of his regeneration ability, because sorceresses can easily do more than 640 points of damage per second, simply by spamming fireballs with meteors interspersed (the burning ground also negates his regenerative abilities so long as he remains standing on that spot).

 

Finished Act II and started Act III last night, and got the Eye. Spiders absolutely suck in Hell difficulty. Even though my merc has maxed poison resistance, that poison rips right through him. There were several times I had to TP back to get the poison neutralized, because I was using like 4 FHP every time he got hit so the poison didn't kill him.

 

To deal with that poison I sometimes put antidotes on my 4th or sometimes 3rd and 4th belt slots. Shift+3 or shift+4, and poison gone. Sometimes I don't bother. I always do this when clearing the maggot lair though.

Sometimes I think monsters can actually do critical poison damage (like Radament's poison in act 2 can sometimes last longer than normal).

Can only play on weekends for now, will be a while before enchantress hits lvl 50+. Hope Enchant does 1k+ damage by then.

 

The antidotes are a far more reasonable option. I mean at 50K gp a pop to revive a merc, you can buy.... I don't even know, but a LOT of antidote potions.

---------- Added 18 hours, 36 minutes and 17 seconds later... ----------

OMG! A unique corrupted rouge spearwoman in the Pits dropped Tyrael's Might! Tyrael's f'ing Might!

OK, it's far from a perfect version - it's *only* 22% resist all, 1405 defense, and +24 to strength. However, with the -100% requirements mod, it means even though this is freakin' sacred armor, that typically comes with a 232 strength requirement, that this particular piece of armor has no strength requirement. (But does have a rather high level requirement of 84).

Having said that, this armor is not for everyone, because of the "Slain Monsters Rest in Peace" mod. That mod not only prevents things like Fallen Shamans from resurrecting minions, or Mummies from reviving undead, it also prevents any and all use of corpse skills.

So you'd never use this armor is you were a summoning necro, for example, as you'd never be able to use Raise Skeleton or Corpse Explosion.

My Fury druid really wouldn't use this armor, as it prevents the vine from getting corpses to eat.

Barbs cannot use their find potion/item skills.

And paladins that rely on the defesive aura Redemption (the one that "redeems" fallen enemies bodies for life and mana) would not work either. I have personally never been a big fan of redemption, because I simply find it too unreliable. Typically, when you are in a situation where you need a life boost, you need it NOW, and Redepmtion usually takes a few seconds after you activate it for it to take effect. (And obviously, when you switch to Redemption during a fight you lose the benefits of whatever offensive aura you were previously using.

Still, that leaves Assassins, Amazons, and Sorceresses that have absolutely no need to have bodies lying around, and all characters have at least some builds that would find this armor very useful. The only downside is that you have to wait forever to use it. With a level 84 character requirement, you cannot really build a character around this piece of equipment. You'll need something else that works (I don't know - maybe an upped Goldskin) that you could transition from once you get to level 84.

 

Upped GOLDSKIN? That'd be rather.. backwards considering your ultimate armor has no STR req. Maybe an unupgraded Viper's or something like that, unless your other pieces of equipment have exceptionally high STR requirements themselves.

 

Upped to an exceptional, not an elite version. The exceptional, IIRC, has a strength requirement of a very doable 140.

While I did not directly state as much in my previous post, I'm assuming that a melee character would most benefit from the armor. So my thinking was, since you're getting resistances on your end-game armor that you'd probably look for something with resistances in the lead-up to your end-game armor that still provided decent defense. Upon further review, Duriel's Shell was probably a better solution, even though you get better resistances from Goldskin.

Actually, I may have an idea for this armor. I have two sets of Titan's Revenge lying around. I could use this armor for a javazon. I would probably go with Skins of the Vampermagi as my armor of choice - that's probably a better option than Duriel's due to better resistances and lower level requirement. For a helm, I have Valkyrie's Wing and since that has a strength requirement of 115, I probably wouldn't want to go crazy with a shield. Maybe something fairly basic like the runeword Sanctuary in a hyperion. That's a stength requirement of IIRC, 113, which is perfect.

 

Wanna try throwing weapons?

 

I forgot you even had an Enigma and a Mara's lying around. Right there is a TON of +skill points. You're getting Enchant from a Demon Limb? The only thing I would recommend with that is to keep the Demon Limb in your stash, and use it just before you leave town. You're much better off keeping two echoing weapons on your switch than keeping a Demon Limb as one of them, especially since Demon Limb casts Level 23 Enchant, which lists for a good 10 minutes.

Actually Demon Limb isn't a bad choice for a weapon, although I know you have already pretty much decided on using a two-handed weapon at this point.

The only time I ever considered a throwing mastery for a barbarian (and I still have the weapon) is when I found a set of the unique elite version of throwing daggers. I cannot think of the name, but I still have them stashed somewhere. They come with the mod "replenishes quantity" so the fact that they are ethereal doesn't even matter. The throw damage on them is something like 500 points of damage.

 

What were the Maul options again? A 2Xshael IK Crusher is a pretty solid choice.

 

Holy strength requirements Batman! Given your other options, the IK Stone Crusher is probably the weakest of your options. At the very least, it is inferior to the Windhammer, which happens to be the only other option on your list (with the exception of Baranar's Star) capable of hitting the last WW breakpoint (LWWBP). You need a total of -70 on maul-type weapons to get to the LWWBP, and since Windhammer comes with -60 on it, a Shael or a +15% IAS jewel with some other nice mod on it would get you to the LWWBP. So more damage and same speed as IK Stone Crusher, so we can cross the IK Crusher off the list of options - well technically the IK Crusher may be better versus demons because it comes with +200% damage versus demons, and all the act bosses are demons so you may consider the IK Stone Crusher on Switch versus act bosses. (I do need to stress that the IK Stone Crusher with a completed IK set - I had a completed set long ago - is simply the most damaging weapon in the game as it deals six damage types.)

Of the remaining choices, the other one I would cross off is Earth Shifter. Anything with a chance to cast mod doesn't work with WW (although crushing blow, critical/deadly strike DO work with WW). You obviously also won't benefit from the +elemental druid skills on the Earth Shifter. Since the damage on Earth Shifter and The Cranium Basher are approximately equal, and the Cranium Basher comes with a very nice +25% resist all, The Cranium Basher is the superior choice between those two. There is one point against this choice however: a shael will not get you to the LWWBP - next to last, so not bad, but not quite as fast as Windhammer. You need -20 IAS to get to the next to LWWBP, on both the Cranium Basher and Earth Shifter, so you would need a shael - a 15% IAS jewel won't do you any good.

Which brings us to the upped Bloodtree Stump. An upped Bloodtree Stump should get you up to nearly identical damage that you get on a Windhammer, so more than the IK Stone Crusher, but less than Earth Shifter and Cranium Basher. It gives +5 to mace mastery, and would also give +2 to all other masteries, including Natural Resistance, which combined with the +20 resist all on the weapon itself, will give you a very nice boost to your resistances. However, Bloodtree Stump comes with NO IAS. So not only is the LWWBP of -70 out of the question, you cannot even hit the next to LWWBP at -40. This is a major strike against it; +5 mace mastery is nice, but there is no way the added damage from that is going to make up for your much slower whirl speed.

So taking all of this info into account I would say your best choice is Windhammer, provided you don't need to utilize your weapon slot for resistances. If you do need the resistances, I'd take The Cranium Basher next, as the base damage is SO high, and it has a lot more CB, so you may be able to make up for the slightly slower whirling speeds compared to Windhammer. Windhammer also will require slightly less strength (225 versus 253 with Cranium Basher). I'd also consider keeping a 2Xsheal IK maul on switch for act bosses.

Finally, combining Baranar's Star with Stormshield may be a viable means of dealing with physical immunes. I'm not sure if the elemental damage on Baranar's will be enough though - you may be better off using your primary weapon with Berserk. The elemental damage on Baranar's is nice, but not huge, and given that your dexterity is at base, you're not going have much of blocking percentage. I'm not sure which option is better here - you may have to play test it to determine for yourself.