First day of Necromancer

[Djuntas]

D2 doesnt have that fixed idea of comparisons...

with a lvl60 poison nova everything dies as fast as with CE. matter of fact, in straight halls everything across a few screens dies.

Nah it doesn't quite Poison nova was never good compared to CE. Again I am talking end-game min-maxing here, not "oh it dies fast enough"...I mean boom, move on dead Diablo 3 speed style.

In Diablo 2 to have necromancer close to as fast as some sorc builds, javazon they rely on CE for every build, and its a bit bored...Kinda hoping Necromancer in D3 wont, but at least you can just blow up corpses or w/e, and dont haft to worry about needing corpses yourself.

[Vespian]

Nah it doesn't quite Poison nova was never good compared to DE. Again I am talking end-game min-maxing here, not "oh it dies fast enough"...I mean boom, move on dead Diablo 3 speed style.

In Diablo 2 to have necromancer close to as fast as some sorc builds, javazon they rely on CE for every build, and its a bit bored...Kinda hoping Necromancer in D3 wont, but at least you can just blow up corpses or w/e, and dont haft to worry about needing corpses yourself.

Dude, I've played D2 for as long as I can remember. I've created every build and invented a few, well, they didn't exist on the internet when I made them. There was no GRXX, there was just Hell endgame and at some point, if you built your char correctly, everything melted period. Yeah, my Poison Mancer could just walk, walk and walk, the only thing that took time was waiting for the next round of spawns in the Baal Throne room. In fact, due to the existence of curses, immunities were completely irrelevant, in contrary to playing with a Javazon against lightning immunities. Of course CE was great, but you're pretending there was min/maxing in D2. There's nothing to min/max for. You only cleared bosses with Sorcs and as I said, rooms melt with any class, any build, if you play them right.

Excuse me, replace Sorc with Hammerdin. I forgot most people had duped shit.

[Deleted]

Got to T7-8 and GR 45 ish with Pest set but as much as I do enjoy the build I have come up with it feels really really squishy.

Need to reroll some bits for the other sets as I got every other sets boots 4 times over trying to get the pest ones but oh well.

[Endus]

Got to T7-8 and GR 45 ish with Pest set but as much as I do enjoy the build I have come up with it feels really really squishy.

Need to reroll some bits for the other sets as I got every other sets boots 4 times over trying to get the pest ones but oh well.

Pestilence's DR is a bit low.

With the Pestilence set, you need to spam bone spears constantly, and hit 25 enemies to cap it out at 50%. And it decays after 15s. So it can take a couple seconds to get up, and you need to keep moving or it'll fall off.

Rathma's, you've got your minions capping you out at 50% DR as well, but if you have minions, it's constantly refreshing. Dead simple and low-risk, compared to Pestilence.

Inarius is even better; it's natively a 50% DR for hitting 10 enemies with Bone Armor (which is easy). To make it better, there's an amulet that you can get/cube that bumps Bone Armor stacks by 5; since it's currently at 10, that's a 50% bump, providing 75% DR. And Bone Armor is on a 10s CD, does buckets of damage in a big AoE with the set, and lasts 60s between refreshes.

Trag'oul's is a whole different kettle of fish, and as fun as it looks, I'm not touching it on hardcore.

Other than that, remember you'll likely want to gear for toughness. I'm cubing an Aquila's Cuirass since my build has me above 90% resource basically all the time, for 50% DR there, I'm using Dayntee's Binding and Decrepify curse for another 50%, Compass Rose/Traveler's Pledge set for more (not TOTALLY convinced it's optimal, but it's what everyone's running and I don't have anything to swap it to yet), plus the Ancient Parthan Defenders bracer with a stun-heavy build. Also using Stand Alone as a passive for 100% more armor. Checking my stats, I'm sitting at 92.5 million toughness in town. I'm farming T13 easy, clearing Grift 70 (and pushing higher). Also, like I said, playing hardcore, so I'm being over-cautious if anything, so this is me comfortable and safely farming, not "I can usually get to the end okay".

[Deleted]

I'm having a blast so far, although I don't know if it's just the items I have access to, but the Inarius set seems to be very powerful compared to the other sets, I was very interested in the pestilence set but so far I am not able to push as far in GR as I can with Inarius. Don't get me wrong, inarius is a fun play style and I'm enjoying my time with it, but I do hope one of the other sets will become comparably powerful with some more items.

Which set is closest to Inarius atm? it seems like Rathma's to me, but I suppose that would change with a couple of legs, I haven't taken the time to look at every legendary available to necromancer.

[Djuntas]

Dude, I've played D2 for as long as I can remember. I've created every build and invented a few, well, they didn't exist on the internet when I made them. There was no GRXX, there was just Hell endgame and at some point, if you built your char correctly, everything melted period. Yeah, my Poison Mancer could just walk, walk and walk, the only thing that took time was waiting for the next round of spawns in the Baal Throne room. In fact, due to the existence of curses, immunities were completely irrelevant, in contrary to playing with a Javazon against lightning immunities. Of course CE was great, but you're pretending there was min/maxing in D2. There's nothing to min/max for. You only cleared bosses with Sorcs and as I said, rooms melt with any class, any build, if you play them right.

Excuse me, replace Sorc with Hammerdin. I forgot most people had duped shit.

We have different ways of looking at end-game Necromancer is very slow without CE compared to the fastest builds such as 200 FCR nova sorc, javazon. With CE they start to creep up there, especially on higher player games - Anyway it doesn't matter, we have different opinions as I usually do even on my channel :P

[Vespian]

We have different ways of looking at end-game Necromancer is very slow without CE compared to the fastest builds such as 200 FCR nova sorc, javazon. With CE they start to creep up there, especially on higher player games - Anyway it doesn't matter, we have different opinions as I usually do even on my channel :P

I guess youre the nr1.ladder kind of guy? otherwise its..pointless...

Actually, why I disagree with the whole thing is this:
You have somehow created your own context for Diablo II. The game is not about what you make it out to be, though you're free to play it any way of course, but in your mind, if a certain box isn't ticked, the build is not viable. And instead of accepting that that's your way of playing, you come here and claim that ' non-CE builds' are non-existent or not viable. But that only goes for the only one that plays DII the way you play it, namely you. Diablo II, especially after LoD, allows for a great amount of very viable builds with which various different playstyles can succeed. The only two competitions that are in the game are PvP and Ladder and if either of those is what the game is to you, then God Bless, but don't pretend that your way of playing is the only way of playing.

That said, I still don't understand how 'instantly melt' with Poison Nova is any different from 'instantly melt' with CE, I'd even say the latter has a disadvantage requiring a corpse, but if you think your CE is even more instantly than instantly, good for you.

[Endus]

I'm having a blast so far, although I don't know if it's just the items I have access to, but the Inarius set seems to be very powerful compared to the other sets, I was very interested in the pestilence set but so far I am not able to push as far in GR as I can with Inarius. Don't get me wrong, inarius is a fun play style and I'm enjoying my time with it, but I do hope one of the other sets will become comparably powerful with some more items.

Which set is closest to Inarius atm? it seems like Rathma's to me, but I suppose that would change with a couple of legs, I haven't taken the time to look at every legendary available to necromancer.

Rathma's, I think, though there's some Trag builds on Diablofans that do well.

Just lost my own necro at GR72 due to some bad overextension/overconfidence. So there goes my Inarius set and a nice Ancient shadowhook. At this point, if I restart, it'll probably be to do something else completely for a change, or I may wait for the next season. I've got 6 pieces of each other set in my stash as it is.

[Djuntas]

I guess youre the nr1.ladder kind of guy? otherwise its..pointless...

Actually, why I disagree with the whole thing is this:
You have somehow created your own context for Diablo II. The game is not about what you make it out to be, though you're free to play it any way of course, but in your mind, if a certain box isn't ticked, the build is not viable. And instead of accepting that that's your way of playing, you come here and claim that ' non-CE builds' are non-existent or not viable. But that only goes for the only one that plays DII the way you play it, namely you. Diablo II, especially after LoD, allows for a great amount of very viable builds with which various different playstyles can succeed. The only two competitions that are in the game are PvP and Ladder and if either of those is what the game is to you, then God Bless, but don't pretend that your way of playing is the only way of playing.

That said, I still don't understand how 'instantly melt' with Poison Nova is any different from 'instantly melt' with CE, I'd even say the latter has a disadvantage requiring a corpse, but if you think your CE is even more instantly than instantly, good for you.

See this is what is so good about Diablo 2: So many ways to play the game, I think I need to do a video on that some day, cause it creates alot of hostility when there does not need to be one. We all play Diablo (2) for different reasons; Some like offline, self-found, others like doing trading as the game itself...Im inbetween, I like making builds, gearing them up, that hole process, which also means I do trading a lot

Anywho, largely I say CE is needed due to the necromancer falling behind the stronger builds without it...Im more end-game focused in my POV, but for others it can work just fine!

[glowpipe]

I tried playing it day one. Got to lvl 50 ish before i logged off. Haven't touched it since. Will try season when its out, but not having high hopes.

And what the fuck is the deal with challenge rifts ? I did it first try, got the reward, what is the point of doing it again ? I don't care about the timer. Should give reward every time and a better weekly bonus. Atm its nothing but a waste of time

[Deleted]

Once again it seems like people are letting some silly nostalgia cloud their memory of D2 where you supposedly used every ability constantly and it was totally optimal to do so and yadda yadda.

No, that's literally how it worked in D2, at least summonmancer builds. It's hardly nostalgia when I last played D2 this year.
You had a lot of abilities to use since you could just put 1 point into curses, corpse explosion and so on and +skill gear got them to a good level.

[Vespian]

Anywho, largely I say CE is needed due to the necromancer falling behind the stronger builds without it...Im more end-game focused in my POV, but for others it can work just fine!

But we still haven't completely clarified what your endgame exactly is, since apparently, it's different from everyone else's.

[Vespian]

Which you "can" do in any ARPG, but it's likely not optimal by any means.

I suspect a lot of the issues that people have between D2 and today's ARPGs is that in D2 as kids they likely farmed Nightmare Baal or something where you could go in with your skills and gear just all over the place like crazy and it was fine because nothing mattered. Now they see GR's and feel a need to be more "optimal" and "meta" and think that somehow the core game is hugely different because of how "limited" the game is.

The difference is that with infinite scaling difficulty, the highest difficulty becomes the one where the most optimal of optimal builds perform reasonably leaving everything else out. D2 had no such issue, leaving endgame open to basically any class and any build. Some more optimal, some not so much, but all of them were at least capable of clearing 'the highest difficulty'. Do I think that this artificial increase in difficulty has led to a limited game? Most certainly.

And for the record; Kids perform far better in games than adults do. Just saying

[Deleted]

Which you "can" do in any ARPG, but it's likely not optimal by any means.

I suspect a lot of the issues that people have between D2 and today's ARPGs is that in D2 as kids they likely farmed Nightmare Baal or something where you could go in with your skills and gear just all over the place like crazy and it was fine because nothing mattered. Now they see GR's and feel a need to be more "optimal" and "meta" and think that somehow the core game is hugely different because of how "limited" the game is.

Did you even play Diablo 2? Like at all? You keep spewing bullshit while you clearly don't know how D2 necro worked.
It was optimal to only put 1 skill into several curses, corpse exp, etc because they barely scaled, or scaling was meaningless over 10+ skill which you would get from gear anyway.
In Diablo 3 no one will ever take more than 1 curse, which really limits utility/fun compared to D2 where you could afford to use 3-4 curses depending on the situation.

[Vespian]

That's what I'm saying. The games aren't really fundamentally different, and there wasn't all this "variety" all over the place in D2. The difficulty just capped out extremely low. You COULD play D3 at some low torment level and play just like you did in D2, just doing whatever you want.

i get the feeling, that were discussing an existential matter and we will have to agree to disagree. It seems the D3 developers are equally confused, to come with this abomination of an endgame. They are far from similar and more importantly, far from fun.

[Nutri]

Was able to find a Rathma set together with the weapon and shield.
Having a lot of fun with it! Still looking for the double skeletal mage ring, but this set is already doing quite nicely.

Definitely sparked the D3 flame again, will play a lot more the coming weeks. For me it was worth the €15,-. (even bought the PS4 Eternal Collection to couch potato next season as well).

[Djuntas]

But we still haven't completely clarified what your endgame exactly is, since apparently, it's different from everyone else's.

I already told you how I tend to play, why the trollish comment ?

[Vespian]

I already told you how I tend to play, why the trollish comment ?

Your "I like to do a bit of everything" was supposed to point out the unique approach you have to end-game? I'm confused.

Indulge me.

[ohiostate124]

Only have my necro at lvl 20 but I'm enjoying overall so far. Not a huge fan of the way mages work though.

[Vespian]

Well, ultimately Greater Rifts are just the logical endpoint of ARPG design. Kill shit, get loot, kill stronger shit, repeat.

They're really just one and the same in the end

As I said, we clearly disagree so fundamentally, its hard to even begin to explain our viewpoints, let alone expand on it. Let me just suggest that a grind doesnt have to be monotonous. In D3 there is no alternative BUT to participate in monotony.