skelemancer?

[Akor]

This is my first post on this website, so i would really appreciate some feedback. First of all, I'm starting a necromancer character, and was considering full skeleton approaches, or a bone/skeleton mixture. Any suggestions?

[A.D.]

Read some of the guides. The marrowalk glitch doesn't exist anymore so it makes hybrids impratical. I do know very high-level bone necros that have put one point into all the summons tree mostly for meat shields, but I have only met these people in baal runs and I'm unsure how it works in practice, and the gear they used was very very expensive (eg, a perfect darkforce spawn)

Out of prefrence I don't put any points into (aside from prerequs) skele mastery, you only need a couple points into revivies or any of the other summons. Summoners typically have a whole bunch of extra points but nothing really worthwhile to put them towards.

[Akor]

thanks for the tip. I don't really enjoy golems, for i think they are a waste of time in my opinoin. Could I perhaps master the bone spells, then add the rest to summoning skills?

[A.D.]

well, don't ruel out golems just yet. Its worth to drop a point into clay golem/golem mastery for taking out bosses.

Clay golem slows your enemy, and paried with a cold attack from a merc and the decrepify curse the bosses slow to a frame by frame animation so they don't deal as much damage to your skellies.

Also you should have a point in every curse, though personally I leave out attract and confuse.

As I said, check out the guides. almost all the full summons guides from 1.10 still work for 1.11. Or better yet just make a couple builds of skelemancers and see what suits your playstyle best, Summons necs tend to be a bit slower killers, but are very easy to go into hell with relatively low gear.

[FraterPerdurabo]

Skelemancers are for solo play. They are probably the easiest class to kill in PvP, and they are a pain in Baalruns. Usually, meat shields are not required anyway, and all they do is cause lag, etc (especially if you have various people with auras in your party). Apart from the fact that they don't do any damage anyway.

Back in the day when I still used to play single player, I had a very fun hybrid, namely a Nova summoner. He uses Poison Nova as his main attack (it only has 2 synergies, so you don't lose many skillpoints).

Put one point into Corpse Explosion, all of the Golems, summon resists, golem mastery, revive, summon skele mage.

Max out skele mastery, and remaining points go into summon skeleton.

[Doono]

acctually frater with the right gear skelemancers summons do a lot of damage but you need to get your hands on beast and a pride. Give the necro the beast and a might merc the pride and if the rest of your gears good your skels can do like 2k each. Use an enigma and you can tele on enemies and they get slaughterd. If they all hit its like 20k damage and 40k if you manage to amp/deceprify the enemy first. But yer they suck in duels

[Akor]

yeah i've been looking at all of the guides and they all don't really go into the skele-theme. i do like the clay golem idea, but would much rather go the skele & bone/skele & curse approach, either one

[FraterPerdurabo]

acctually frater with the right gear skelemancers summons do a lot of damage but you need to get your hands on beast and a pride. Give the necro the beast and a might merc the pride and if the rest of your gears good your skels can do like 2k each. Use an enigma and you can tele on enemies and they get slaughterd. If they all hit its like 20k damage and 40k if you manage to amp/deceprify the enemy first. But yer they suck in duels

Still, that's for solo play. And they can never reach the killing potential of a good Wind Druid or Hammerdin.

[Akor]

i think i've decided on the skele-bone idea as my character, maxing things out like bone armour and bone spear and spirit, so this is sort of what i'm aiming at:

*max raise skeleton
max skeleton mastery
1 into clay golem
1 into golem mastery
*max skeleton mage
*max bone spear
*max bone armour
*max bone spirit

*: deciding

what do you think? does this look good for a starter necro?

[FraterPerdurabo]

Only 1 point into skele mages. They suck.

Anyway, I don't think that it's a good hybrid build, since your bone spear will be weak. And put 1 point into everything in the summon tree, and also 1 into corpse explosion.

[Akor]

corpse explosion, huh? I dunno about the summon tree, for i dislike the golems, and i don't know about the revive spell. I wonder: why do mages suck? They do have low health, but could they do massive damage combined with the lower resistance curse?

[A.D.]

Not really, at least, not in hell.

The only real uses for them are that they are meat shields, poison mages prevent monsters from healing, and cold mages slow enemies (but in hell its a marginal amount).

at 20 mast/20 skele mage poison damage is about 350 out of *600* seconds, cold is around 220, fire damage is just under 400, and light does between 50-600

really not worth it IMO

[bushwhacker]

Skelliemancers are okay, but my point is that they don't have meat shields, unless you use blood golem or revives!

The entire point of being a skeleton is that you have no meat to slow you down

[A.D.]

Bush, if that was meant to be a joke, it was very, very lame.

[Akor]

thanks almostdeadly for the info. although, i'm conpletely lost now on how to distribute my stats, since skelmages are out the window, revives aren't supposed to be good, and i don't like golems. and yes, that was a terrible joke, bushwhacker.

[Mr Mellow]

So if you were to make your skels go to maybe 2k DMG+ what would your skill/gear/stats be for them?

[Bloodangel26]

akor, dont go summon/bone. if you are going to hybrid go poison/summon. poison skills require far less points to max. whoever said not to max skelly mastery is wrong. if you are going skeletons, you MUST max mastery. this is what i recommend you do. max poison nova, poison explosion, poison dagger, skeleton, and skeleton mastery. get 1 point in every other summon skill like frater said. put 1 point in corpse explosion and 1 point in bone armor(if your gear sucks this is probably just a waste of a point, so use at your discression). use clay golem and USE REVIVES! you said you dont know what they are, well find out. they are good. the only downside to them is they disappear after 3 mins. if they stuck around everyone would use them instead of skeletons. go ahead and use the few mages you will get from putting 1 point in the skill too...just cause it never hurts to have more minions

[Akor]

alright, thanks for the help. i must admit, i've never played a necromancer before, just wnet for paladin, so needed some help. so go poison and summon, huh? i've always questioned the use of poison dagger. Does it create a poison dagger, or do you already need a dagger for poison dagger?

[A.D.]

You need a dagger for it to work, and it just adds poison damage and an AR bonus to your attack.

It's rarely used however, the only time you would invest any more points in this is as a synergy to Poison nova. For a *full* skelemancer you shouldn't have any points into the PnB tree except for maybe bone armor (which still is impratical) or just a single point in CE.

Additional Comment:
Also.. Poison/Skele hybrid sounds interesting. Have you ever made one of these, Blood?

[FraterPerdurabo]

Keep in mind if you're ever going to make a Meleemancer. There was a bug in 1.10 (I don't know whether it was fixed in 1.11 or not, why don't you find out) that when you used Poison dagger with a non-dagger weapon, you didn't get the damage bonus, but you got the AR bonus (nice for necros since they have low AR). For example, if you assigned Poison Dagger under left click, it would appear red, you would not get the damage bonus, but when you looked at your chance to hit, the AR bonus had been taken into consideration. Oh, by the way, I used to have a meleemancer, don't know whether I should recommend it or not... I guess that it's not for you if you cannot afford high-end gear.