>>719759014
*chugs thawing potions before entering*
That was easy.

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>>719759014
>I Need Mana

I got my friends into D2 since none of them played it before
One of them rolled a skele necro
How fucked is he going to be

>>719759358
even with okayish gear & thawing potions the act 2 mercenary should be able to solo durial, at least in normal

>>719759658
>just don't bother with skeleton mages
but i like seeing the 10 million bolts fire out, even if they do almost no damage

>>719759358
skele necro is...fine for a first char
no seriously it's fine, he will be incredibly bored and reach several walls that he cannot break by himself. normal bosses you can cheese with iron maiden+clay golem spam over the course of 15 minutes, but without a ton of +skill gear summon necro tends to really suffer. it also gets mega fucked on anything above players 3.

bone spear necro was honestly more fun and capable of clearing the game, the main holdup for it is shopping a +3 to bone spear bone wand from drognan for a white wand, but god damn is a finished +8 skills wand something to behold

>>719759014
i remember watching my older brother play this when it came out. he played the amazon and struggled really hard on duriel, dying a lot. i dont remember exactly what he did to fix things, but in order to help him concentrate on the fight and positioning, he had me work his belt potions in order to keep him healed and not out of stamina or mana. together, we beat him at last, and i remember him running over every single grub as payback.
its a fond memory.

>>719760528
That’s a nice memory, anon

>>719759014
no I was looking to get cornholed before the screen even loads. did I come to the right place?

>>719759358
Not at all. Have him level enough to pick up Decrepify and toss a point in Clay Golem before Duriel.

He's going to be the reason you murder bosses from that point forward. Skeletons can carry you into Hell mode with minimal gear and an A2NM Might merc... though you still want decent shit anyway.

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The Baal's in your court

>>719760751
thanks. we dont talk anymore, and its one of my fondest memories of him.

>>719761060
Shut up and jam, Nephilim.

>>719759014
>summoner necro in 2002
>open door to duriel with like 30 skeletons in tow
>die before you can finish loading in
they just don't make em like that anymore

The worst thing about Diablo games is how many builds are non viable. Every build should be good if your build has synergy with all your skills and gear. And the OP builds should have been nerfed.

All Blizzard had to do was collect player data of build average DPS, survivability, and average clear time.

They should have made a program to analyse the data, and give a percentage of synergy and measure the performance of builds with a high degree of synergy, and categorise them according to a threshold of matching skills and gear amongst players. So builds that are like 90% of one build, with only a 10% difference or less would be thrown into the same category for data analysis. Give each category a score then start tweaking, and then run the analysis with new data after tweaking.

But instead a few builds are just arbitrarily broken, with a few high tier builds and some more that are passable. The rest are non viable. A build with high synergy should not be non viable.

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>>719759358
Depends, if you tell him what level up, what to buy and what curses to use, he should be fine. If he plays by himself without even expecting the sudden power spike he will get fucked up. Playing as a summon necro my first time Duriel shredded all my skellies in less than a second and then gibbed me in less than one before I could click the teleport I just raised. That was when I learned what rape was.

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Ba'al?

>>719762089
>Depends, if you tell him what level up, what to buy and what curses to use, he should be fine
Yeah. Someone is definitely going to need to give him a couple pointers along the way so he's not trying to drop 20 points into Corpse Explosion before beating Normal mode.

Max skeleton.
Max mastery.
Mages are hit or miss, cold damage adds to slowing effects.
Revive can wait until Nightmare or Hell, few points for useful enemy types.
1 in Clay Golem.
Handful in Summon Resist eventually.
1 in prerequisites and get Decrepify ASAP -- you'll use it on all bosses.
Fair number in Amplify Damage to get a good radius.
Don't worry about Corpse Explosion until late Nightmare or Hell difficulty when you need to clear crowds and skeleton damage starts to drop off.

>>719759014
>chug a million fucking potions
>teleport out, restock
>teleport back in
>repeat

Is this really how you're supposed to beat this shitty boss?

all necros are corpse explosion necros
just a matter of how u wanna get the first kill

>>719763584
That's how you're supposed to beat every boss !_!

>>719759014
>Looking for Baal?
Nah nigger IM DOING TOMB RUNS
>Duriel gets raped by 8 players with mercs clicking everything at the speed of light.
I love this game

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My first character ever was a necro which didn't get very far, but my first character i got to hell solo with was a shockadin.
Then i saw how busted shit like zeal+fanat and blessed hammers could get.
Man i should boot this ol thing up again, it's been almost 10 years for me. Any point in looking into the remake if i still have the original?

>>719759051
t. 1.10 bab

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>Try double swing barbarian
>Do no fucking damage
>Look up any builds about it
>Every one assumes you have 4000 runes to make rune words

>>719764290
resurrected is exceptional and also brings quite a few important balance changes, bug fixes, quality of life, and new runewords that add quite a bit of variety and flavor

>>719764290
original is clusterfucked with bots.
your game key was most likely already hacked by chinks to spam their website in lobby chat.
other than that if you wanna play solo go ahead.
the remake has new runewords and class balances though.

>>719764448
wasnt double swing just a worse frenzy?

>>719764543
I believe the logic is Frenzy is great for solo enemies and Double swing for crowds

I remember the first time I play act 2 I was playing on a shitty old laptop in the middle of summer so it would overheat super quickly.
The heat kind of added to the immersion of walking through the desert.

>>719764448
barb is a challenge to build while poor but i would argue one of the most fun solo self found challenges there is

>>719759358
I beat Duriel with a skele necro when I was a child, playing the game completely blind, so he might be fine. It is a very sudden difficulty curve, though.

>>719759014
what was his fucking problem?

>>719764720
Demons are jerks

>>719760528
>he had me work his belt potions in order to keep him healed and not out of stamina or mana
that's how me and my friends played diablo lmao

In my entire life I've only ever seen one SoJ drop and it was from nightmare Duriel.

>>719759358
skele necro is probably one of the least gear dependent specs in the game. slower than other classes but incredibly easy to play and curses are welcome in multiplayer.

>>719764720
He was gatekeeping.

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Should I just follow the money value of weapons for what I should equip. Or should I just jump to this other weapon for more dmg. This is one normal difficulty

>>719764795
got mine off a random zombie in blood moor right in the border to cold plains. i've never found a zod rune, or honestly any run higher than gul.

>>719764795
think the highest level rune i ever saw drop was an um

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>>719764664
>playing the game normally is a challenge
Trading was a mistake

>>719764862
sell value has no correlation with quality, its mostly biased by certain suffixes
you just want damage and attack speed

>>719765043
>you just want damage and attack speed
for a wand nigga?

>>719759358
No one mentioning bone wall but I used bone wall against Duriel. He said skrrrt *crash*.

Durial and diablo himself are the only bosses that are a threat to a summoner necro, the former due to cold aura and the latter due to his huge AOE attacks. Mephisto and baal get absolutely raped. With enough skeletons and decrepify leveled up, baal wont even be able to kill a single skeleton, they will body block him into a corner and rape him as long as decrep is active

>>719762089
>Playing as a summon necro my first time Duriel shredded all my skellies in less than a second and then gibbed me in less than one before I could click the teleport I just raised
Are you me?

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>>719759014
Looking for Pail?

>>719767256
what's duriel doing with a crummy pail of water when he could be slaying nephalim creatures

>>719766197
Doesn't mephisto instakill summons or get a huge damage bonus or something vs them

>>719759358
Just tell him to get a damage spell of some kind. Bone spear is a good all rounder, even if he's not getting synergies for it.

>>719761662
Originally, D2 didn't have synergies, and didn't need them, because hell difficulty hadn't been power crept, yet. They made it harder with patches, and added the synergies to compensate for it.

>>719761662
I agree with you that some shit builds should be fixed, and D2R did just that. A lot of terrible builds like Throw Barb and Anything Druid Does This Class Is Dogshit, got pretty significant buffs. However I don't think there should ever be a dogmatic approach to balance where everything needs to be equal. Fuck off with that spreadsheet analysis about optimal DPS and clear speeds. Primarily focus on fun, and if something isn't fun because it's bad, buff it. Don't be a slave to numbers.

I can't tell if I've somehow totally fucked up
I'm a charged bolt sorc, I've maxed it out, leveling synergies as I get points. I have my 1 point of warmth/frost armor and everything else is put into lightning stuff
But I still feel like I'm doing fuck all damage and my merc instantly dies to shit in nightmare
My notable runewords are a spirit sword and stealth armor, and some random rings and other armor bits (I think some boots that are giving me a bunch of speed, a set shield with magic find, some rings with faster casting, and the eye of etlich amulet)
My merc similarly has a bunch of random gear that I haven't found upgrades for but I've got most of the runes for insight once I find a polearm that fits it

>>719762089
He'll be fine until he gets into the maggot lair in Act 2. After that he'll also be mostly fine if he uses his curses properly. Summon Necro gear is the most commonly used and traded and the gloves are just Trangs which are super fucking common.

>>719764448
Runewords dominate end game. If you don't have runes, play a class like Sorc to farm them then build barb once you get them...IF you ever get them.

PS, double swing sucks ass. Use frenzy and WW. or do something else with barb.

>>719769460
>Stealth and Spirit sword

Those are normal runewords. Nightmare they will BARELY work. google Maxroll and look up their sorc guides. They have a "leveling" guide and confirmed GG build guides for ALL classes. Or ask someone in a discord to help you. Hell I could log on and taxi you right now if you want. I'm bored home with covid.

>>719769460
the trick to charged bolt is to teleport on top of the enemy so all the bolts hit it. if you just spam from a distance and let it spread out, it's garbage

>>719769460
Charged Bolt just does not scale well past act 3 normal. It's a good skill to rush through those first three acts but once you get to A4 it just can't be helped. Especially if you already have spirit, you should consider a better build.
Blizz Sorc is the tried and true but is also boring and relies on your merc to clear immunes.
Frozen Orb + Hydra or Meteor is another good one, and Hydra got significant buffs with D2R. Neither of those skills are reliant on synergies so they're good to get through the game but you'll respec out in postgame.
I actually did Blaze+FOrb for a change of pace and it was surprisingly good, but I had to eventually spec out near the end of Nightmare. It's not top tier, but it definitely is fun and you'd be surprised how fast you can run, even if the dogma is to just use teleport, running around at mach 3 is very satisfying. It has problems with archers and other stationary mobs, you can push them with telekinesis but it's janky. I wouldn't recommend it if you're already dedicated to another build or have gear.

>>719770781
Stealth can very easily last you through the end of nightmare as Sorc, obviously you want something like Skin of the Vipermagi, but just getting any stealth is good because of 25 FCR. Spirit Sword is something he should eventually look to replace but it's also capable enough until he lucks out with some well-rolled rare or unique Orbs.

>>719770896
While true, there's just much better equip he can get FCR from. Like a spirit shield and a good wand. I've got shit in my stash I keep for trade I could literally give away including a viper and a wand if he wants. But I don't play much anymore and trading is all but dead unless you have the fucking uber rare shit because people just pay botters or forum gold like cucks instead of just playing the fucking game normally and trading on top.

>>719770781
Ah I was reading they were good for most of nightmare too
I'm not too interested in getting taxi'd to higher difficulties, I am on multiplayer (non-ladder), but I'd rather find my own stuff
I'll look into stuff for nightmare then. Haven't played in a few days but I think I' only in act 2 NM right now

>>719770993
Spirit Shield is good but judging by his post I'm assuming he's somewhere near the beginning of Nightmare, and the earliest you can get a Spirit Shield is early NM cows or early Hell.

>>719771074
False, you can get the runes from farming countess. It's not hard and the runes are very common. The hard part is getting a good base and a perfect roll. Everyone uses Monarchs and we all aim for that perfect % roll.

>>719771074
it's dumb to assume he has 156str for a monarch shield anyway

>>719771231
You can put spirit on a lower end shield for now and it will work just fine. The runes are common and not hard to regain.

>>719771318
anon a monarch is the single lowest requ shield with 4 sockets aside from class-specific paladin ones

>>719770781
Covid isn’t fucking real you fcking kike you have a bad cold

having to move and fight literally mind broke millenials it's insane.

>>719771490
Tell that to my dr. I'm not here by choice, even my fucking job wont' let me back for 3 more days.

>>719771358
You're right now that I think about it there is other rune words he can use for now. Ancient's Pledge should work for his res boosts but does nothing else really.

>>719771158
You can get the runes, sure, but the base itself only drops later on. According to https://dropcalc.silospen.com you can only start getting it in Hell, not even NM cows.

>>719765854
those arent wands
nigger

Do any of you ever play with mods? Are there any you would recommend?

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>>719773601
PD2 Reawakening;
a mod for a mod, greatly improves drop rates, has cards, awakened skills, corrupt and awakened orbs, and lots of well-designed uniques, maps and many different orbs.
Easily the best if you want single player without too much new shit overwhelming you. You can also play with x10 monsters density, which can be pretty challenging at times but also so good for drops. I built my first enigma and others there.
You literally cant farm countess or lower kurast as they drop nothing, just play the game and get good stuff as you go (and maybe stop by arcane sanctuary to farm ghosts for runes if you feel you need more power)
pic related, its a new, extremely rare card (for a good reason). Also there's a unique key next to it. it has unlimited uses (there's also unique tomes, the Identify one identifies all items on you, so it replaces your need to run to the old man every time)

>>719767256
lel

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>>719775110
>>719773601
Oh, should add, two of my favorites are the replica and legacy orbs, which each give you either a replica unique (alternate version of an existing unique) or a legacy unique from older patches (items that were removed from the game).
there's a LOT of uniques there. and unlike PoE, it doesnt feel like most are just filler

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>>719759358
I've only ever beaten Hell difficulty with a Skele Necro.
Just get as many pieces of equipment that add to skill levels. I ended up with a total of something like +17 to summoning skills. I could barely take a hit, but it didn't matter when you've got 30 or so summoned creatures around you.

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>>719759271
>played 1.0 as a sorc
>died 51 times before i killed him
>he was killing me with one hit
i didn't even a sound card on that PC, good times

have*

>>719776000
Gloams and the like, ranged units with piercing projectiles, are pretty much the only thing that can wreck skelli necro. And even for that there is a curse ready to solve it. Unless you're sniped offscreen or sth.

>>719773601
Do you play original or D2R?

>>719777275
Gloams and the like are essentially the games worst enemies but there's an infinite MF trick with them.

"Gloam MF Trick," also known as the Soul Ritual or Developer Easter Egg, involves gathering four gloam monsters in isolation, at which point they stop attacking and spell letters with their lightning attacks. Successfully completing this ritual grants a massive, server-side MF boost that can last for around 19 hours or until the game session ends or your character dies. To trigger it, you need to clear out all other enemies from an area, find four gloams, let them stand still for a moment (usually requiring your merc to be dead and yourself to be in an open space), and wait for them to spell the letters before they resume attacking.

>>719764862
>skulls
>13 damage weapon
kek
Ditch the pick and pretend this never happened.

>>719777535
This sounded like "My dad works at Nintendo" tier bullshit, but then I went and checked it and turns out it's real.

>>719778342

it was only discovered like last year even though it was the in the original release of the game

>>719778342
Yeah, I thought it was bullshit too but it was recently found. As >>719778940
Said it was in the original release but never found.

the only instance where you may die if you do not know what is on the other side in this piss easy game besides the summon 20 demons on top of your head room right before diablo

Is Diablo the only RPG series where the most powerful beings in the universe all die by the second game?

>>719761662
Teleport on one class (Sorceress) ruined the meta forever, either give a lvl 20 generic runeword build that grants Teleport or remove Teleport (skill) outside of staves.