I am playing with a necromancer in Diablo 2. What is the recommended skill points distribution for hell difficulty?

Question

I'm playing with a necromancer (84 exp) in hell difficulty with the following skills:

• Skeleton mastery: 20 (for revived monsters stats)
• Corpse Explosion: 15 (for quick cleaning of small monsters pack)
• Bone Spear: 20 (main attack)
• Bone Spirit: 20 (for bosses)
• 1 skill point for the rest, coupled with a +6 all skills from various items

I get the impression that even moderate level monsters are not killed fast enough, even when using lower resist or decrepify (the latter has the nice effect of slowing down enemies and is the most used spell).

I didn't find any updated guide for hell difficulty (for patch 1.12 or later), is there a better combination of skills/spells?

Answer 1

I've referred to this for my source on necromancer skills: http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/necromancer-curses.shtml

Lower Resist decreases an enemies elemental resistances and Decrepify decreases their physical resistance. Unfortunately, bone spells do magic damage, so I don't think either curse improves your bone spell damage (as Grace Note pointed out). They are only useful for your minions; Lower Resist helps your skeletal mages and Decrepify helps your skeletons. Also, if you are using Revive then those minions will do more damage when you use those curses (most monsters don't do magic damage).

Unless you totally focus on them and skills that synergize (see my sidenote), Bone Spear and Bone Spirit are ineffective because they do not scale up in Hell difficulty. However, Bone Prison and Bone Wall do. Also curses and revives scale up because they are based on the strength of monsters in Hell.

For a summoner, playing heavily to revive is a good plan. Look at some revive necromancer guides, this being a short example: http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=707530. I recommend maxing Revive and Iron Golem, so that you have plenty of summons to work with and a golem for killing monsters to get that first revive. I also think you're better off replacing Bone Spear with Bone Prison and Iron Maiden. Then you can lock monsters in with your minions and have them damaged by both their own attacks and your minions, while boosting with other curses you have. Iron Maiden has the nice property that an increase in skill level increases the damage taken, not the spell radius like many other curses. Bone Spirit is appropriate to some extent for helping your Iron Golem take down monsters, but certainly not worth focus.

Sidenote: To get an idea of how much damage a pure bone necromancer does, I'm in Hell difficulty with my necromancer right now using an all bone build, around level 76, roughly these skills (I can update values tonight when I check):

• Teeth: 10 (about +6 with items)
• Bone Spear: 20
• Bone Spirit: 20 (about +4 with items)
• Bone Wall: 10
• Bone Prison: 20
• Some other misc. skills

And I only do over 3000 damage per spirit. That's very little in Hell difficulty.

Answer 2

The most efficient build for the Necromancer (maybe even for the entire game), is the "Fishymancer". It allows you to go through Hell and back without much/basic gear, perfect for first characters with the intent of magic finding better items for future characters. You could even go through the game naked.

In summary, the skill build:

• Raise Skeleton (20+)
• Skeletal Mastery (20+)
• Corpse Explosion (20+)
• Amplify Damage (1+)
• Clay Golem (1+)
• Deceprify (1+)

(Clay Golem + Deceprify to help with bosses)

Merc: Act II with Might aura

Ideal items: +resistance, +skills, +mana per kill, magic find, +runspeed, +life/vitality

Those are all the skills you need. That leaves for a lot of skill points to put in any skill you want, and it wouldn't really matter since the above skills synergize perfectly. And Corpse Explosion doesn't have a lot of immune monsters.

Answer 3

A Poison Nova based build works nicely, and allows one to stack +skills and MF.

Max Poison Nova and its synergies, get Decrepify and CE. Between decrepify, the clay golem, and a cold-based act II hireling, most bosses barely move anymore.