The playthrough was really enjoyable, but in the end he seemed to be trying to rush too much and ended up wasting a lot more time than he would've if he had gathered an army, some good revives and then went to Throne. But that's the speedrunner in him talking louder, and it shows when comparing this playthrough with the bone spear necro playthrough. Still very educational.
Played this game since I was a kid but never managed to beat Diablo (the boss), not even on Normal difficulty. Summoner Necromancer is my personal favorite because it doesn't require too much player input and is very casual, I think. Anyways, I followed the guide and I've finally beaten the game... on all 3 difficulties! Thanks for the help, MrLlamaSC, it makes me glad knowing there's still a community around this game. There's nothing else quite like it.
You should also try a mix of skeletons with bonespear for fun now that your necro is done with hell. It's super safe, fun but obviously slower than sorc. Also able the do Uber Tristram + portals solo the fastest IMO (Just need obediance, duress and Gface for your might merc which is super common). You really only need around 1k-1.5k spear damage. It's also really easy to get cheap +skills to with 5BS White (+4 mastery too, it's literrally made for this), spirit, Lore and Bone as a super great armor (bone armor when struck makes you super tanky vs melee and +30 res, 2 necro skills). You level like a bone necro then switch at about level 80 when you've got enough +skill equipment to get 20 total level of skeleton mastery +skills included, maxed skeletons, maxed spear, 20 total level CE +skills included, Max bone prison, 1 into summon resist, decrepify and revives (dim vision for souls if you want, it's super good CC), rest into bone wall. With only +7 skills, i've got 225 base dmg skelly, 1.5k spear and 490 bone armor absorption and 22 total skill into CE (more than enough). This is the best and safest necro build before switching to poison nova after getting the necessary trang oul pieces (belt, shield and gloves). It's more of a midgame build, but you should clear super quickly up to P3, bosses will fall down quickly with Gface ib nerc, almost never have to use potions due to insight merc, bone armor and easy maxed resist. TL:DR, It's much easier to the get first skill due to semi-efficient bone spear and skeletons deal ok damage while being very good tanks, saving you to prison everything without losing much BS damage honestly, but gaining 1k+ boosted melee damage per skeletons. Clear packs faster than summonner, kill bosses faster than BS,, got maximum safety from both bone armor and summons.
Whoa never heard anyone come up with this too, literally played this exact character on USEast years ago. I eventually found a +3 bone spear, +decrep, +revive on a bone wand and nearly fell over. It gave me an extra few points for synergies. Just a better version of the summoner IMO
I love it when MrLlama finally acknowledges in hell chaos, his summon Necro is actually pretty good when it has all it's summons out, rather than just 1 or 2 skellies and a merc.
Mages / Revives 1 point wonders - just some meat, mainly ice mages for slow. Get your clay golem up for tanking and slow / get your minions resists up - instead of maxing corpse explosion. - shop 3 raise/3 mastery skelly wand (normal wand only at very low lvl, before lvl8? in act1) - find a 2 socket necro head in act 1, starting from Stony Field upto ?, with skelly raise/mastery for creating a Rhyme runeword. - gamble +2 and 3 summons circlet/amu - chest armour: Viper or make Bone runeword for skills + resists. Bone also has very nice mana pool. - gloves/belt/boots magic find + resists - buy a golumlord's wand (+3 summoning) at higher levels to replace your 3/3 wand.
I am currently trudging through this and just finished Act 2. Duriel wasn't bad, but what a Hell of a trip to get through that tomb. I hate Physical immunes. and so many Vamps to just pummel you with fireballs and firewalls. Thankfully I am maxed out on immunes, my cold merc has a Strength Grim Scythe. I am level 75 with Max Skely, Max Skel Mast, Fire Golum, golum mast, and summon res. I have a Smoke Armor, and Lore Helm, with a Rhyme exceptional head. Corpse Explosion at 11 points, taking it to max, golum mast to max. Working to 99. I have a + 3 to summons wand. More + to skills in Lore, and Head shield. I have a love/hate with my cold merc. It is great when combined with decrepify to slow mobs down to a crawl, and terrible when corpses shatter, and leave nothing to blow-up. So far it hasn't hindered me much, but here comes act 3 and the test of rat men upon me!
Really nice playthrough. It was way faster than a melee barb, which surprised me. I thought those skellies wouldn't handle it well but they stood up fine.
Love this play along and plodding along in Hell right now, Act 4 -- way over leveled at 84. I couldn't deal with the minion AI anymore (even with Teleport) and respec'd to a variant of his bone'n the world play-through. Same points in Poison and Bone you'd find there, but one in each curse, each summon golem, summon resist, and picked up fire golem. My point is, Attract is sorely underrated as a crowd control skill. Fire Golem will still pasta noodle everything but it's fire absorb and aoe has helped me more than Clay Golem although it's objectively better for the slow effect.
I wish you just grinded a few more levels in these guided playthroughs, as it doesn't really reflect what a casual player would do. You also have no issues with the hell act bosses and ancients if your skeles are higher level (they are equal to player level). And I think it would be good for other guided playthroughs in the future. That said I've been binge watching them and I love having them in the background while I play d2r! Been watching you a long time and love the content.
7:40 what u do when u see random slingers like that is to cast a mud golem right behind them so the immediately focus on the golem instead of u or your army, cast repeatedly until ur army clears whatever they were attacking and start to surround the random slingers
I don't see why so many people hate on the summoner builds. Are they slower? Sure! But not everything has to be uber competitive best min/max. I thought this run was fun (although crushing blow earlier would have definitely helped)
@@magisteryura Nice to hear. I’m slow rolling it. My level 63 Necromancer just finished NM. Level 24 in both SM and RS. Only 5 in Skelllie Mages. My Skelliebros, all 10 of them, Survived a 41+ minute fight against a NM ancients group that included physical immune and lightning enchanted. The Skeleton Mages only had 5 levels. They perished before noticed I needed to change out golems to a Fire Golem, use my laughable Teeth skill (6-8 magic damage), hit with my runeword sword for lightning and poison damage (with laughably low hit chance)... 41+ minutes later: success! Not one skelliebro perished. My Necromancer barely touched. And my Fire Golem able to regenerate all the damage if the Ancient was slowed down by Decrepify. I expect to do much better once the merc gets a runesword. I’m still grappling with bases. Walked away from 2 socket Polearms thinking I needed at least 4. Since I used Larsuc’s socketing quest on my character’s sword... oh well. Learn and do better.
Well, I could follow along until Hell Act 1, then I started getting insta-gibbed bc of lack of res gear. Found a Duriel's Shell, so at least my merc is surviving. Looking back, where I went wrong.. I didn't watch for res gear like Llama did, mostly just went for +skills. Also didn't keep an eye out for good base items for socketing, since I didn't really know what to look out for, and was wary of wasting runes on subpar items. Got plenty of runes stocked up but still haven't made any rune-words, looking for the right base items atm. Also I suck at changing skills (only 8 hotkeys?) and doing things like switching weapons and teleporting quickly, no idea how Llama is doing it so fast :o. Great guide though, all I need to do is kill some more mobs and grab some more xp and loot :).
He swaps and teleports fast because he has 10,000 hours of play using teleport in every class. So he efficiently avoids most bottlenecks. I was pretty astounded at how often he teleported in NM act 5 crystal caverns. Just about all his movement there was teleports. You can see from that the devs expected players to be teleporting. Because they know that gamers, in the main, only want to do the most optimum form of play. Period.
I just wanted to put my 2 cents in about crafting. Mrllamasc said he felt that crafting is something that could be improved in d2. Crafting is the reason I hate Path of Exile. I never feel excited to find ANY item in PoE. In D2, It feels AMAZING to find rare items and high runes. If we increase the emphasis on crafting, the finding loot part of the game becomes devalued.
That and the fact that PoE is a Loot 'em Up game... All about instant gratification, by constantly flooding loot at your feet.. Waaaaaay too much loot. It's like cocaine to some people.. not me. The drop rates in D2 is perfect. D3 screwed up just like PoE.
@@Benkenobi8118 That was always going to happen over the lifetime of D2 and the min/max gets more and more refined. It happens to all of these games in the genre. I'm just thankful it took D2 so long to become as refined as it is now. Most loot based games nowadays the min/max builds are all figured out in a matter of days after release. That's what is truly depressing. D2 is the defiant stubborn grumpy bastard that won't 'get with the times'. That's why D2 is still relevant.
@@Kevin-zz9du D3 is the arcade version of the Diablo franchise. Life globes. Really? Progress globes? They had console game on the brain and dumbing down and kid-ifying as core game design features. Bean counters. Out to try and out-profit from a base genius design. Their greedy money-grubbing created PoE. Without their bungling PoE never would have been so successful.
As I commented on his NM video, I know this is old, but here is how I’ve progressed so far. Normal and NM were ran on players 5 and Hell was dropped to players 3. I just got to Act 2 Hell and I’m level 75. I have with gear, 58 Str, 28 Dex, 37 Vit, and 35 Energy with 341 Stat points unspent. My resists are -10 FR, 2 CR, 25 LR, and -48 PR with 394 life and 375 mana and I’ve only died 3 times. My skills are RS 25, SM 25, CG 20, GM 12, SR 6, R 8 BA 6, CE 10 AD 13, DECREP 10 *PLAYERS COUNT WAS NEVER CHANGED FOR ANY BOSSES* Edit Just finished. Dropped player count to 1 in act 5 to make it go quicker. Finished at level 81 with 381 unassigned attribute points and 5 skill points.
Hmm, I understand the logic of not going skeleton mastery but your skeletons ended up super weak throughout the playthrough. The fishymancer build is skeleton -> skeleton mastery -> CE and when played that way, your skeletons barely died unless you're fighting a boss. I think that would have made the run a lot easier.
I also ran underleveled since I'm trying to just push through. Leveling a bit more definitely would help as I could allocate more points to summons/mastery
MrLlama prioritized RS over SM. You need a balance. Get 3 skellie bros and make them tough as Gargs. SM adds damage a life points. RS gives attack rating and numbers of bros. Damage is king. Pushing SM high will make skellies into unstoppable trucks that make short work of mobs and bosses. By Nightmare I lost only 2 bros to Duriel. One trip to put Duriel down. Tissue paper skellies are sad.
Love the content and seeing the differences from how you play and how I play the same build is interesting to say the very least. Someone did ask a question I do really like, what changes would you make. One I would definitely is add lore books/scrolls that are not needed, but add useful knowledge. Like Horodric Tomes that when brought to cain teach you rune words and cube recipes so there is an ingame mechanic to how you are suppose to learn them.
I think I've completed hell once in my life maybe 10-15 years ago. And it was with a melee barb LOL. I've gone thru 2 different pc's since then so I don't have the character any more. But I did that where my only reference was the book manual. Anyway ... All that is just an aside. What I really wanted to say is that although I love the concept of the game I never can finish it (because too hard waaaaaaaaa) The main reason it's so hard: souls in worldstone chambers or throne room. Back when all I had for reference was the book manual I didn't know any better and just tried to force my way thru and eventually got it. But now I just insta-exit the first soul I see. And I ALWAYS get souls. Like it must be 1 in a million chance not to get any of them in any of the last 3 levels. So much rage-quit. Edit: and you and everyone else who says "the game's perfect, it doesn't need a remake" .... lol whatever. Lightning (souls) is broken, and double enchant is broken ... At least the devs got rid of iron maiden for monsters before they stopped development. Still an awesome game that I play casually to this day .... but yeah .... Sorry for the book-length comment lol.
In real life, I lived in Winnipeg the year the Jurassic Park movie came out. I rode my bike to the mall to see that movie. It was dusk when I headed home. That was also the time they trapped 500 mosquitoes in the monitoring traps overnight. (They fogged for mosquitoes at 100. So. Record breaking infestation.) I learned to prevent mosquito landing. And that stop signs needed to be disobeyed that night. Unlocking the shed and putting the bike away meant I had to modify my method if I wanted to remain unbitten. I had to defeat the swarm’s targeting of the delicious meal. Which I did. By constantly moving each part of my body randomly while still putting the bike away. The Souls will target you. Never be where they expect you to be. Do not travel in straight lines to where you want to go. Build misdirection into your movements. You can see this type of gameplay in TeamFortress 2. Where 2 teams try to eliminate each other in a complicated map. It’s a capture the flag kind of game. I would never have come up with this idea if it hadn’t been for Jurassic Park and an infestation. PS when you get inside your house, eliminating the mosquitos that cane in with you should be your number 1 priority. 😉
I'm leveling hardcore summoner now and I should say that mages aren't that bad at least in 1.14. I recall playing a while ago on either 1.10 or 1.11 and yeah, mages were dropping like flies. With more points invested they are surprisingly durable - at least seeing how they do on level 28 skeleton mastery (crown of the undead is getting a high level of it) and >20 hard and soft points in mages. It is much easier to deal with immunities, the only painpoint is cold mages that you don't want to have b/c they shatter corpses that you want to explode so the only caveat is to desummon cold mages and raise any other ones. Physical immunes are much easier to deal with - and combined with lower resist they also make CE more powerful.
I love cold mages. They slow and help with crowd control. Interesting to see that they are definitely viable. I've been debating where to put the summon points, in Golems or Mages.
Thormammu on twitch is a summon focused player. (Well... plus Paladins). He has spent a lot of time trying different strategies. You should check his ideas out there.
@@kb6530 Skeleton Mastery is damage a day life. 1 RS, 1 SM, RS x2, so now you have 3 skelliebros. The. SM till you like more Skellies. Do it this way and they survive. No resummons. I lost 2 skelliebros to Nightmare Duriel. No crushing blow on merc. Hardened skellies are tough as nails.
Surely skele mage is better than no skele mage. There is extra dps and life when enemy targets them instead of you. Same idea with revive. It adds more than not using them at all....
Skele mage provides extra slow with cold mages. Mages die quicker than regular skelliebros because they draw the most aggro being ranged. People don’t get that skelliemages are the expendible part of the army. In real life a general makes decisions on victory with acceptable losses. SMages are going to be those losses. Effective use of unsummon can unblock bottlenecks in Maggot Lair and Arcane Sanctuary. Mages can shoot through other units. Also Golem placement greatly helps the flow. Golems also get in the way of the merc, but a re-summon behind enemy lines speeds things up. (Like garg placement in D3)
Was super happy to respec my necromancer so i can raise my iron golem from a super healing potion. Helped a ton once i found that hit box. Thanks MrCamel!! #CamelFacts #NewPlayerTips #CamelSpeaksTheTruth
In hell mode. When the Necro dies several times in the worldstone keep, if you had shopped a few tele staves, you could move forward with more progress.
The speed runner is always under powered. Because time, not player kill speed, is the goal. I lost only 2 skelliebros to NM Duriel with max+4 skellie mastery. I lost 0 Skelliebros to NM ancients and all 3 of my Skellie mages.
The D2 creation of rune words was similar to the D3 set boosting. A cheap and easy way to take the game to the next tier of difficulty. Harder game for players hardened to the challenges.
It made the game harder in the sense that it can be hard (or, rather, take a long time) to farm high runes*, but in every other way I’d say runewords made the game easier PvM
Great video, MrLlama! I have one question for you, why didn't you use more often your revives? You relied mainly on your skeletons which as far as i remember are not that strong. Decrepify, corpse explosion and might aura are good combination, but you have to find ways so that your minions can do even more damage. When i played Diablo 2 /which was long time ago/ i used to revive those giant white apes in the snowy caves - Abominable /because they got that nasty stun /or the Moon lords who got the frenzy skill.
@@aaronaustin9814 There are many other creatures as strong as urdars and they also have the stun attack. I gave an example with the Abominable and even the walking trees from act 3. Skeletons may be enduring to damage, but they don't deal big damage themselves.
@@aaronaustin9814 Didn't you watch the video? All the work was done by the corpse explosion, the skeletons hardly managed to kill at least one monster, so that the explosion would kill everything else.
mine too 67 but stuck on hell frozen immunity since im blizzard, cant respec cause zombies in den of evil are immuned and my 2nd slight spec is fire which the minions are immuned to so i cry inside, im trying to figure a way around this i abosluty love bliz sorc, dont have infinity no idea how to start, find a thingy to a thingy hope its a thingy apply runes lol for conviction aura
@@phoenixbae3310 WELL I DONT WANT YOUR LEMOMS TAKE EM BACK THE WAY OF THE SUMMONMANCER WILL BE SUPREME!!!!!!!!! lol i mean i could, thats pretty much what i have to do, i dont feel like farming on nm 8players, its too eazy lol i was soo excited to do hell they a bit stronger lol this blizzard build i have and the items i got its working so nice then i made a hc necro summoner its really fun i enjoy watching my army grow and murder, though i kinda want to do something beside sit back, and im not a fan of CE for it takes my summons, and more importantly doesnt work for bosses so why bother, it kinda vexs my natural set up with key binds, so i just junked it :P besides CE is too op, i laughed manicially when i set a trap of dead bodies oh man it was hilarious, ill keep it for hell though/ late nm to hell depends ty for tips tricks and ofc the guilds :P
I like how you make these guides except when you get to Hell. I dunno, maybe you get tired or just bored (in Hell dificulty). The thing is, you just rush and don't take your time farming levels, items or just crafting. Seems a bit contraditory, because in the beginning you talk about "taking your time and patience to build the character", but then after nightmare you just want to get over with it. I've watched this Necro guide and the Barbarian guide and it seems very promising and enjoyable in the early stages.... only to disappoint in the end.
He would have to stream for way too long if he didnt rush. 5 hours is still quite a long video, would you really watch it if it was longer and filled with repetitive farming? Barb and summon necro are very slow anyways, why make it even slower.
@@yankochoynev652 then why do the video if you know it's going to be too long. Not much of a guide. Most of this isn't how summoner mains play it anyways.
Llama admits he doesn’t do math. Admits this won’t be the best. Just workable. RS gives attack rating and defence rating and number of bodies. SM gives damage and life points. Going 1 RS, 1 SM, enough points in RS to get 3 skelliebros, 10 SM, match RS, then alternating points-and grabbing 1 point in each summon, and each curse for decreipfy... you balance having enough skelliebros to meat shield that simply survive. Your player attention can be more fully on looting and planning. The new descriptions in D2R make the Skeletons skills easier to understand. I’ve lost only 2 skeletons to Duriel in NM. So never had to go back to town for that fight. I think Mephisto might’ve gotten more. But the 6 replacements outside Kurast from Diablo made this unremarkable. It’s so much easier if your skeletons are durable. Makes even my runewordless merc able to do his job without too many interruptions. (I only watched his NM guide fully after completing NM myself.) Llama is using his speedrunner mindset and skills to look at how to play. And his assumption that RS is superior to SM for damage puts the stress on the wrong skill for the intertwined skeleton skills. You need them both, but mastery provides the base damage and RS the synergy damage (plus the number multiplier of the base damage).
..... name 1 other person who takes their free time to stream entire playthroughs for d2 on single player. The guy doesn't have to even share this to youtube. His guides helped me solo single player entirely. Like even if you're in act 5, you've cleared all the modes and can farm most areas at that level... lol.
people always ask what you would change or add. me personally, i would add non class locked skills rarely to loot, like possibly getting a helmet that lets any class cast bone prison. it always bothered me that they would limit the game like that, sure it would weaken class individuality, but would open the game to so much more fun combos and builds not governed by a few runewords.
The design isn’t focused on single player. It’s focussed on multiplayer, trying to give a role to each class. You see this in more mature form in D3. (Besides the clown-car health globes and other collectibles that don’t belong in a Diablo franchise.)
@mrllamasc if you do a zealadin guided playthrough.. Do you think you could do different zealots each difficulty? Like frost, shock, fire? Probably fanat on hell, BUT anyways. ...???
Mages are miserable lol. Not a good merc for them either really (though I suppose I would say defensive nightmare if you insist so that your merc is your tank with holy freeze)
The character design is 3 main damage types, like the Sorceress. Physical from summons, magic-type damage from bone projectile skills, fire portion from corpse explosion... and negligible from mages. Magic damage is rarely resisted in the game. Physical damage is highly resisted-but you have curses to lower resist and increase damage (Amplify damage and Decrepify.) AD for packs, D for single target. You can lower resist to boost your mage damage. But the design decision to boost player engagement hovers in the background. That is: the player must adjust play constantly to be constantly engaged. Ranged units in a game must be weaker than melee units to maintain engagement. Otherwise the game is too easy. But they should be strong enough to be somewhat viable. Given that skeletons are provided at the start, I think the devs expect you to stick to using them, and augment them with ranged attacks that draw aggro. This allows the player to concentrate on effective cursing and corpse explosion. Enough to maximize player engagement. It might be powerful to have your Necromancer surrounded by powerful mages... but player engagement would go down if all you needed to do is walk around and pick up loot. And throw the occasional curse. Under the hood, skellie mages are more fragile than their melee cousins. By design. For player engagement.
Further: in NM I had 24 levels in Skellie Mastery, Ahhh. I just realized. By having 24 levels in Raise Skeleton and 5 levels in Skeleton Mages, I was going to compare them as equal. They are not. The defense valué fir the mages would be laughable. No wonder my 10 Skelliebros survived NM Ancients, and my 3 Skellie Mages did not. It’s not just how many Skellie mages I had. Both groups had the sabe life totals. But the mages had a very small defense rating. No wonder all my Skellie mages died. Thormammu on twitch has a video and he recommends using full both armies. I don’t recall if he ever tried just mages. Iirc he used full Skelliebros and Mages, plus full CE and one point elsewhere.
There's one thing I really don't understand. Why would you put a bunch of points into CE if it's already pretty much blowing up half of the screen? If you put like 5 - 7 in CE, it would be alright, and the rest you could put into Revive and have a huge army of monsters... The more damage you can acquire, the faster the enemies die. How useful is + 0.3 yards CE?
I had only 1 point in CE before I maxed RS and SM. I only put enough points into RS to get 3 skellliebros. Then put 15 points into SM, then brought RS up to equal and alternated points. I also grabbed 1 point into the summon tree and curse tree. I lost 2 skeletons to NM Duriel. I still lack crushing blow on my merc at the start of hell. I didn’t realize a 2 socketed polearm was worth keeping. I have 3 runeword sets waiting in my private stash, but lack 4 socketed weapons to put them in by the end of NM.
I expect runewords farmed from Nightmare Countess and Hell Countess provide Crushing Blow. In white bases farmed in normal Cows and Nightmare Cows. Plus revives of ur-dars (act 4 chaos sanctuary) and Abominables (act 5).
Merc can only level to the same level as the player. So. Shortly after your character levels, your merc can level. If you’re already playing in areas level appropriate, you should get the best leveling results anyway.
“Guided play through” for a summoner so I’m clicking instantly! Proceeds to teleport through entire game with pinpoint accuracy; only stopping to loot items to redeem his ridiculous repair bill’s. Lmao I love some of these “guides” !!
Not gonna lie, this is probably the first guide that has made me doubt making a build. This was painful to watch (especially the Barbarians and Baal waves in act 5) but still I admire that you did it though.
I just hit the Baal waves in Hell with a similar level summoner and it was WAAAY eaiser than Llama's run, I imagine he's just super tired / bored after such a long stream. Rock up in the throne room with 16 revives, 10 skeles and your merc, amp then once the first mob drops amp damage and CE the rest. Quickest and easiest hell throne room of any of my characters yet, it was a breeze honestly. I didn't need Decrepify, and only tend to use it for bosses, but if you have low mana / regen, don't spam the button like Llama does, he cains his own mana several times. Decrepify lasts 8 seconds at level 8, so you can use it a lot more sparingly.
I never understood why a lot of people play only summoner or only poison bone A bunch of skellies, both melee and mages, a golem, merc, bunch of revives, amp curse, bone spear and pop those corpses! Fun times
challenge. :) I tried my pure summon build on hell hardcore. Discovered I needed a merc with Crushing blow and why Amn/Tir runes are so important. This run I'm doing I will make a two socket polearm with strength.
At 35:53 he says he hasn’t found a nice 2 socket white head to make a stealth? What did he really mean because stealth is a body armor runeward isn’t it?
Already 70, still not getting good countess runes for upgrading myself out of stealth and improving my merc. On the pro side, i found a ethereal titan's revenge. guess i gotta make an amazon now.
I know this is an ancient post but yes, they can. RWs greatly enhance the skel army, as does +skills. Skels actually scale REALLY well. You can do ubers pretty well with a decently geared summoner.
There is so much lost uptime, especially before the first mob dies, where you could be throwing a couple bone spears in there Also, where is the revives? Cool walkthrough tho!
I'm relatively new to playing necro, but doesn't bone spear need a ton of synergies to become effective in hell? You gotta dump points in it, teeth, bone spirit, bone wall, bone prison, so that's a potentially 100 point investment right there. By that point you're not playing a summoner, you're just a bonemancer with a really weak skeleton army. Corpse explosion seems like it'd do better with a hybrid build because it doesn't rely on synergies. As for revives, they're less reliable than skeletons in later builds of the game because their pathing is really shitty and they tend to get trapped and die.
Out of curiosity do you think an Act V mercenary if you had good gear for him would actually be viable? because he has a lot more life than the Act 2 mercenary and he can stun enemies I also think he has slightly higher damage potential maybe depending on what kind of weapons he at least has a faster first kill when you don't have any summons from what I've heard
Idk I know that might arua does really helps but I was just kind of thinking of a way to use some other Mercenaries also if I had faith would the Act 1 mercenary actually be worth it just so the skeleton get a faster attack speed or are Act 2 mercs just too good overall to ever justify either?
Also I've literally never heard anyone talk about the other mercenaries unless they were talking about end of the line GG gear what actually qualifies as good equipment for the Act V mercenary that someone can realistically get through a normal Nightmare and Hell difficulty playthrough? Cuz I actually want to use one but no one ever explains what's good for him they just say Act 2 is always better which I know but still
@@114bleachfan IMO, it will depend on your build. Act 1 Cold mercenary is extremely good, because she gives you range which can hit enemies before they hit you, and you can use her for cold/elemental damage. She also doesn't die very often because she's behind the shield wall. You can do NM no problem with her. The problem is in Hell is the requirement for crushing blow. That gives you two options - the level 5 merc or the level 2 merc in NM. NM's might Aura is just better, because it boosts the whole team, skeletons, and your revives. IMO, creative use of Revives can really make the difference. But this is for a summon build.
Argument against Might merc - dies quite a bit without excellent gear. Argument in favour for might merc is the increase in damage from the Might Aura. You'll need to gear him up with things that help him tank and something with crushing blow. Act 5 is tougher, but he really doesn't offer anything the others provide.
The Might Aura is a huge damage multiplier across your entire melee army. Yes an Act 5 merc can deal significant single target damage, but doesn’t provide a multiplier. So is ignored because gamers want, in the main, to excell. That’s why Sorc and Paladin are the two favourite classes. I prefer Necromancer and Assaasin. But playing the most efficient isn’t what’s fun for me.
Mr Llama have you seen indreks new assassin world record speed run, watch his skills. How is he casting fire blast with melee/melee or melee/Burst of speed selected as skills, been playing a loooooooooooooong time, thats not something I'm familiar with, any thoughts ideas?
Started a summoner necro last week. Pretty ez & chill and puts my ass to sleep 😴 funny how I can watch someone else play one for 5hrs and be good lol..
Attraction and Golem placement. Golems generally require only mana because placing them is a dynamic strategy. Also use of unsummon is strategic (mostly on Skellie mages-who are useful as expendible aggro-drawers, and can provide slow with the cold mages, and prevent monster heal with the poison mages) Blizzard devs increase player engagement by making them expendible. The goal is to keep players busy but not overwhelmed.
3:33:00 This is a balance issue with the game. Nothing should be this ridiculous. It should be possible to break immunities or use elements of the game against them. Other than cheesing.
I believe the immunity issue was a poor choice by the devs. Players don’t like running away. But devs like being clever and using any means. That means strategic use of game reset by insta-quit. This is the same mindset from the ancient text based dungeon game Zork. In that game you were expected to hex Edit the game to find the string “xyzzy” to progress. If you didn’t hexedit the game, you couldn’t finish unless someone told you the magic word. They highlighted this in the tv show “Halt and Catch Fire”. One other issue with the game is the devs never balanced the game for single player. It was designed with team play in mind. (So is D3). Each class should have its own version of teleport and lower resist. Kludging equipment to provide this functionality is cheap and klunky.
The skellie mages serve valid uses. They just draw more aggro and don’t survive because of it. But when you need elemental damage... these are useful. My NM Ancients spawned an ancient who was physical immune. I only noticed it after he’d taken out my mages. He had 15% damage at that point. So I switched to passive Necromancer to Teeth spell attack. Switched from Clay Golem to Fire Golem. From Amplify Damage to Decrepify. And 41 minutes later... had slain the 3rd ancient. I know it wasn’t an efficient use of time. I just wanted to see if my Fire Golem could out heal the incoming damage. And that the ele damage from the Fire Golem, the poison damage from the head in a bag, the ele damage from the hardly ever hitting runesword, and the always hitting spell (only 6-8 magic damage) would be enough to win the day: Turns out the small magic damage from teeth did the most damage. Fire Golem and player contribute but hardly ever hit in melee. Fire aura damage : in D2R --I wonder if that is coded correctly -because it didn’t look to be working. The teeth damage significantly increased the damage rate. Could they have included a “to hit” calculation fir aura damage? A big no-no. They also might get the range wrong. They have wildly too large attack range for a polearm wielding act 2 Merc. My 10 skeletons survived the entire NM ancients fight. Maxed +4 skills. (24 levels). Not one defeated. Outstanding.
Llama didn’t understand the math behind Skeleton Mastery and Raise Skeleton. SM is damage (and life points). RS is number of skeletons (attack rating and defense, plus a small damage synergy). Getting a robust skeleton army that effectively deal damage : RS, SM, RS until 3 summons, then lots in SM (to 15) , then RS to 15, then alternate pintes to max. That’s how you maximize damage and avoid tissue paper summons. A player like Thormammu on twitch, who specializes in Necro Summoner has a video on how to level up.
![[Hell] Diablo 2 - RAINBOW DRUID v2 - Summoner](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/AiA2CZ9s6Ic/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Hell] Diablo 2 - RAINBOW DRUID v2 - Summoner](/img/tr.png)
![[Nightmare] PLAYERS ? SUMMON NECRO HELL RUN](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kKK8GpB_5z8/mqdefault.jpg)
The playthrough was really enjoyable, but in the end he seemed to be trying to rush too much and ended up wasting a lot more time than he would've if he had gathered an army, some good revives and then went to Throne.
But that's the speedrunner in him talking louder, and it shows when comparing this playthrough with the bone spear necro playthrough. Still very educational.
You’re making my days better with these videos my guy. Thanks
this wasn't a summon necro run. It was an act 2 merc run
Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.
Merc gets kill 1, the corpse explosion. That’s the necro summon life.
Played this game since I was a kid but never managed to beat Diablo (the boss), not even on Normal difficulty. Summoner Necromancer is my personal favorite because it doesn't require too much player input and is very casual, I think. Anyways, I followed the guide and I've finally beaten the game... on all 3 difficulties! Thanks for the help, MrLlamaSC, it makes me glad knowing there's still a community around this game. There's nothing else quite like it.
Thankful these vids exist. 5 hours? Perrrrfect to keep me grinding, and feeling like I'm hanging with the boys.👍
You should also try a mix of skeletons with bonespear for fun now that your necro is done with hell. It's super safe, fun but obviously slower than sorc. Also able the do Uber Tristram + portals solo the fastest IMO (Just need obediance, duress and Gface for your might merc which is super common).
You really only need around 1k-1.5k spear damage. It's also really easy to get cheap +skills to with 5BS White (+4 mastery too, it's literrally made for this), spirit, Lore and Bone as a super great armor (bone armor when struck makes you super tanky vs melee and +30 res, 2 necro skills).
You level like a bone necro then switch at about level 80 when you've got enough +skill equipment to get 20 total level of skeleton mastery +skills included, maxed skeletons, maxed spear, 20 total level CE +skills included, Max bone prison, 1 into summon resist, decrepify and revives (dim vision for souls if you want, it's super good CC), rest into bone wall. With only +7 skills, i've got 225 base dmg skelly, 1.5k spear and 490 bone armor absorption and 22 total skill into CE (more than enough). This is the best and safest necro build before switching to poison nova after getting the necessary trang oul pieces (belt, shield and gloves). It's more of a midgame build, but you should clear super quickly up to P3, bosses will fall down quickly with Gface ib nerc, almost never have to use potions due to insight merc, bone armor and easy maxed resist.
TL:DR, It's much easier to the get first skill due to semi-efficient bone spear and skeletons deal ok damage while being very good tanks, saving you to prison everything without losing much BS damage honestly, but gaining 1k+ boosted melee damage per skeletons. Clear packs faster than summonner, kill bosses faster than BS,, got maximum safety from both bone armor and summons.
Whoa never heard anyone come up with this too, literally played this exact character on USEast years ago. I eventually found a +3 bone spear, +decrep, +revive on a bone wand and nearly fell over. It gave me an extra few points for synergies. Just a better version of the summoner IMO
I love it when MrLlama finally acknowledges in hell chaos, his summon Necro is actually pretty good when it has all it's summons out, rather than just 1 or 2 skellies and a merc.
I was really confused as to why he kept going without a full army, lol.
Came for the summonmancer, stayed for the mine sweeper.
Mages / Revives 1 point wonders - just some meat, mainly ice mages for slow. Get your clay golem up for tanking and slow / get your minions resists up - instead of maxing corpse explosion.
- shop 3 raise/3 mastery skelly wand (normal wand only at very low lvl, before lvl8? in act1)
- find a 2 socket necro head in act 1, starting from Stony Field upto ?, with skelly raise/mastery for creating a Rhyme runeword.
- gamble +2 and 3 summons circlet/amu
- chest armour: Viper or make Bone runeword for skills + resists. Bone also has very nice mana pool.
- gloves/belt/boots magic find + resists
- buy a golumlord's wand (+3 summoning) at higher levels to replace your 3/3 wand.
I am currently trudging through this and just finished Act 2. Duriel wasn't bad, but what a Hell of a trip to get through that tomb. I hate Physical immunes. and so many Vamps to just pummel you with fireballs and firewalls. Thankfully I am maxed out on immunes, my cold merc has a Strength Grim Scythe. I am level 75 with Max Skely, Max Skel Mast, Fire Golum, golum mast, and summon res. I have a Smoke Armor, and Lore Helm, with a Rhyme exceptional head. Corpse Explosion at 11 points, taking it to max, golum mast to max. Working to 99. I have a + 3 to summons wand. More + to skills in Lore, and Head shield. I have a love/hate with my cold merc. It is great when combined with decrepify to slow mobs down to a crawl, and terrible when corpses shatter, and leave nothing to blow-up. So far it hasn't hindered me much, but here comes act 3 and the test of rat men upon me!
Level 1 clay golem MVP throughout the run all the way through hell wtf lmao
Really nice playthrough. It was way faster than a melee barb, which surprised me. I thought those skellies wouldn't handle it well but they stood up fine.
They get more HP and suffer no resistance penalties in Hell, so they tend to be pretty survivable
Woah!! Didnt know we have this is a Summon Necro AND Minesweeper Guided Playthrough!! U keep us surprised everytime Mr.Llama!!
Love this play along and plodding along in Hell right now, Act 4 -- way over leveled at 84.
I couldn't deal with the minion AI anymore (even with Teleport) and respec'd to a variant of his bone'n the world play-through. Same points in Poison and Bone you'd find there, but one in each curse, each summon golem, summon resist, and picked up fire golem.
My point is, Attract is sorely underrated as a crowd control skill. Fire Golem will still pasta noodle everything but it's fire absorb and aoe has helped me more than Clay Golem although it's objectively better for the slow effect.
hell ancients at 3 hours, but still 2 hours left. Pepelaugh
I wish you just grinded a few more levels in these guided playthroughs, as it doesn't really reflect what a casual player would do. You also have no issues with the hell act bosses and ancients if your skeles are higher level (they are equal to player level). And I think it would be good for other guided playthroughs in the future.
That said I've been binge watching them and I love having them in the background while I play d2r! Been watching you a long time and love the content.
7:40 what u do when u see random slingers like that is to cast a mud golem right behind them so the immediately focus on the golem instead of u or your army, cast repeatedly until ur army clears whatever they were attacking and start to surround the random slingers
I don't see why so many people hate on the summoner builds. Are they slower? Sure! But not everything has to be uber competitive best min/max. I thought this run was fun (although crushing blow earlier would have definitely helped)
Lol? Clearing Uber Tristram solo with my summon necro right now. Maxed skellies, couple revives - baal can't kill even single skelly
@@magisteryura Nice to hear. I’m slow rolling it. My level 63 Necromancer just finished NM. Level 24 in both SM and RS.
Only 5 in Skelllie Mages.
My Skelliebros, all 10 of them, Survived a 41+ minute fight against a NM ancients group that included physical immune and lightning enchanted. The Skeleton Mages only had 5 levels. They perished before noticed I needed to change out golems to a Fire Golem, use my laughable Teeth skill (6-8 magic damage), hit with my runeword sword for lightning and poison damage (with laughably low hit chance)...
41+ minutes later: success! Not one skelliebro perished. My Necromancer barely touched. And my Fire Golem able to regenerate all the damage if the Ancient was slowed down by Decrepify.
I expect to do much better once the merc gets a runesword. I’m still grappling with bases. Walked away from 2 socket Polearms thinking I needed at least 4. Since I used Larsuc’s socketing quest on my character’s sword... oh well. Learn and do better.
Well, I could follow along until Hell Act 1, then I started getting insta-gibbed bc of lack of res gear. Found a Duriel's Shell, so at least my merc is surviving. Looking back, where I went wrong.. I didn't watch for res gear like Llama did, mostly just went for +skills. Also didn't keep an eye out for good base items for socketing, since I didn't really know what to look out for, and was wary of wasting runes on subpar items. Got plenty of runes stocked up but still haven't made any rune-words, looking for the right base items atm. Also I suck at changing skills (only 8 hotkeys?) and doing things like switching weapons and teleporting quickly, no idea how Llama is doing it so fast :o. Great guide though, all I need to do is kill some more mobs and grab some more xp and loot :).
He swaps and teleports fast because he has 10,000 hours of play using teleport in every class. So he efficiently avoids most bottlenecks.
I was pretty astounded at how often he teleported in NM act 5 crystal caverns. Just about all his movement there was teleports. You can see from that the devs expected players to be teleporting. Because they know that gamers, in the main, only want to do the most optimum form of play. Period.
I just wanted to put my 2 cents in about crafting. Mrllamasc said he felt that crafting is something that could be improved in d2. Crafting is the reason I hate Path of Exile. I never feel excited to find ANY item in PoE. In D2, It feels AMAZING to find rare items and high runes. If we increase the emphasis on crafting, the finding loot part of the game becomes devalued.
I find the loot part of Diablo 2 really depressing. So much good loot is just cash.
That and the fact that PoE is a Loot 'em Up game...
All about instant gratification, by constantly flooding loot at your feet..
Waaaaaay too much loot. It's like cocaine to some people.. not me.
The drop rates in D2 is perfect. D3 screwed up just like PoE.
@@Benkenobi8118 That was always going to happen over the lifetime of D2 and the min/max gets more and more refined. It happens to all of these games in the genre. I'm just thankful it took D2 so long to become as refined as it is now. Most loot based games nowadays the min/max builds are all figured out in a matter of days after release. That's what is truly depressing. D2 is the defiant stubborn grumpy bastard that won't 'get with the times'. That's why D2 is still relevant.
@@Kevin-zz9du D3 is the arcade version of the Diablo franchise. Life globes. Really? Progress globes? They had console game on the brain and dumbing down and kid-ifying as core game design features. Bean counters. Out to try and out-profit from a base genius design. Their greedy money-grubbing created PoE. Without their bungling PoE never would have been so successful.
As I commented on his NM video, I know this is old, but here is how I’ve progressed so far. Normal and NM were ran on players 5 and Hell was dropped to players 3. I just got to Act 2 Hell and I’m level 75. I have with gear, 58 Str, 28 Dex, 37 Vit, and 35 Energy with 341 Stat points unspent. My resists are -10 FR, 2 CR, 25 LR, and -48 PR with 394 life and 375 mana and I’ve only died 3 times.
My skills are
RS 25, SM 25, CG 20, GM 12, SR 6, R 8
BA 6, CE 10
AD 13, DECREP 10
*PLAYERS COUNT WAS NEVER CHANGED FOR ANY BOSSES*
Edit
Just finished. Dropped player count to 1 in act 5 to make it go quicker. Finished at level 81 with 381 unassigned attribute points and 5 skill points.
Hmm, I understand the logic of not going skeleton mastery but your skeletons ended up super weak throughout the playthrough. The fishymancer build is skeleton -> skeleton mastery -> CE and when played that way, your skeletons barely died unless you're fighting a boss. I think that would have made the run a lot easier.
I also ran underleveled since I'm trying to just push through. Leveling a bit more definitely would help as I could allocate more points to summons/mastery
@@MrLlamaSC Revive is much stronger than the skeletons.
@@thomasrosendahl2783 revive comes after skelebros use both
MrLlama prioritized RS over SM. You need a balance. Get 3 skellie bros and make them tough as Gargs. SM adds damage a life points. RS gives attack rating and numbers of bros. Damage is king.
Pushing SM high will make skellies into unstoppable trucks that make short work of mobs and bosses.
By Nightmare I lost only 2 bros to Duriel. One trip to put Duriel down.
Tissue paper skellies are sad.
Man, please do more of these.
Can you do a poison nova necro run?
My favorite D2 class
Love the content and seeing the differences from how you play and how I play the same build is interesting to say the very least.
Someone did ask a question I do really like, what changes would you make. One I would definitely is add lore books/scrolls that are not needed, but add useful knowledge. Like Horodric Tomes that when brought to cain teach you rune words and cube recipes so there is an ingame mechanic to how you are suppose to learn them.
Yea i have always wonder how people find out about runewords
I think I've completed hell once in my life maybe 10-15 years ago. And it was with a melee barb LOL.
I've gone thru 2 different pc's since then so I don't have the character any more. But I did that where my only reference was the book manual.
Anyway ... All that is just an aside. What I really wanted to say is that although I love the concept of the game I never can finish it (because too hard waaaaaaaaa)
The main reason it's so hard: souls in worldstone chambers or throne room.
Back when all I had for reference was the book manual I didn't know any better and just tried to force my way thru and eventually got it. But now I just insta-exit the first soul I see. And I ALWAYS get souls. Like it must be 1 in a million chance not to get any of them in any of the last 3 levels. So much rage-quit.
Edit: and you and everyone else who says "the game's perfect, it doesn't need a remake" .... lol whatever. Lightning (souls) is broken, and double enchant is broken ...
At least the devs got rid of iron maiden for monsters before they stopped development.
Still an awesome game that I play casually to this day .... but yeah ....
Sorry for the book-length comment lol.
In real life, I lived in Winnipeg the year the Jurassic Park movie came out. I rode my bike to the mall to see that movie.
It was dusk when I headed home.
That was also the time they trapped 500 mosquitoes in the monitoring traps overnight. (They fogged for mosquitoes at 100. So. Record breaking infestation.)
I learned to prevent mosquito landing. And that stop signs needed to be disobeyed that night.
Unlocking the shed and putting the bike away meant I had to modify my method if I wanted to remain unbitten. I had to defeat the swarm’s targeting of the delicious meal. Which I did. By constantly moving each part of my body randomly while still putting the bike away.
The Souls will target you. Never be where they expect you to be. Do not travel in straight lines to where you want to go. Build misdirection into your movements.
You can see this type of gameplay in TeamFortress 2. Where 2 teams try to eliminate each other in a complicated map. It’s a capture the flag kind of game.
I would never have come up with this idea if it hadn’t been for Jurassic Park and an infestation.
PS when you get inside your house, eliminating the mosquitos that cane in with you should be your number 1 priority. 😉
I'm leveling hardcore summoner now and I should say that mages aren't that bad at least in 1.14. I recall playing a while ago on either 1.10 or 1.11 and yeah, mages were dropping like flies. With more points invested they are surprisingly durable - at least seeing how they do on level 28 skeleton mastery (crown of the undead is getting a high level of it) and >20 hard and soft points in mages. It is much easier to deal with immunities, the only painpoint is cold mages that you don't want to have b/c they shatter corpses that you want to explode so the only caveat is to desummon cold mages and raise any other ones. Physical immunes are much easier to deal with - and combined with lower resist they also make CE more powerful.
I love cold mages. They slow and help with crowd control. Interesting to see that they are definitely viable. I've been debating where to put the summon points, in Golems or Mages.
Thormammu on twitch is a summon focused player. (Well... plus Paladins). He has spent a lot of time trying different strategies. You should check his ideas out there.
"You can use this playthrough for Hardcore" ... dies 36 times...
Haha like some dude beat the game naked with summon necro , but i struggle with my best gear lol
@@kb6530 Skeleton Mastery is damage a day life. 1 RS, 1 SM, RS x2, so now you have 3 skelliebros. The. SM till you like more Skellies. Do it this way and they survive. No resummons.
I lost 2 skelliebros to Nightmare Duriel. No crushing blow on merc.
Hardened skellies are tough as nails.
Your reaction to that hel rune dropping from forge was hilarious😂😂😂🙏
OKY! finally beat normal with my skelimancer. leaned heaver on magi. know they are trash but they are my rave light rattle buddies
catching up on andariel normal now ^^' cya way later
Surely skele mage is better than no skele mage.
There is extra dps and life when enemy targets them instead of you.
Same idea with revive.
It adds more than not using them at all....
Skele mage provides extra slow with cold mages. Mages die quicker than regular skelliebros because they draw the most aggro being ranged.
People don’t get that skelliemages are the expendible part of the army. In real life a general makes decisions on victory with acceptable losses. SMages are going to be those losses.
Effective use of unsummon can unblock bottlenecks in Maggot Lair and Arcane Sanctuary. Mages can shoot through other units.
Also Golem placement greatly helps the flow. Golems also get in the way of the merc, but a re-summon behind enemy lines speeds things up. (Like garg placement in D3)
Was super happy to respec my necromancer so i can raise my iron golem from a super healing potion. Helped a ton once i found that hit box. Thanks MrCamel!! #CamelFacts #NewPlayerTips #CamelSpeaksTheTruth
LOL
In hell mode. When the Necro dies several times in the worldstone keep, if you had shopped a few tele staves, you could move forward with more progress.
Almost died laughing towards the end when u started to become the dead instead of raising them.
The speed runner is always under powered. Because time, not player kill speed, is the goal.
I lost only 2 skelliebros to NM Duriel with max+4 skellie mastery.
I lost 0 Skelliebros to NM ancients and all 3 of my Skellie mages.
The D2 creation of rune words was similar to the D3 set boosting. A cheap and easy way to take the game to the next tier of difficulty. Harder game for players hardened to the challenges.
It made the game harder in the sense that it can be hard (or, rather, take a long time) to farm high runes*, but in every other way I’d say runewords made the game easier PvM
Gotta love MrCamel
Great video, MrLlama! I have one question for you, why didn't you use more often your revives? You relied mainly on your skeletons which as far as i remember are not that strong. Decrepify, corpse explosion and might aura are good combination, but you have to find ways so that your minions can do even more damage. When i played Diablo 2 /which was long time ago/ i used to revive those giant white apes in the snowy caves - Abominable /because they got that nasty stun /or the Moon lords who got the frenzy skill.
Skeletons are very strong and only urdars are useful for damage they are mostly meat shields
@@aaronaustin9814 There are many other creatures as strong as urdars and they also have the stun attack. I gave an example with the Abominable and even the walking trees from act 3. Skeletons may be enduring to damage, but they don't deal big damage themselves.
@@alexandervladimirov9874 they definitely do big damage themselves man
@@aaronaustin9814 Didn't you watch the video? All the work was done by the corpse explosion, the skeletons hardly managed to kill at least one monster, so that the explosion would kill everything else.
@@alexandervladimirov9874 well you haven't fully geared a summon necel before if you think they do no damage lmfao
I was watching this while playing my Bone spear necro (just got into nightmare) and I dropped a goldwrap off of Treehead feels good man.
mine too 67 but stuck on hell frozen immunity since im blizzard, cant respec cause zombies in den of evil are immuned and my 2nd slight spec is fire which the minions are immuned to so i cry inside, im trying to figure a way around this i abosluty love bliz sorc, dont have infinity no idea how to start, find a thingy to a thingy hope its a thingy apply runes lol for conviction aura
@@knightaaron7 equip an a2 merc with something that has Open Wounds / Crushing Blow and try to support him vs mobs you can't handle. just my $0.02
@@phoenixbae3310 WELL I DONT WANT YOUR LEMOMS TAKE EM BACK THE WAY OF THE SUMMONMANCER WILL BE SUPREME!!!!!!!!! lol i mean i could, thats pretty much what i have to do, i dont feel like farming on nm 8players, its too eazy lol i was soo excited to do hell they a bit stronger lol this blizzard build i have and the items i got its working so nice then i made a hc necro summoner its really fun i enjoy watching my army grow and murder, though i kinda want to do something beside sit back, and im not a fan of CE for it takes my summons, and more importantly doesnt work for bosses so why bother, it kinda vexs my natural set up with key binds, so i just junked it :P besides CE is too op, i laughed manicially when i set a trap of dead bodies oh man it was hilarious, ill keep it for hell though/ late nm to hell depends ty for tips tricks and ofc the guilds :P
My Goldwrap dropped Ethereal. Is that always an ethereal drop? I stopped wearing once the durability got low. I wanted to save it. (I’m playing D2R)
I like how you make these guides except when you get to Hell. I dunno, maybe you get tired or just bored (in Hell dificulty). The thing is, you just rush and don't take your time farming levels, items or just crafting. Seems a bit contraditory, because in the beginning you talk about "taking your time and patience to build the character", but then after nightmare you just want to get over with it. I've watched this Necro guide and the Barbarian guide and it seems very promising and enjoyable in the early stages.... only to disappoint in the end.
He would have to stream for way too long if he didnt rush. 5 hours is still quite a long video, would you really watch it if it was longer and filled with repetitive farming? Barb and summon necro are very slow anyways, why make it even slower.
@@yankochoynev652 yes. Summon necro is extremely slow.
@@yankochoynev652 then why do the video if you know it's going to be too long. Not much of a guide. Most of this isn't how summoner mains play it anyways.
Llama admits he doesn’t do math. Admits this won’t be the best. Just workable.
RS gives attack rating and defence rating and number of bodies. SM gives damage and life points. Going 1 RS, 1 SM, enough points in RS to get 3 skelliebros, 10 SM, match RS, then alternating points-and grabbing 1 point in each summon, and each curse for decreipfy... you balance having enough skelliebros to meat shield that simply survive.
Your player attention can be more fully on looting and planning.
The new descriptions in D2R make the Skeletons skills easier to understand.
I’ve lost only 2 skeletons to Duriel in NM. So never had to go back to town for that fight. I think Mephisto might’ve gotten more. But the 6 replacements outside Kurast from Diablo made this unremarkable.
It’s so much easier if your skeletons are durable. Makes even my runewordless merc able to do his job without too many interruptions. (I only watched his NM guide fully after completing NM myself.)
Llama is using his speedrunner mindset and skills to look at how to play. And his assumption that RS is superior to SM for damage puts the stress on the wrong skill for the intertwined skeleton skills. You need them both, but mastery provides the base damage and RS the synergy damage (plus the number multiplier of the base damage).
..... name 1 other person who takes their free time to stream entire playthroughs for d2 on single player. The guy doesn't have to even share this to youtube. His guides helped me solo single player entirely. Like even if you're in act 5, you've cleared all the modes and can farm most areas at that level... lol.
people always ask what you would change or add. me personally, i would add non class locked skills rarely to loot, like possibly getting a helmet that lets any class cast bone prison. it always bothered me that they would limit the game like that, sure it would weaken class individuality, but would open the game to so much more fun combos and builds not governed by a few runewords.
I personally don't like that design decision. It was fun to play Diablo 1 where you could learn whatever skills you needed.
The design isn’t focused on single player. It’s focussed on multiplayer, trying to give a role to each class.
You see this in more mature form in D3. (Besides the clown-car health globes and other collectibles that don’t belong in a Diablo franchise.)
@mrllamasc if you do a zealadin guided playthrough.. Do you think you could do different zealots each difficulty? Like frost, shock, fire? Probably fanat on hell, BUT anyways. ...???
Best D2 content creator
Love the +1 to minesweeper skill
What mercenary would you use if you wanted to specialize in mage skeletons? Any other tips?
Don't specialize is mages man
Mages are miserable lol. Not a good merc for them either really (though I suppose I would say defensive nightmare if you insist so that your merc is your tank with holy freeze)
@@MrLlamaSC I'd agree with holy freeze.
The character design is 3 main damage types, like the Sorceress. Physical from summons, magic-type damage from bone projectile skills, fire portion from corpse explosion... and negligible from mages.
Magic damage is rarely resisted in the game.
Physical damage is highly resisted-but you have curses to lower resist and increase damage (Amplify damage and Decrepify.) AD for packs, D for single target.
You can lower resist to boost your mage damage.
But the design decision to boost player engagement hovers in the background. That is: the player must adjust play constantly to be constantly engaged.
Ranged units in a game must be weaker than melee units to maintain engagement. Otherwise the game is too easy. But they should be strong enough to be somewhat viable.
Given that skeletons are provided at the start, I think the devs expect you to stick to using them, and augment them with ranged attacks that draw aggro. This allows the player to concentrate on effective cursing and corpse explosion. Enough to maximize player engagement.
It might be powerful to have your Necromancer surrounded by powerful mages... but player engagement would go down if all you needed to do is walk around and pick up loot. And throw the occasional curse.
Under the hood, skellie mages are more fragile than their melee cousins. By design. For player engagement.
Further: in NM I had 24 levels in Skellie Mastery,
Ahhh. I just realized. By having 24 levels in Raise Skeleton and 5 levels in Skeleton Mages, I was going to compare them as equal.
They are not. The defense valué fir the mages would be laughable.
No wonder my 10 Skelliebros survived NM Ancients, and my 3 Skellie Mages did not. It’s not just how many Skellie mages I had. Both groups had the sabe life totals. But the mages had a very small defense rating.
No wonder all my Skellie mages died.
Thormammu on twitch has a video and he recommends using full both armies. I don’t recall if he ever tried just mages. Iirc he used full Skelliebros and Mages, plus full CE and one point elsewhere.
There's one thing I really don't understand. Why would you put a bunch of points into CE if it's already pretty much blowing up half of the screen? If you put like 5 - 7 in CE, it would be alright, and the rest you could put into Revive and have a huge army of monsters... The more damage you can acquire, the faster the enemies die. How useful is + 0.3 yards CE?
I had only 1 point in CE before I maxed RS and SM. I only put enough points into RS to get 3 skellliebros. Then put 15 points into SM, then brought RS up to equal and alternated points. I also grabbed 1 point into the summon tree and curse tree.
I lost 2 skeletons to NM Duriel.
I still lack crushing blow on my merc at the start of hell. I didn’t realize a 2 socketed polearm was worth keeping. I have 3 runeword sets waiting in my private stash, but lack 4 socketed weapons to put them in by the end of NM.
Recently finished full players 8 solo HC with summon necro
what did you use for crushing blow?
I expect runewords farmed from Nightmare Countess and Hell Countess provide Crushing Blow. In white bases farmed in normal Cows and Nightmare Cows.
Plus revives of ur-dars (act 4 chaos sanctuary) and Abominables (act 5).
Does a merc lvl like a character? Like following that chart that Llama always pulls up to show where the best XP is at based on char lvl?
Merc can only level to the same level as the player. So. Shortly after your character levels, your merc can level.
If you’re already playing in areas level appropriate, you should get the best leveling results anyway.
Well done my man
9:48
Totally agree, end of nightmare/early hell is peak d2
thanks for this video! i completed hell baal today!!!
Have you ever tried stacking Dragon with Hand of Justice? And would Pride have been viable for this build?
I was saying chess is a sport that could still go on during covid and he brought up chess too.
“Guided play through” for a summoner so I’m clicking instantly! Proceeds to teleport through entire game with pinpoint accuracy; only stopping to loot items to redeem his ridiculous repair bill’s. Lmao I love some of these “guides” !!
Not gonna lie, this is probably the first guide that has made me doubt making a build. This was painful to watch (especially the Barbarians and Baal waves in act 5) but still I admire that you did it though.
I just hit the Baal waves in Hell with a similar level summoner and it was WAAAY eaiser than Llama's run, I imagine he's just super tired / bored after such a long stream.
Rock up in the throne room with 16 revives, 10 skeles and your merc, amp then once the first mob drops amp damage and CE the rest. Quickest and easiest hell throne room of any of my characters yet, it was a breeze honestly. I didn't need Decrepify, and only tend to use it for bosses, but if you have low mana / regen, don't spam the button like Llama does, he cains his own mana several times. Decrepify lasts 8 seconds at level 8, so you can use it a lot more sparingly.
Any tips for HC here ? The physical immunes are my problem and I don’t wanna to tele death. Lol
I heard when you summon things it makes the playthrough alittle easier.
I never understood why a lot of people play only summoner or only poison bone
A bunch of skellies, both melee and mages, a golem, merc, bunch of revives, amp curse, bone spear and pop those corpses! Fun times
challenge. :) I tried my pure summon build on hell hardcore. Discovered I needed a merc with Crushing blow and why Amn/Tir runes are so important. This run I'm doing I will make a two socket polearm with strength.
of course I was playing Players 8, so. Bit different.
Great series summonmancer throughout. Although you are abit too rushy sometimes.
Gotta rush forward just for guide/timing purposes
At 35:53 he says he hasn’t found a nice 2 socket white head to make a stealth? What did he really mean because stealth is a body armor runeward isn’t it?
Pretty sure he meant a Rhyme
like u !!!!!!!!! ,diablo 2 forever! from vn!
Already 70, still not getting good countess runes for upgrading myself out of stealth and improving my merc.
On the pro side, i found a ethereal titan's revenge. guess i gotta make an amazon now.
Question can might aura and fanaticism stack increasing your damage further on your skellys
I know this is an ancient post but yes, they can. RWs greatly enhance the skel army, as does +skills. Skels actually scale REALLY well. You can do ubers pretty well with a decently geared summoner.
There is so much lost uptime, especially before the first mob dies, where you could be throwing a couple bone spears in there
Also, where is the revives?
Cool walkthrough tho!
I'm relatively new to playing necro, but doesn't bone spear need a ton of synergies to become effective in hell? You gotta dump points in it, teeth, bone spirit, bone wall, bone prison, so that's a potentially 100 point investment right there. By that point you're not playing a summoner, you're just a bonemancer with a really weak skeleton army. Corpse explosion seems like it'd do better with a hybrid build because it doesn't rely on synergies.
As for revives, they're less reliable than skeletons in later builds of the game because their pathing is really shitty and they tend to get trapped and die.
maxing corpse explosion instead of other summon skills. :wutface:
Playthroughs aka runawaythroughs.
i'm your biggest fan
i found a Head Hunters Glory with 3 sockets..can i use Rune Words on that?
nope only on grey items
Out of curiosity do you think an Act V mercenary if you had good gear for him would actually be viable? because he has a lot more life than the Act 2 mercenary and he can stun enemies I also think he has slightly higher damage potential maybe depending on what kind of weapons he at least has a faster first kill when you don't have any summons from what I've heard
Idk I know that might arua does really helps but I was just kind of thinking of a way to use some other Mercenaries also if I had faith would the Act 1 mercenary actually be worth it just so the skeleton get a faster attack speed or are Act 2 mercs just too good overall to ever justify either?
Also I've literally never heard anyone talk about the other mercenaries unless they were talking about end of the line GG gear what actually qualifies as good equipment for the Act V mercenary that someone can realistically get through a normal Nightmare and Hell difficulty playthrough? Cuz I actually want to use one but no one ever explains what's good for him they just say Act 2 is always better which I know but still
@@114bleachfan IMO, it will depend on your build. Act 1 Cold mercenary is extremely good, because she gives you range which can hit enemies before they hit you, and you can use her for cold/elemental damage. She also doesn't die very often because she's behind the shield wall. You can do NM no problem with her. The problem is in Hell is the requirement for crushing blow. That gives you two options - the level 5 merc or the level 2 merc in NM. NM's might Aura is just better, because it boosts the whole team, skeletons, and your revives. IMO, creative use of Revives can really make the difference. But this is for a summon build.
Argument against Might merc - dies quite a bit without excellent gear. Argument in favour for might merc is the increase in damage from the Might Aura. You'll need to gear him up with things that help him tank and something with crushing blow. Act 5 is tougher, but he really doesn't offer anything the others provide.
The Might Aura is a huge damage multiplier across your entire melee army.
Yes an Act 5 merc can deal significant single target damage, but doesn’t provide a multiplier. So is ignored because gamers want, in the main, to excell.
That’s why Sorc and Paladin are the two favourite classes. I prefer Necromancer and Assaasin. But playing the most efficient isn’t what’s fun for me.
Mr Llama have you seen indreks new assassin world record speed run, watch his skills. How is he casting fire blast with melee/melee or melee/Burst of speed selected as skills, been playing a loooooooooooooong time, thats not something I'm familiar with, any thoughts ideas?
It's swap casting. Mrllama has made a video on it :)
Cheesing the ancients in the way you do won't work in D2R now cause they changed the Merc and there's no glitch now... So how do you cheese them now?
Pretty please try an uber-build with this guy. PRETTTTTTYYYYY PLEEEEEAAAAASE XD. Thx for your necro-time
See Thormammu on twitch for a summoner focused Necromancer player.
Started a summoner necro last week. Pretty ez & chill and puts my ass to sleep 😴 funny how I can watch someone else play one for 5hrs and be good lol..
found a wand with all skill +2 and Attraction curse +2, Attraction solves all the crowd control issues
Attraction and Golem placement. Golems generally require only mana because placing them is a dynamic strategy.
Also use of unsummon is strategic (mostly on Skellie mages-who are useful as expendible aggro-drawers, and can provide slow with the cold mages, and prevent monster heal with the poison mages) Blizzard devs increase player engagement by making them expendible. The goal is to keep players busy but not overwhelmed.
Why are there ladder only rune words
what mod are you running on your d2 ?
2:03:22 i did that on a summoner nec back you could have 1 skele & mage per level and had to leave b.c there was no un summon skill lol
Diablo clone decided walk the earth in my already annoying maggot lair while I was playing along... Just barely got the staff and got out alive.
Summon necro who doesn't use his summons...
3:33:00 This is a balance issue with the game. Nothing should be this ridiculous. It should be possible to break immunities or use elements of the game against them. Other than cheesing.
I believe the immunity issue was a poor choice by the devs. Players don’t like running away.
But devs like being clever and using any means. That means strategic use of game reset by insta-quit.
This is the same mindset from the ancient text based dungeon game Zork. In that game you were expected to hex Edit the game to find the string “xyzzy” to progress. If you didn’t hexedit the game, you couldn’t finish unless someone told you the magic word. They highlighted this in the tv show “Halt and Catch Fire”.
One other issue with the game is the devs never balanced the game for single player. It was designed with team play in mind. (So is D3). Each class should have its own version of teleport and lower resist. Kludging equipment to provide this functionality is cheap and klunky.
MrLlamaSC what will I do differently in d2r with no merc fade bug??
For ancients I mean
I love you, Llama.
theres big bunch of dead bodies at pindle place ready for summons if u need an army in a jiffy. dont have to go around cold plains...
And just outside Harragoth.
Is the youtube voice your real voice or is the Twitch voice? Do you sometimes wake up afraid of what the other personality did?
Sees ancients at 3h10. Sees video is 5 hours long. Oh no...
Ancients Pledge or Rhyme?
If you have decrepify, a cold mage, and a clay golem, Baal gets very, very slow.
The skellie mages serve valid uses. They just draw more aggro and don’t survive because of it. But when you need elemental damage... these are useful.
My NM Ancients spawned an ancient who was physical immune. I only noticed it after he’d taken out my mages. He had 15% damage at that point.
So I switched to passive Necromancer to Teeth spell attack. Switched from Clay Golem to Fire Golem. From Amplify Damage to Decrepify. And 41 minutes later... had slain the 3rd ancient.
I know it wasn’t an efficient use of time. I just wanted to see if my Fire Golem could out heal the incoming damage. And that the ele damage from the Fire Golem, the poison damage from the head in a bag, the ele damage from the hardly ever hitting runesword, and the always hitting spell (only 6-8 magic damage) would be enough to win the day:
Turns out the small magic damage from teeth did the most damage. Fire Golem and player contribute but hardly ever hit in melee. Fire aura damage : in D2R --I wonder if that is coded correctly -because it didn’t look to be working. The teeth damage significantly increased the damage rate. Could they have included a “to hit” calculation fir aura damage? A big no-no. They also might get the range wrong. They have wildly too large attack range for a polearm wielding act 2 Merc.
My 10 skeletons survived the entire NM ancients fight. Maxed +4 skills. (24 levels). Not one defeated. Outstanding.
You can solo ubers with a summon necro and úrdar or bigboylittleheads as I call them. Source: Thormammu on UA-cam
I wish he do another run of summon necro in D2R this time, without Merc bug, etc
70th like
right here
How can i make hercuilen crest socketed by (1). thank you for the answer.
Use Larzuks free socket after you kill shenk in Act 5
@@elusivecamel thank you
Anyone knows why Llama did not pick Revive instead of the weak skeletons?
Llama didn’t understand the math behind Skeleton Mastery and Raise Skeleton.
SM is damage (and life points). RS is number of skeletons (attack rating and defense, plus a small damage synergy).
Getting a robust skeleton army that effectively deal damage : RS, SM, RS until 3 summons, then lots in SM (to 15) , then RS to 15, then alternate pintes to max.
That’s how you maximize damage and avoid tissue paper summons.
A player like Thormammu on twitch, who specializes in Necro Summoner has a video on how to level up.
How's the flu MrLlama?
Little long, but fantastic run.
Lmfao the world stone keep 🤣🤣🤣
2:19:50 Me every time I play Act 4 in Hell
After watching 5 hours i got a big headache but still dont know why you can teleport that early???
How come you dont ever go in and out of town to reset vendor rolls?
I do sometimes, just depends how much I need something
Your headphones SONY?????
Steelseries
Why skip Radament?
Speed. Llama focuses on speed.