Proceed, Heroes, Into Terror's Lair! Diablo II Freestyle Group Slamdance Thread!

Blessed Hammer, broken?



Why, I have no idea what you're talking about.

(I still prefer Lightning Fury or Blizzard for clearing rooms though.)

Geez, Blessed Hammer is sick. I thought I was doing well with Tornado hitting 1.8k

Anyway, after a couple of Nightmare Baal runs (fate has decided to laugh at my expense and keeps spawning Undead Flayers on the Throne of Destruction, at least it's giving me experience in dealing with them) I haven't found much of interest to me yet but I got a few items up for grabs.

M'avina's Tenant - Amazon Set, Belt.

Wilhelm's Pride - Belt, 'nother Set piece.

Ironstone - Unique War Hammer

Warlord's Trust - Unique Military Axe

Also! Bean, did you still want a Frostburn? Or, if you don't, does anyone else?

I'd like the Wilhelm's Pride, since Muntak is using the helm from that set when he's not mfing. Can't complain about 5% dual leech, and a nice amount of Defence and Life boost.

I have the gloves from that set if you want them.

Ah, that would be most helpful too. Currently have Blood gloves with no IAS, or Chance Guards for when I go mfing. Helps having a costume change or two for different things.

Amazing. I'm not even to level 15 yet. I just learned how useful the "/players 8" command is, though!

Act 2 is usually pretty quick paced for me, and after getting to the city in Act 3 it's very much a quick pace for the leveling.

I've always been partial to Dragon Tail.



And for just sheer impressive numbers, there's always:



Much less impressive when you realize that damage comes over 15.6 and 15.2 seconds, respectively. My venomancer's Poison Nova does "only" 15k-16k, but the fact that it takes only 2 seconds to deal that damage makes it the far more usable skill.

Annoyance of timezones means I never know when to be about for item trades. Gimme a shout for good times to pick up the gloves and belt. Also MrBean, the Visceratuant is still up for grabs if you want it. Best place to find me is probably IRC, if I'm not on Battle.net.

So I finally picked up Lord of Destruction yesterday. And I just killed Normal mode Baal a few minutes ago. He fell like a chump to a dozen 1.2k-damage Blessed Hammer shots. I was half-expecting an encore with something stronger, but nope. I'm wondering if the fact that I tackled most of Act V with /players 8 and thus was level 45 when I killed him had anything to do with how easy it was...

Man, Hell is rough. So many times I've died because a mob of enemies suddenly surrounded Frrrt and killed him before I could GTFO.

Oh, and Treehead Woodfist is immune to both Physical and Cold. Yaaaaaay.

Also the Countess dropped a Tal rune and an Eth rune. :|

Anyway, a Trang-Oul's Wing dropped, if there's any other Necros interested.

I killed Hell Duriel today, and he dropped three* unique items! And they all sucked! Oh well, at least he died easily, which could be a good sign that Act 3 will go better than 1 and 2 did.

*Boneflesh, Rattlecage and Biggin's Bonnet if anyone's curious, though I didn't bother keeping any of them for trades.

Reading into the Poison Necromancer has me interested, and since I've only ever played the Right Kind Of Necromancer in the past, I might be in the mood to try something different.

Not that Frrrt is losing his charm or anything, but darnit, sometimes you just want MORE Diablo II! Is that so wrong?

What is the Right Kind Of Necromancer and how do I make one?

Take it away, Bungle.

The Right Kind of Necromancer is the one that you can't even see on the screen because THERE ARE HELLA SKELETONS IN THE WAY

A second trip into the Countess's tower proved more fruitful, as an Infernostride dropped (unique demonhide boots), and the countess herself dropped a Hel and Lum rune this time.

Now I can make the Smoke Runeword and give Frrrt some much needed boosting to his defenses and resistances.

Just need to find a GOOD two socketed body armor. So, uh, if anyone stumbles upon such an item, let me know?

Also, the Hel rune is up for grabs, since I don't think I'll be making any of its runewords.

I'm thinking about trying one too. Those are silly damage numbers. Granted, it's all damage over time and one quarter of everything in Hell is immune to poison, but still, that dude must tear through monsters at a speedy pace.

No.

Take it away, Past Bungle!

This is what the Right Kind Of Necromancer looks like:



The funniest thing is that Nigel doesn't have a full army in that screenshot and doesn't have optimal gear. And yet he's still sitting on 65 minions.

You are aware that that kind of army isn't possible any longer in 1.13, right? They put much tighter limits on how many minions a Necromancer can have at his disposal. The trade-off is that each one is now inherently stronger than before, of course.

Sounds like someone gave you some bad info! I took that screenshot only a month ago.

EDIT: Ah, I see where this got mixed up. It was actually back in 1.10 that the number of skeletons was reduced. Prior to 1.10, skellies were basically useless but you could have a ton of them. That patch beefed them up and made them viable minions, but reduced the number you could have. I never actually played a Summoning Necro before 1.10 so I didn't know that!

I have no idea what the maximum number of minions is now, but my fully geared Necro runs around with an army of 68, so whatever the limit is it's pretty reasonable.

Lower Resist is your friend; there're only a handful of critters that stay Poison Immune after you hit 'em with a lvl 15+ Lower Resist. But yeah, he kills shit so quickly it almost feels like cheating.

That said, i don't think the damage numbers i posted above are really reachable anymore, however. I made him in the days of the 1.09 beta and he's wearing a Bramble with a +186% poison damage mod; nowadays Bramble gives "only" +100%. (That's one little quirk of D2 i really like; when a patch comes along and modifies an item's stats, any copies of said item you picked up before the patch will remain unchanged, for good or ill.)

So, uh, is anyone an Assassin on the US-East Ladder? Because if so I got some good news and some terrible news.

The good news is that Bartuc's Cut Throat dropped for me just now.

The terrible news is that it's Ethereal.

So offhand it and it'll take less wear? Or maybe socket a Zod in. (ha ha really that'll happen, at the end of the alphabet and commonality)

I think it will wear out equally quickly, regardless of which hand it is on.

And besides, while rune rates have improved noticeably, getting a Zod naturally is still an exercise in sacrificing 100 virgins to the luck goddess until she favours you. Or something.

Arrrrrrrgh!

Actually, this is probably not terrible news, since I absolutely never use physical attacks anymore. Weapons don't degrade from using traps, right? Either way, I'd be very happy to have it.

Well if you'd like it I'll send it your way, shame to let it go to waste. Using traps shouldn't degrade it. When can I nab you on US-East Ladder?

And you can help me move some stuff too. Since my latest stab at Nightmare Baal netted me a Blackbog's Sharp, which is pretty much tailor made for Poison Necros, so I guess I'll be trying one!

Also, anyone interested in The Scalper (Unique Francisca)? It's a throwing axe, but it can be wielded one handed so I dunno, any good to Muntak?

Not really. I have a Cruel Twin Axe now which I managed to gamble up, it isn't great by any means but it outdamages that axe. I'll keep looking to see what I can find or gamble, but I'm doing rune runs at the same time in order to make a worthy endgame axe. There's several runeword options there, but I'm not holding my breath for making most of them.

Blessed Hammer? Maybe it should have been called Holy Hammer instead. As in : "Holy Sh*t! That's a lot of damage!"

Maybe it should've been called MC Hammer. At least then its brokenness could be attributed to just how awful an artist he is. :P

After watching Hamtaro, I'm inclined to call it the Ham-Ham Hammer.