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!King_Amazon!

!King_Amazon! said: [Goto]

That build lacks in comparison to a fishymancer. Drop the skeletal mages and get corpse explosion instead. Skeletal mages are pretty horrible unless you've got the build to support them. Usually, that means something like lower resist and a merc with that one runeword that has conviction. Also, enigma is almost required to make a necro with skeletal mages work.

Corpse explosion synergizes better with skeletons because you use amplify damage, increasing the damage of both your skeletons and your corpse explosion.

Try playing your necro sometime without summoning the mages, and you'll see that there's hardly an improvement when you use them. Then try doing the same thing, except dont summon your skeletons, and only summon your skeletal mages. You'll see that they just do nothing and get their asses kicked in the process.

To effectively play a "skeletal mage" necro (usually called a lich,) you need to also recast your skeletons until you get the best ones you can. For instance, if half of your skeletons are poison casters, you're going to do horribly. The only use of poison casters is to prevent monster healing, and you only need one to do that. Just the same, cold casters can be pretty bad as well, since they freeze enemies, destroying the bodies. Having one cold caster to slow enemies is good, but more than that is only annoying. Therefore, you're constantly having to not only make sure all of your skeletons are alive, but you have to keep recasting them to get the right ones. Much too high-maintenance.

The fishymancer wins on every front. The skeletons rarely ever die, and serve their purpose as a meat-shield to keep you alive. Once they (or your merc) get one monster down, you take out ALL of them with corpse explosion, creating a chain-reaction of CARNAGE. There's hardly any maintenance necessary, so you don't have to spend time resummoning shit.

Don't get me wrong, a lich necro is a force to be reckoned with. However, this "skellymancer" people go on about is just a bastard child of the two, and it's pretty rubbish compared to either of them.

BTW, you can make a killer fishymancer without any gear requirements. It's the build that people claim can "solo hell naked." I've heard of people playing solo all of the way through normal, nightmare, and hell, without any gear. What this means is that you can essentially wear as much MF as you can possibly get without worrying about it gimping your character. You can have a 900+ MF fishymancer soloing WSK and baal in hell. If you want a build just let me know, it's a really simple one.

This might be so, but why is it that my necro rocks? I'll tell you. 30 summons overpower everything. My skellies have about 1K health each and there are so many of them it is like a riot effect. Nothing beats my skellies.... Nothing. I killed hell baal with them.