This variant is a blend of two existing variants. The 'arty' part is short for 'artillery', referring to the fact that he relies heavily upon damaging spells from the poison and bone tree, such as Corpse Explosion (CE), bone spear (spear), and bone spirit (spirit). DaShiv was the first to use it in his guide. Minionless is strict - no points at all are put into the summoning tree, and the necromancer uses curses to compensate. Arty necs with golems are discussed in DaShiv's guide and in Lemekim's guide, both here at the Lurker Lounge. The points saved by eliminating all summoning equates to stronger artillery and more versatile cursing. I probably should come up with some other poetic name, but this functional name serves well enough in relaying rapidly what the variant encompasses.
What I enjoy most about this variant is that it is (a) great in party and solo player situations, (b) is tactically rich and interesting, (c) streamlined and doesn't suffer from all the baggage of having to shepherd minions all over the dungeon, and (d) bone spirit and corpse explosion are just plain fun to use. The challenge of the variant is learning how to mold crowds into the concentrations most effective for your corpse explosion. When I first started playing it, I thought I was going to be wide open and helpless - to my surprise it is much the contrary - with Dim in a large radius, you feel very safe indeed. Also you always have terror and your bone prison as fallbacks. You should play a curse dependent nec just once to recognize all the curses you will face from the minions of Diablo.
If you wish to read about my experiences with this variant, see my posts on Bone-ified and Lok-nLoad right here.
Strength: You don't need much strength. Strength from 45 to 75 is all you will ever need. Those with 45 str can go for magefist/ wall of the eyeless (WoTE). Those on the higher end go for tower shields and frostburns. In the early game you can do very well with just 27 strength, enough to wear twitchy and use a bone shield. Foot speed is important for the minonless arty nec, so keep this in mind if you want to use speed-slowing things such as tower shields.
Dex: Starting level, no points. By the time you start missing, it is time to move to spells full time. Compensate at low levels with rings, which grant attack rating. The only reason for pumping this is if you simply cannot imagine life without the spectral shard.
Energy/Vitality: The tradeoff here is between life and mana. In the early game, pump energy and rely upon bone armor. After you reach your str target, add vit as needed. A good target is 100ish energy, strength at your goal, and vit around 50 by lvl 30. You can go less on vitality and rely more upon dim/fast dodging via cursor. Your goal is to have enough mana to cast multiple curses and corpse explosions, and have enough life to take a single solid hit from a typical monster in the zone where you adventure for experience.
Your emphasis here is upon gaining broad cursing ability with solid support from the poison and bone tree. Suggested skill point levels are total skill levels - if you have or ultimately intend to have skill adders, reduce the points invested accordingly. It is wise early on to take a few moments and think about what your ultimate gear will be, so you do not over spend points in an area. Note that +skill items are very useful for this type of character as you have several areas to develop. A +4 skill total is a pretty good target (+2 wand, +1 helm or shield, +1 amulet).
A. Major investments:
Bone Spear/Spirit: Some of the bone spell trapping techniques involve the use of spirit and prison, so I would suggest going with spirit (20pts) and leaving bone spear at its 1-point prerequisite level until you get spirit. In addition, spirit equates to faster kills of bosses - the kind of creature you cannot easily dispatch with CE. Some advocate maximizing spear to speed up the process of generating corpses, since the piercing ability of spear can weaken many with a single, well-placed cast. Others suggest a balanced distribution between spear and spirit. Spear usually helps against crowds such as beetles, etc. However, remember you have corpse explosion, and if you attract and kill the egg layer/vile mother, that corpse will detonate to destroy all the young in a very large radius. You do not have enough points to max both, so decide what works best for you.
Dim Vision: Highly useful for both solo and group play. Dim is the ultimate in crowd control - everything stands still and only fights if you get within their range 1 awareness. Like Attract, add points as necessary in nightmare/hell for desired duration. Dim is the best thing to toss out first into a swarm - if you sidestep, you can avoid all contact and they stand still (except for bosses, champs, and ob knights which are immune). Because dim will not overwrite attract, you can keep a large crowd blinded and fighting each other by using those two skills in combination. Frogs of act 2 become invulnerable to all attacks while dimmed - use attract on them before dim to prevent this from happening. There is a bug where if you dim vultures in flight, they can become aggressive and attack you from the flying position, and there is nothing you can do but run. The way to clear the bug is to get far enough away such that the vultures 'fly' again and this fixes the broken state. River watchers are immune to this and all other curses, the same as towers/lightning posts and nests. My suggested targets: 3pts for 4yds and 11sec in normal, 7pts for 6.6yds and 19 sec in NM, and 17pts for 13.3yds and 39 sec in hell. This nets you about 10s duration in all difficulties, enough time for you do what you need.
Corpse Explosion (CE): Your main killing engine. As you go up in player counts, you need more explosions to drop monsters. This kind of character tends to work better in the lower count games since fewer explosions are needed; however, CE still is the fastest way to drop a big crowd regardless of player count. Corpse explosion does 50% physical damage and 50% fire damage, and its damage tracks the 1player life total of the corpse. The physical damage of this skill will frequently stun creatures, since they easily receive 1/12th their max life from CE (unless say you explode a beetle spawn corpse next to say an Urdar in an 8p game). Fast cast with CE means you can stun lock the approaching crowd - each CE sends them into a stun sequence, and you get another explosion in before the sequence finishes. Stun lock from chained corpse explosion makes a minionless necromancer much safer, and can rescue a party member from a swarm. As far as yardage goes, 4yds is a nice break point, 6yds is plenty through nightmare. My suggestion: 11 total skill for 6yds radius and 25 mana.
Iron Maiden: Add points to this skill in direct proportion to the amount of time you solo. You tend to use this as your main corpse-generating curse in solo play, high player count games. Also this works nicely in combination with bone prison (prison), as the boss will beat his way out and harm himself. For party play it is far more effective to employ other curses. One point with adders works just fine for situational use in group play. My suggestion: 1-20 points as needed.
Attract: Attract is the cornerstone of your corpse generating method for solo play. Even in group play it is useful to distract off-screen ranged attackers with nearer onscreen targets. My suggested targets: 1 pt for 12 sec in normal, 4 pts for 22.8sec in nm, and 9pts for 40.8sec in hell. This grants about 10s duration in all difficulties.
B. Minor investments:
Amplify Damage: A bread and butter curse for you. A few points here will bring it up to equal your radius on corpse explosion, which helps save time on the cursing aspect, and since you are minionless, you run a lot and time savers help. The radius on amp increases much faster than CE, so keep in mind skill adders you may or may not gather later. With amp running your corpse explosion averages 80% physical, 40% fire, and with decrepify you get 60% physical, 40% fire on average. Since physical resistance is rare and fire resistance is common, it is most effective from a damage standpoint to amp prior to CE. Lower resist will increase fire damage received, but fire resistance is very common, and the amount of increased damage is less than amp. Furthermore, big physical damage received by a target will stun them (if damage is 1/12th their max life), which keeps them from advancing on you once you begin the CE chain reaction. My suggestion: a total skill of around 7 points, granting 6yd radius for 26 seconds.
Decrepify: This skill is of use mainly for support of party members and bosses/champs. Some would say replace amp with decrepify in the CE engine - I disagree - you want max damage from CE for stun purposes and rapid kill, and to get the most bang out of the fewest corpses. For grouping, this curse can dramatically reduce the threat potential of any group of monsters by dropping both the rate at which they attack and the damage they do by attacking. Decrepify is also a nice fallback position for those times when prison/IM/spirit do not work. Where dim fails, decrepify can save the day. Another important use is against wraith bosses, which will completely ignore bone prisons. Shaman bosses burn out prisons faster than you can stack them with inferno, and will not physically beat on prisons to get an IM return. In my opinion, dim vision is better for general-purpose use, having a longer duration and idling creatures greater than 1 range away. It takes some points for this skill to begin to last long enough to matter. My estimate of this threshold is 6pts, for 6yds and 3sec duration. Even at the 3-second duration, you may find it difficult dodging creatures and keeping everything cursed.
Lower Resist: This curse will reduce monster resistance by direct subtraction. Since most monsters in D2 have zero percent magic resistance, you can achieve negative resistance with regularity by using lower resist. The main uses for it are against prisoned bosses and in party situations with sorceresses or element using amazons. Diminishing returns are evident here, and my suggested goal is 5 pts for 7.3yds, 28 sec duration and -47% resistance.
C. Single Point Investments:
Bone Wall/Prison: I prefer prison to wall, since its mana cost decreases with level and it can enclose a creature. The prison you cast has a fairly large physical extent, enough to serve a blocking function of the wall in a pinch. You must have a target to cast prison, and you need no target with wall. You can stack bone prison multiple times to create a series of barriers which will preoccupy even tough bosses for a while. Walls/prisons count as minions and scale with players in the game, and furthermore the base hp scale up with difficulty. According to DaShiv, a lvl 1 bone wall has 19 hp in normal, 147 in NM, and 431hp in hell. Add people and skill adders, and stack them up and you can see how they could last quite a long time.
Terror: A must have skill, will save you and your party many times. If you are stairs trapped or a friend is surrounded and going down, use terror to break up the crowd.
Confuse: Difficult to use properly. Works well against boss/champ/Obsidian knight groups- what happens is the boss/knight/champ is not confused, but all creatures surrounding it are and they beat up on it. Unlike attract, they are not compelled to attack a certain target - they will only do so if their current AI is disrupted and it retargets to the uncursed creature (happens if it is closer than any other targets). For Ob Knights the problem is that they tend to hang far back from the pack, and you must break the chase AI of the pack and turn it on the boss (terror works nicely, followed by confuse). Furthermore the boss keeps coming for you sometimes. You can use it through doors and across rivers - creatures with no access to you will begin to melee others who are not cursed. It is tricky casting it to get about half affected, and half not affected. Increasing the radius of confuse makes it even more difficult to get a 50/50 split of cursed to uncursed. Confuse after terror is effective, but tends to disperse corpses over a larger area, rendering CE less effective. My favorite use for confuse is to toss it up on the summoner's platform in the arcane sanctuary (AS) - the minions there will pound on him and you can approach without much fear from spell attack. My personal opinion is attract works much better with the CE killing engine, and since you are pressed with hotkeys, go with attract. Play around with this one until you get attract.
Bone Armor: Absorbs only physical damage, will let you get by in the early game. Keep it running all the time and you get 'free healing by recast'. My problem with pumping this one is that you simply do not have the points.
Life Tap: A great party support curse. Avoid routine use of this skill - your melee group mates should have enough life steal to see them through fallen and the other mundane threats. Presently this skill is bugged and does not return life for ranged attacks. The best use is against bosses with a melee party. Your paladin and barb friend will really appreciate you when you life tap Diablo and they survive. This can take the edge off a LEB. If you have a character with stun (smite or the barb skill stun) usually it is better if they use that against ordinary bosses and you up their damage via amp. Life tap is not a life saver for a party member besieged by many attackers - the basic problem then is he gets hit more than he hits, and can be in stun lock - terror is a much better way to assist in that kind of situation.
Teeth: You can make this work in the early game if you have triumphant type items and a +teeth wand. Teeth + retreat is a good way to do Anduriel. Otherwise you are better off going with a socketed longbow, or weapon, shield, amp, and CE.
Weakness: Of use early on to reduce the damage potential of creatures against your party. This curse is useful early in your career when you engage in physical melee and face a dangerous foe such as the Smith. Don't screw up like I did and accidentally plus this one up!
There are many possible combinations for this variant. I will try to touch on some of the better ones.
Infernal Set: belt, cap, wand - conveys +2 skills, requires 45 str. An excellent early game set of gear, since it will help in meleemancer style (leech back mana for CE, generate initial corpses by melee). Once you switch to casting instead of melee (lvl 18, bone spear) this set becomes less desirable. Ultimately you can replace the set with a nice rare +2 nec skills wand.
Helm - tarnhelm, wormskull, socketed skull helm, or other nice rare. The find magic item abilities work well with an arty nec, since you drop many with corpse explosions and a shower of items comes out. The +skills is desirable on this slot. Mana and life regeneration can be improved by using a skull helm. A nice rare helm can grant resistances, mana, or life.
Armor - twitchthroe, heavenly garb, greyform, other rare armor - twitchy grants shield block (+25%) and 10 str - max shield block can save your hide while you are herding large groups of monsters. Garb helps on regeneration of mana, and conveys some resistance. I would sooner gamble for twitchy than garb. Greyform is ok for the resistances and magic damage reduction, but a nice rare will beat it. On rares, look for resistance, fastest hit recovery, life and mana.
Gloves - magefist, chance guards, frostburns, or rare - I like magefist- the fast cast and regeneration are nice. Chance guards work will if you want to find magic items. Frosties can really give you solid mana, but that is about it. On a rares I like resistance and find magic item.
Belts - lenymo, nightsmoke, or rare - leyamo grants regeneration, but 2 rows it is tough living with 2 rows - you must reload healing pots frequently. Nightsmoke grants more slots and the occasional refill via being damaged can help, but it is not a critical priority (and the same goes for other vulpine items, except for perhaps an early game meleemancing use). A nice exceptional 4 row rare belt with fastest hit recovery, resistance, life/mana, and some regeneration would be close to ideal imho.
Boots - treads, vidala's, gorefoot, tearhaunch, or rare - treads and vidala's grant infinite running - your requirement here is not as urgent as it is for a blaze babe, but high speed does help. Tearhauch gives you nice speed and some resistance. Gorefoot is useful in the early game when you are meleemancing. Gorefoot and vidala's both have higher strength requirements. Your best bet is rare high resistance boots with fastest run and find magic item.
Shield - WoTE, 3 diamond shield, or rare - I really like the Wall of The Eyeless (WoTE) - the fast cast and +5 mana per kill can greatly improve spear/spirit/CE. When combined with other triumphant rings, the mana return on a mass kill can be substantial. For a socketed shield, your choice is shield block or speed. A kite gives you speed at the expense of shield block. A tower with diamonds and twitchy is a well known combo. I really like nice bone shields in the absence of WoTE- you can get 60% on a deflecting one, and other nice properties.
Weapon - culwen's, shard, ume's, deathspade, rare wand - With twichy, you can probably use culwen's with not much difficulty. Shard is a high dex commitment - if you are going to use this and need to pump dex, pump your dex early so you can get some use out of it.. Ume's lament is really fantastic, but it is hard to get. Use deathspade + WoTE + 2 triumphant rings to get +9 mana per kill and blast all day long. For rares, I would love to get fast cast, mana, +2 skills and more - it would be like Ume's, only better. If you are looking for something to imbue, imbue a wand. Wait until level 34 or more, to get a shot at +2 skills. You can take your time on imbue with a nec, since most of the undesirable melee skills are lower level, and desirable resistance/skill adders are high level.
Rings - mana leech, life leech, attack rating, Jordan, or rare - in the early game life/mana leech works ok. I found my mana leech at 10+ % not to be enough to finance CE with the infernal set. Attack rating items can really help out from lvls 12-18 where your lack of dex starts to hurt. Stones of Jordan are very nice, but frankly who ever gets any short of trade? For rares, life/mana/resists are nice, and triumphant can really add up. Fast cast can help too.
Amulets - Eye, Civerb's icon, rare - the eye is a waste for this character. Civerb's icon grants 40% mana regen and replenish - great if you have mana problems. Arcana's seal is lesser regeneration (25%). For rares get resistance, +skills, life, mana, replenish.
Notes on curses - (from DaShiv, Sirian, Crystalion, and Chaos Sanctuary)
Attract and Confuse will not overwrite each other.
Attract overwrites any other curse on only one creature.
(Attract or Confuse) will stack with IM for 2s, no matter which is cast 1st
Terrored creatures continue to run, even after you lay another curse down
Dim will not overwrite (Attract or Confuse).
Only the AI curses (Dim, Confuse, Attract- terror does not count here) have their duration decrease in nm (1/2) and hell(1/4) difficulties.
Decrepified foes will not change speed until they stop.
A. Solo Kill Techniques
Boom = Amp + CE
Dim-Spear/Spirit: You can also use this with teeth or a bow in the early game. Dim stops them from moving, permitting you to stand off and use ranged attacks with zero return fire. This is important for the AS and ghoul lords - it shuts down their firewalls and lets you kill them without them leeching back life. Use this on maps with widely dispersed foes of low hp (e.g. flayer maps)
Lure-Boom: what you do is activate many and lure them to the site of your last battle. Amplify damage on them as you gather. When they are over the corpse pile, explode as many corpses as necessary. Now your corpse pile is even larger. Repeat until the map is clear. This tactic works because you are minionless - a golem would engage them at a spot not of your choosing, and require recast for strategic positioning. In a sense you are playing a nec like a blaze babe, being most effective on damage when retreating to a kill zone and desiring things like fast run boots to have a speed edge over the pursuit.
Dim-Spear/Sprit-Boom: A highly effective technique for low count games. For instance, say you are in the tombs of act 2 and face reanimators and skeletons. You dim the room. This stops the reanimators from animating the skeletons. Now you go about spearing/spiriting the reanimators. This generates a few corpses. Finally you overwrite dim with amp while standing on/near to a reanimator corpse. The entire room converges to your position. When they are within your explosion radius, blow up the room. For higher count games you need more corpses, but stun lock from rapid chained CE explosion can provide defense. For general applications, spear/spirit the largest creature/creatures you find since they will create the highest damaging corpse for CE. This technique works very well because you are minionless - you are the bait and you can pick your position to drag them across the high hp corpse.
Dim-Attract-IM-Attract-Boom: This technique works well in high player count games, and serves to reduce the number of corpses necessary to kill off a crowd. You dim the onrushing crowd and sidestep. This keeps them from targeting you, and they eventually stop and stand there. If a boss crawls through the pack, deal with him by retreating a few screens and applying another technique. Toss an attract into the pack. This will give them something else to fight, and helps break the chase AI of those dimmed creatures still following you (as long as it is within the attract radius, 6yds). Eventually you get a dimmed crowd fighting each other. Now IM and toss up a few more attracts (since IM overwrites attract, and fresh applications of attract will last). Infighting continues, and everyone dies faster. When enough corpses are down, blow them up with the amp-CE. There is an art to gathering monsters and parking them with Dim - you want them close enough so future CE's will be efficient.
Prison-IM-LR-Spirit: since dim does not work on bosses/champs/ob knights, the only real way to stop them short of minions is with bone wall or prison. Prison surrounds them. Put up a few prisons, and replace them as they are knocked down. IM on the boss. Now as he beats on your prison, he takes damage. When he gets low, lower resist and spirit him to get the killing blow. This is fantastic against Duriel. This method does not work against things which hose your prison or ignore it (e.g. shaman or wraiths).
Terror-Attract: while they are running off, tag one with attract. Others will fight it and this cuts down on the number returning to swarm your position. This helps in stair trap situations. This is a dispersive technique and generally not great for CE. Also finding all the drops can be hard since you don't see off screen drops.
Terror-Confuse: like terror attract, fleeing monsters fight each other (cursed ones fight non cursed). Shares same drawbacks as Terror-Attract.
Terror-Wall-IM-Boom: Use this when you have a restrictive choke point such as a door. Terror drives them off through a door. Remember terror makes them flee from the position you terror, so line up your terror to drive them through the door. Once they are through the door, block the door with prison/wall. They return, are IM'ed and stuck in the other room, eventually a few die and you explode. You can add an attract or two to the creatures on the other side to keep them off your wall and get full experience. This works better with bone wall, since you can cover greater area with walls and achieve better movement restriction.
Decrepify-Spear/Spirit: This is best used against bosses who sneer at your puny ineffective bone prison. Use decrepify to get a speed edge to stand off at range, and out gun them with spear/spirit.
Confuse-Wall-Boom: confuse the minions of a boss so they attack him. Put up a wall to break their chase AI. Once enough corpses drop, switch to amp and explode. Prison does not work really well here, and wall requires a nice choke point.
B. Group Kill Techniques
Boom: Here you have enough party members where you can just run amp while they drop corpses all over the place and you explode them. Works well with strafe/multizons who have valk. Smart party members know to retreat over the big corpse pile if things get sticky. Smart zons can cast a decoy over your corpse pile.
Dim-Boom: This is useful against large groups of ranged attackers. Your party members kill a few blinded creatures. You amp and corpse explode to take out the rest. This technique shuts down the ranged attack. Also prevents leapers from leaping, flayers & zealots from fleeing, etc. Blind creatures do not disperse.
Decrepify-Boom: Your melee friends love this one - everything slows down, they get hit less and not as hard. Decrepify is so melee friendly that they will mow through the monsters with little personal risk. You can directly explode after decrepify, but it is not as effective as amping before corpse explosion. You need to frequently recast at lower decrepify levels, and this can be difficult to pull off if you are dodging stragglers. This is also good against creatures which have a high lethality level, IE things which hit hard, fast, or both e.g. vultures.
Tap-Spear/Spirit: A fantastic way to take out bosses. Your melee buds run in, melee the boss w/50% life steal while you support with spear/spirit. Lowest risk against big act bosses. Remember tap does not return life for ranged attacks.
Prison-Amp-Leap Attack: You bone prison the boss/champ/ob knight, put amp on it, and your barb buddy leap attacks the stationary target, leaping out for further tries. Usually, barbs can get in and out of a prison before a boss can do anything. Advise barb friends to put leap attack on their left for this one - it is pretty easy for them to accidentally click on the prison and drop it if there is a melee attack on the left.
Terror-Boom: Your melee buddy is in real trouble. You terror stuff off him, and amp it as it goes. It will return amped, and he can pick them off as they trickle in. You are his grim ward. This generates some corpses for the main amplified pack, which arrives to witness their explosion.
Lower resist-spear/spirit-Boom: this works well with sorceresses. You do not need to use amp before corpse explosion if the sorc is using static. Whoever is the center of attention should be the target zone for your CE. Your corpse explosion basically replaces their finishing spell. You use spear/spirit to get a few corpses going to start the process.
Your central difficulty in this variant is a lack of hotkeys. I can't wait for the expansion and its 16 hotkeys! Here is my recommendation based on remapping q-w-e-r to skills 5-8 and a-s-d-f to 1-4:
For solo:
Left action= Bone spirit
Q= bone armor W=bone prison/wall E= terror R= iron maiden
This package lets you do most of the effective combat techniques described in the proceeding section.
I am a firm believer in remapping hotkeys. Fast switching between skills is critical for effective play. The default position of F1-F8 is a tough reach over your potion row. Furthermore assigning keys to letters based on mnemonic value is a waste - you think 'character sheet' then associate 'c' with character sheet, then remember where 'c' is on the keyboard, then type it. I like to assign keys based on a simple spatial grid. So a-s-d-f is a row of 4, and above it q-w-e-r is another row of 4. So when I think of my hotkey, I think immediately of its position in the keyboard grid and punch it, saving a few mental steps.
I put dim/attract/amp/CE on a-s-d-f, since those are your speed keys and your left hand rests on them by default. You will use all of these much, and will be more effective by having them on these keys.
The q-w-e-r keys are for things you use periodically. IM is the exception, but I find the r-key an easy reach on my index finger from the f-position. Prison and terror are seldom used, but important to have keyed when you need them.
Determine whether you want wall or prison.
The only potential key for change is the bone armor key. Certainly in the early game, this skill will be frequently used. However, in the late game when you have your mana established to your satisfaction and you begin to add life from level ups to vitality, you may find that your armor is no longer useful and something else may be worth it there. A solid choice is decrepify as a backup for those times when prison does not work. Wall is also a good choice if you like using IM + wall as a good way to get corpses generated in high player count games. Confuse is also a fun one to put there, but remember that once confused, the fact that monsters can't be attracted can be annoying. Think of this key as your free key, and put whatever you like there.
My advice on town portal is to put the town portal tome on the top left side of your inventory. Then you can pop open inventory and right click on it for a quick trip to town (I find this faster than the spell select key). Get used to this early on, and you will never miss it from your precious hotkeys. The only time you may want to re-key it is for Duriel, where you may need a quick escape.
Other things I re-map which are sort of quirky, but work for me- z-x-c-v, the row below a-s-d-f are my inventory functions z=character sheet (don't look at it much, a hard key to reach) x=skill speed key c=inventory, use all the time, easy reach v=view items on the ground g=auto map toggle h=run/walk toggle f2= quests f3= portraits left control= Roger Wilco message key
Typical strategy for solo: Venture into new areas with dim ready. Dim at the first sign of monsters (toss it towards the edge of your screen). If you listen carefully, you can usually hear their war cries before you get them on screen. If things trickle through and will not dim, you have champions or bosses. Retreat and deal with them via prison-IM-LR-Spirit, confuse-wall-boom, or decrepify-spear/spirit. Go far enough on your retreat that you are beyond the activation radius of the minions. If nothing trickles through, approach and see what you have, being prepared to dim newly exposed creatures. If you have nasty ranged attackers, spear/spirit kill them while dimmed; then, proceed with canceling dim by amp and exploding the corpses you have. If the ranged attackers are firing from far off and you can't dim them, advance, dodge, and dim until you can. If there are intervening monsters preventing this, use lure-boom to get out of the range of the off screen ranged attackers and kill the intervening pack. For ob knights, attract an intermediate monster (here intermediate means within 6yds of the ob knight) so the knight goes for it instead of you. If what you have is just melee creatures, cancel your dim with amp and lure them to your previous kill zone.
For groups:
Use the same hotkey setup with the following modification:
R= decrepify or life tap or lower resist
Life tap is great with a mixed player party lacking stun. A barb using the stun skill or a smite pally means that life tap is completely unnecessary except for act bosses, and you can re-key then. Although you can run life tap all the time in support of your barb (which will make him very happy), your overall kill speed suffers since you are not using amp/CE to speed clear. Also most melee characters should have a modest amount of life steal for routine operations figured out, and they only really need assistance versus bosses/champs. Throwing life tap out as a lifesaver when your melee guy is surrounded is not very effective - often they get hit faster than they can hit, and even with the tap running they die. In those kind of situations terror is a better bail for them.
Decrepify works well if you do not need tap, such as being grouped with ranged attackers such as a sorc or a zon. In this case they are not very concerned about life return.
Your use of kill techniques really depends critically upon with whom you are grouped. Most will enjoy dim for added safety. Often your party's offensive kill rate is so impressive that your offense is your best defense, and you should run with the curse that maximizes their kill rate (amp for physical, lower resist for elemental). It makes sense to tell them to ask for things like terror when they are pinned (this works best if you are running a chat program like freeware Roger Wilco, www.rogerwilco.com, where you can real time communicate a problem such as 'help! I am in lag and none of my pots are working!). If they are smart, they will try to stay on the same screen as you to take advantage of your support. Many will out run you on the rush of power they get, and over run your curses and die. After a few deaths like this, a humble reminder to stay close might not fall on deaf ears. It is often better for barbs to circle the pack and whirl back towards you - this gives him a nice safe clear spot to finish the whirl, and leaves a corpse trail through which approaching foes walk.
There will be some who think Necromancer = Minions and be confused. Tell them you spent all your points getting great curses such as lower resist and dim, and the best minion in the world is a party member supported by curses. Most need to get over their fear of swarming, which a few minutes in the dungeon with pumped dim will alleviate.
Levels 1-5: Go with weapon + amp, or teeth to kill foes. Keep bone armor up all the time. Get strength to 25 as soon as possible to use long bow unless you have a weapon to twink. Longbow damage of 3-10 +25% for your dex and doubled for amp will drop just about anything you face, and stun most anything you face.
Levels 6-11: You now have dim and corpse explosion. Use dim when the crowds get too big to handle. Use corpse explosion if you have a big corpse and a nice tight pack of monsters. Use weaken if you are going to melee something tough like the smith.
Levels 12-17: This is going to be your toughest struggle all career. You do get terror, which helps make things easier. Also IM and bone wall give you a way to hold off and whittle down big nasty bosses. Weapon + amp in high player count games is very productive, you can do well in act 1 up through lvl 17. If you use weapons, try to increase your attack rating by items. Lure tactics using amp and CE work nicely in lower count games, but it can be tough getting that first corpse- a bow will drop things while dimmed (also you tend to have low dim radius then).
Levels 18-23: Bone spear is your lifesaver here. It goes on your left to stay until spirit arrives later. Confuse is an amusing distraction. Tap arrives at 18, and will be of use for your party members against Duriel. You should retool your gear at this time to go for big mana/triumphant items and get the best + skills/ + bone spear wand you can buy.
Levels 24-29: At last you get attract. Put it to use as much as you can to help generate corpses. Decrepify arrives to help with some bosses and help out party members. By now you should be in full bloom, lacking only a decent direct damage spell.
Levels 30+: You have arrived. Bone spirit will provide a welcome boost to your arsenal, and lower resist will find occasional use. Concentrate on getting your ultimate gear assembled via strategic gambling.
Thanks go to Sirian for detailing the vulture/dim bug. Thanks also to Spiderdrake for the cure to vulture/dim. DaShiv + Lemekim wrote excellent and informative guides which have stimulated my thinking on this variant. You should read Crystalion's pioneering post on how curses work and stack. Inix for reporting tap does not work with ranged attacks. WhyBish for pointing out 27 strength is a viable early game strength target.
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