Maldar, the Magnificent

[MongoJerry]

MALDAR BUILD AND EQUIPMENT

Maldar's equipment is completely untwinked, so he found all of his items himself. He's level 79 now and is about to step into hell for the first time. He's going to abide by the following rules:

1. He plays solo.
2. He plays in /players 1 mode.
3. He must get every waypoint and quest in game order.
4. He may only kill those monsters whose deaths are necessary to fulfill the quests.
5. He may not use any cross-class skills, except that he can use a staff of Teleport in the Maggot Lair (where it would be impossible to travel otherwise without killing things).
6. No mercenaries ever! (Maldar has had difficulty finding mercenaries who will abide by his pacifist code, and if he used mercenaries only against bosses, then he'd have to kill the mercenaries afterward which would be an abomination to him. Besides, Maldar the Magnificent needs no stink'n mercenaries!)
7. He may be twinked as much gold and as many full rejuvenation potions as he needs. (The council is covering all his expenses). Obviously, he can't gamble with twinked cash. I don't expect to use this feature much. Maldar already has a large cash horde and a large stash of his own full rejuv potions. Plus, I'll conserve rejuv's by using red and blue potions as much as possible. However, I didn't want to end up in, say, Act IV and not be able to make any progress simply because I'd run out of rejuv potions with no way to restock Maldar's supply.

Maldar can reroll monsters and maps if he needs to, but he has to fulfill every quest. I'm going to play him as if he were a hardcore character and see how far he can go without dying. Feel free to speculate how far you think he'll get.

As far as I can tell, the only monsters that the game requires one to kill in order to fulfill all of the quests are:

1. All the monsters in the Den of Evil
2. Blood Raven
3. The Countess
4. Andariel
5. Radament
6. The Summoner
7. Duriel
8. The Gidbin flayer
9. The Council members
10. Mephisto
11. Izual
12. Hephasto
11. The Grand Vizier
13. De Seis
14. The Infector of Souls
15. Diablo
16. Shenk the Overseer
17. Nihlathak
18. The Ancients
19. (Colenzo and Achmel?)
20. Baal
21. The Cow King

I'm not sure if it's possible to coax Colenzo and Achmel out of the main room in the Throne of Destruction (which would allow the next boss pack to appear). If it is, Maldar will do that. If it's impossible, then he'll have to kill them.


CURRENT EQUIPMENT

Maldar's equipment is completely untwinked. In other words, all of these items are ones he found himself or bought from shops:

Helm: Vampire Gaze socketed with a perfect ruby (18% dr, +38 life)
Belt: Ocher Plated Belt of the Whale (14% lr, +99 life)
Gloves: Iratha's cuff (30% cr, half freeze duration)
Weapon: Necromancer's Grim Wand of the Magus (+2 all skills, 20% fast cast, +3 Confuse)
Shield: Scintillating Bone Shield of Deflecting socketed with 2 perfect diamonds (60% block, +52% all resists)
Ring: Bahamut's Ring (+105 mana)
Ring: Great Wyrm's Ring of Nova Shield (+90 mana, 14% chance to cast lvl 4 Nova)
Amulet: Prismatic Amulet of the Whale (19% all resists, +89 life)
Boots: Ruby Greaves of Acceleration (33% fr, 40% faster r/w)
Armor: Artisan's Light Plate of the Whale socketed with a Ral, Ort, and Thul (+30% lr/fr/cr, +99 life)
Weapon switch: Pus Spitter
In stash: Battle staff of Teleportation (only for use in the Maggot Lair)

Interesting. Two uniques (one of which is on weapon switch and will be rarely used), one low level set item, and all the rest are magic items. And yet, I'm quite happy with Maldar's equipment. That goes to show just how much Blizzard improved magic items in LoD. In fact, a lot of my equipment was stuff I bought from shops. I got the shield, armor, and boots from nightmare Anya. The wand and staff came from Akara, and the belt came from Larzuk. Shopping at Anya's was a huge time saver, because I could use Anya portal to reroll her shop and shop for armor, boots, shield, and gloves at the same time. I ended up using the Iratha's gloves, because of its bonus "half freeze duration," but while shopping I got separate gloves with 30% lr, 30% fr, and 30% cr (the highest possible resists on gloves). If I used my 'Lore' circlet instead of my Vamp Gaze, I could have a no uniques, rares, or set items character. Heck, I could have Maldar wear a crown socketed with a Ral-Ort-Thul and add a no runewords policy, too. Incidentally, the amulet was one I gambled, so you could say that I bought it from the shop, too. I just about fell out of my chair when it appeared.

I know, Maldar's equipment makes him look florescent. Oh, well. This is hardcore. Safety matters more than fashion. One of the critical aspects of this build is that Maldar needs to be able to run quickly. So getting a pair of 40% faster r/w boots and a lightweight set of armor and shield was essential. That's why I shopped for light plate armors and bone shields at Anya's instead of shopping for tower shields and higher defense armors at Charsi's.

The "of the Whale" suffix on Maldar's belt, amulet, and armor gives Maldar a huge boost to his life. Combined with the life bonus from the perfect ruby, Maldar's equipment provides 325 life out of Maldar's total 951 life.

I tried crafting several pairs of gloves and imbuing and crafting a couple of wands, but I didn't get anything useful. I'm going to spend Maldar's last imbue (assuming he gets the malus) on another wand. Maybe I'll get lucky. It'll be tough to get something that beats +2 all skills and 20% fast cast, but you never know. Fast cast isn't as important for this build as it is for other casting necromancers, but a small amount of fast cast helps when you have to cast on the run.

The Pus Spitter on weapon switch will be useful to stop monster heal on bosses who regenerate life with it's poison damage over 8 seconds. I checked the poison damage calculator to see if adding poison damage charms to Maldar's inventory would increase the poison duration, but it turns out that it wouldn't. (Well, if I added two charms, I could increase the duraction to 8.5 seconds. Big deal).

Charms: His inventory is almost completely full of charms and combined they give:

+120 life
+61 mana
38% lightning resist
20% fire resist
24% cold resist
14% poison resist
10% magic find
+1 strength
+7% faster run/walk

Maldar found a +14% all resists grand charm (I was so happy about that), so that's the reason for the +14% to poison resist. The magic find won't do Maldar much good, since he won't be killing many monsters, although he can open chests. However, the 10% mf is on two small charms and I don't have anything else good to replace them with, so I might as well use them.


MERCENARY EQUIPMENT

There is no mercenary!


SKILL ALLOCATION

CURSES

20 points Dim Vision
1 point Terror
1 point Decrepify
1 point Amp Damage (deprecated)
1 point Life Tap (deprecated)
1 point Iron Maiden (prereq)
1 point Weaken (prereq)

POISON AND BONE SPELLS

20 points Bone Spirit
20 points Bone Prison
14 points Bone Wall
1 point Bone Armor
1 point Teeth (prereq)
1 point Corpse Explosion (prereq)
1 point Bone Spear (prereq)

SUMMONING SPELLS

1 point Clay Golem
1 point Golem Mastery


I found a bug with the way Bone Armor and its synergies, Bone Wall and Bone Prison, work. The game and the Arreat Summit say that both Bone Wall and Bone Prison give +15% to the damage that Bone Armor can absorb. It turns out that they actually give you a straight +15 to damage absorb for each skill point put into them -- not +15%. Since Bone Armor itself only gives you +10 damage absorption per point put in it, if you want to boost the amount of damage your Bone Armor absorbs, it's better to put the points into Bone Prison and Bone Wall rather than Bone Armor itself! That kind of works out well for me, because Bone Wall and Bone Prison also act as synergies for Bone Spirit, so I get a "two for one" deal by putting points into them. However, meleemancers should be in an uproar about this. Consider 41 points dedicated to boosting one's Bone Armor. Currently, the best strategy would be to place 1 point into Bone Armor and the rest into Bone Wall and Bone Prison. That would give you 620 points of damage absorption. But if the synergies worked the way they're supposed to, then you would put 20 points into Bone Armor and the other 21 points into Bone Prison and Bone wall. That would give you 871 points of damage absorption.

While leveling up Maldar (yes, he had a mercenary in normal and nightmare -- he wasn't a pacifist then), Amp Damage and Life Tap were very useful. Maldar meleed through most of normal and the early part of nightmare and used a blessed aim merc to keep up his attack rating. By the middle of nightmare, he switched to being a pure caster. The combination of maxed Dim Vision which halted entire screens of monsters at once with a low radius Amp Damage and Life Tap in service of Maldar's merc rocked. Unfortunately, Amp Damage and Life Tap won't be useful anymore, but they were so useful in normal and nightmare that I don't regret spending the skill points on them.

The Clay Golem was a late addition to the build. I'm not sure how much I'll use it -- probably very little, actually. But I thought that being able to cast a Clay Golem as a distracter could be useful at times. I figured that spending two skill points to enable me to have an extra tool to use would be worth it.

All further skill points will go into Bone Wall.


STAT POINT ALLOCATION

Maldar's naked (no items) stat allocation looks like this:

Str: 75
Dex: 213
Vit: 167
Energy: 25

After equipping everything, his stats look like this:

Str: 76
Dex: 213
Vit: 167
Energy: 25

This build is not very mana intensive, so I chose not to put any points into Energy. The two rings and one grand charm with +mana on them are plenty of mana to work with. When I have to kill bosses, I can quaff mana potions in order to spam bone spirits.


RELEVANT STATISTICS

With this equipment, stat, and skill setup, Maldar gets:

1188-1286 Bone Spirit damage
550 Bone Armor damage absorption
951 Life
437 Mana
74%/75%/73%/5% Resists
18% Damage reduction
75% Block
+2 All skills
+47% Faster run/walk
+20% Fast cast


GAME PLAY WITH MALDAR

In theory, an encounter a typical monster pack works something like this:

1. Dim Vision the edge of the screen to blind all upcoming normal monsters.
2. Run up and bone prison all the bosses and champions.
3. Cast Terror as necessary to get monsters out of the way.
4. Run past everyone.

Of course, in real life, things get a lot hairier -- especially in narrow passageways.


COMMENTS

1. I'd originally intended to wait until Maldar was 80th level before moving on to hell, but it was taking too long. It was really easy to get to 78th level in 8-player nightmare with Baal runs, but it took like five runs to go from 78th to 79th level. By that time, the only things giving Maldar any decent experience were Lister's minions and Baal himself. I didn't want to bother going through the pain of getting to 80th level in nightmare.

2. So, on an insanity scale from 1 to 10, where does this character build lie?