Introduction

Hardcore is dangerous for a number of reasons but the primary risk that kills most competent players is lag. For those who battle lag often, really the only safe way to play Hardcore is with a Summoning Necromancer. Thankfully this build can completely dominate all aspects of the game while adding a certain amount of safety into the mix. This is my favorite build and I have the most fun playing it. While it is technically a “Summoner”, the killing will be mostly done by Corpse Explosion (CE). Summons can kill decently enough but nothing can kill quicker in this game than CE if the toon is built correctly to fully leverage its power.

Stat Point Distribution

Place enough Stat Points into Strength/Dexterity to equip your gear. Everything else should go into Vitality. Pretty easy.

Skill Point Distribution

Max the skills Raise Skeleton, Skeleton Mastery and Corpse Explosion. Put 1 point into pre-requirements and also into Revive, Clay Golem, Summon Resist, All Curses and Bone Armor. The rest should go into Bone Wall which will synergize your Bone Armor.

Necromancer’s Gear

Helm – Shako (Um)
Armor – Mage Plate Enigma
Shield – Homo (PDiamond)
Gloves – Trangs
Belt – TGods
Boots – Marrowalks
Weapon – Hoto
Ring1 – Raven (20 dex)
Ring2 – Stone of Jordan
Charms – Torch, Anni, 1 x 15 All Resist Grand Charm, Summoning Skillers and Life SCs.

Mercenary

Act 2 Might Mercenary is the obvious choice here. Equip him with an ebugged Chains of Honor, Guils and an Eth Elite Infinity. No that isn’t a mistype I really meant Infinity and no I didn’t actually mean Pride.

Bone Armor

This is a very nice skill. It allows the Necromancer a method for essentially absorbing physical damage and the best part is that it is applied BEFORE the impact of any curses. This means you won’t be taking crazy damage when a doll pops next to you if you happen to be cursed with Amp! I love this skill for Hardcore and we should aim to maximize its impact. To do this we put only 1 point into Bone Armor itself and then we start to synergize it by pumping up Bone Wall. It’s pretty stupid but the synergy skill of Bone Wall actually increases your Bone Armor more than putting hard points directly into Bone Armor.

Corpse Explosion

Let’s talk about the most powerful skill in the game and why we should max it. CE pops a corpse resulting in damage being delivered equal to 60% – 100% of the monsters original base life and that damage will be delivered to each monster within the radius of the blast. CE is not a timered spell so you can spam it. It does not do a “to hit” check and can’t be blocked. So just how much damage are we talking about?

The damage you dish out is directly related to the monsters you are currently fighting. Lets say you are fighting a pack of Venom Lords in the Throne Room. Also in the Throne Room are packs of Doom Knights and Mages. If you CE a Venom Lord corpse that originally had 20,000 hit points, the damage dished out from your CE will be approximately 6,000 to 10,000 (8,000 on average) fire AND 6,000 to 10,000 (8,000 on average) physical resulting in a total damage output of 12,000 to 20,000 damage (16,000 on average). This damage is dealt to EVERY monster that is in the radius of the explosion. You can clear most of a room with just a couple CEs!

But wait, why Max CE? Why not just put 1 point in there and let my plus skills get me a huge radius… I mean, I don’t need to kill things 3 screens away right? No that is not correct. You can never get CE to kill things 3 screens away or even 2 screens away. As an example, following is a picture of a Necromancer who just set off a CE. IF this build had only put 1 point into CE and gained another 15 from gear the radius of the blast would be 7.6 yards as shown by the purple semi-circle. IF this build had put a full 20 hard points into CE and also gained another 15 from gear the radius of the blast would be 14 yards (double the radius) as shown by the red semi-circle.

The difference is quite obvious. Remember, each CE does a crazy amount of damage to everything in its range so you want that damage to hit as much of the screen as you can. A 14 yard radius is capable of covering more than a full screens worth of monsters (think Throne Room). This often will result in the death of not only the pack of monsters you are currently fighting… but also the pack of Doom Knights and Mages hiding in the corner you haven’t seen yet.





But wait again, CE’s damage is impacted by the mosnters base damage so if we’re in an 8 player game the skill sucks right? Uh, no. That is the stupidest argument against CE I’ve heard and I here it alot. NO other skill increases in power simply because you are in an 8 player game. It’s not like a Sorc’s Frozen Orb increases in killing power or a Light Sorc’s Chain lightning increases in intensity as more peeps enter a game. There is no difference here. Yes it takes more CE’s to kill things in an 8 player game the same way it takes more Orbs, Lightning, Fire Balls or whatever else you want to use to kill things. It’ll take your minions longer too if you choose to let them doing the killing for you.

But wait, aren’t monsters resistant/immune to fire/physical damage? So the damage actually dealt isn’t that much right? Yes and no. When you confront any pack of monsters the first thing you’ll do is cast Amplify damage. Venom Lords are 50% physcially resistant but with Amp applied they are actually -50% physically resistant. So the physical portion of the CE will actually do MORE damage than previously thought.

Venom Lords are 95% fire resistant and that can take away lots of fire damage normally. Our Merc is carrying Infinity to counter that though and the Conviction aura it has will remove 85% of the resistance leaving Venom Lords only 10% fire resistant. The net impact of Amp + Conviction will mean the actual damage dealt with be 5,400 to 9,000 fire AND 9,000 to 15,000 physical (total of 14,400 to 24,000).

Notice the impact Infinity has had here. Because we are using Infinity the fire damage per CE is 5,400 – 9,000 instead of only 300 - 500 (Venom Lords are normally 95% fire resistant). That is a pretty big impact and it’ll “impact” every monster in the range of the CE instantly!

What About Using Pride and Beast?

The first primary issue with Pride is that it has a Freeze Mod. This mod is horrible for anyone that likes to use CE because your merc generally will be the first one to get a kill and with a Freeze Mod he leaves no corpses behind. Very bad mod and is enough for me to avoid it like the plague as a merc weapon. Pride’s Concentration Aura does seem like it’d add lots of extra damage to an army though so maybe we need to take a closer look.

Time to do some math. There are many peeps who will stop reading at this point and just sit there convinced their Pride build does more damage than my build but this article isn’t for them. It’s for peeps that have an open mind and are willing to evaluate a build properly. So that’s what we are going to do now. We will use a very handy Necromancer Pet Calculator which you can find here: http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~gottwald/necro_pet_calculator.html

First let’s get some baseline damage data. Let’s look at our Skeleton Army Damage including the impact of a lvl 18 Might aura from a Mercenary (think we can all agree that is the right merc to use) but without any other outside influences:




With +15 to skills from gear you will have 13 Skeleton warriors and as a unit they will dish out 7,231 physical damage per second. Not terrible but not great either especially considering what CE can do.

But wait! What about Pride? Won’t that make them do crazy high damage? Let’s find out by adding a level 20 Concentration Aura into the mix. But wait! We need to be carrying Beast too! Surely that will tip the scale!? Fine, let’s also run a set of numbers assuming we build our army using Hoto and then switch to Beast bringing with it a level 9 Fanatacism Aura.





So every second on average our army will deliver 11,903 physical damage with Might and Concentration Auras active. Including Fanatacism increases the damage per second to 14,978 and yes that takes into account their increased attack speed. The total impact is a doubling of the base damage from 7,231 to 14,978. This assumes that our Skeletons never miss when they attack and that their attacks don’t get blocked which of course is not true so we’ll need to adjust for that.

Impact of Chance to Hit

We will assume that our level is the same as the level of the monsters we are attacking for simplicity. The chance to hit equation is: Attack Rating / (Attack Rating + Defense Rating) x (1 – Block Rate). A Venom Lord’s Defense Rating is 1,792 and its block rate is 50%. The chance for a Skeleton Warrior to hit a Venom Lord under the Concentration/Fanatacism Auras will be:

8,377 / (8,377 + 1,792) = 82.4% x 50% = 41.2%

The adjusted damage dealt can now be calculated as:

14,978 x 41.2% = 6,171 damage per second

Let’s assume we’ve casted Amp damage on the Pit Lords thus resulting in the final effective damage dished out of:

6,171 + (50% x 6,171) = 9,257 damage per second

By way of comparison, a Skeleton Army built using a Might Aura and Conviction (my build) instead of Fanatacism/Concentration will do final effective damage of:

4,654 / (4,654 + (1,792 – 85% x 1,792)) = 94.5% x 50% = 47.3% x 7,231 = 3,420 + (50% x 3,420) = 5,130 damage per second

By not using the Fanatacism/Concentration Auras my army outputs 4,127 less damage per second. A second is a long time in Diablo though.


Corpse Explosion Compared to Skeleton Army Damage

Let’s compare the damage figures above to what CE is gonna do for us under both scenarios and we’ll assume there are 6 Venom Lords getting ready to smack us around. If we decide to pop a corpse the average damage that will be done instantly is:

Physical Damage Dealt = 6 x (8,000 + (8,000 x 50%)) = 72,000 Physical Damage
Fire Damage Dealt (Pride/Fanatacism) = 6 x (8,000 - (8,000 x 95%)) = 2,400 Fire Damage

Total effective damage popping a corpse (Pride/Fanatacism) = 74,400. Even if you use Pride/Fanatacism you are still gonna want to use CE heavily as it does way more damage than your army can do.

Fire Damage Dealt (Conviction) = 6 x (8,000 - (8,000 x (95% – 85%))) = 43,200 Fire Damage

Total effective damage popping a corpse (Conviction) = 115,200. Wow, that’s a whopping 40,800 more damage dealt and its application is instant! The larger the radius the higher the damage will be with each CE. The damage applied to each monster in this case is 19,200 and again, its application is instant. If there were 12 Venom Lords the total effective damage would be 230,400.

These numbers are silly high but it’s the reason why CE can clear rooms in just a few CE’s. It is also a primary reason why you really want to max the range of CE as nothing else can dish out this kind of mass damage and it’ll be your primary killer.

Killing Bosses

But what about killing Baal? Ya can’t use CE on him so a Pride/Fanatacism build will surely kill bosses faster right? It’s true that CE can’t be used against bosses like Baal so you are stuck with your army and on the surface it would seem that the Fanatacism/Concentration build will be far superior here but its not quite as cut and dry as it may seem.

Bosses have huge amounts of hit points and there is 1 sometimes overlooked mod that is the biggest boss killer of them all. That mod is called Crushing Blow (CB). Very few things can take out a boss faster than a toon carrying lots of CB which is the reason why CB is the most important mod when fighting the Ubers. We all know this. Pride is a nice polearm but it does not have Crushing Blow. Infinity does have crushing blow. In fact, my merc will carry a total of 80% Crushing Blow with him (Infinity + Guils). The Conviction Aura will remove 85% of Baals defense rating too so my army will hit more often including my merc. Poison mages are the final boss killing key as they stop Baal from regenerating health. Baal does not last long when confronted by my build and the difference in killing speeds is probably negligable.

Why not Max Mages?

I’m not a fan of maxing mages as the damage output does not increase to anything remotely close to what CE can do and with 1 point in Mages + 15 from gear I can have 7 mages as it is allowing me to get a decent supply of poison mages. There are 4 types of mages and their damage is very different. Poison mages do pathetic damage but their poison lasts for a crazy long time. This is the most effective way to stop bosses from regenerating health and I make sure I have a couple poison mages with me when I fight bosses. You can’t choose what mages you will be summoning though so just make sure you keep summoning mages until you see some with green hands. Assuming I get 2 poison mages and the rest are an equal combo of light/fire/cold my average damage per second would be:

( 1,272 + 729 + 1,111) / 3 / 7 = 148 x 5 = 740

Even with Conviction that is pretty pathetic.





If we max mages we’ll get 13 total mages. Let’s assume 3 of them are poison leaving 10 that will do damage resulting in an average damage per second of :

( 3,161 + 1,797 + 2,733) / 3 / 13 = 197 x 10 = 1,970

Again, pathetic and nothing compared to what CE is gonna do for us. By the time my mages stop walking around and start casting their spells most everything will be dead! Putting more than 1 point here is a waste of skill points.