I've mostly played Boner/CE, wondering if it's worth to try Summon or Psn instead. SC btw

So what's your choice?

To make it short, I've played all three and I'll try to summarize as succinctly as I can.

Summons do comparatively little damage; to get them to do a nice amount you need to sacrifice a good necro/caster weapon for beast. Also very slow-going and most of your time is spent either summoning an army (depending on your join/leave rate) or finding a good hiding spot to stay away from monsters not covered by summons or reachable by CE.

Poison - Two choices here - Novamancer and Daggermancer. Novamancer is slow and suffers against anything even slightly poison-resistant in Hell. Poison dagger can be fun as there are many +poison skill items and such to make it pretty damn deadly, but suffers from the same handicap as nova since you will always run across poison immunes in addition to having to get up-close and personal to hit your target (not a good idea for the frail necro).

Boner is the one I'm impartial to. You can get massive magic damage on spirit/spear the likes of which you won't see on any other character. Most monsters, even in Hell, have little to no defense against magic, spears can be launched with at a high rate of fire (with a good amount of fcr of course), spirit auto-targets which is invaluable against the beefier-yet-extremely fast targets (Travincal comes to mind), and anything in the rare instance of a magic immune can be handily dealt with CE (1/2 fire, 1/2 phys damage - I don't recall ever seeing a monster having all three immunities).

Any specific questions feel free to ask me! Good luck!

Id say nova/summoner hybrid. Master_Zappy has a good build for this as always.

I'm in the poison nec camp for general pvm, the other two just cant compete with the exception of summoners specifically in ubers. 6K bone spear doesnt do nearly what a 12-15K poison nova can do to a screen full of monsters at -140-150 negative enemy res with that huge aoe. In chaos you can clear whole screens in one cast most of the time. The high number of plus skills also means the ce is awesome. 60 points to max poison nova, 20 in raise skelly, mastery 1 lower res, revive and decrep and the build is set. It has the meatshields that keep it safe and add other elements to the mix.

ymmv

I'm thinking about LR and Infy merc to deal with immunes? Would also affect 1/2 CE (the fire part). So the downside of the psnmancer seems to be lower phys dmg from minions and phys CE part (when casting LR instead of amp, also there's no room for pride or beast if using insight golem and deaths web/psn dagger).

#1 summoner
#2 poison/summoner
#3 just random clicked skills build
#4 boner

e:



infi doesnt affect psn res unfortunately

ce/minions/amp is your weapon vs immunes

This post was edited by kronosHardcore on Mar 23 2017 09:52am

Summoner is the strongest overall.

Poison is nice for the lazy man who cbf raising all those skeles - as fast as summoner in single player when fully geared

Daggermancer for very patient people.

Bear necro using Oath for the funsies! <--- this is da best but you didn't put it as a vote option

This post was edited by draftw3dr on Mar 23 2017 10:50am

amp damage and corpse explosion > the entire game

fishymancer is best

poison is fun, but I'd rather use Amp + CE + Skeles/Revives than Lower Resists/Psn Nova.

amp and summons (udars) kill bosses way faster too.

This post was edited by The_Charade on Mar 23 2017 12:43pm

ce

Poison necro > all. PvM or gm PvP (but gotta be high level and have good dmg spirit to go with it ofc).

In PvM it's important to realise that nova is only one of your killing methods. Get a powerful merc with some crushing blow and you're good to go. Against crowds, cast lower resist and nova - your merc will support - when one falls, cast amp over the rest and let corpse explosion do the rest. Easy as that.

Lower res -> nova + merc killing -> amp dmg -> corpse explosion

Against bosses, cast decrepify (keeps merc safe and still amps dmg by 50%) and let merc do the work. Cast a few novas just to help him along. Remember that clay golem is also good for slowing those bosses to a near halt combined with decrep.

The beauty of a poison necro is that you're left with a nice few skills to play with. Even if you're a pvper, you can afford one point in skeletons just as meat shields - and with summon resist + skele mastery + bo + equip bonuses to skills, they're actually quite tanky and you'll have 7-8 of them.