My mercenary runs treachery and has about 7k defense when faded and buffed by my barbarian shout. His life is about 4.7k.

Meanwhile, my barb runs fort and has about 14k defense when fully buffed and 4.1k health.

Why is the merc virtually immune to doll explosions with less stats? I let him tank them and he is fine, yet they could still rip me if I am not careful.

Thanks

dolls explosion doenst do any dmg to merc even if hes got no gear.
long time ago a patch changed this

Never understood why they deal so much damage https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Bone_Fetish

About 10% of max hit points at death. Can be doubled by monster critical strike, which is 5% chance, but not applied if you are cursed.

Max hit points of undead stygian doll is 6249. So that's about a maximum of 625 damage from one explosion, minimum 290.

I am currently running hydra/static/orb sorceress doing quest bugged mephruns in hardcore, with 900 hit poins and 500 mana running 40% mana shield. One explosion cost me 400 life and 200 mana. If that had been a critical strike, it would have almost killed me. Or if i had been cursed.

So i always cast hydra at the edge of the screen and around corners to find out if there are any monsters there, then teleport forward and run back so that my merc engages them. If there is a pack, i have to be really careful and maybe teleport backwards anyway, and engage really slowly. Even might/extra strong as a pack are deadly enough without the explosion, even my 1400 hp merc with eth partizan insight, duriel's shell and crown of thieves has died within 0.5 seconds to such a pack, and then i was about the same time away from dying before i save and exit. You barely get time to think.

So they are definitely some of the most dangerous monsters in the game.

I’m more scared of death lords in wsk2/wsk3 than dolls tbh
Use hotspurs, soe, ss, dwarf and shako and dolls can’t hurt you anymore

That's a good warning, i haven't started running hell baal yet .. got used to running diablo now. Yes those death lords are dangerous .. but they don't move as fast as the dolls even with extra fast.. but still, they can probably deal pretty big damage with each swing if the right mods spawn..

I get the pdr theory, but how does the hotspur boots help against dolls?

Their explosions do part physical part fire damage.

Dang i didn't know that. Thanks.

100% physical.

They do 100% physical damage with their explosion. It's not like Necromancer and Nihlathak Corpse Explosion (which actually is part fire part physical).
Still, PDR + DR% are good ways to counter dolls. And because PDR is calculated before DR% PDR is actually a very good way to counter Amp + dolls (say you get 100 damage and have 50 PDR, that 100 will first get reduced to 50 by your PDR and then doubled to 100 by Amp; instead of 100 being doubled to 200 by Amp and reduced by 50 to 150 by PDR).

That's what I always thought. Thanks for confirming.

But still, I found out that their explosion deal about 10% of their total hit points, which range pretty wildly from if I recall about 2500-7000, not considering champions or boss packs which againif I recall can have double or more hit points. 5% monster crit also applies to it, but not if cursed. But it's still a major hazard if sub par gear, and pdr either in percent or points is not much of a safety measure, even if I do agree on the teleport theory with fast fcr, fhr, block%, stormshield and dr.

To quote Scarface; I guess I, how you say... paranoid ^^