you need CE otherwise it is too slow
and ofc infinity so CE does its best dommage

Not sure if you know, but you shouldnt spam nova, re-applying the effect resets the time between tics

high level ce is completely op. amp for physical and conviction for fire = amp everything and use infinity on merc (while on a necro) normally you use a insight on a nec just about all the time but ce is 50% physical 50% fire. yes making the monster weak to both physical and fire is slightly overkill but.... you can clear the entire screen for massive mobs of monsters extremely fast. extremely effective in player 1 games and medium effectiveness in full games. now why dont everyone just clear areas with ce on a nec? you run out of corpses to ce so you lose your damage output fast. the damage you output scales with the monster immunity and number of monsters that are dead. you have to tele next to a pack of monsters amp everything, cast a few bone spears into the pack and hope something dies then ce ce ce ce ce and stuff just explodes. your secondary damage ce becomes your primary damage since its a one point wonder spell like static. now ofc lvl 1 hardpoint ce + skills will maybe clear 1/4 of the screen and thats not good enough so you need to nearly max ce out so you have high area of effect for damage radius. if you use infinity over pride the merc wont break the monsters bodies and you will have a better supply of monsters to ce. with pride your damage output will be much higher but ce body count will be less.


other skills have ce built in like sin's trap death sentry so you would cast 4 regular traps + 1 death sentry trap or 3/2 lay patterns but the general idea is the same, you would have a skill kill stuff while the area of effect damage take over. most sin players dont use death sentry as the main skill even with ce simply because you have so much elemental damage and you have fire blast. a necro is similar in the main damage usually is magic almost no one uses poison because its terrible then ce ce ce + amp and infinity merc. bone necros, or poison, or summon is almost never used pvm unless its specialized builds or for testing. most players use a neco, build it bone with the direct intent to kill other players. when players need to mf the game almost everyone uses either mf sorc or hdin. you can automatically tell a new player if they play melee builds with terrible gear or use non standard builds to mf. you can build hybrids of bone + poison for pvm but if pvm is your goal for killing then a summon nec is the best way to go. you wont be able to stack mf very much at all but it has the highest physical damage in the entire game.

i have level 40 skelly and that does 599-603 damage x 15 of them, with lvl 22 migh aura from merc, lvl 9 fanta from beast thats 323% ed increase so each skelly does 2540 damage per hit (2535–2550 per skeleton) so 2540 × 15 ≈ 38,100 now lets add in amp damage + merc (2250 + 8390) / 2 ≈ 5320 so i can do 43,420 with summons + merc for physical damage and if amp damage is applied i will do ≈ 43,420 × 2 ≈ 86,800 (physical)

now it gets better if you add pride for crowd clearing but it totally sucks ass vs bosses (no cb)

add pride: 230 + 93 + 345 = +668% Enhanced Damage = 601 × 7.68 ≈ 4,615 damage per skeleton = 4,615 × 15 ≈ 69,200 total physical damage + damage damage = 74,200 × 2 ≈ 148,400 effective (ya its insane physical damage) and we did not even add damage from mages since they are so useless its just a meat shield at this point.

as for mages : https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Skeletal_Mage_Damage 120 × 15 ≈ 1,800 damage still a good meat shield with a little pew pew.

to mf and actually get profit you need to hit cost and time points:

the build needs to be very very cheap
you need teleport
you need to clear tc 85 areas as fast as possible
act bosses at range since if you take a hit more then 2 or 3 times the char is usually dead, so kill at range.

a sorc (bliz or fb) does this very well. you can clear tc 85 areas, swap gear with cheap but better gear (vipermage, magefist, caster crafts, spirit mon, spirit cs) and get better gear to either make infinity and stay on a sorc or make a hdin.



i too have used poison nova necs a lot but mainly to troll es sorc's back when pvp actually existed in d2. you could nova a sorc twice if they had high end gear and they died, if they had low end gear once was enough. then the passive damage from the fire golum or the mercs dragon + dream kills off screen. is it fun to troll players? yes lol, but its not useful pvm.

Short answer is that they are not great.