from experience - yes, but a bit slower due to less damage, and less damage added/str pt. I loaded up a chanter for extra damage on the non-fire immunes, and the AR boost, and did just fine with an AA set up this season.

if you die ever 1/3 travi run you clearly fail, which is pretty pathetic to fail so hard at an 8 year old game... the build works just fine in 8 player games with even a fairly affordable 268 leachy mart which is what I used in LS3... 3k life, with life+mana leach is plenty for even the aura'ed hell council in a full game.

hey why 150-250 base str??

read thread much? it's a matter of preference. the lower end would be if one is going more vita route, and finds a -req mart, or uses str gear to glitch a full req mart on.

the upper end is to take advantage of the mace class weapons benefiting from extra damage per stat of str added.

Have you ever heard of steeldriver?

yeah. it sucks. even the perf steel's suck compared to a 180+ ed mart in terms of killing speed in a full hell council run. it's also not legally possible to get leach, psn dmg, or AR on a steel driver, or it's counterpoint the bonesnap.

snap >> steeldriver.

one thing i want to add is an explanation about the fire/lightningenchant-bug:

there is a bug in the game which causes multiple elemental damages on monsters to stack and multiply each other.
specifically:

cold- and fireenchanted: on death the frostnova and the corpse explosion are both triggered twice.
cold- and lightenchanted: each time the lightnings are triggered (= each time the monster is put into the recovery animation) the dam of the coldnova is triggered within its own range (= in a quite close circle around this boss), but not shown graphically.
light- and fireenchanted: each time the lightnings are triggered the dam of the corpse explosion is triggered within its own range, but not shown graphically.
cold- light- and fireenchanted: each time the lightnings are triggered the dam of the corpse explosion and the frostnova is triggered within their own range and when the boss dies the forstnova and corpseexplosion are both triggered twice.

note: the lightnings dont carry the damage of the death-explosion-abilities with them, but the elemental dam which is added to the bosses physical attack by the attribute cold-/fireenchanted. so the lightnings of ce/le bosses do freeze u even if u catch them at quite some distance from the boss, but this damage is minor. for example on a bowazon u dont have to be afraid of dying when u shoot a fe/le boss from a safe distance and get hit by one of the lightnings.

now the even more technical part:
the death explosion caused by the attribute fire enchanted is technically equal to a necromancers corpse-explosion. its damage is divided by equal parts into fire and physical damage, coz of the physical part it can be blocked btw.
the amount of damage is computed as a percentage of the monsters total hps. this means that the damage u take is proportional to the hps the monster has.
as the monsters hps in hell are so high that sick and irresistible damage figures from these explosions would result, to make hell any playable blizzard added a global 1/4-factor to the damage done from the fe-explosions in hell. this penalty doesnt apply on nm. as the monsters hps in nm are only about half of those in hell the finally resulting damage of fe-explosions in nm is about twice as much as from the same monster on hell difficulty.

note that high fire res and damage reduction (virtually doesnt exist in classic, but is worth a consideration if u play lod) help against the damage of fe´s, but amplify damage, lower res, extra strong and conviction enhance it significantly.
also note that the death beetles and all monsters of this class have a naturally given lightning enchantment, they only need the attribute fireenchanted to do these deadly fe/le-dam.

the main problem arises from the fact that the fe-explosion is triggered everytime the monster is put into hit-recovery due to many skills doing many attacks at a high frequency, potentially triggering over 6 such explosions within 1 second. (full ww through a fe/le boss). most relevant are zeal and, in classic even more important, ww. ww does damage every 4 frames. (a second in d2 consists of 25 frames.... there are theories that in classic the ww speed actually is 2 frames and not 4, but this hypothesis couldnt be verified nor denied yet.)

the most common and dangerous situation where this issue applies are ww-barbs without block doing traviruns - the councilmembers have very high life which makes their fe-dam very high and geleb always is fe and extra strong. if he gets le among the random attributes he becomes a deathrap for any barb which wws through him. even more dangerous is the fact that ismail vilehand always is cursed - if the barb is cursed with ad while wwing at a fe/le extrastrong geleb he is down in max 4 hits, even with over 4k life.

the best way to avoid this bug in travi is to clean out the minions around him first and if he is fe/le run in front of geleb and ww away - by this u only hit him once and thus only trigger the fe once at a time, leaving enough time to regenerate or retreat. u should get rid of the ad curse at any price before killing him. and if there is any monster with conv nearby kill it first, else u will get ur ass whooped to the next galaxy.


i hope my waffling was helpful for some

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 27 2008 10:39am

well i found a solution quite a long time ago to deal with fire + lightning enchanted monsters

and that is to have some poison dmg on your weapon

when you poison the monster for some reason their lightning dmg drops considerably

With the high strength and therefore lower vita, would you consider this build doable on hardcore?

ofc, but for doing specifically traviruns id prefer a strong bh + shield + gobs if i was playing hc.
other regions arent as dangerous as the monsters have lower baselife and thus the fe/le bug does less dam... a barb with ~3k life and good res should survive that.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 12 2008 01:49pm