Why FF?
1) It gives +3CE and -15% fire res, no other item can boost your dmg that much.
2) it fixes your fire res and makes all your summons immune to fire, which is the only thing that sometimes kill them. Often saves your iron golem.
3) Instead of using a 15ias/30fire in your merc's andy, he can now use a 15/40 instead. Very important buff for faster first kill before you can chain your buffed CE.

Why beast and not hoto?
1) You don't benefit at all from +skills at that point. Summons are just a meat shield.
2) It's useless to aim for 125fcr, you gotta telestomp and wait a sec for your merc to get a kill before you can cast CE. Even if you 'could' cast faster, you wouldn't have a corpse.
3) Max res is already reached easily, and its seriously not that much needed, your meat shield makes you impossible to kill.
4) It literally doubles your merc kill speed -> allowing to use GPA infinity for the optimized dps (reaching better fpa with a higher base dmg)

I heard some youtuber named cOoLeY say that bramble is better on merc?
1) hahahahahaha
2) his comparison is exclusively vs diablo. Here's why he is completely wrong :
Bosses deal 4x dmg vs summons.
Thorns effectively returns 4x more dmg then...
If diablo lands a hit (not a spell) vs one of your summons, he will effectively lose a lot of hp.
But for this to work, you absolutely need to use the fire golem, else he will aggro your merc, not your summons.
Not using IG = dogshit
And let's just have a good laugh at how much slower the overall clear speed is vs mobs if your use bramble instead of fort.
Reminder : this is a build made for density destroying, not target killing diablo.
CE cost 50 to 60 mana per cast, good luck trying to sustain without IG's insight.

looking forward to trying this build out.

Back in days i used Sillwaves + Homu and mana was not so huge issue, i used Insight IG when boosted ppl ( had to tele a lot ).

Let’s compare!

Shako gives 2 skills instead of 3.
Yes, the only +skill that matters is CE.
Amp is already 2x bigger radius.
Summons have completely irrelevant dmg, and their swing animation is so long that they never even have time to land a hit if you play this build correctly.

+mana/life?
100% useless, it is impossible to die on this build due to your meat shield.
Also, this is mana/life per lvl, which does not scale with bonus %.
So 75 mana from FF is effectively more mana after BO.

%dr?
Lol, good luck trying to get hit by a melee attack.

The only thing shako gives in the end is some mf. You can get it elsewhere. Anyway, going above 300% mf is just plain wrong.
We reach 264% already without any scs.

So… that’s a ton of big disadvantages compared to FF.
Fire immunes are the most prevalent, and they tend to be the tankiest mobs.
Almost all fire immunities are not broken by infinity.
Without FF its useless to use a fire sunder.
You end up doing only half your CE dmg vs all the most tanky problematic mobs.
If however you use FF (and look! A facet in shield!) those sundered mobs are now down to 58% fire res -> that’s a 21% total phys/fire dmg increase to a skill that is 95%+ of your total dmg output.

So FF?
Bigger aoe radius
Much more dmg
Summons and IG can’t die anymore
Your merc now kills faster for the first corpse and vs bosses

This post was edited by SinsOfTheSun on Feb 27 2025 09:53am

Skeletons deal reasonable damage as opposed to merc, no? and revives too

Look at the maxroll I linked, you can see full stats :

full army of skel dps : 16k
they have a 15 frames delay before they land a first hit

merc dps : 72k
the mob you telestomped is already dead before those 15 frames delay

Revives are exclusively used for urdars vs ubers.
Their dmg comes from CB.
You shouldn't ever use revives for anything else than ubers.

This post was edited by SinsOfTheSun on Feb 27 2025 10:05am

good info, but you forgot one thing

revive bats/witches/ghosts are sick when they insta-pop out when you tele. useless, but so damn cool.

hahaha
yeah, if you dont care about the time lost to summon them, the fact that they expire pretty fast, make you and the rest of the players laggy, have some blinding effect (not as bad as mosaic tho), can even stop your merc from attacking sometimes.
But if you like the glitchy visual and don't care about loosing overall effectiveness, sure why not

edit : witches will however cast 'blood mana' curse, removing your amp and this curse does nothing vs monsters

This post was edited by SinsOfTheSun on Feb 27 2025 10:18am

Made one of these 2 ladders ago. Super boring

To each their own
Not a big fan of necros either but love having one in my party