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.
Didnt read but I agree