Has anyone ever tried a FoH-based Paladin as a MF-character? Out of curiosity, i made one. The results are surprisingly good, though not stellar. I targeted Pindle and AT. Some observations:
-It is kind of hard to get much of MF out of him; i'm running with ~400 and i'm not exactly sure if i'm capable of switching too much gear around. With that being said, i'm running with sub-optimal gear to begin with since i'm not too keen on actually investing too much on him.
-The FoH itself is somewhat of a non-factor, the holy bolts are more important. They are unresistable magic damage, meaning that the immunite of Plague Bearers aren't of concern. Mine does about 2.3k damage, and i'm still 3 points short of maxing HB. Holy Bolt itself is very effective, dealing ~4k damage. The bolts are slow though.
-The character is quite safe. Max block and max resistances, though merc dies very often. This is most likely because of my very low level of 78. Also, no CC to interfere with the charge hurts.
-The targeting of FoH is very awkward. When trying to pick up items, open chests or really interact with the world in any way causes the poor Paladin to cast the FoH at the most nearby target.
Chaos Sanctuary is doable since the knights are undead. Venom Lords are tough. Maybe he could run with another aura, since the lightning damage isn't too important (though it helps, and Pindle dies to 2-3 hits from it along with all of his goons.) I guess you could target Mausoleum with him too, though it is a poor area to run.
No real benchmarks, sorry. Anyway, merry christmas/happy holidays to everyone.
I've been waiting my whole life to be asked this question
These were the earliest AT runs with my FoHer (about 100 in, so you can see how bad I am at picking up items and dealing with the casting delays). EDIT: One of these videos is apparently 7k runs in. Wow. Shows my gear, at the time as well
I've reached lvl 96 (95.8, I think?) with that FoHer and my more recent, decked out FoHer (using 1.07 gear, beta runewords, etc.) is around lvl 95.
I will reiterate what you said and something I have said many many times regarding this character that makes it a lot more powerful than at first glance:
When targeting a moving monster (ie the unique monster itself) it will be hit by the bolts being released by it as well as the lightning attack, thus leading to 1-hit KOs on most of them. You can see this occur several times in my videos.
You will also want to learn the timing to spam FoH and HB in between during the casting delay to maximize kill-speed. Of course, the merc gets in the way of this but that just means after you teleport you need to step to the side which isn't a big deal.
I actually use less MF but it's partly because I play HC and partly because I just like having really high res, life and fcr (and dmg!). Beta CtA helps with this, too.
FoHer is effective (ie usable, but slower/less MF than blizz sorc, hammerdin, etc.) in AT, mausoleum, CS, pindle and a few other places.
edit2: In the faster video, you will see I often decide to FoH at the invaders instead of the undead bosspacks since the holy bolts will take them out, and in some instances I make the educated guess that since a monster ran to a wall and started attacking instead of moving I should FoH the monster beside them (a minion, usually) so that the HB spray will kill the bosspack, since each HB typically does more dmg than FoH even with conviction + synergies + -lite res since the immunity was broken
QQ
), and certainly seems to be almost totally ignored.
I think your Furyzon is fine as is with the addition of Decoy and Valkyrie. I just meant to suggest that you might consider a second Zon using CS, LS and the Poison skills in order to utilize your TStroke.