Pherdnut said:
Oh, and point taken but not well received Rick. Criticism is invited but I can do without the *obviously*
In any case, there are tradeoffs. Gumby slows enemy critters so they won't get as many attacks in. I also wasn't aware that all golems had the same healing rate at the time. However, as part of a hybrid build where DR is your supplementary rather than primary source of damage (which I would recommend due to the hitpoint/damage ratio of monsters in Hell), slow will still enhance the survivability of yourself and any minions you have. Also, gumby is considerably cheaper than other options where making a golem that can take hits is concerned. I'll make note of that if I find time to get all of RTB's stuff into the final doc this weekend.
Of course! I must have been a complete idiot to think that slowing monsters was a bad thing for a damage return build! I'll just rush out right now and exchange all my mercs for Holy Freeze ones too!
Also, I was speaking specifically about Damage Return builds, whereas you seem to be defending your position based on the general properties of the Clay Golem, which is not relevant.
The cheapest (in terms of skill points) Golems are the Iron Golem and Fire Golem. You actually have to put a bunch of points into Clay Golem just to get its base hps up to par with the other two.
I posted an analysis of this not so long ago. You should go look it up. If you want to write a Golem faq you should do your homework, not just repeat rumours.
Other than the factual errors you've done a nice job though.
The good news for Gumby fans, is that Clay Golem gets a 'double hit' from +skills. Each level of +skills it gets a multiplier to base hp from itself, and then another one from the mastery. Whereas the other Golems only get extra hit points from the mastery.
You need about +8 or +9 for the Clay Golem to catch up to the other two.
And even then it would still not be the best Golem for the job (that job being Damage Return). For most other jobs the only thing you care about is the hit points.
For those other jobs:
There's some interesting defensive options for the Iron Golem - if (lets say) half of the damage the Golem takes is elemental... then that would mean that an Elemental Immune Iron Golem would have (roughly) twice as much damage taking ability for each hit point. So it would have roughly 6 times as much damage soaking ability as a base lvl gumby. In that case you'd have to get up to +17 skills for the gumby to match the Iron Golem!
The other thing you can do which is really cheap is to shop for an item with "% chance to cast frost nova". That makes your Iron Golem into great crowd control. They are easy to find because they are that light blue colour. Conversely for offensive options a weapon with +1 cold damage is also quite easy to shop for.
Another great thing to feed your Iron Golem is all those random rares which bosses drop. You might find items with large amounts of elemental damage, but no AR or ED, so you would never use them yourself for instance. Rather than flog them off to Charsi for that whopping great 2.5k gold, hold onto them for a bit and use them to replace your Golem. Takes a little bit of sting out of doing that 752nd Meph run and *still* getting crap.
At low levels when +skills are not plentiful (but see note below) the Iron Golem is much more sturdy. I normally aim to stick at least one point into Revive, so I pick up the Iron Golem as a prerequisite... and I find that by the time you hit Act 4 the Clay Golems lower hit points and lower hitting power are quite noticeable. Sure the Iron Golem dies and you 'lose the item', but theres usually more than enough random whites lying around on the ground that I can pop off an IG without even bothering to look. If not, its not far back to the last pile of corpses. For triple the hitpoints, and either much more damage or much better defense, its worth it.
Personally I think the best thing is not to become too attached to any one Golem or strategy. Fire Golems and Iron Golems die pretty quickly against end of act bosses, whereas Gumby is particularly good against them. So when my other Golem dies in those situations, I want to have Gumby hotkeyed. He's also cheaper (in mana), which if you're in the middle of a boss fight can be important - even if you're not casting any other spells except the occassional curse.
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But for those people who are absolute Gumby fanatics, for whom there can 'be only one', I find that its relatively easy to find +3 Gumby wands and +3 Gumby fetishes (often with other bonuses), so its not too hard to have +6 to Gumby on weapon switch even in the early game, which makes him a lot more useful and robust early on.
I find that a lvl 7-12 Golem combined with a Rogue with a decent weapon (and maybe the occassional Amp as my contribution) is quite an effective way to mop up acts 1 and 2 at least (optionally switching to an Act 2 merc) even on players 8.
Even up till skill level 7 skellies only do 1-2 damage, so even a skellimancer can get a boost to their killing power in the early game with a gumby if they're having no luck finding gear with skeleton mastery. And gumby of course can be summoned when there are no corpses around, which is occassionally handy for a starting skellimancer.
:hanky:
