help in my fanatic zealot

slothpark

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May 15, 2009
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help in my fanatic zealot

Hi guys, at last i have one week vacation and i want to play D2X again...
im about to make a fanatic zealot

*players 8
*untwinked (i dont know how to twink lol)
*i usually do full clears

sacrifice 20
zeal 20
fanaticism 20
holy shield 20
1 pt to prequisites
rest on defiance

So what items must i wear to deal with physical immunes and Iron Maiden?
Do i need to put vengeance for PI's?
Mercenary, Might or Holy Freeze?
Which skill must i max first? Zeal, Sacrifice or Fanaticism?
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

slothpark said:
So what items must i wear to deal with physical immunes and Iron Maiden?
Do i need to put vengeance for PI's?
Mercenary, Might or Holy Freeze?
Which skill must i max first? Zeal, Sacrifice or Fanaticism?

untwink will be hard to get good weapon against PI. Your best chance would be shopping/gambling for high elemental damage weapon.

*Iron Maiden is awesome heavy metal band, you cannot defeat Maiden, never.* the curse IM is different matter. Look for a weapon that does very little physical damage, but a lot of elemental damages, lightning is the best (OK is CI in hell, those doom knights are FI). Or if you don't play HC, just rush in front OK, they would normally cast Decrepify (other OKs can still cast IM).

I would balance Zeal and fanat first, then work on sacrifice.
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

untwink will be hard to get good weapon against PI. Your best chance would be shopping/gambling for high elemental damage weapon.

*Iron Maiden is awesome heavy metal band, you cannot defeat Maiden, never.* the curse IM is different matter. Look for a weapon that does very little physical damage, but a lot of elemental damages, lightning is the best (OK is CI in hell, those doom knights are FI). Or if you don't play HC, just rush in front OK, they would normally cast Decrepify (other OKs can still cast IM).

I would balance Zeal and fanat first, then work on sacrifice.

How about crescent moon? is it fine?


 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Crescent moon in PB is indeed very good, but it may not be easy for untwinked. The rune is not the problem, getting a PB with the right number of socket is the issue. You may already finished the build and still not finding the weapon. CM also does "too much" physical damages if you are IMed.

If you are planning CM for weapon, I recommend getting a lawbringer PB for backup weapon. It will solve most of PI problems, provide much needed crowd control, and it is awesome for its low physical damage.
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

So what items must i wear to deal with physical immunes and Iron Maiden?

Get a point in Sanctuary for undead. A lot of physical immunes are undead and this will make you quicker at killing them than things like Vengeance. The Lawbringer that DM mentioned gives you this aura for free, so it's a good backup weapon (if you can get a Lem & Ko).

For Iron Maiden, your only real solution for this build is to not (melee) attack while under this curse. At all. Physical-Melee attacks on /players8 simply isn't a viable idea when under the Iron Maiden curse.

Either run away until the curse runs out (switch to Cleansing to reduce the duration) or go to town to get it removed, or switch to Vigor and run around without attacking to get re-cursed with something else (expect to drink some potions - and get close to Oblivion Knights when doing this, don't run away, and hopefully they'll overwrite IM with Decrep). Or get a socketed bow and stick some Ort runes in it and use it on weapon switch, or something like that.

Even if you get a perfect elemental-based melee weapon it won't work very well on /players8. I tried it once with a 2-8 physical damage and ~1000 (total) elemental damage scimitar and even with Conviction to help my damage I still received ~300 returned damage per kill on /players1. With higher monster life on /p8, zealing under IM is simply not a viable solution.

Do i need to put vengeance for PI's?
It doesn't hurt, but Sanctuary's better for the undead ones - which should be ~70+% of the PI's you fight. You can easily spare that extra skillpoint for Vengeance to tackle the other ~30% though.

Mercenary, Might or Holy Freeze?
Or Blessed Aim, since your AR will probably be pretty low. Assuming you get to hell with ~5000 AR (probably a reasonable estimate), I'd be likely to choose the BA merc. A rogue (casting Inner Sight) could work too.

Which skill must i max first? Zeal, Sacrifice or Fanaticism?

~10 each in Zeal/Sac, picking away at one-pointers until 30. Then max Fanat. once you get to level 30.

That's how I'd build it.


For the weapon, basically anything reasonably hard-hitting and able to hit a decent zeal speed (and hopefully having decent leech and/or crushing blow). For untwinked it pretty much depends on what comes up.

Some of the clubs (Nord's Tenderizer, Demon Limb, etc.) are adequate, relatively common, but often overlooked. I'd also keep a 'Black' runeword in mind as a moderately solid untwinked solution (at worst it'll be useful for boss fights), and on /players8 you're likely to stumble across the necessary runes at some point.



 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Crescent moon in PB is indeed very good, but it may not be easy for untwinked. The rune is not the problem, getting a PB with the right number of socket is the issue.

True about the PB, but I don't think the runes are all that easy either. If you don't just so happen to get an Um from Hellforge, then the untwinked character is stuck having to run Countess possibly hundreds of times for the Um (or two Puls), which is not something I would really care to do with a character that doesn't have teleport.


 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Um is not super rare, some LK runs (get the WP next to the area) would surely get there. However getting a PB with 3 socket is much harder in my experience.
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Best bet IMHO to get 3os phase blade is to normalize a low quality phase blade (which drops its ilvl to 1) and use cube (or Larzuk which is guaranteed 3os) to get 3os with 66% probability.

Ulla
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Well, my own experience is a bit different, as I've found 4 3os phase blades before finding my first Um (after about 500 Countess runes) a few days ago. Hell I found 3 Azurewraths and 3 HoZ's before my first Um :p , not that I'm suggesting that's necessarily normal.

But I based my comment on the probabilities rather than my own experience. Chance of Um from an LK chest is, at best (p3), 4:65536, and chance from Countess is 1:635. I'm not trying to say 3os phase blades are common either--I agreed with you on that (though Ulla's idea is pretty good!), I'm just saying that the Um is likely to require hundreds of LK or Countess runs.

And, personally, I have no interest in running either of those hundreds of times without teleport. YMMV.
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

What is LK again?

Lawbringer runeword is hard to find for me...

What is the best weapon in early game?

Will I go to IAS? Leech?
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

LK is Lower Kurast.

Leech is always good to have for a physical damage character. You'll want some IAS; refer to the Weapon Speed Calculator to figure out how much IAS you need for different breakpoints.

Since you're playing untwinked, best weapon for the early game is the best weapon you find in the early game. :p
 
Re: help in my fanatic zealot

Have a look at the lower level runewords as well, there are a few with crushing blow/ias/ED on that list and the runes are very common. They provide a great alternative until you can start running for better items, and because they are cheap the base weapon doesn't matter as much.
Also, for Normal and to some extent NM, dont overlook two handed weapons for your zealot, the gain in killing speed my be better than the safety from a shield.

/g
 
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