Evrae Altana said:
Monsters deal pitiful damage compared to the insane amounts of life they have.
Don't take this the wrong way, it's not that you're wrong... oh wait... yes it is, my bad.
I wouldn't have said anything, but you invoked maths, so I must lay the numerical smackdown.
Evrae Altana said:
Since the damage returned to them is dependent on how much damage they inflict on you, the 800% returned damage from Thorns isn't going to kill anything within any respectable amount of time.
Level 29 Iron Maiden: 1000% Damage Returned
Level 12 Iron Golem: 300% Damage Returned
The combination of the two: 1300% Damage Returned
Note that I'm assuming that the player decides to max out Iron Maiden and say Golem Mastery, they may plonk a couple of points into the Iron Golem itself, the remainder of the other 11 points is from spare skill points or +skills.
So you could look at it like this: a level 12 Iron Golem with 20 Golem Mastery has 4949 hit points in Hell (according to the skill calculator I'm looking at).
That will translate to 64,337 points of damage to monsters before the Iron Golem bites the dust.
.... That is not too bad for 35 mana ...
Evrae Altana said:
Example:
Let's say a Pit Lord has 10,000 HP and deals ~60 damage with its physical attack.
Hey, lets go grab the actual stats.
Pit Lord in Hell: 9374-14880 hit points (12127 average)
Attack 1: 94-150 damage (122 average) (Attack 2 is the same)
So each attack is only worth 1% of the hit points of the Pit Lord.
Damage reflection of 1300% is x13, so each attack they deal 13% of their hit points back to themselves.
Evrae Altana said:
That's ~540 damage reflected back onto it when it hits you. At that rate, it needs to hit you 18 times in order for it to die.
That is actually 1586 damage. Per monster.
Try 8 instead of 18. (Give or take some for regen*)
Evrae Altana said:
9374-14880 By the time that happens, you can probably clear a room fifty times over using another skill.
Yeah maybe with a maxed corpse explosion and an infinite supply of free corpses.
Evrae Altana said:
The only time Thorns is even remotely useful is if you have a giantic army to carry the aura,
Actually, you have it round the wrong way. Thorns is best when you are going up against a gigantic army.
When you have the giant army there may be better options, such as Amplify Damage, or Life Tap, or Decrepify (depending on the target)
Evrae Altana said:
but even then, the killing speed pales in comparison to other skills.
Yeah, the Necromancer has lots of other skills which deal 1600 points of physical damage even when not maxed. Oh wait, no... no they don't.
Evrae Altana said:
Besides, Thorns and Iron Maiden only reflects back melee physical damage. What about all the ranged and elemental monsters?
See... those are good points. It's a shame you used such a bunch of bogus math before them.
Other points that you could have used against this concept:
You don't really mention the hit point enhancing effect of Champions, and minions. You might easily run up against monsters that take say 30 or more shots to kill themselves, but their damage regen will kick in. (So you'd need a source of poison damage, eg those pesky poison mages)
Also you could take a different look at it and say that the Iron Golem with only 4949 hit points is only going to take 40 of those 122 point shots in Hell before crumbling. If it was surrounded by a large enough group of monsters they might easily kill the Golem and still be alive themselves (albeit in a quite damaged state).... so you'd need some kind of backup plan.
The same number of skill points would get you a clay golem with around 7350 life in Hell. So you'd lose about 25% of your killing power, but gain 50% more hit points (roughly speaking).
But who knows, it might be a concept worth trying. Yes, it is not perfect, but the flaws (regen, ranged) can be compensated for with a proper design (poison magi and Dim Vision solve both those problems).
Even if you think I'm wrong about the army size argument above, if you have Poison Mages, and you have Iron Golem, you are a single point off having N+1 revives, where N is how many pluses you get to summoning skills, since you have all the prerequisites. Might as well go for it.
So a basic build would look like this:
20 Iron Maiden
20 Dim Vision
20 Golem Mastery
(12)(+) Iron Golem
1+ Revive
(3)+ Skeleton Mages
1+ Skeleton Mastery
1 Summon Resist/Clay Golem/Raise Skeleton/Amplify Damage
For tactical flexibility you might include a point in Confusion and Attract (to manage the flow of Monsters to the Golem (though if you have a few Revives there will be much less heat on the Golem)), and to increase killing speed there is always Corpse Explosion.
So for about 80 skill points you get a decent build with a lot of tactical options. Mix Ice magi in with the Poison ones for increased defense. Dim Vision for the win. Whatever floats your boat.
*In the interest of avoiding accusations of lies, damn lies and statistics, I should point out that the Pit Lords 50% physical damage immunity was ignored by both sides of this discussion. Neither does the discussion include the elemental damage for which no figures are listed on the Arreat Summit. Your mileage may vary.
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