Originally posted by AJK on Jul 23, 2007:
Let her fend for herself. A mat thread.
Once upon a time, when I was little and naive, I decided to build a fendazon. It was in classic, and I got as far as act IV normal. Then I gave up. Fend whiffed so much that I was more of a walking air conditioner than a killing machine.
A while later, after registering at the forums, I wrote a post much like this one:
Much later, after I got well-versed in the finer details of D2 gameplay mechanics I decided to give my poor zon a second chance, and it worked. I present to you
Cattleprod, matriarch, lvl. 84 Fendazon.
Now where did I go wrong? Easy: I put points in the passive tree's evasion skills. I read that those D/A/E animations cause a fend cycle (which lands up to 12 hits) to whiff, which is quite dangerous for a build that relies on leech. Skipping those and valk resulted a nice bucketful of skill points, allocated as follows [+skills]:
Fend - 20 [24]
Jab - 9 [13]
Inner Sight - 20 [29]
Decoy - 19 [28] (next point would have gone here)
Critical Strike - 20 [29]
Penetrate - 3 [12] (2 points too many)
No points in the bow tree (an eardrum piercing 'DUH!' sounds from above), and no lightning spear skills at all. I didn't want to be tempted to do even just a little charged strikelet against anything PI. If I want to deal with PI, I'd better pack something good on switch.
Why I maxed
- Fend: if I need to explain this, the world is in trouble.
- Critical Strike: who cares about diminishing returns on a damage modifier that gets applied as an additional multiplier on whatever else one uses to boost damage. Percentage at lvl. 29 : 73%.
- Inner Sight: this skill gets rediculously effective beyond level 20. My level 29 IS lowers enemy defense by 1515. A straight reduction in defense, applied at base level. Considering the fact that your typical Hell monster has a defense in the 1300-2200 range, a reduction of 1500+ completely negates the defense of the smaller creatures, and seriously cripples the defense of the tougher ones.
This also meant that I didn't need much AR, my 3774 number was more than adequate, even in the case of the toughest monsters, where my chance to hit dropped to ~80% (yes, dropped). This analysis made me a happy camper.
Regarding tactics: I can think of two classes of fendazons
- Defensive: don't get hit, and wait ages for stuff to die. Built around Stoneraven.
- Offensive: pack as much leech as possible and maximize your pain. Pray that the pain you inflict surpasses the amount of pain you recieve. Built around any gnarly pig sticker. EBotD would have been nice, but until Blizzard remembers to make more runewords for spears, uniques or crazy rares will have to do.
I went for option 2.
Code:
Hat............ Andy's visage, 10%LL, +30STR, socketed with a perfect fire res. of fervor jewel.
Amulet:........ Rare, +2 ama skills, 18 prismatic, +30 strength, 10% FCR (?!)
Weapon:........ 'Amn' Steel Pillar, 255% ED
Armor:......... 'Treachery' Archon
Glove:......... Laying of Hands
Belt:.......... 7% LL, 15% PDR String of Ears
Ring1:......... 20/227 raven
Ring2:......... 26% light res, 3% ML, 4% LL
Boots:......... Rare, 29% LR, 27% CR, 20% FRW, 25% MF
Weapon switch:. Tiamat's Rebuke + Demon's Arch (against nasty PI's)
Charms: ....... 5 Passive skillers (one with 45 vita, thanks nex!), resists, and a bit of life
Merc hat:...... Delirium Tiara
Merc weapon:... eth Reaper's, socked with a fire res. of fervor
Merc jacket:... Treachery
LCS Damage, plain: 686-3623
LCS Damage, might+venom: 1242-5330
Average damage per hit, including 73% critical strike: ~5.3K (estimate)
Total IAS: 125%, needed for the 5frame fend breakpoint.
Total Life: 1147
Resists: 32/31/25/42, 75/75/75/85 after fade
I traded for the war pike (thanks Naab!) because I decided that the poor underused TC87 needed a bit of love*. I could have gone with an upped Lycander's, but the presence of 25% crush on the golden rod won out in the end.
Thanks to my massive leech (28%) I could tank crowds by virtue of leeching more life than I lost. Especially when cursed, or facing might mobs, my red ball went the way of the ping pong ball. Exciting times! Getting hit so often also means that once Fade triggered, I didn't need to worry at all about keeping it active. My merc proved to be undispensable with his safety curses triggering all the time. Decrep for the critters up close, and confusion for the archers afar.
My decoy was deployed a lot in act V Hell to draw OK curses, red balls of doom, and streams of lightning. The nice thing about a 2K+ life decoy is that seeing one poof before your eyes in two seconds flat makes for a good indication of severe bodily harm ahead.
Finds:
NM Forge: Shael
Hell Forge: Lum
From one of Fangskin's buddies: Ethereal Oculus
Palace Cellar, level 3: Fal rune
Summoner: Perfect ED% Witchwild String
Lower Kurast: Druid elemental skiller
Frozen River: War cry skiller
Random thoughts:
- Nasty death by three succubus packs in Frozen River.
- Rescue mission: lots of decoy, and merc. Grabbed corpse, went mental.
- Another death by succubi and Gloams.
- Stuff it. Resists already maxed post fade. Let global warming thaw Anya.
- Ah well, rescued her anyway. I took a pacifist HC untwinked sorc to Duriel, so I should be able to complete this rescue mission. Long live strategic decoys!
- Ancients: when the jumper spawns PI and AJK spawns extra stubborn AJK dies. I died.
- Second try: death by unfortunate skull-axe collision.
- Third try: easy. No nasty mods besides cursed.
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Fun times at the WSK: I encountered an unbreakable PI frenzytaur pack with some champions on top together with a conviction lightning skelly pack. Knowing when to reroll is a great survival tool, but I didn't and died. Did I mention that someone organised the yearly OK convention few corners away?
- Baal's waves: like taking candy from a flayer. Oh wait, what's that. Lister? Extra fast? Hit recovery lock? Dead? Yup. I believe the ancient greeks call that hubris.
- Retry: again, waves 1-4 easy. Wave 5, I'm smart and let the decoy do the tanking. Confusion and decrep make the fight a lot eas..hang.. what? Unrecoverable internal error? What cunning tricks and devilry are those, Baal?!
- Third try: success! Let Baal spawn as much annoying clones as he wants, the 25% crush on the steel pillar just says no to prime evil.
____________________
*:I'll rot in Hell before I consider building something around a Stormspire.
) She wasn't as botched as most first characters are, but she was botched all right: a furyzon with too many points in critical strike, dodge, avoid, evade and pierce. I decided to remake her, in the hope that she might make a good cow girl, so here's the cookie cutter. As she'll mostly be running cows and the arcane sanctuary and p1 or p3, I didn't see the point in boosting charged strike damage sky-high, and the lightning synergies don't do much for lightning fury damage, so I decided to max out valkyrie and decoy instead. It was a bit of an experiment too, to test the survivability (answer: she's invincible to everything except IM) and kill speed (good with a might merc, needs PMH without) of the valk before trying out a passivezon.
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