Patriarch Mishra, Synergized Oath Meleemancer

[snickersnack]

This character started as another attempt to find a good use for the buffed barbarian mercenary. I planned on gearing a Frenzy merc with Grief, Crescent Moon, Arreat's Face, and Treachery to lay down heavy damage as well as some AoE from the static proc on CM. As I levelled the character, though, it became increasingly clear that the good old desert moron would carry me to victory.



I typically start new characters in 1.14d so I can use an old Ravenclaw to speed up the leveling process, but I decided to run melee from level 1. As a result, the early game may have been a bit tedious, but I got used to playing melee with a squishier character. I mostly pumped up Raise Skeleton initially with the plan to respec out of skellies later. As I progressed through NM, though, it seemed like having a pack of meat shields around would be helpful. I also focused on maxing Bone Wall and Bone Prison to synergize Bone Armor. I ended up not respeccing at all, which was surprising.

The leveling/questing really took a turn once I was able to equip this:



I made this Oath a long time ago, and I wanted to leave it in 1.14d. I had a few ethereal Scourges in my D2R stashes, but cubing them got me some very nice, but unusable 3 and 5 socket maces. I forwarded this one instead of trying to farm more bases. Oh well.

From there, NM was a breeze, and really, so was early Hell. I ran Normal and Nightmare on /p8 and I did early Hell on /p8 as well. Somewhere in Act 2 (I think) I dropped it down to /p5 and kept it there for the rest. I just had one death in early NM due to not playing carefully. The character is really quite safe with 12 skellies, max block, fully synergized Bone Armor, fire/light/cold absorb, Chilling Armor proc, and Fade proc.

Stats Dump:

Spoiler

Name: Mishra
Class: Necromancer
Experience: 1228658213
Level: 86

Naked/Gear
Strength: 124/159
Dexterity: 160/195
Vitality: 211/246
Energy: 25/70
HP: 624/1068
Mana: 195/364
Stamina: 360/430
Defense: 40/2605
AR: 755/1601

Fire: 147/107/47
Cold: 137/97/37
Lightning: 172/132/72
Poison: 137/97/37

MF: 50 Block: 75
GF: 0 FR/W: 30
FHR: 12 IAS: 85
FCR: 25

Amplify Damage: 1/12
Dim Vision: 1/12
Weaken: 1/12
Iron Maiden: 0/0
Terror: 1/12
Confuse: 0/0
Life Tap: 0/0
Attract: 0/0
Decrepify: 1/12
Lower Resist: 0/0

Teeth: 1/10
Bone Armor: 1/10
Poison Dagger: 0/0
Corpse Explosion: 1/10
Bone Wall: 20/29
Poison Explosion: 0/0
Bone Spear: 20/29
Bone Prison: 20/29
Poison Nova: 0/0
Bone Spirit: 0/0

Skeleton Mastery: 1/10
Raise Skeleton: 20/29
Clay Golem: 1/10
Golem Mastery: 1/10
Raise Skeletal Mage: 0/0
Blood Golem: 1/10
Summon Resist: 1/10
Iron Golem: 0/0
Fire Golem: 0/0
Revive: 0/0

Gear:

Spoiler

main: Oath eth Scourge, Homonculus with pDiamond
swap: CtA, eth Spirit
chest: Fortitude AP
helm: Shako with IAS jewel
gloves: Hellmouth
belt: Thundergod's Vigor
boots: Gore Rider
ammy: Highlord's Wrath
rings: Ravenfrost, BKWB
charms: torch, resist, AR, life

Merc:
wep: Infinity eth 1.07 GPA
chest: Treachery (swapped back and forth to keep both armor procs going)
helm: Andariel's Visage with Fire Res / IAS jewel

Some comments on gear choices:
I had been planning on using either Stormshield or maybe Sanctuary in a Troll Nest, but Homonculus filled the role very nicely. +4 to all curses worked well with the play style as I kept curses on right-click. The high +block chance also made it easy to reach max block while also putting enough points into vitality. And, of course, the all res was good. I used Moser's Blessed Circle until I could equip Homonculus.

Shako is an odd choice for a melee build, but I needed +skills for BO and the +life and %DR helped a lot. The IAS jewel in the Shako (which I already had socketed that way for my furyzon) let me hit the 11 frame bp. I toyed with using Andariel's Visage, but that wouldn't get me the last normal attack bp without also putting an IAS jewel in the Homonculus, and I didn't want to bother with that.

Infinity on the merc was instrumental. The Conviction aura meant that I didn't have to worry about AR much, if at all. On very rare occasions, I'd spam CE just to speed things up, so Conviction helped there as well. The Might aura did not go unappreciated either. I think the build would be significantly weaker with a barb merc.

Some comments on the gameplay loop:
Prebuff with BC, raise the skellie army and Blood Golem, then BO and BA, then switch to main with normal attack on the left click and curses hot-keyed on the right click. I mainly used Amp and Decrep and rarely used Dim Vision. The recent changes to how left click attacks are handled in D2R helped to make this setup work. I don't think it'd work quite as smoothly in 1.14d.

Some comments on the mostly-synergized Bone Spirit proc:
I didn't max out Teeth and as I write this, the character has something like 4 skill points unused. If I recall correctly, the Bone Spirits that Oath was spitting did about 2k damage each, which worked well with the wide damage range on the weapon. I also noticed something: Bone Spirit will turn around to hit an enemy you didn't target under certain conditions. If you kill an enemy by striking with Oath and BS procs, then that BS will just fly away and hit nothing. BUT, if that enemy is one that has a second phase (e.g. fire spitting guys in act 3), then once the second phase appears, the Bone Spirit will turn on a dime and hit it! I'm guessing that's because the second phase monster has the same internal ID as the original so BS thinks that it's the original target. I wasn't able to find an existing pat thread/post that used Oath this way, but maybe this is old news. I threw together a very rough video showing it:

All in all, the character was pretty good fun and very safe, if just a touch slow at /p5.

 

[BBS_Agonistes]

This is a really cool write-up! I was considering a meleemancer recently, and this certainly looks like they can be viable. I hadn't thought of using Oath in that manner either.

 

[little birdy]

Cool stuff!

 

[snickersnack]

This is a really cool write-up! I was considering a meleemancer recently, and this certainly looks like they can be viable. I hadn't thought of using Oath in that manner either.

It turns out that someone did use it in a similar way. TopHatHat64 made an Oath/Bone bear necro years ago. He used a phase blade, though, and relied on magic damage as a result, so little/no use of curses.

I think that using BS procs on Oath seems clearly under powered just on its face, so it was nice to show that it's quite viable, even at higher play counts. I might try out some /p7 Baal runs just to see how effective the build is at that. I wonder if there may be some use for the build that I can find before stripping the character and doing something else.

 

[LouB]

Ok, another build I've got to try! Great write up

 

[PhineasB]

Nice Pat! I like the use of the 1H Oath, and the use of skeletons for defensive purposes is a great investment in points for meleemancer, I think. It seems likely a completely different playstyle to the 2H Oath Meleemancer I made (with Bone armor), but I also found the Spirit procs to make a noticeable difference.

 

[snickersnack]

@PhineasB Yeah, I was thinking that the build might be too defensive. The only time the life bulb even dipped in Hell was when a whole pack of gloams hit me at once, and even then, it was a minor annoyance. I think there's room for optimization, for sure. I might also try a 2-hander to see if the added oomf is worth the loss of the off-hand. Homonculus really surprised me with how nicely it fits into the build, but maybe forgoing a shield would work better.

One other thing that I might try is a different base for Oath. I wonder if a BA would be better when using Andariel's Visage.