Re: PvM 1.13 ExplosionMancer guide
My explosionmancer recently achieved level 84, same as my fishymancer. And it was pretty creepy when he was running around with low resistances, having to Bone Prison everything mainly to avoid elemental attacks. But whenever he's afraid of fire, he wears a pair of Hellmouth war gauntlets and a Nokozan Relic amulet. It worked really well against Diablo, but the physical part of the fire still hurt a little bit. And the lightning hose hurt a lot, as Diablo trapped my necromancer in a bone cage near the end of the battle. (The necromancer was trying to close to melee range after the time ran out for the revived doom knights, but Diablo dodged him.)
I hope I'll find a Thundergod's Vigor so I can scoff at lightning as well, but at the very least i hope that I'll remember to renew my Bone Armor next time I go up against Diablo. My plan was to have the stream of hits from his lightning activate the 'Bone' Bone Armor, but apparently the lightning and the firestorm count as spells and not as attacks, unlike fires burning on the ground. Cost me a few full rejuvs, but that's what they are for. (Now I have too many again. Sell them? But they are life!)
After getting better resistances and stealing the fishymancer's rare +2 skills +1 Revive head* I don't use Bone Prison quite as often. I've found that revives are much handier for keeping the enemies at bay, and without a dozen skeletons to get in their way, they can usually keep up. And it's just plain fun to have six frenzytaurs running around looking for things to kill. (Or things to tank, I guess. Even with quite a lot of revives ganging up on a single enemy it's unlikely that they'll do more than soften up the target for me or the rogue mercenary.)
* Got that head from Anya, and she gave my explosionmancer a +1 skills +2 Bone Spear head. It sure is nice when quest rewards are useful.
My one and only curse is Amplify Damage, and rather than spending points on other curses I would increase the radius of Amplify Damage so that I could curse monsters off screen before blowing up a corpse at the edge of the screen. But Bone Spear synergies have a higher priority, so I'll just settle for what I get with a single hard point. Lately most of my real trouble have been piercing attacks from off screen. Souls, vipers and slingers. And to a lesser extent Spike Fiends, whose attacks don't pierce, but are pretty difficult to see. Makes me really miss a maxed Dim Vision, but that would eat waaay too many Bone Spear synergy points.
I'm using a Gull dagger socketed with a rare jewel (+18% lightning resistance, +9% magic find) on the main weapon switch, and Golemlord wand and head on the 'summon Clay Golem' switch. I guess that with revives I don't really need the golem as much as I used to, but since I do most killing with Corpse Explosion it doesn't make much sense to switch out the Gull dagger for anything but an awesome White wand, and my only available base wand is a +3 Bone Spear wand, with no other skills. They say that killing speed is more important than magic find, but it doesn't really help when it's the sifting through loot that really slows me down. (OK, so having less magic and rare items to pick up might speed me up, but ...)
Is there a way that you can farm Hell Andi for it? or Hell Countess (Unsure of her highest possible drops but she drops runes). Or NM/Hell Trav? Hell CS? (Just throwing out good rune areas). Since you are able to kill everything, it shouldn't be a problem... except for getting there.
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