Necro spot reports being all the rage these days, I thought I'd toss in my little bit. Especially as I've been threatening to start a necro for some few days now. Between Mickey's offer of cool undead toys and Stephen's superlative discourse on Necro Fun, I was moved to get my butt in gear and get on with it.
I had a hybrid assassin, have had for some months, who made it to lvl 26 and stalled like a Yugo in A4. It wasn't that she was dying to doggies or anything, but just… no spark. No joy. I thought it was me until, having played an MA assassin with Orchid's team I realized, no, it's her. I gave her a last trial yesterday, then took her to A1 and stripped her. Right in front of the rogues, too. I failed to strip her rogue companion, dammittohell, and so lost a Coif of Glory and a Zepher'd Razor Bow, but that's just life in the airhead lane, and without further ado, I brought in a brand new necro in her slot and using her name. Other players append numbers to their rebirths; me, I just go for the full phoenix effect and reuse the name as is.
Boiwonder sold the claws and my mule from another account picked up the better assassin-specific things, and, with his trusty +1 to skelly skill wand, he strode forth into an unforgiving world. He leveled pretty quickly, as the mule stayed in the game, playing cards with Akara, and soon was able to raise a skeleton, a clay golem and surround his sacred person with a spinning lace tu-tu. He cast AD like he was made of mana, which he pretty much was, frankly, often on his own minions due to being somewhat near-sighted and more than a little jumpy.
His most difficult problem in that stage was Blood Raven, and in the end he solved it as have so many others before him—lose the wand, get a good bow, and just shoot the bitch.
Wailwulf popped in for a bit with his own baby necro and the two journeyed to Tristram where they considered leaving Cain to rot but then relented and let him go. The quest ring was not bad—something to AR and +1 to Mana after Kills. Wailwulf popped off again, and Boiwonder soloed on into the Black Marsh and the depths of the Tower. Stephen popped in and out, leaving little presents on the greensward, and at one point some flawless gems and Ort runes which he did not intend as prezzies but which I, absentmindedly pondering skill point allotments while wandering to and fro from the Mac, picked up thinking he'd left them for me, though why? what on earth was I to do with them? I couldn't quite work that out. I wandered back to the Mac and was pulling chipped gems from my stash in case he came back, and didn't he come back? And worried bnet had eaten his baubles, but it was only me. Among the runes he did truly intend to leave were a pair of Tirs, very thoughtful. I had a two-Tir'd full helm from the assassin, but no others, and couldn't wear the helm yet. With the right shield, I was thinking, those Tirs could be put to work.
There were a few close calls in the Tower, mostly lack of coordination between Boiwonder and minions, but in the end she died and Boi walked home with a ton of loot. Then I called it a night, as I had to get some work done and owed my mama an email.
Today Boiwonder, now lvl 12 or so, began the day with another run-through of the Dark Wood. He continued to browse Akara's shop for wands, since I had dumped rather a lot of gold on him for this very purpose. (He also got the assassin's Cube. I am not entirely stupid, after all.) He had pretty good luck there—I was aiming for wands that added points to skel mastery, skels, golems and/or golem mastery, plus AD or CE or other curses I was considering but hadn't committed to yet. Between that and a preserved head he found, he had plusses to several skills that are in his basic plan: +2 to skels, +3 to GM, +1 to AD, +1 to CE and +1 to Weaken are, I believe, the combined mods.
The 'head also had a pair of sockets, and he used one of the Tirs and a flawed diamond, giving him a nice boost to resists and mana re-supply.
Level 12 had been another watershed moment in that he was now old enough to use the gloves and boots passed on from the assassin. These put his resistances at well over the mark I normally aim for with lvl 12 chars. Frankly, they put his resistances at a mark I usually enter the River of Flame with. Steadfast gambling for rare boots and gloves and belts pays off, and at level 13, Boi could wear her Heavy Belt as well, punching up lightning and poison.
Bnet crashed the game just as he'd cleared the Black Marsh and Tamoe, but it saved his progress, and after getting himself re-minioned and the mule back in for the experience boost, he herded everyone into the Monastery. I had reordered my hot keys so that the succession of curses and summons were in some kind of order when I spun the mouse wheel. When Boiwonder gets a bit older, I will likely be able to trim the number of skills on the wheel, but right now he needs to have access to everything in his bag o' tricks. Which, for a player like me, is show-stopping unless I can set it up to a one-touch effort. There's nothing like an all-out firefight onscreen when the human player is sitting there, toying with her hotkeys and wondering which one does CE.
Game crashes have become routine of late, a phenomenon which I lay at the doorsteps of those losers who run various meph- or pindle-bots and the like. Boi treated this one as an opportunity to redo the Black Marsh, and then make a beeline straight into the Monastery, where he practised his AD, then CE technique. Outside, his minions killed things too fast for the CE to be of use, but in the Monastery, he had more of a chance to employ it. By the time he'd found the Smith, he had 3 skels, 2 skel mages, a clay golem and Amplisa (rogue hotshot) working for him.
The Smith is highly susceptible to AD.
Down into the Jail, and back out into the Inner Cloister, then the Cathedral, then the Catacombs. Boi was committed to full-clearing, so of course he kept finding the stairs down right off. He continued to level, though, and added another skel mage, plus points in GM and SM.
Stephen popped in again, about when Boi found the Cathedral, and had more goodies to offer to an adoring public. A couple nice 'heads, one socketed and one rare, plus a pretty bow for Amplisa and so on and so forth. He had his necro in A5, and stayed in, giving Boi the benefit of the experience boost. (The mule had to leave. Someone wanted to use that Mac to do paying work.) Boi full-cleared the Catacombs with little difficulty, trying mostly to balance his use of CE with his need to continue with a full complement of summoned minions. It was good practise, as at the end of it all, running and ducking from Andariel, he managed to feed rejuvs to Amplisa while re-summoning the golem and thus keeping the She-demon from Hell from noticing his own skanky self. Well, she did see him once, she called him a maggot, but he found the golem click before she closed. He got at least one AD off on her at the start, but she wiped out his skellies in a single poison nova and I was scrambling for the right hotkey. Luckily, I had a clue from earlier set-tos and didn't waste time trying to revive the skels. I saw that the golem was holding up and making progress, so hunted out his hotkey and kept him on Andariel. With him to focus on, Amplisa wasn't taking nearly as much damage from Andariel as she would sans golem, so I kept her topped off and she in turn kept shooting.
In his initial foray into Andariel's chamber, Boiwonder blew up every corpse his minions created, so that even if a stray Shaman wandered down from the far end, there wouldn't be anything for him to revive. This meant that there was little raw matter for Boi to use for summoning, but as skels aren't worth much against an end-Act boss anyway, that's no matter.
So now he's in A2, and Atma wants him to comb the sewers for Radament. The sunshine is much too much for his complexion, so he's keen to go underground.