I've played alot of diablo2 before, but now I'm starting over with my cousin. He has never played it and neither of us have a higher level char to help us gear up.
So I was wondering what would be a great combo of classes/builds to start with?
I currently have a paladin and he has a sorceress, my main concern is that I will need really good gear as a paladin once we get to hell difficulty since I also intend to solo from time to time.
Wouldn't a summoning necro be a way better choice? (though I've heard it can become boring very fast).
Thanks in advance!|||A summoning necro is really good. Remember, if you get bored you can respecc to pick other skills.
I would really suggest you to pick up a necro instead, using skeletons as a wall and building bone walls while your sorceress friend bombs them all.
Your paladin can do fine, just pick defensive talents and get max block/use a 3/4 socketed shield and gem Sol on them for reduced damage taken, till you get your gear.
But sorceress is kinda meh. Youll fight lots of immune monsters.
Maybe he could... start a necromancer for poison and bone skills and life tap?=D
Necromancer is like the best support class for team play.
Hope it helped you out, i dont think so... keep it for yourself =D|||A paladin will be fine. If you are willing to do some Nightmare Countess runs, you will be able to make a decent weapon from runes. If you run NM Mephisto a couple hundred times, you'll get a nice pile of items (good for both characters) and you stand a good chance of landing a decent weapon.
As sumsum pointed out, you can always respec to a different build. You might do well with a Fist of the Heavens pally since they also use Conviction which will help the sorc.
Remember that with Holy Shield, paladins have no trouble reaching 75% blocking and fairly high amounts of defense, so you shouldn't have too much trouble playing the tank for your team. As I said, you can always make a good weapon, but if you're still concerned about finding a good weapon, you can play an elemental zealot (zeal + holy freeze/shock) since they don't need a high damage weapon.
You might also consider playing a hammerdin (look for guides to these builds in the strategy forums), but then you'll be competing with the sorc for caster gear. I think it's a much better idea to play a non-caster character since your cousin is playing a caster. A barbarian could work very, very well given the crowd control skills that barbs get.|||I would keep the paladin and try an avenger (vengeance + conviction) it works wonders with any sorc (the sorc will plow through everything) and it is an enjoyable character to play when you want to solo (however you should shy away from it if you just want to see things blowing up in groups: this is a one-at-a-time killing type of character). With nightmare countess runs you should be able to make a decent runeword weapon that will take you far.|||Sorceress wouldn't be a bad pair for a summoner. Enchant those skeletons for crazy damage and static hostiles down!|||Frozen orb sorc + trab assasin
In my opinion this is a best "start from scratch" team.
You have nice damage from two different elemets and in my opnion, those builds are actually quite fun (even though you probably will be unable to have whirlwind on your assasin). Please note that in few areas you will rely a bit on the assasins shadow to be a "tank" - aka someone who takes the damage while you stand behind him and shoot orbs/put traps. Although act 2 mercenaries will help too.
The problem with those classes is that in order to be good single player, one needs some gear (basically infinity polearm); and frozen orb is not THAT good in LOD.
But Id say that those two builds are the most fun to play in two players; also there is some little challenge as you arent that super strong due to absurd vitality (but this is still very easy since you can kill everything).
By palladin I assume you mean hammerdin; the argueably strongest PvM character in the game. They just kill everything with hammers, but arent that good for playing through the game, because the hammers simply have some blind spots and dont work that well in small passages. Although the concentration aura helps the mercenaries, so they do very well too.
Skellymancers are incredibly slow + they are simply useless in hell unless you have at least some +skill gear (not to mention that you need much more to make them effecive; unless you have a cooperating palladin). Combo of hammerdin + summoner can be ok, but in my opinion would be incredibly boring (I have did the whole game using a necro alone and it took a lot of time with good items).
Other alternatives would be wind druid + sorc.
The person who recommended avenger pala obviously has no clue about the game. This class is simply bad and all you can do is just support your caster friend; especially with 0 gear.
Barbarians also need some weaon to be semi decent at least.|||Quote:
Frozen orb sorc + trab assasin
In my opinion this is a best "start from scratch" team.
You have nice damage from two different elemets and in my opnion, those builds are actually quite fun (even though you probably will be unable to have whirlwind on your assasin). Please note that in few areas you will rely a bit on the assasins shadow to be a "tank" - aka someone who takes the damage while you stand behind him and shoot orbs/put traps. Although act 2 mercenaries will help too.
The problem with those classes is that in order to be good single player, one needs some gear (basically infinity polearm); and frozen orb is not THAT good in LOD.
But Id say that those two builds are the most fun to play in two players; also there is some little challenge as you arent that super strong due to absurd vitality (but this is still very easy since you can kill everything).
By palladin I assume you mean hammerdin; the argueably strongest PvM character in the game. They just kill everything with hammers, but arent that good for playing through the game, because the hammers simply have some blind spots and dont work that well in small passages. Although the concentration aura helps the mercenaries, so they do very well too.
Skellymancers are incredibly slow + they are simply useless in hell unless you have at least some +skill gear (not to mention that you need much more to make them effecive; unless you have a cooperating palladin). Combo of hammerdin + summoner can be ok, but in my opinion would be incredibly boring (I have did the whole game using a necro alone and it took a lot of time with good items).
Other alternatives would be wind druid + sorc.
The person who recommended avenger pala obviously has no clue about the game. This class is simply bad and all you can do is just support your caster friend; especially with 0 gear.
Barbarians also need some weaon to be semi decent at least.
FYI, I've made quite a few guardians (that is, beating hell baal on hardcore) using avenger paladin/sorc and avenger paladin/summoner necro combo, always untwinked (that means using nothing but whatever gear we find). You say summon necros are useless in hell and then claim someone else doesn't know crap about the game? Don't make me laugh. Summon necros can solo hell 100% naked relying only on skeletons + curses.|||Quote:
Skellymancers are incredibly slow + they are simply useless in hell ...
I wonder maybe if your different perspective on Skellymancers (arguably quite diff than the experiences of most of us), is due to the exact build/skill placement you used.
There are variations to the build, and while some of them might be catering to playstyle, there are many variations that specifically aim to gain crazy killing speed.
On the slow hand, you might have a Necro that relies solely on +skills, and uses his points on maxing Skeletons, maxing Mages, maxing Revives, and maxing a Golem /w synergies. In this case I would agree with you 100%... it might suit a certain player's playstyle, but it would be mind-numbingly slow. Safe and fun perhaps, but slow.
Now on the fast hand, you can tighten up your skill allocation, only max Skeletons and synergy, no Mages & no (or one point) Revives, 1pt Golem and then rely on +skills, just 1pt in Curses (and perhaps rely on a weapon swap for Decrep), and then have a pool of spare points you can use for killing speed. Max Corpse Explosion, and get Bone Spear pumped up as hard as the excess skill points will allow.
Pair this build with Insight on merc, and play very aggressively. Pound your Bone Spear non-stop to help get that first corpse, then refresh your Amp Dmg and clear the entire screen with CE. Necros that really know their class and know how to play, cannot be deemed in the same league as those Summoners we've all seen with 10 skellies 10 mages Revives everywhere and constantly trying to find more mobs to Revive (because the horrible skill doesn't last very long) and they sit there wondering why they've been sitting there trying to clear this section of a map for 15mins
Edit: I played around a little on a calc to see what kind of point allocation you would be looking for, on this very tight build. I put in maxed Skelle/Mastery/CE, 1pt in Clay/Golem Mastery/Resist/Bone Armor/Teeth/Amp Dmg/Bone Spear, and then maxed Bone Prison and Bone Wall. After plugging in 10 to plus skills, it ended up being a 730dmg absorb Bone Armor and an almost 450dmg pure magic Bone Spear that is completely spammable with Insight on merc, and your Bone Spear ends up being low mana cost by choosing to up it's synergies instead (because those synergies also help with Bone Armor so it's more efficient this way).
It's not perfect by any means, but between a Might Act2 Merc wielding let's say an Ethereal Thresher Insight (or CA,CV,GPA,GT) and spamming your Bone Spear, the first mob in a pack is gonna die very fast. And everyone that's ever truly played D2 for any length of time knows what a maxed CE cast on Amp'd mobs is gonna do to the screen in mere secs. BOOM.|||If you can get 10 plus skills after just starting untwinked (that other guy explained what it is), in a legit way; then good work. Tell me how to do it; does it mean you visit those shops?
Also, if you actually claim to know things about necros, you'd know that concentration from pride is probably worth more than those +10 skills.
After +25 skills and 3 auras (personally I use 2; dont like holding beast, but did some tests), skellymancers arent that slow actually. You dont even need to use any other aura than amp. But I dont expect someone starting to play the game to have such gear. This is ridiculous. So advise him a class that is actlually playable naked. Unless for you, definition of fun, is playing super-dave style (the guy who finished the game by having a naked amazon recast her valkirie). For me it is not fun.
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FYI, I've made quite a few guardians (that is, beating hell baal on hardcore) using avenger paladin/sorc and avenger paladin/summoner necro combo, always untwinked (that means using nothing but whatever gear we find). You say summon necros are useless in hell and then claim someone else doesn't know crap about the game? Don't make me laugh. Summon necros can solo hell 100% naked relying only on skeletons + curses.
Avenger is in general a terribly slow class; and untwinked it is probably one of the worst classes, as it requires some decent gear to make it semi playable. His friend would have all the fun. Some form of conviction zealot would be better.. but for zeal you need a good weapon to make it work.. and you dont have one when you start.
Being your friends merc (he kills all with orb, you just provide conviction), is not much fun IMO; also the char is terrible in general; without the friend he would have trouble doing much.|||All you really need for any melee class (assuming you'll be using a shield and not a two-handed weapon) is life leech (cathan's ring works in a pinch, if you tell me you cannot have such a ring drop before the end of normal while killing all mobs then something is wrong and if on bnet people will give it for free), some crushing blow (there are a number of cheap runeword weapons and regular unique items that have it) and enough attack rating to actually hit the monsters. Cannot be Frozen is a necessity in Hell mode for soloing, but as a team is something you can do without.
For avengers you really don't need the attack rating part because conviction drops enemies defenses to almost nothing so you need very little attack rating (pretty much whatever AR you get from vengeance works) so a crushing blow weapon works wonders. One could argue that conviction zealot would do the same job + use zeal to be a little faster killer, however they suffer with physical immune monsters as there is no guarantee that you won't run into one when soloing. I suppose a conviction zealot with 1-pt vengeance could work as well, I just like the prismatic damage. Sure you will not plow through everything like a hammerdin, but they are certainly not "slow" in my opinion.
As for necros, all you gotta do is max the regular warrior skele and max corpse explosion for the radius, 1 point on golem / each relevant curse and you're set. There is nothing slow about killing one guy with 10+ skeletons and then going kaboom on whole rooms with a couple clicks (amp+CE). See, corpse explosion is such an insane skill because it does not rely on any +skills to be effective, and fire immune monsters will die all the same because amp damage reduces their physical resistances into the negatives and CE deals physical + fire damage
But maybe the only thing missing here is your perception of what is a slow killer? so let me ask you, how fast is "FAST" killing for you? If you expect full geared sorceress-like speed where everything just die after .5 seconds spamming something, that is certainly not achievable going untwinked.
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