Skelly the Summon-Only Necromancer: Normal Difficulty


Skelly began his journey in the Blood Moor by smacking a zombie to death with his starting wand, the only enemy he would ever kill directly, and then raising a skeleton minion from its corpse. As a quick primer for anyone unfamiliar with the summoning Necromancer, all of their non-golem minions require a corpse to be present on the ground in order to be summoned. Unlike the Diablo 3 version of the Necromancer, all of the skeletons raised will last forever until killed and don't have any sort of a timer present, however they do require those initial bodies to be created. One of the biggest challenges for Skelly is going to be getting his minion army started at the beginning of each gaming session or after the minions get completely wiped out, since Skelly won't ever have direct damage or curse support to help out.

Anyway, this left Skelly with a single melee skeleton minion sporting the stats listed in the screenshot above. Raise Skeleton is a downright pitiful skill with only a single skill point invested, as the melee skeleton has a mere 21 HP and deals an embarassing 1-2 damage per swing. Sad as that might be, the fallens in the Blood Moor only have 2 HP and the quill rats only have 3 HP so this solitary skeleton was able to slowly cut down the denizens of the first outdoor area until Skelly hit CLVL 2 and could add a second skill point into the Raise Skeleton skill. Fortunately for Skelly, the summoning Necromancer is a character build that gets exponentially stronger with more skill points invested into the skeletons. The second skill point allows the Necromancer to raise a second skeletal warrior, and then the third skill point invested adds a third bony minion. After that, the Necromancer gains an additional skeletal warrior for every 3 additional skill points, with the fourth skeleton arriving at SLVL 6 and the fifth appearing at SLVL 9 and so on. More skill points starting with the fourth one also begin adding more health and damage to the skeletal warriors, with the net effect of the Necromancer getting double benefit: more health and damage on each skeleton compounding with more total skeletons on the field!

The Raise Skeleton skill is only half of the total picture, however, as the summoning Necromancer also needs to invest in Skeleton Mastery as well. This Mastery skill is a passive ability that never increases the total number of skeletons available but does strengthen the stats of all skeletons, both the melee ones and the upcoming ranged spellcasting skeleton mages. Each point in Skeleton Mastery adds a flat 8 HP and 2 damage to each of the melee skeletons, and a similar amount of stats to the skeleton mages (though their exact stats are more complicated because they can appear in four different elemental types). This sounds unimpressive at first glance but once again the skill has a multiplicative effect with Raise Skeleton and later Raise Skeletal Mage. Skeleton Mastery provides flat stat increases while Raise Skeleton provides percentage-based scaling; SLVL 20 Raise Skeleton will let the Necromancer raise 8 skeletons with 119% damage scaling... which translates into a grand total of 17-18 damage per swing if there are no points in Mastery to scale off of. Whoops! Any skeleton-based Necromancer needs skill points in both and it's usually a good idea to raise these skills in tandem rather than trying to max one or the other first.

In the specific case of Skelly, I started out by taking Raise Skeleton to SLVL 3 to unlock the first three skeletal warriors, then dropped the next few skill points (including the Den of Evil freebie) into Skeletal Mastery. By the time that Skelly had reached CLVL 5 and cleared out the Cold Plains, his sad little initial skeleton with 21 HP and 1-2 damage had been replaced by a trio of skeletons with 37 HP hitting for 5-6 damage apiece. That was more than ten times the damage output of the initial skeleton, assuming that all three warriors could get into the fighting together, and a good indication of the impressive scaling of this summoning build as it added more skill points across the early levels. Enemy monsters weren't putting up much of a fight thus far, with the only minor tactics that I employed taking place against the fallen shamans where I would run Skelly right up next to them and lead the skeletons into their vicinity. I couldn't directly command the melee skeletons but they would follow Skelly around to some extent and prioritize targets near him.

The next tool for Skelly arrived at CLVL 6 when he unlocked his first golem. This was the Clay Golem which is intended to be a damage-soaking tank, having high health (at 100 HP it had about triple the current health of the melee skeletons) but very low damage at only 2-5 per hit. The melee skeletons would very quickly outscale the golem in damage and leave it as nothing more than a blocking dummy. However, the golem had the unique property of not requiring a corpse to be summoned which was an invaluable asset indeed. I could point my mouse cursor anywhere on the screen that Skelly had vision and cause a golem to appear at that spot, which was extremely useful for tying up shamans that might be holed up inside buildings or through doorways. The Clay Golem also has a new property added in one of the recent patches which causes it to slow nearby enemies, though this was only 11% at SLVL 1 and I didn't plan on investing any more points into the Clay Golem skill. I was quite happy to have this unique new minion to increase the functionality of Skelly's growing army.

I cleared everything up through Blood Raven and the Crypt/Mausoleum in my first gaming session. Upon starting the second session, I was able to use the golem to land a few kills in the Blood Moor and raise a new trio of melee skeletons before continuing onwards into the Stony Field. The next few areas were uneventful as the melee skeletons chopped their way through everything in sight. They were fantastic at dealing with all of the fallens and carvers in their big camps, never getting bored or missing the little shrimps who might be hiding behind some bit of terrain architecture. I spent these next few levels adding more skill points to Raise Skeleton until hitting SLVL 6 for the fourth skeleton, then went back to pumping Mastery for a bit. I also refreshed Akara's shop a number of times until finding a wand with +1 Raise Skeleton and +2 Raise Skeletal Mage, which would be enough to have three points in the mage skill immediately upon hitting CLVL 12 for an instant three spellcasters.

CLVL 12 arrived as Skelly was clearing out the Black Marsh and its two attendent dungeons, the Hole and the Countess quest. Skelly placed one skill point into the passive Golem Mastery skill, which grants golems extra life and movement speed but isn't worth investing more than the single skill point, and another saved skill pointo into Raise Skeletal Mage. This would be the other core summoning skill for Skelly, functioning in much the same way as Raise Skeleton but adding mages instead of melee warriors to the army. Each time that a corpse is converted into a skeleton mage, it has a chance to roll as fire, cold, lightning, or poison on the damage type. Information on the extra damage dealt by the mages has historically been difficult to access because it's never provided in-game, but there are third party websites like this slightly outdated one that have concrete numbers for the mages. The fire and lightning mages do the same amount of damage, with lightning having a wider range of potential damage rolls (if the fire mages deal 4-8 damage then the lightning mages will deal 2-10 damage, with both of them averaging 6 damage per shot). The cold mages deal about 75% the damage of the fire/lightning types but slow the target while poison mages inflict a slow-acting damage over time effect. The poison mages used to deal their damage over an ungodly long time but Patch 2.4 of D2R changed them so that their poison always lasts a fixed 4 seconds which greatly buffed their usefulness. The player can unsummon individual skeletal mages and try raising more corpses to get a specific type but usually I just use whatever the game gives me because it's helpful to have a mixture of several different elemental damage sources.

I've always loved the skeletal mages because their brightly-colored shots look so awesome in practice. Skelly had a fire, lightning, and cold mage in the screenshot and that was a really nice combination for both dealing damage and providing minor crowd control. The summoning Necromancer never really needs to worry much about damage immunities because their mages allow them to access every element and handle any combination of resistances. From what I can tell on third-party websites, the fire/lightning mages actually deal the identical amount of damage as the melee skeletons, assuming the same skill level for their two skills, only attuned to their respective elements instead of physical damage. Thus the warriors and the mages are basically equivalent in damage output, though it can sometimes be tough to get all of the melee fighters into the action simultaneously. Aside from having different damage types, it's also really useful to have both mages and melee skeletons due to basic space concerns: there's rarely enough room for every melee skeleton to hit the same target, made even worse when fighting in tight underground spaces or through doorways. Having a bunch of mages on hand to hit targets at range helps enormously in this regard even though they often spend a lot of time standing around doing nothing too for lack of a target.

In any case, what this meant for Skelly was that his army was kicking some major demonic booty throughout the rest of Act One. I took Raise Skeleton to SLVL 6 for the fourth skeleton, then added more skill points to Raise Skeletal Mage as I pushed for the fourth ranged skeleton as well. As Skelly raced through the remaining outdoor areas and then into the monastery itself, I found that his skeletal minions simply were not dying. They had enough health to survive the weak damage output of these early opponents while their own attacks were flattening everything in a couple of hits. The math of these encounters became even worse when Skelly managed to find a Preserved Head with +2 Skeleton Mastery in the Black Marsh, followed by an even better Preserved Head with +3 to Mastery on one of the levels of the Jail. I was dropping my skill points into the two direct skeleton summoning skills and these Preserved Heads allowed Skeletal Mastery to increase alongside them without having to invest more of those scarce points. We talk in various games sometimes about simply "out-stating" the opposition, where the numbers for some mechanic are simply too high for the other side to overcome. That was absolutely the case here as Skelly and his crew steamrolled through the remainder of the Act.

Andariel could potentially have been a cause for concern since Skelly only had a limited number of corpses to raise as additional skeletal minions and I didn't want to have to fall back on his Clay Golem which was still dealing a pitiful 2-5 damage. Fortunately this didn't end up mattering as I was able to have the golem tank most of Andariel's damage; her poison did indeed kill several golems and a couple of skeletal warriors but there were enough bodies to summon replacements and Andariel didn't survive for long against the damage output of the melee warriors and the ranged mages. Skelly would have better golems unlocked by the time that he had to face any of the other act end bosses - the Clay Golem is legitimately useful for its crowd control but it's absolutely terrible for dealing damage.

Act Two was essentially more of the same as Skelly's minions continued to tear right through everything in their path while rarely seeing a skeleton death. He reached CLVL 18 in the Rocky Waste and I swapped over to Blood Golem as the new golem of choice (the Necromancer can only have one golem summoned at a time). I had no past experience with Blood Golem because this skill originally created a life link between the Necromancer and the golem, with the damage dealt by the golem healing the Necromancer (good!) and a portion of the damage taken by the golem also getting reflected back to the Necromancer (very very bad!) This made Blood Golem virtually unusable in Hell difficulty since even a small percentage of the damage taken by the golem represented a dire peril to the Necromancer, not what you wanted for your main tank. That massive weakness no longer exists in D2R as the Blood Golem still heals the Necromancer but doesn't reflect damage back to its master. And while it loses the slowing effect of the Clay Golem, the Blood Golem has significantly more health and damage output as compared with its pudgy cousin. I was content to make the switch and convert over to Blood Golem usage full time.

Skelly raced through the first part of Act Two in a single session, everything up to the Horadric Cube at the bottom of the Halls of the Dead. I spent some time refreshing the wands on sale at Drognan at the end of this session and eventually found a Graverobber's Wand with +1 to the Necromancer summoning tree. That was as good as a wand with +1 to all Necromancer skills since Skelly would never have anything in the other two skill trees. Some character builds benefit more than others from +skills items but I'm not sure that any character setup gains more from them than the summoning Necromancer. This new wand cost Skelly one point in Skeleton Mage and broke even in Raise Skeleton but added a point in EVERYTHING else: another point of Skeleton Mastery, another point of Golem Mastery, another point in Blood Golem (which I was not planning on taking beyond the initial skill point), and so on. Because the skeletal minions benefit from so many different skills, getting additional points in all of them just yields a massive advantage across the board. I was really hoping that this character would be able to find some amulets and circlets with +skills on them down the road to keep snowballing this advantage even further.

So what did this look like in practice? With the new Graverobber's Wand in hand, Skelly had effective skills levels of SLVL 10 in Skeleton Mastery, SLVL 9 in Raise Skeleton, and SLVL 6 in Raise Skeletal Mage. This allowed him to summon 5 melee skeletons and 4 skeletal mages, plus the Blood Golem which also benefited from the extra level in its own skill and Golem Mastery. The ranged skeletons had 159 HP each and their various projectiles averaged out to about 21-22 damage while the higher level melee skeletons had 164 HP and slightly higher damage. (Yes, the skeletal mages actually had higher health here in Normal difficulty than the melee skeletons after a patch change in D2R, and no, it doesn't make a lot of sense.)

In any case, that was nine different skeletons on the map simultaneously who had about 150 HP per minion and were each hitting for a little over 20 damage per attack. Do you know how that compares to the average monster in Act Two Normal? They typically start around 50 HP apiece at the beginning of the Act and scale up to around 100 HP by its conclusion. The Unravelers in the Tombs of Tal Rasha have 156 HP (and almost no resistances) for example, and they're essentially the minibosses of the ending area. Each monster attack deals around 10 damage on average, increasing up to roughly 15 damage per hit by the end of the act. Thus Skelly's minions could kill the enemies in a couple of hits but the monsters would have to hit the skeleton crew something like 10-15 times to down even one skeleton... which Skelly could then easily replace from the ample bodies. The math here was simply brutal for the enemies which couldn't stand up to the skeleton army, not even a little bit, as they were blown to smithereens without Skelly even breaking a sweat.

As far as Act Two was concerned, most of it passed by at breakneck speed with the enemies barely registering for Skelly. The Maggot Lair stood out due to its absurdly narrow corridors which prevented most of the skeletons from getting into the action. It could have been worse though: early in on Diablo 2's history, the Necromancer couldn't walk through the skeleton minions and you could get trapped by your own skeleton army down there (which happened to Sirian on his original Skeletorr character). Even with this no longer being the case, there were way too many situations where Skelly only had the golem and one or two skeletons doing the fighting, which was fine for Normal difficulty but would cause problems when coming back here later. I will say that the Blood Golem was quite strong for this point in the gameplay, dealing legitimate damage in its own right and also healing back Skelly in the process. I noticed a bunch of times where Skelly took random chip damage only to see him pop right back to full health thanks to the efforts of that life link.

The Claw Viper Temple had an all-snakes draw and the minion army simply annihilated them, the vipers falling like wheat before the scythe as I spent most of the time running (not walking) from one room to the next. The toughest part of the Palace floors was distinguishing Skelly's mages apart from the enemy skeleton mages since they looked very much alike. That was also an issue back in Act One since there were lots of skeletons crawling around in the outdoor areas, hopefully it wouldn't cause me to make any big mistakes in the future. The Arcane Sancutary was also quite easy with the narrow walkways creating natural funneling paths for the skeleton mages to shoot down. I was particularly amused in the teleporting quadrant because the whole group would pop out of the portals right behind Skelly himself. There's a limit to how many of them can occupy the same space on the map so in practice Skelly would appear first and then the skeletons would come racing out in a line behind him. It really looked like everyone was exiting some kind of ridiculous clown car and had me laughing more than once.

The Tombs of Tal Rasha were packed full of Unravelers and Burning Dead, with Skelly drawing them in 6 out of 7 tombs including both Kaa's Tomb and the True Tomb. The summoning Necromancer has one of the best solutions of any class for dealing with the greater mummies, however, simply raising the skeletons as minions when they hit the floor to deny the opportunity for enemy resurrections. That tends to be a slow and mana-intensive process though, so I skipped it here on Normal difficulty and instead ran Skelly recklessly into each new room to cast Blood Golem right on top of the Unravelers while the melee skeletons tanked and the mage skeletons shot down the Burning Dead. This worked well enough and wasn't too dangerous given the difficulty level which allowed Skelly to get through all seven of the tombs faster. I also managed to find enough runes to create a Stealth armor (using the Horadric Cube to do some rune upgrading to produce the Tal) which I expected to use for a long time unless something better dropped.

Duriel and all of the other act end bosses were always going to be difficult fights for Skelly since they don't produce additional corpses to raise more minions. Upon entering the small boss room, the four skeleton mages split out to the sides and found good firing positions while the melee skeletons and the Blood Golem rushed the big demon. To my dismay, Duriel smashed the Blood Golem in two hits (good thing it no longer reflects damage back to the Necromancer!) and then began crushing the melee skeletons as well. After a second or two of surprise, I sprang into action and began spam-casting more golems on top of Duriel, managing to get him distracted while there were still two melee skeletons remaining. And that's where things remained for the rest of the fight, with two melee skeletons and all of the ranged mages surviving while Duriel went through something like two dozen Blood Golems (with their poor bodies visible in the screenshot above). Skelly drank three or four mana potions but never let Duriel get free again until the skeletons finished him off.

Skelly hit CLVL 24 at nearly the same instant that he fought Duriel; he was something like 2000 XP short after clearing the final True Tomb and I fought a handful of monsters in Canyon of the Magi to put him over the top before facing the boss. Upon crossing over to Act Three, I switched from Blood Golem to Iron Golem to test out the latest unlock in Skelly's summoning tree. Iron Golem is one of the most unique skills in Diablo 2, differing from every other golem in requiring a metal object to be cast upon and bring the golem to life. Every single item in the game is coded as either being "metal" or "non-metal" specifically for the use of this skill and nothing else. The Iron Golem literally equips the item that it gets cast upon and uses whatever stats might be present on that item; unlike all other golems, the Iron Golem also remains alive from session to session so it can theoretically remain alive indefinitely if the player can keep it from dying. I've read that the extreme high-end players will create Iron Golems out of Insight polearms to grant the Necromancer its Meditation aura, while also running Might aura on their Act Two mercenary and a Beast weapon for a Fanaticism aura in the weapon slot. Then they can use the new Bone Break sundering charm plus Amplify Damage curse to break physical damage immunities and run over everything from there.

Skelly would never be able to benefit from that kind of high-end gear and many of those options were off the table by variant rule anyway (like not having a mercenary). I had created his Iron Golem from one of the rare weapons dropped by Duriel and it proved to be quite sturdy as Skelly and his minions passed through the outdoor jungles. As in Act Two, the skeletons almost never died and the golem lasted the entire way to the gates of Kurast, with its health bar dropping into the yellow area only a single time during a big fight in the Flayer Dungeon. The stats on Skelly's companions were simply too high for the enemies to handle at the moment and therefore the whole jungles went by in a blur. This is a portion of the gameplay where the player barely levels at all, with Skelly only gaining three levels total from CLVL 24 to CLVL 27 across all of Act Three, so there really wasn't that much to discuss. I used some gambles to upgrade various parts of Skelly's early game equipment, added two more skill points into Raise Skeletal Mage to unlock a fifth skeleton, and that was about it.

The various parts of Kurast didn't do much to change the ongoing pattern, with the skeleton army still overwhelming everything too fast for Hierophant healing to cause any problems. I could see that this was going to get a lot harder down the road with no Dim Vision to blind the enemy casters but for now the skeletons simply crashed over all opposition. The six Kurast Temples were also a real breeze and I have to say that there's pretty much no character build safer for taking them on than the summoning Necromancer. Your army always appears around your character on the stairs to provide innate protection against the stairs traps that dominate those little areas. Skelly fought Sarina and her big mob in a doorway where the Iron Golem was able to tank and the ranged skeleton mages shot everything down in safety, just the way that I was hoping to see things play out.

The Council members in Travincal put up the first real fight in all of Act Three. The big issue here was the three of them and their minions refusing to come out of the central building for whatever reason, forcing Skelly's army to face them together in a congested area. Ismail's Cursed aura hit the whole skeleton crew and that was enough extra damage to put them in real danger; the Iron Golem was redlined and then died for the first time in the whole act, followed by the melee skeletons getting wiped out. I decided that this was a good time to portal out of there and rounded up a fresh army back in Act One, along with summoning a new Iron Golem from another rare weapon that had dropped a bit earlier. I was able to use the second army to force my way into the Black Temple and defeat the rest of the Council, however I wasn't satisfied with the way that this fight had played out. I was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the inability to recast the Iron Golem for positioning purposes, something that's not possible because the skill requires the use of a metal item, as it took away most of the flexibility of having a golem at all. I kept the Iron Golem for the moment but I didn't expect to use it for much longer.

The first two floors of the Durance were uneventful, with the skeletons again obliterating everything in their path. Durance 3 dialed up the challenge level, as always, when Bremm and his minions spawned on the right side of the central blood pool with a Blessed Aim aura. There were so many sparks flying around from his Lightning Enchanted status that the Iron Golem was unable to handle the sitation and collapsed into a pile of metal. This was the last straw for me and I switched back to the use of a Blood Golem, casting the sack of flesh behind Bremm to distract him while the remaining skeletons finished cleaning up the rest of the fight. I really wanted to like the Iron Golem because it has such a neat concept but the skill simply wasn't the right fit for Skelly. I had even planned on running Iron Golem as the primary golem for this character, only to discover that the skill was heavily nerfed in D2R when they changed its Thorns aura from reflecting a percentage of damage dealt to flat damage returned. Reflecting back 200-300 physical damage per hit wasn't going to get the job done in Hell difficulty and therefore Skelly would be using a different golem as he advanced further into the game.

For the moment though, it had to be the Blood Golem for use against Mephisto. I knew that the skeletal warriors would never survive this battle since the demon lord constantly sends out a cloud of poisonous gas against nearby threats. All of the skeletal warriors turned green and they lasted for about half of Mephisto's healthbar before collapsing, which was honestly more than I'd been expecting. Then it was down to the golem to tank while the ranged skeletons shot down Mephisto from afar. The Blood Golem would die in two hits which was plenty long enough for Skelly to keep raising more of them as they distracted the Prime Evil from focusing the mages. This was a really fun fight to play out and I was successfully able to keep Mephisto focused on the golem; he launched one lightning bolt that fried an individual mage but the other four kept shooting and got the job done.

The monsters in Act Four tend to be a pretty big increase in difficulty over the ones in Act Three, unsurprising since this was originally the final part of the game, and they're often harder opponents than everything other than the minotaurs in Act Five. Skelly's army continued to handle them in stride though, with the occasional skeleton crumbling here and there but the bulk of the group carrying on. None of the enemies had much in the way of physical resistance here in Normal difficulty and the multi-elemental nature of the skeleton mages kept the minions from being bothered too much by heavy fire resistance. Izual was hanging out right at the entrance of the Plains of Despair and took a little over a minute to cut through his huge health bar but his pathetic offense was unable to defeat even a single skeleton. I was pleased to find that the skeleton army did well against the Stygian Hags and their masses of pups which provided an endless supply of corpses for potential minions. And then Hephasto rolled a non-dangerous Holy Shock aura followed by the Hellforge quest giving Skelly a Ral rune and a ton of Topazes (one Perfect, one Flawless, and one normal version of the yellow gem).

The Chaos Sanctuary was straightforward as well, with Skelly rarely having to replace his minions. Both the Vizier and De Seis were easily defeated without needing to do anything other than stand in place and raise the occasional new skeleton. The Infector was more difficult, as usual, with his double-sized batch of Extra Fast minions running over Skelly's army to become the first boss that completely wiped out every summon. I had to portal back to Act One and raise a new army which was able to get the job done since the initial skeleton force had taken out a decent chunk of the Infector's crew. I expected that this sort of thing would get more common as the difficulty level continued to scale upwards. Then it was time for Diablo:

And this is where I knew that Skelly was going to run into some problems. Diablo is a much more difficult boss than Mephisto in terms of raw stats, with more than double the health of the Act Three boss and significantly more deadly abilities. Diablo's Flame Nova, River of Flame, and especially his Lightning Breath of Doom abilities can all wipe out the Necromancer's summons with extreme prejudice. Skelly brought his full army to the pentagram to face Diablo and I had specifically not portaled back to town since entering the Chaos Sanctuary in the hopes that this would preserve some of the corpses on the ground for potential revival during this boss fight. Unfortunately this tactic was a complete failure: Diablo 2's ancient coding cleaned up all of the corpses anyway as soon as Skelly left the screen and there would be no source of fresh recruits during this battle. I did my best to distract Diablo with the Blood Golem but he started wiping out the various skeletons very quickly. Soon enough the golem was the only one left and Diablo's health was barely touching the "O" on his lifebar. Not good.

I tried my best to use the Blood Golem to deal the remaining damage to Diablo but the process was a bit like trying to cut down a tree with a toothpick. The golem died incredibly fast to Diablo's physical attacks as well as his fiery abilities. Diablo kept freezing the golem with his melee attack which would lock the thing in place until Diablo shattered it with another blow. The poor golem would also die instantly to the Lightning Breath of Doom and the lifespan of these things was measured in mere seconds. When the Blood Golem did managed to land its own attack, it did a whole 11-32 damage per hit. Ummm.... Diablo has 13,800 HP in Normal difficulty and the skeleton army had maybe removed 20% of that before kicking the bucket. I tried swapping over to the Iron Golem in desperation but that was no better, with the iron version of the summon surviving no longer and inflicting a whopping 70 reflected damage via its Thorns aura each time it was struck. Maybe it would have been possible to use the Iron Golem if it didn't require a new metal weapon to be summoned each time, but with that restriction this clearly wasn't going to happen.

Therefore I had to fall back on my reserve plan for dealing with Diablo: leveling to CLVL 30 and swapping over to the final Necromancer summon, the Fire Golem. I had thought ahead of time that Skelly might need the Fire Golem to get past Diablo and there was nothing to be done aside from gaining two more levels to unlock the skill. Skelly was sitting at CLVL 28 with about 3.3 million experience gained thus far, needing to reach 4.6 million experience to gain the next two levels. I consulted the Amazon Basin and determined that he could level the fastest by clearing the River of Flame (rerolling the map if it had the low-experience Blood Maggots present) followed by the Chaos Sanctuary which would result in a little over 400k experience for each repetition. I also realized that Izual was worth a whopping 23k XP and he would always be present right at the start of the Plains of Despair, so I made sure to head over there and wipe him out as well. I had to repeat this process three times which wasn't too bad, with Skelly hitting CLVL 30 just before the Infector fight on the third such repetition. I even practiced managing Skelly's army against the Infector and did better with each repetition, managing to avoid the need for a retreat to Act One on the last two tries.

Then it was time for the rematch against Diablo with the shiny new Fire Golem in tow. I pasted in the stats of the two golem skills in the last two pictures above for comparison, as the Fire Golem outclassed the Blood Golem in every single respect. Quite aside from having about a third more total health, the Fire Golem also absorbed a good portion of fire element damage which allowed it to survive Diablo's various abilities at a much higher rate. Most importantly, when the Fire Golem did land an attack, it dealt something like quadruple the damage, plus it would always have a low-intensity Holy Fire aura running in the background to tick away at Diablo's health. When I started up the boss fight again, I found that the Fire Golem was surviving at a much better rate as compared to its fleshy predecessor. It was still dying frequently but the Fire Golem could actually take a hit without exploding and that gave me time to re-summon a new version at full health to tank the next blow. Furthermore, the skeletons were actually lasting for a while and getting in some real damage; there were still two melee skeletons and three mages alive at the time of the screenshot above when Diablo had fallen to half health. The mages fell soon thereafter but one hardy melee warrior lasted all the way to the "D" on Diablo's healthbar before finally perishing. I kept summoning and resummoning the Fire Golem, going through something like a dozen mana potions in the process, until finally the last 15% of Diablo's lifebar was expended. The in-game clock said it took about four minutes and I could breathe a huge sign of relief.

I was exceedingly glad to have Diablo out of the way and now Skelly needed to finish up with Act Five to lay claim to a full game clear. He was about two levels ahead of where a normal character would be thanks to that pitstop for the Fire Golem skill although I knew that edge would be almost entirely gone by the end of Normal difficulty. Act Five was significantly easier than Act Four as the skeleton army returned to mowing down everything in its path. As I've written about on many previous occasions, the default Act Five monsters just do not have particularly interesting or dangerous abilities in comparison to the threats in the previous act. Overseers and their melee followers, the teleporting imps, the prowling dead that come back to life after killing them - all of those monster types get repeated everywhere in Act Five and none of them pose much of a threat. The one great exception to this rule is always the minotaurs with their Frenzy attacks, though here in Normal difficulty they hadn't been juiced up with enough stat increases to be too scary yet. Skelly raced through most of this act without encoutering any battles worth noting.

In terms of his character build, I continued to drop each additional new skill point into Fire Golem on each level up. There were more bosses coming up where the skeleton army would fall by the wayside and Skelly would be forced to rely solely on his golem once again. Because he had no curses and no direct damage skills, Skelly *HAD* to have the strongest possible golem for dealing with these situations which was why I kept relentlessly dumping each new skill point into Fire Golem. I've never invested more than a single skill point into any of the golems before and Skelly's Fire Golem very quickly outscaled his skeletal warriors and skeletal mages in terms of damage. The Fire Golem that had been dealing 53-124 damage against Diablo when it was SLVL 1+1 had ballooned to 151-222 damage at SLVL 6+1 by the end of Act Five (!) This was enough to kill most normal enemies in two or three hits and it felt bizarre watching this super-powered golem smacking around ice monsters and witches down in the frozen catacombs.

That strong golem did come with a drawback, however: the mana cost to summon the Fire Golem also grew at a fantastic rate as well. The Fire Golem skill costs a base 50 mana at the initial rank and then goes up by 8 additional mana for each skill point. That was another 48 mana by the end of the act for a grand total of 98 mana per golem, yeouch! You can look at the mana orb in these screenshots to see how Skelly was still a bit short of 200 total mana, meaning that he didn't even have enough mana to cast two golems before running out. This made using the skill pretty awkward and I hesitated to cast the golem too often for positioning purposes unless it was truly necessary. All those skill points also didn't make the Fire Golem any tankier either: more skill points only make the Fire Golem deal more damage, not survive longer, which would require more points in Golem Mastery via +skills items for additional life. Basically the fire golem could hit really hard but was only slightly more tanky than the individual melee skeletons. At least I didn't need corpses to re-cast the golem so it could always be re-summoned... assuming that Skelly had enough mana on hand.

Feeding all those skill points into Fire Golem also meant that the skeletons weren't getting any stronger. Skelly remained stable on 6 melee skeletons and 5 skeleton mages all through Act Five which meant that they were slowly getting weaker relative to the monsters who were scaling up with more health and more damage. The skeletons were still plenty strong enough for the moment though, and while they lacked the near-immortality that they had demonstrated back in Act Two, they still died fairly infrequently. For example, against Nihlathak Skelly simply let the suicide minions and Corpse Explosions detonate harmlessly against his skeletal warriors. They suffered a few casualties but there were lots of bodies available for replacement. I made sure to cast the Fire Golem up in the face of the boss to distract him and the rest of the skeletons cleaned him up from there. The chilling effect of the cold mage skeletons particularly seemed to cause Nihlathak problems for whatever reason.

Then the next big test was against the Ancients at the top of Mount Arreat. This is the only battle in the entire game where the player cannot leave by town portal without reseting the encounter, which is obviously a huge problem for a summoning Necromancer where there are no corpses at all. I had been pumping Fire Golem for exactly this reason, expecting that the skeleton army would fall by the wayside somewhere against the Ancients and then it would be up to the golem to secure the remaining kills. To my great delight, nothing of the sort happened: the Ancients seemed to have no effect on the skeletons at all! Korlic hacked at them and Talic spun through them but the melee skeletons held strong and kept attacking. Madawc has no physical resistance so he died first followed by the skeletons concentrating on the remaining two opponents. One skeleton mage fell towards the end of the battle and that was it, nothing else died including the golem. Apparently the skeleton force simply out-stated the Ancients this time around; I can only hope that Nightmare and Hell difficulties will be anywhere near as smooth.

The monsters on the three floors of the Worldstone Keep were irrelevant, with only minotaurs on the third basement putting up any kind of a fight. For the boss rush in the Throne of Destruction, I found that once again Skelly's minions were tough enough to tank their way past the first few waves. Colenzo and Achmel didn't do much more than give Skelly more corpses to raise as skeletons for the following bosses. I thought that Bartuc's Council minions and Ventar's Venom Lords might be enough to overwhelm the skeletons but nope, in both cases Skelly was able to pull back slightly away from Baal's throne and raise more minions from some earlier monster corpses to replace skeleton losses in combat. Both times the skeleton line bent but didn't break. Only Lister with his utterly insane monster level of 58 was able to smash the skeletons completely; I think that the skeletons might have been able to land some kills on Lister's initial rush if they could have focused on one target but it's always really hard to get them to concentrate on one opponent. Thus Skelly was forced to let his army get wiped out, lure Lister and his minions back into the maze passages to split them up, then return with a fresh army to kill the isolated demons. I had expected that a retreat would be needed and these tactics worked well as usual.

Baal wasn't going to be much fun since I knew Skelly would soon be left with nothing but his golem. I did my best to distract him with golems and the skeleton boys gave it everything that they had, however Baal simply had too much health and too much damage for them to last for long. Baal's lifebar was only halfway to the "L" when the last skeleton fell which meant that they contributed perhaps 10-15% of the overall damage. Then it was down to a whole lot of Fire Golem spellcasts and suddenly all those skill points that Skelly had dropped into the skill earlier didn't feel like a waste anymore. Baal has an obnoxious 26,000 HP and 33% fire resistance on Normal difficulty so it took some time for the golem to punch the demon to death even at nearly 200 damage per hit. Baal didn't make this any easier by blinking around the room constantly and then summoning his clone, though I paid close attention and made sure to keep the Fire Golem on the correct target. Most annoying of all was the fact that Skelly had to drink a mana potion after EVERY casting of Fire Golem, as he didn't have enough mana for another golem after each summoning. With Baal mowing down the Fire Golems in mere seconds, this meant consuming an awful lot of blue potions. I was going back to town and purchasing 18 of them at a time from Malah while still running short.

Nevertheless, there was zero danger in this fight. Baal was never going to kill Skelly since the demon lord was content to stay at range launching the occasional projectile and I'd have to fall asleep for that to defeat my character. I went back to town four different times to restock potions and otherwise kept resummoning an endless stream of golems. Eventually the demon was going to go down to defeat; the in-game clock said that the whole fight took 14 minutes:

And with the final quest of the game completed, Skelly wrapped up with Normal difficulty. Baal didn't drop anything of interest although going forward I would now allow Skelly to equip the unique wand that I'd been saving for him in stash. The skeleton army had been practically invincible against all of the normal enemies throughout the game thus far, only faltering against the last two act end bosses where there were no opportunities to summon more replacements. I was looking forward to seeing how the skeletal warriors and mages would handle Nightmare difficulty; clearly they would fall off at some point, but how long would it take before that happened? I intended to keep going until I could find out. The tutorial part of the gameplay was now finished - on to the real game.