I am going to redo my Aura-based Summoning Necromancer. I believe it would be best if my Mercenary held an Infinity polearm, rather than a pride one. Instead, I plan to do something terribly risky:

Make a Pride Iron Golem.



The risks are terribly great, as pride is NOT a cheap runeword. If I or my Iron Golem perish, my Pride weapon will melt away...

According to the Necromancer Pet Calculator, I ought to be able to summon an Iron Golem with around 9.8k base life in Hell mode at around clvl 80 (giving me enough points to max Golem Mastery, and place a point in Summon Resist). Truly, I won't see any real use of a Pride Iron Golem until this stage of the game, so I believe it ought to work relatively well.

Before, I've only used Iggy as an Insight fount, and he didn't last very long as I had chosen to initially try a Fire Golem set up instead. But I believe a much more focused approach would give me a very stable, strong Iron Golem.


Due to his low damage attacks, he shouldn't kill himself instantly when under the effects of Iron Maiden (Unlike my damn merc...). Iggy also has a natural resistance of 50 Lightning and 100 poison, which will prove most beneficial when dealing with Lightning Enchanted monsters such as Scarabs, or when facing the infamous Black Souls.

Really, my only concern after pumping points into Golem Mastery ought to be how I am going to keep myself alive. There are many left over Skill Points when building a Summoner Necromancer, so I am thinking of placing 1 point in Bone Armour and the rest in its respective synergies. At around clvl 80, I ought to be around the 500 damage absorb mark.


This may fall flat on it face and I will be one precious Pride runeword less, but there is too much of an allure in having Conviction AND Concentration at work. My Skeletons will kill faster as they hit 50% more often, and have a lovely boost in damage output from the wandering Pride Iron Golem, and my Corpse Explosion will receive the bonuses of Conviction as well (since half of its damage is Fire based).


I guess we'll see how it works.



NOTE: I've recently discovered that summoned minions will keep the stats that they are granted from whatever items they were initially summoned with. This means that if I use King Leoric's Arm and Spirit/Homo to summon minions and then switch to my Beast and Spirit/Homo set-up, the skeletons will still benefit from the +Skeleton Mastery and other bonuses found on the wand. Same can be said of any item. It seems that although I may lose the amount of skeletons, their damage, AR, and life stats remain.

I simply found this interesting, and suspect it's also true for Druid Summoners, and perhaps even the Amazon's Valkyrie and Assassins Shadow Summons benefit from similar effects.