as69 wrote:Hi, happy to see a guide which goes in a similar direction i´ve choosen to start with. However i decided the "Holy Neutral" tree, going with Hoplites - was more a decision because that tree has Rapture which i found quite useful for starting. What do you think about Hoplites? they are less in count, but more defensive ones. Now i read you can summon 15 scourges. Of course they can spread more plague damage as they are more, but less tanky (???). What do you think about the Hoplites - i mean, they can cast retalitate and inner fire - as i will respec once i finished baal on terror (which was frustrating yesterday, i really hit a wall...but to be honest, i have so crap gear - it wasn´t required before until now...
). Invested too much points into the Vessel of retribution - was nice for starting, but now it does almost no damage compared to the other skills (hoplites/ retaliate / divine judgement)
Honestly, it's really hard to say since I didn't try out a neutral summoner. Hoplites are definitely the better 1-point summons. While Scourge have around 20% avoid, hoplites have around 80% or something like that if I remember correctly and if it wasn't changed. However one reason why I chose to go with the holy tree is the damage bonus of 5% you get for each skillpoint. I invested 72 skillpoints into the holy tree atm, which means I get a damage boost of 360%, buffing the damage from something around 480 to 2200. Combine that with their Crucify attack, and you have the perfect boss-killer minions.
Another reason is the skill Colosseum. In early game (in normal and nightmare) it spreads the poison damage really well while knocking back every enemy on the screen. So it's both a really good defensive and a really good offensive choice, especially since it gives your minions time to attack freely, while rendering the enemies useless until Crucify hits. And as a bonus it also allows you to teleport and gather your minions, which is really important for every boss. This skill single-handedly increases the damage against any boss by about 200% that way due to that focused attacks.
In my understanding Scourge are more the squishy boss killer minions, whereas Hoplites are the tanky AoE minions. It just happens to be the case that Scourge are in a bigger number which results in their damage against groups being equally good, if not better than Hoplites. And the poison damage from Plaque... honestly at this point I think the poison is too weak. Most of the damage comes from Crucify anyway. But I'll keep it because it adds to the Crucify damage.
Imho though, I think the general idea of those 2 summons goes against every good game design since they are either tanky and have low damage or have low defense and kill everything quickly due to the fact that they get buffed so much by every single point into the holy/unholy tree. And you can't have both since holy and unholy lock each other out, which sucks. This is just me ranting though.
@Dakai what as69 said is correct. Retaliate only needs 1 point to be effective. I still keep it on my LMB so I can push enemies away if I get hit.
@Pub Yeah that's what I originally planned, but the new sprint mode made me mad, so I made a totemancer to avoid having to sprint all the time. But that was boring so I wanted to try out something else, which was this pala, and it worked surprisingly well.