Comprehensive Dark Pact Guide - Project Diablo 2 - Season 5

[@rsSloth]

Thank you for the video very informative and compehensible

[@mewdawn917]

Cool video! I used your first video at the start of S5 for inspiration and went dark pact to support my group. It allowed me to easily solo hell travincal on day 1 and jump into maps on day 2. My biggest suggestion would be to always pair dark pact with revive. Even at 20 skill points invested, reviving council members will allow you to tank mobs much better and melt down any map boss in seconds. Especially for starting out this was crucial as necromancers are just too fragile. But throw in a mix of councils/urdards/moon lords and you are flying through any map. Of course it's annoying when councils die, since you have to get ghoul lords to finish the map. But paired with maxed lower resist, they really worked wonders. Also I found it much smoother to NOT put dark pact in itself on quick cast, but rather use it on right click. That way you only apply curses with quick cast which feels much smoother all together. Depending on map my main rotation was Lower Res - Decrep - weaken -> right click twice and the hydras from councils would pick up any stragglers. Then on bosses of course amp damage + lower res + weaken/lifetap.

[@KordeshGaming]

Did you end up going eternity for your weapon?

[@mewdawn917]

@@KordeshGaming no, just blackhand key. It's just too good to skip IMO. Also revives are not good enough end game without summon skillers but that kind of defeats the point. I ended up making a second necro going full on summoner since most of the gear is directly swappable. I like both but summoner is just much smoother end game wise for quick mapping.

[@mr.mardoc8651]

You want to revive 5 of the witches from are at plateau i think it is and 3 council members. The witches apply the first curse and then you only have to apply 2 or 3 it makes the build much faster solo

[@mr.mardoc8651]

@@KordeshGaming check my comment let me know if you tried it before

[@KordeshGaming]

@@mr.mardoc8651 I haven't tried this. Ill check it out

[@cory9919]

Hell yeah buddy!

[@averageboss92]

Do you not have issues with the Oblivion Knights casting over your curses, overwriting them all? Because I'm pretty sure mine did, which is why I quickly stopped using Darkforce Spawn and ultimately respecced into Skellies. E: also, it's so annoying to join public games/maps. Two dark pact necros in one game are terrible, and if someone in your party or their merc casts any kind of curse on striking etc. they might overwrite all your curses!

[@KordeshGaming]

I've never encountered a second dark pact necro. Usually always summoner or the occasional poison. I didn't notice an issue with the oblivion knights, but often I play in groups so its possible my last hit kill count was much lower than soloing which would spawn much less oblivion knights.

[@NomisIsGozulike]

I've tried different setups now. 1 with DF spawn, 1 with homu for max block and now one with a 5 DP head. I think the Homu version was the smoothest mapping because the survivability was just insane, feels almost immortal. I just jumped into the biggest group of monsters, cast everything on myself, rinse and repeat. Now with the dp head i have a lvl 56 DP currently but not max block. Build is really squishy atm, but the dmg is good. Darfkforce spawn was nice too, but tbh i didnt feel the need for 4 curses. First of all it is sometimes kinda buggy and it feels like not all curses are applied and second is that nothing survives the plop of 3 curses, casting a fourth one just seemed like a waste of time. All for solo play. RN with the 5 DP head i was around 80k DPS but i thought i dont really need more than that since nothing survived the first rotation of DP casting. I liked that there are many different approaches for the build. Seeing that people use revives a lot might be the next thing i test, but atm the build is mapping pretty fast. I am at around 11 minutes on maps with not so high density, but at 300%+ this build really shines IMO. I do play with maxed weaken though, i like that all my curses have roughly the same spell radius and i like it if the radius is really big. Means i spend less time casting curses and more time applying DP which felt faster in my experience. Thank you for the video, getting more info on DP is very helpful since this build doesn't really have a meta at this point.

[@CD-hy6fg]

Can I ask what other items you used? And which merc did you prefer?

[@NomisIsGozulike]

@@CD-hy6fg sure. Just check the video I recently uploaded. For the most part everything is the same at my current setup (any more plus skills are extremely hard to obtain). I think a total of +5 more skills than I currently have can be achieved (theoretically). If I get my dream setup I'll make another video.

[@MylesIyce1]

I have to agree with this - I've been main-ing Curse Necro sense season 2. Darkforce Spawn is painfully overrated and sacrifices too much in the way of survivability that it's actually a hindrance. Max block Homunculus is the smoothest of all builds, bar-none. As a personal preference, I do get 10 into golem mastery to be able to summon 3 clay golems. They provide so much mob distraction that I never feel at risk of dying against anything other than map bosses. It also functions perfectly fine without feeling clunky at the 75 fcr breakpoint (due to not needing to pop 4 curses) - if you can get 125 fcr, great, but some of your gear options will suffer unless your filthy rich and can get FCR corruptions on most of your gear. Also, Waterwalks w/ the +20% faster block is highly recommended for Homunculus. Having enough "+X to mana after each kill" mod on gear is a godsend as well. Combine that with Insight, and I honestly can't even remember the last time I've had to use a mana/rejuv potion for the sole purpose of healing my Mana in season 5 (senpai team dropped mana costs on DP/curses in S5). It was certainly an issue in prior seasons, but should be manageable now.

[@ashiik]

I wish they would just do what pod did with their hemo curse. You still have to go all in on curses but I’m not going to get repetitive stress injuries to play 4 casts a kill. Yikes

[@KordeshGaming]

Yeah. Without smart cast its kind of unplayable

[@hiura_mihate]

less clicky and better dmg but it has small aoe so u have to drag the tiny circle all over the place. most maps in pod all the annoying open area types. if hemo had a bit more aoe i think it would definitively be superior to dp

[@HiredHC]

Only one point into dark pact?

[@KordeshGaming]

Nope. Max it. I realized I misspoke. I meant max curse mastery and dark pact before moving on to the curses.

[@stopbeeping8861]

Tbh i can't ever see myself playing this. Neat concept with damage curse but the set up is just not worth it when any other caster (and some melees like ww) outclass it for clear speed. The only thing this skill does is make curse necros not support bots in group play, noone should even consider running this solo imo