Put a pride on your act 2 nm offencive merc. If you can't afford a good runeword, any item with Crushing Blow can help a lot (especially against the Act bosses). If you have time and money to invest in your Necromancer (+summon GCs, gear, etc), you can equip yourself with Beast (or Faith, if you want to forgo an offhand), an Act II Merc with Might with Infinity, and an Iron Golem made with an item with Pride or Insight (a very good and cheap runeword to start with), once you have you army (all the auras stack and will benefit your summons immensely) summoned you'll be nearly unstoppable! Stacking Summon Resist (helps buff your skellies too) and Golem Mastery can help to keep your golem alive against bosses and mobs later on in the game (at the higher difficulties). The Iron Golem even becomes ethereal if you use an ethereal item to create it.

It won't disappear when you log out,unlike the other golems. The only real downside with Iron Golem is that you lose the armor/weapon you use to make it. If you have enough to invest in a (metal) weapon/armor with decent attributes or runewords, the golem will inherit most of the attributes (very useful especially for runewords that give auras such as Insight). I'm very surprised no one has talked about the hidden features of Iron Golem. Clay Golem honestly seems the most use with its slowing effect, but it requires 10+ points before it starts getting useful.Īny advice around using primarily a Golem summon and then a combination of other skills (bone and curses) is also helpful. Besides being a prerequisite for Summon Resist, are any of the Golems actually useful? If so, which one? They seem to die rather quickly and their damage seems to scale up extremely slowly (like 6% per point in an alternate Golem skill). I noticed however that all the golems as well as Golem Mastery are quite pathetic. This morning I had a close look at the Golem summons, thinking they might be cool to invest a fair amount of points in and then use Corpse Explosion + Lower Resist (For Fire Golem) or similar. Works like a charm and gets me through all difficulties without much trouble. I generally have stuck to this or similar:

I've always run the same build (below), but now I want to start trying some alternative builds to mix it up a bit and add some extra interest to my next playthrough.

The class I play most commonly in Diablo 2 is the Necromancer.

Diablo 2 clay golem