EyeBite, master of the Den'Trag.

EyeBite will be a Teeth Necromancer, with Bone Armour as a skill point sink. First point will be bone armour, to make early melee safer, and then Teeth will be Maxed. I normally hate Bone Armour because of the way it acts as if hit when tempting fate, which I'm sure all ranged characters do even if they haven't heard the term. Anything faster than a player pretty much forces it :) It is still great against fetish and archers, so the points won't be wasted anyway. Stats will allow a Belt(25 Str), or possibly Breast Plate for the look(30 Str). Other than that Vit and Energy will be kept similar until I feel my mana high enough then all vit. I have never gotten a hardcore character past level 30, so I have no idea what level I will stop with Energy :P

If I hit higher difficulties, then I will decide based on Teeth's performance as well as experimentation with wands what I should do with bosses. Teeth is essentially a croud control skill (ala multishot) and I suspect this will combine with low damage to be inefficient against bosses. My original plan was to get a wand of Bone Spirit to avoid the temptation of using the prerequisites (corpse explosion springs to mind), but then made the depressing discovery it is not available on wands. Bone Spear would probably render Teeth obsolete, sharing similar funcionality as well as better damage for lower cost (according to the Chaos Sanctuary web site).

I only mention the highlights from Normal difficulty, so don't be dissapointed if this does not compare to the other character reports on this site... most of normal is not even remotely noteworthy IMHO except for the fact I am using Teeth only :)

ACT ONE

I started with a combination of Teeth (when mana allowed) and Melee/Bows. My first observation about Teeth is that it is relatively expensive at first, so I pretty much saved it for mobs. This combined with some Triumphant rings worked beautifully. Much like a late-game Corpse Explosion, actually. Oh the power :) As a side note, I found two dupes. Not the cheaty type of dupe, but pairs of items with identical stats. Triumphant club of worth, and the Triumphant rings(same graphics, within 5 minutes of each other). I've never seen it before, but that could be related to the common double boss bug. I wonder if 1.06 caused it?

When my mana runs out I normally melee/shoot until I can cast again, but on vampires I need potions to win the race between monster regen and mana regen. In this act that my mana went UP on fallen camps (from Triumphant), which was very fun.

Andariel took some potions but died remarkably easily because of how little effort I had to make to aim accurately :)

ACT TWO

Started at level 15 with:
Buckler of Warding
Wand of the Apprentice (+3 Teeth)
Two Vulpine Rings
useless Amulet, gloves and footwear
Skull Cap with fastest hit recovery
Some gems in stash for future rejuvs
30 Strength, 25 Dex, rest in Energy/Vit

A lot more physical combat at the start of this act this act. Even using potions, my regeneration rate was far to slow to support my Teeth level. By the end of the act I could afford lots of town portals, so I popped into town a lot.

Radament shocked me by taking forever to defeat. I took him on in his room so that killing his minions would let me shoot more often because of the triumphant rings, but he still took a good 10 minutes of walking around. Most of the act was like this - slow but safe, because of my high Vit and good buckler.

The desert shocked me straight away with a double-boss. Teleport Leaper, Fast leaper and both mobs were all the same colour and I fought them together. Luckily for me Teeth is VERY powerful against leapers. Normally it works like multishot, while each Tooth pierces until it kills something, but in this case the knockback of leapers allows double hits from one cast. From some experimentation, it seems to get double hits on moving targets, but it's almost impossible to tell with a piercing attack.

Almost the whole act was obscenely easy once I could afford lots of town portals. Gather a mob, spam mana empty, go Fara, Find a new mob. A beetle boss in the maggot lair almost killed me though. I entered a room, saw beetles, and spammed teeth. They died almost simultaneosly, and the screen went WHITE with sparks. I was too busy drinking purples to take a screenshot until all minions were dead, only to discover "Rust Shank the Dark" was a LEB. Great fun.

The Arcane was was no different, except that in the long segment I made a BIG mistake. I woke a huge mob as normal, but then a Goat who I ran past stopped me from retreating, getting me cornered badly by wraiths and goats and vampires. I had to drink a full rejuv and then save and exit. After that I was a bit more cautious with my mob gathering :P

The canyon of the magi was Crushers and Devourers, and I found a new tactic for them. Whenever I met a big bug, I killed it (three casts) with Teeth aimed at the following Crushers. I rarely fired at crushers until I had killed all the bugs, and there were surprisingly few stragglers. A quick run around the map for leftovers and I was done. All in one go :)

Duriel ate a lot of town portals and mercs, but my life was high enough to survive the odd charge, so I got to be sloppy. Poor bug.

ACT THREE

ITEMS -
Double chipped skull helm
Drakes Bone Wand of the Magus
Breast Plate of Warding
Bone Shield
Burgundy Heavy Gloves of the Tiger
Burgundy Belt of the Tiger
Crimson Heavy Boots of Haste
Amulet of the Apprentice
Angelic Halo
Fortuitous ring of Brilliance

STASH- Angelic Halo (yes, 2 :), Wand of the Apprentice (+3 Teeth)

Spiders and Bosses needed TPs, fetish mobs died like fallen, gambled some brilliant boots. Bone armour rocked against blowdarts and was useless against melee fetish as predicted. The six temples only offered only one stair trap and a merc lasted from the Bazaar right up until Bremm.

The Durance needed a LOT of portals and I had to buy a wand of +3 Bone spear to kill Maffer(to get past his double healing) and Wyand(to get him before he got me...). God I hate the second batch of Councillors :P

Went back to Teeth for mephisto. It has one BIG advantage over low level BS - spam from offscreen is very easy with the wide spread that can be used. He was slow, but very, very easy.

On to the first hard and intersting bit. Teeth was beginning to show it's age by the Durance, so I am ready for a lot of town portalling in hell :)

ACT FOUR (and I have finally gotten my act together about recording items)

CHARACTER
Level 25
Str 30, Dex 25, Vit 75, Energy 75
Level 20 Teeth and 6 Bone Armour

ITEMS
Helm with 2 Chipped Skulls
Coral Amulet of Regeneration
Wand of the Apprentice (+3 Teeth)
Breast Plate of the Tiger
Bone Shield
Bergundy Heavy Gloves of the Tiger
Bergundy Belt of the Tiger
Drake's Ring (Triumphant is now longer practical as of the Durance)

"Glyph Track" - Heavey boots with Fastest Recovery, Fastest Run/Walk, 93% Gold, +1 Light Radius, Lightening Resist +5%, Fire Resist 47%. These boots MAY just last me a while... I am terribly paranoid about people thinking these are a cheat, but no, I gambled them while on one of my many town trips to keep mercs alive in the jungle dungeons :)

"Entropy Eye" Ring - MDR 2, Lightening Resist 18%, Fire Resist 5%, +6 mana, +2 Strength. Great ring, but with the Glyph Track it feels like a crap rare :)

Izual took forever, but the Plains of Despair gave me the nagelring. I don't want a Stone (2 skills :P ). but MDR 2 rocks, especially with the gift from the visier later :) Poor Diablo.

STASH 2 Angelic Halo (which I can't bear to sell), Ruby Ring of Chance (for later difficulties vs FEB), Amber Yew Wand of Radiance (because my Lightening Resistance is still only medium), Bone Wand with +3 Bone Spear (for teleporters if Teeth won't do the job.

I thought act four would be vastly harder since Teeth maxed out so long ago, and I was right. On bosses. Mobs were so easy it was obscene, provided I did not delay to TP when my mana ran out. This lead me to keeping TPs in my belt to skip the casting time. I do have a Whirlwind Barb (everyone has to at least try a lawnmower out :) and this feels remarkably similar.

Although by the time a Barb would have WW, I think I will be feeling the pinch, this is basically boring. I have gotten much better at herding mobs together, especially damned, and now that I understand I should rely on TPs as pseudo-mana-potions instead of waiting for mana to refill.

This may seem dodgy, but monster regeneration really makes makes normal mana regeneration obsolete. I know things will get harder, so I don't think I have any other option without compromising my Hit Points.

Of note is the rare Amulet that the Visier gave me.

DR3, MDR3, Lightening Res 12, Fire Res 27, +21 mana. This basically let me sit in Diablo's LBOD (with bone armour) and take almost no damage. I didn't even need to max my lightening resistance for this fight :) Fire resistance was actually more useful, because Teeth allowed me to keep a BIG distance. The biggest strength of Teeth would probably be its offscreen spamming capability.

And that's it. So anticlimactic it is obscene. To be honest, I wouldn't recommend Teeth as a main attack despite how easy this run was.

I heartily recommend trying the skill out for normal though. Its fun factor was HUGE in normal. If playing until later, Bone Spear does more damage for less mana, while Bone Spirit has MUCH better damage as well as spamming potential.

Count EyeBite will see you in nightmare with a much more interesting transcript :)

- Savant

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