Necro charming - conga line vs clump
 

Good morning everyone,

After studying up on the zone, I've been soloing in Howling Stones on my necro for about one level now. I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn that videos from Sessedrix and Rektyu have been very helpful in getting a good idea of what to expect and strategies for the area.

After charming for a level though (ie, I've got some experience but am still figuring it out) I'm not sure I understand the benefit of the "conga line" method of fighting groups of enemies, opposed to just rooting them all in a clump and letting stuff burn down your pet really fast then moving onto the next one.

I'm sure I'm just being a slow study, but what is the advantage to the conga line method, please?

Thank you!

I have only played Enc in HS and the few times I had a bad pull where I had to mass mez it became difficult to keep track of my roots/mezzes when everything was clumped.

What you're saying makes sense: more damage = faster kills. I'm guessing the conga line is an easier way to keep things organized.

clump 4 life

I've also only done HS on enchanter. Iirc the conga line necromancer demo I watched was from an era where root almost never broke early, I bet that made it more appealing. Seems like it could have been a way to kill the group with fewer charm casts and maybe pace the fight so you end with better mana.

A pacing trick I picked up from a Tecmos video is to just let charmed pets in the clump die (poof) if you either don't have mana to safely xp kill all the mobs or you're pushing the clear rate to get to a named.

This is how I completed a number of named kills. Just suiciding all the adds.

Spreading them out has the advantage of making it far less likely you will lose exp when you drop the charm, it also is generally better for staggering a spawn so they reop at consistent rate and aswell as a consistent pattern you can more easily control. Clumping is faster but may have issues targeting stuff, and you may end up with a mob with like 50ish HP at the end and nothing to do with it and it will generally be harder to know when/which mobs root has broken.

Thank you all for this input! This all makes a lot of sense. The control factor, mana use rate, and the pacing of repops in particular I hadn't really considered as I tend to just let rooms repop then do it all again, but it certainly requires a lot of stuff to go right and burns through a ton of mana. I'll keep working on my conga lines.

Also, duo today I found makes a lot of sense for conga lines as when they were clumped both of our pets just got pwnt instead of doing the owning.

Ty all!

Conga line MIGHT have a case on Green as we don't have tab-targetting.

Other than that, clump all the way for fasters exp.

For a solo necro I think it depends on how many living vs undead mobs you have in your clump. Necros are relatively inefficient at killing living mobs obviously, so if you just have your one pet and 3 living mobs, a conga line is much better because you want your pet to survive longer for the "free" damage that you don't have to do with dots.

If the clump is 2 undead and 1 living or something like that then clump is better.

Also I learned the trick of summoning a regular pet to pull wings from the comment section of Sesserdrix's videos. He is a P99 legend for sure, but I think several better strategies have been derived so don't accept the strategies in the videos as the gold standard and keep thinking for ways to improve!

Great point! That makes sense, thank you! Killing those largely living pops definitely sucks; I'm going to try a new (to me) strategy soon and will holler if it works!