Fanat-Zealot Gear for NM ?s

[:1]Hello,

As this is my first melee build, I was going to post it here and see what kind of gear i should aim for when starting Nightmare.

As the title says, I'm working on a standard fanat zealot build. One that will hopefully be able to do Uber trist runs.



My Gear

Strength Dimensional Blade

Rattlecage

Ancient's Pledge in a Dragon Shield

RockStopper

Goldwrap

Hsarus' Boots

Some IAS unique gloves

Manald Heal

other crappy ring

+1 combat skills amulet



As you can see I'm going for some Crushing blow with the RattleCage and Strength RW i have 50%.

I guess the question I have is will I be able to kill efficiently once the CB stops having its dramatic effect on enemies with full life? And, what some good weapons are to start NM with?|||i�d look for the following:

do u have an item pool ready u could dice into? bloodletter, butchers pupil or even civerbs cudgel will do great

in the long term i�d look for:

io-rune to make a "black" in a 3 soc knout or battle hammer, but any exceptional unique will crush everything. u don�t need to load heavy on cb. eth ginthers or aldurs mace are very nice options

any paladin base shield with 2 soc and dencent base res "rhyme" for cbf

i�d also probably try to get my hands on the angelic combo

rattlecage could be replaced with a peace rw for the critical strike or lionheart or ...

there are some other upgrade u could make, but in the end i think ur equip should work fine for early nm and should be decent till a4. by then i�d suspect the weapon to have not enough dmg anymore|||+1 for Krupa's advice on Butcher's pupil.

I, personally, like to use paladin weapons such as scepters and sprinklers until hell than i make some "nasty" runewords to beat hell. I assume you are around lvl 40 for NM...

My advice for weapon is Fetid sprinkler. Lvl request is low, pretty high damage, attack rating, +2 pala skills... enough to walk through NM on /players 4-6 difficulty.

Armor: duriels shell. cannot be frozzen, ressistance, + life and def per lvl

Helm: Gillaumes face. THE helmet for zealots, becomes available at lvl 34. If you dont have 115 strenght to wear it punch hole in it at socket it with Hel rune. This is also an end-game helmet so when you get get to Hell difficulty remove Hel rune and put Um rune or scintillating jewel.

Boots: Tearhunch graves

That's it from me for now but if something slipps my mind I'll let you know |||I keep reading that Guillaume's is a great helm, does it have a pretty decent chance to drop? I have a LF Javazon that can tear through packs that i use for magic finding. Hopefully I can drop one.|||It is indeed. Even if it doesn't drop for you it's fairly cheep on trade forum.|||^ exactly, even if you don't find it in a drop you can find it for a lem or so.

if you have a decent exceptional armor with 2 sockets laying around you could use the smoke rune word. it's pretty good for that early in the game.|||I think that one of the best (price/bonus) combo is "IK bottom". Immortal King gloves, belt and boots. Req 110 str.

Lionheart is great armor (even end game) but Fal rune is quite rare (unless you have hardworking keyhunter). Fal is cheap and common then it is hard to buy, and is not as common to find it when you need it.

Rattle Cage has very annoying mod - monster flee. Another nice options are crappy Viper, Spirit Shroud (CBF if you have not rhyme shield), Smoke RW. Even Sigon armor + helm are nice - 10% LL + AR bonus. BTW my last zealot finished NM with Twitchthroe armor and Lore helm.

Very good and cheap weapon is uped Rixot. Can be used at lvl 23 or 25 has CB and average dmg. Anyway "Black" (knout not battle hammer), or Butchers Pupil are better