Back to Basics: Bring the Fun!

Okay, so I've been reading about so many optimized builds for this and that area lately its made my head spin.

I figured, lets bring back the average, every-man, once in a while playing builds that don't require Droknar's armour and 60k weapons to be effective.

With this idea of just having fun I decided to go to my roots. I played D2 for a long time, gave away several mule accounts (8 chars each full) but really only engaged in PvP once in a while. Most of my time was spent helping other players, magic-finding, or working on interesting builds like naked sorcs, singing barbs, and different necromancer combos.

In my time, probably the most challenging, and in the end, fun character was my Meleemancer. Using a golem, curses, and a few skills like corpse explosion, he was wacky, and even effective!

So I started a N/W for GW. He's up to lvl 11 right now, and so far has put most of his points into Death Magic, with a lvl 3 Axe and a lvl 4 Soul Reaping.

At this point, I Death Swarm a bunch of enemies, Putrid the first corpse which drops a few more, then raise those as horrors, then move on to the next. I don't have any of the minion enhancing skills yet, such as Verata's Sacrifice or Blood of the Master, but even so, my Horrors make short work of most enemies, since at lvl 9 Death Magic (8+1 scar) the Horrors are the same lvl as me, last a while and hit hard. Once I have a few up and running constantly, I can move in with my axe and adrenal skills like Dismember to make the process even faster, Putrid'ing, Soul Feasting, or Animating as needed. And with just a lvl 4 in SR, I haven't once run out of energy, I'm super impressed by this attribute, which usually gets totally underrated. While the Eles and Monks are running around wanding things, I'm still blowing up corpses, Death Swarming everything in sight and raising more minions.

Oh, and if you want to look totally cool, use the Fanatic's Armour, it has a metallic sheen so you can make those nice colors such as gold look really nice.

Just my take on the matter. This build has reinvigorated my interest in the PvE side of the game, its so fast paced now since I'm always doing something, rather than sitting around as another caster waiting for energy, or plinking away at range with a bow, etc.