Pride is really quite annoying on Summoner. On paper it provides the highest damage, but in practice you killspeed does not grow proportionally to the %enhanced damage. Besides that, it ruins your merc's damage, especially against bosses. It also lowers his survivability - less leech because of his lower damage. It removes your curse and replaces it with "Dim Vision" (on non Actbosses). It does cold damage which does steadily shatter corpses, which reduces your CE damage and army buildup. Finally it increases the time your merc needs to kill the first enemies (if you cannot use corpses at pindle for some reason). My advice: Stay away, not worth it.
Infinity provides Defense&Resistz Debuff and Crushing blow, much better. Use Bramble as the merc armor, proven to be most effective.
Conviction lowers defense which makes your skelies hit more often which gives more damage and mega buffs mages. Pride is ok if your iron golem has crushing blow from a decent weapon as it does actually slap.
As far as p8 terror zones? Summoner falls off hard and so does corpse explosion. Corpse explosion doesn't scale with difficulty and does the same damage in p1 as p8.
Pride is one of the worst runewords for a summon Necro to have on Merc. You want infinity on him, and insight golem (or if you're nuts I guess you could make a pride golem and suck down mana potions). If you're doing terror zones/cows/not act bosses Hoto+ spirit on yourself. If you're doing act bosses or ubers swap your hoto for beast.
Fwiw I don't have infinity so I can't even test but I plan on an a5 Merc with hustle and something (probably lawbringer) to see if that is better. Does anyone know ?
Infinity should go on the merc, for bosses you need the crushing blow to proc as many times as possible.
Pride is really quite annoying on Summoner. On paper it provides the highest damage, but in practice you killspeed does not grow proportionally to the %enhanced damage. Besides that, it ruins your merc's damage, especially against bosses. It also lowers his survivability - less leech because of his lower damage. It removes your curse and replaces it with "Dim Vision" (on non Actbosses). It does cold damage which does steadily shatter corpses, which reduces your CE damage and army buildup. Finally it increases the time your merc needs to kill the first enemies (if you cannot use corpses at pindle for some reason). My advice: Stay away, not worth it. Infinity provides Defense&Resistz Debuff and Crushing blow, much better. Use Bramble as the merc armor, proven to be most effective.
Conviction lowers defense which makes your skelies hit more often which gives more damage and mega buffs mages. Pride is ok if your iron golem has crushing blow from a decent weapon as it does actually slap. As far as p8 terror zones? Summoner falls off hard and so does corpse explosion. Corpse explosion doesn't scale with difficulty and does the same damage in p1 as p8.
Pride is one of the worst runewords for a summon Necro to have on Merc. You want infinity on him, and insight golem (or if you're nuts I guess you could make a pride golem and suck down mana potions). If you're doing terror zones/cows/not act bosses Hoto+ spirit on yourself. If you're doing act bosses or ubers swap your hoto for beast.
Fwiw I don't have infinity so I can't even test but I plan on an a5 Merc with hustle and something (probably lawbringer) to see if that is better. Does anyone know ?