Death Sentry

Trap that shoots lightning at your enemies or explodes nearby corpses laying waste to more enemies.

Death Sentry is the last trap of the Assassin's Traps tree (level 30, requires Lightning Sentry). It is two traps in one: with no corpse in reach it is a weaker Lightning Sentry; with a corpse in reach it detonates it, Corpse Explosion style, for a share of the corpse's life. The number that decides it is not on the tooltip's lightning line but in the explosion: 40–80% of the corpse's base life, in a radius that grows with the skill's level.

The numbers

The lightning is EMin/EMax with a HitShift of 8, read as written: the minimum is 1 at every level, the maximum 50 at level 1 and +8 a level to level 8, +14 to 16, +22 to 22, +28 to 28 and +34 past that (EMaxLev1–5): 1–306 at level 20, 1–586 at level 30. +skills count. Shots are Param1 (5) plus one per 3 hard points in Fire Blast, so a bare sentry fires 5 times and one with 20 in Fire Blast fires 11. Mana is a flat 20.

The explosion's numbers and radius are read from the monster-skill row the sentry fires with ("mon death sentry"), which is not in the repo's bank, so they come from the Basin's page: the damage is 40–80% of the corpse's normal average base life, half of it converted to fire, and the radius is [(9 + level) ÷ 2] × 2/3 yards for the physical half and [(10 + level) ÷ 2] × 2/3 for the fire half — 3 1/3 yards at level 1 and 9 1/3 (fire 10) at level

1. The Basin warns the tooltip's radius is exact only at odd levels; at even levels it prints the average of the two.

How it works

The sentry is a summon (pet type "assassintrap") and takes one of the 5 sentry slots (petmax) the Basin says the Assassin and her Shadow share across Blade Sentinel and the five sentries; a sixth dispels the oldest. The Basin's page says it is laid with the attack rate, must be placed in line of sight, then acts on targets within its own line of sight and awareness range, which it gives as 10 2/3 yards for the lightning; it cannot be targeted or harmed and expires after its shots.

Without a corpse, each shot is a piercing size-2 lightning bolt, fired once every 31 frames, whose range grows with the skill's level. The row's seven passive stats pass the Assassin's Lightning Skill Damage, Enemy Lightning Resistance Reduction, Enemy Fire Resistance Reduction and the lightning, fire and physical sundering to the trap (the Basin's page says the same of D2R).

With a corpse, the shot is spent on the explosion instead. The Basin's page sets its rules: the damage is figured from the base life of a normal monster of the corpse's level, so a champion's or a boss's corpse is worth no more than a normal one's; it does not grow with the player count; when the target's level is above the Assassin's it is multiplied by her level over the target's; it cannot be blocked; it is not reduced by the -% damage of Taunt, Battle Cry, Weaken or Decrepify; and Fire Skill Damage does not raise its fire half.

The explosion is half physical, half fire: a monster immune to both takes nothing from it, and the sentry falls back to lightning only when no corpse is in reach.

Synergies and +skills

EDmgSymPerCalc reads the hard points in Lightning Sentry and multiplies them by Param8 (12): +12% lightning damage per hard point, on the maximum only since the minimum is 1. Fire Blast's hard points add shots as above. Neither touches the explosion, which has no synergy and no +% line of its own. +skills raise the sentry's level, which raises the lightning and the explosion radius, but not the shot count. Death Sentry's own hard points feed no other trap. The Basin says the Shadow Warrior and Shadow Master can lay it too.

Against players

A player's hit on another player, and a pet's, is cut to 17% of its value (difficultylevels.txt PlayerDamagePercentVSPlayer) before resistances, see Player versus Player. The Basin's page says nothing else specific about players.

Build notes

• The explosion is where the damage is, and it scales with the corpse, not with points: the radius is what a level buys (a yard every three levels), so +skills do as much here as hard points.
• A hard point in Fire Blast buys a third of a shot; 15 points are five more corpses a sentry.
• The lightning side is a +12% synergy from Lightning Sentry only, and it only fires when nothing is dead.
• Flat 20 mana, 5 shots bare; it earns its slot once the first kill is on the ground.