Untouchables
by Carbon Copy

Classes: Paladin, Barbarian, Amazon, Sorceress, Druid
Team: 2-8 players. Team composition described below.
Tag: None.

Team Composition and Objective

A team variant for 2-8 players, for the Paladin, Barbarian, Amazon, Sorceress, and Druid classes. The core two roles to play in this team are those of the Barbarian and the Paladin, as those two alone hold the party-affecting defensive skills. For teams up to five people, no two roles may be duplicated, but for six to eight people, the Amazon or Sorceress roles may be duplicated as many times as is necessary.

The team is founded upon two core directives, to which everything else is subordinate. These are, in the order of their importance:

1. To avoid being hit by the enemy's attacks
2. To prevent enemy attacks from occurring

These will be referred to as the Primary and Secondary Directives, respectively, later on. In order to fulfill these two directives, each member shall specialize in a small number of core skills that boost their abilities to both avoid attacks and to prevent them from happening. The skills that help to fulfill the Primary directive will be listed as "primary skills", those that assist in fulfilling the Second Directive will be called "secondary skills".

Rules

These rules cover areas that affect team dynamics in areas other than gameplay and tactics. Many of them are common sense, and some are up to the team leader's discretion whether to enforce or not. They serve as a means to make sure that everyone playing this variant is doing so with a common set of expectations for appropriate behavior.

The team will be played pure and in closed, passworded games. No twinking, no playing in public games. Not even a little. (i.e. Closed Team Rules)

Players should make new characters for this team. At the discretion of the team leader, players might also be required to make new accounts, and to give the passwords to those accounts to the team leader.

The team should have a leader. He or she settles the disputes, sets any optional ground rules, makes the tough decisions, and basically gets stuck with doing all the things that aren't very fun to do, but are nonetheless necessary. Should the leader fail to show for a game session, there should be a backup leader to assume this thankless position. It would probably be advisable for the Leader to assume either the Paladin or Barbarian roles, but that, of course, is not strictly necessary.

Items found during the course of playing the game belong to the team, and not to the individual players. They may not be hoarded, traded, given away to others not from the team, sold (in cases of items that would be useful to wear), etc. without the consent of the entire team. Items may and should be given freely within the confines of the team, of course.

There will be times when members of the team fail to show up. Play should not start, or stop if it already has started, under these conditions:

- Both the Barbarian and the Paladin fail to show. These two roles are essential, and should be handed out to those that will be most likely to show up. If they aren't there, the play doesn't begin. If both leave the game, play stops at the first reasonable point, even if the others are still present.
- More than half of the players do not show up, or leave. This is more of a rule of thumb than a rule set in stone. The point of this is that the team should play together, and that isn't accomplished very well if the majority of the team isn't there.

The team is meant to play together. This will mean that they should remain at approximately the same character levels and game advancement, and should play as much as practical in the same areas. If some players fall behind the others in quests, experience, whatever, efforts should be made to catch them up. Players should not play solo games except with the express purpose of catching up, and if they do so, they should not advance beyond the highest clvl or the farthest waypoint achieved by the team.

Classes

Paladin
One of the core members of the Untouchable team. His primary skills are Defiance and Holy Shield, and his secondary skill is Smite.

Barbarian
The other core member of the team. His primary skills are Shout and Iron Skin, and his secondary skills are Warcry and Stun.

Druid
His Lycanthropic Werebear form provides a tremendous DR boost, and can additionally summon wild creatures to fight alongside the team. His primary skills are Werebear and Spirit Wolves, and his secondary skill is Shockwave.

Amazon
The one member of the team who is not especially reliant upon DR to be unhittable. Her primary skills are Dodge, Avoid, and Evade, while her secondary skill is Slow Missiles.

Sorceress
Able to use elemental magic to both increase her own defensive power as well as to attack, she will likely be the team's primary non-physical damage dealer. Her primary skills are Frozen Armor, Shiver Armor, and Chilling Armor, and her secondary skills are Glacial Spike and Telekinesis.

Why no Nec/Asn?
The reasoning behind the lack of an Assassin or Necromancer role is this: Neither class has skills that allow them to comply with and further the Primary Directive. For a skill to qualify as such, it must grant some form of attack avoidance, like increased DR or blocking, etc. The assassin would only have Weapon Block as a primary skill, but that skill is useless without dual-wielding claws (and all characters will be required to wear shields). The Necromancer doesn't even have a single primary-qualifying skill (Bone Armor is merely a damage absorber, not an attack avoider. Damage absorption does not show up anywhere on the list of directives). So they are therefore out.

Items

Armor & Shields
Every character shall wear a shield. The Amazon may wear a bow in her second equipment tab, but she is the sole exception. The type of shield does not matter, but efforts should be made to keep it near or at maximum blocking. At the very minimum, every player should add five points to their base dexterity for every five clvls.

Higher DR will be preferred over other attributes, except in cases where very small amounts of DR are gained, but very useful suffixes (like of the Whale, for instance) are lost. Common sense should be your guide, but as a rule of thumb, the lesser of a 10% or 30 base DR difference shall not necessarily be grounds for swapping armors.

Ethereal items do not need to be used, despite their high natural DR. Of course, you can do so if you really want to.

Additionally, all characters should have at least 103 str (the strength needed to wear Archon Plate naturally, or slightly less than an average of 2 points of str per levelup) by clvl 50. Most should strive for 232 str in order to wear Sacred Armor.

Armors with affixes that give effects upon hitting (vulpine, of razors, of nova shield, etc.) are disqualified and may not be used, even if they have the highest DR.

For the purposes of this team, the damage reduction modifiers or hit recovery speed increasers are not considered to be a hit effect, although if it is agreed to beforehand, they may be. Since this is a variant for up to 8 people on a team, it would not make much sense to eliminate too many affixes from the pool of valid items or there will be the problem of there not being enough equipment of decent quality to go around.

Other Gear
For all other slots, each player may choose what they wish. They could choose to further advance their DR totals (especially in the helmet slot), or they could add to skills (which could, in turn, raise their damage avoidance or prevention), or whatever. Items that add hit effects are, of course, disqualified.

Skills

No skill that provides an effect upon being hit may be used. If that skill is a prerequisite for another skill (Thorns), then one point may be placed into it, but never used. The sole exceptions to this rule are the Cold Armors of the Sorceress, since they provide her only means to boost her own DR.

All other skills may have 1 point placed into them and used freely.

Beyond slvl 1, any skill that is listed as a primary skill may be increased without restriction.

Beyond slvl 1, any skill that is listed as a secondary skill may not have more base points than that of the primary skill with the highest number of base points.

Beyond slvl 1, any skill that is neither a primary nor a secondary skill may have more base points in it than the secondary skill with the most base points into it.

It is difficult to easily explain the mechanism of this restriction method, but it is easy to give examples.

Example
A Paladin with base slvl 15 Defiance, slvl 10 Holy Shield (both primary skills) and slvl 14 Smite (a secondary skill). The slvl 14 smite is allowable, since it is not greater than the base skill level of Defiance. If this paladin wanted to raise Smite to, say, slvl 17, he would first have to raise either Defiance or Holy Shield to that level first. If he wanted to raise, say, Vengeance, to slvl 15, he would first have to raise Smite so that it would remain greater than or equal to his Vengeance investment.

Mercenary Rules

Any mercenary is hirable with the exception of the Defensive mercenary from Act 2. His defiance aura would conflict with that of the team paladin.

Any Combat mercenaries hired from Act 2 in Normal Difficulty should be dismissed and replaced before their thorns aura begins to be used. They can, of course, be replaced with Combat Mercenaries from Act 2 Nightmare or Hell, since those, I believe, do not develop the thorns aura at all.

Mercenaries may be equipped with any item the player wishes, except for items that give hit effects. The exception to this would be vulpine items. Since mercenaries have neither energy nor mana, the hit effect from vulpine has no effect on them. Players should also try not to equip their mercenaries with items that would be an improvement over one currently worn by another player.

If the costs of reviving the mercenaries gets out of hand, the team leader has the right to restrict their use.