I have seen a lot of guides that explain builds and list end game gear, but what kind of gear should I be looking for as I level? What should I prioritize when choosing gear? I know that +skill (especially Raise Skeleton) gear is great, but apart from wands, I haven’t found much of that while leveling.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
This is pretty common, actually. Most guides are like that, and assume you’re going to level with a “generic” build then spend a respec on the actual build later.
If you’re just looking for that sort of thing, Google this:
Icy Veins Necromancer Fastest Leveling Build in Diablo 2
It should be the first result.
This is a build I moded up so you can see gear that will get you through hell. I made it through hell with the ‘real’ gear meaning that’s all you need to get you to the end. If gear is not listed you can use anything with an emphasis on getting resists.
https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/7g0106y0#2
Necro can do hell naked. Rondels build shows the important stuff:
-get as much +skills as possible (runewords)
-get a sturdy merc with much CB
-Amp+CE
The lower your gear (and higher the player count) is, the smarter you need to be with curses. Especially true if you want to recover your body in a p8 game…requires a geared merc tho.
As an aside I would add that with a summoner, don’t get too carried away with walk/run speed on your stuff especially if you’re not using a teleport staff. If you get too far ahead of your minions it’s roughly a coin flip as to whether they will auto-tele to you or simply vanish.
I appreciate the responses, but somehow no one actually addressed my question.
Teknomancer, I read the icy-veins guide for fastest leveling build. It recommends Bone Necro and I don’t want to play that build. I’m quite happy with my Summoner build. It also doesn’t say literally anything about gear. I wonder if you are looking at a different Necromancer Fastest Leveling Build than the one I see because the one I’m looking at on icy-veins doesn’t answer my question at all.
Rondel, that link is broken. I tried it as you typed it as well as removing the space from “htt ps” and it didn’t work either way.
Imperial, I’m aware necro can do hell naked from the guides I’ve read. That doesn’t address my question. I’m going to get gear and put things in my various equipment slots and I’d like to know what stats to prioritize on that gear so I know wtf I am doing when picking between different items to equip. I don’t know what your various abbreviations (BS, AMP, CE) mean.
I’m really hoping someone can just directly address my question. I know plus skills is my highest priority and that bonus magic item finding is good, but I have no idea what to prioritize after that stat wise. Do I need plus mana, plus life, plus defense? Obviously resistances are good, but how should that affect prioritizing gear?
I had to put two spaces in there, one in ‘m axroll’ as well. B-net doesn’t like me yet, I told them how I really feel about the que’s a while back so they don’t let me post links.
I have a tab in there for leveling form 1-23 showing skill order. At level 23 you can have your skellys maxed, Amp, IM, Clay golem and Skelly Mastery. I recomend getting Summon Resists and Decrep before Diablo, that can be done by lvl 28, I edited it so show that.
If you get the link going it shows the gear I used to kill Hell Baal. It’s a simple spirit, Stealth, Lore and Rhyme. The rest of the gear is just aimed at resistances. Naturally if you find or have better you upgrade. That’s what I have been doing since finishing up hell, but Necy is my first guy I take through so he doesn’t get tweaked gear. I also have a tab for what IMO is BiS gear but too many people already put their idea’s out for that.
You don’t need + to mana, you will burn mana pots for summoning and if you spam CE. Most of the time between the regen on Rhyme and Stealth you don’t need to worry about spamming Amp or the occasional CE. Insight is one of the cheapest and best Polearms to get early on, even better than many uniques you can find. Once you get one your Mana issues are fixed.
Additional life charms are always a good idea if you have room over + to resistances. I have a combo of life and resistance charms going. Again replaced as I find better/get resists from items.
Defense isn’t really an issue, if you kyte well you don’t need defense. As you will see, I was using a scale male stealth in Hell with about 60’ish def. Naturally more is better but it’s not going to be something that holds you back. You should decide what base you will eventually use for an enigma or Bone armor and adjust your St to that. I choose vanity over ‘optimization’ and I like the look of Sharktooth armor and a bone helm so I get ST up to 103 for that. Is it needed no, I just like the way it looks.
https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/7g0106y0#2
Key
BS Bull…
Amp - Amp Damage
CE - Corpse Explosion
Decrep - Decrepify
Bis - Best in Slot
CB - Crushing Blow
The nice thing about a summon necro is that it doesn’t matter that much. Keep your skellies pumped and cast your curses well, get a decent merc, and your own gear is mostly irrelevant.
I suggest, besides the obvious +skills, that you focus on resists, since some random spell could still snipe you through your skelly army. Life is always good, more alive is more fun.
Since you have so much flexibility, you can focus a lot on MF much earlier without sacrificing anything, relative to a lot of other classes. A Tarnhelm is a great example, +1 all skills and high MF on a very low char level item, but with no resists, armor, or any other stats that other chars would need. You can afford to go with double nagel rings, for the same reasons. Just make sure your merc has some decent gear and life steal. Besides his own damage output, his aura hits all your skellies, and of course insight for corpse explosion and curse spam.
Thank you all. I think this gives me enough to work with that I don’t feel so clueless.
Defense vs missiles is also nice to have, especially in Acts 2 & 3 (skele archers, slinger cats, flayer blowguns, etc). Not strictly speaking required, but recommended if you can find it.
It’s really nice vs the piercing slinger kitties
PS I saw a tip elsewhere in the forums: use the preformatted text tag </> icon on the editor toolbar and you can actually put a real address inside it like so:
https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/7g0106y0#2
That way it’s just a simple browser copy-paste. 
You can shop Akara in normal for a wand. I like +5 between skeleton mastery and summon skeleton. You can gamble amulet and circlet for + to necro or summon skills, I think starting at level 29 (not sure on that) lore hat in a 2 socket head piece for +1 all skills works also (Amn has been dropping frequently in act 5 normal for me. I did not have a base for insite yet so cubed 3 Amns for sol.) Sigons shield (75 strength) has +1 all skills when you can wear it. I also check all heads and you can reroll less than normal quality (cracked-low quality) non magical heads with ell, chipped gem, and head for a chance at better staff mods. I usually have a summon set for my skeletons that I wear to summon them then put on resist gear and put the summon stuff in the stash. You don’t have to and I don’t do it any more.
I’m off to bed now, but if you want I got a gravespine wand and wormskull helm I just retired from my Necro (almost charsied the wand but then bought it back cause I figured… It’s really low level req ((20)) so I would find someone that can use it.
Ok so for gear you want
+Skills
Resists
Life
Faster Cast rate
Faster hit recovery
You can also shop a teleport staff from act5 normal and above put this on your weapon swap and use it sparingly when you need to reposition your self or your army.
Helms to look for
Lore (rune word Ort Sol)
Peasant crown
Wormskull
Chest pieces
Viper magi
Trans chest
Spirit shroud
Gloves
Trans gloves
Magefist
Chance guards
Rare dual resist gloves
Amulet
Maras
Rare +summoning skills /w cast rate and or resist
Any resistance amulet till you get the above will work
Rings
SOJs X2
bul Kathi’s rings
Rare rings with fcr and or resistance and or life
Belt
arachnids
Goldwrap
Any belt with resist/life
Boots
Marrow walk
Aldurs
Natalya’s
Rare boots with FRW resists MF
Offhand/shield
Boneflame
Darkforce
Homunculus
Spirit shield
Any rare head with +to skills/resists
Charms resistance life
The above are mostly ordered from hardest to find to easiest
I’ve found them starting with A3 Ormus, usually Lv24 but rarely you find one that’s only Lv18. You may have to exit/enter town a few times for one to show in his inventory, but he does occasionally have them.
I got a teleport staff from Ormus and have been using it with great success.
I feel like I’m doing pretty well on this issue now. I really want to make a Spirit for my shield, but I haven’t found any 4 slot shields yet. I’m at Act 3 in Nightmare now and just haven’t seen any of them.
I think you cant get the shield to drop before hell
you want to get enough str to equip your gear. if you want to make spirit shield for the necro you are gonna need to grab a monarch shield(hell drop) and 156 str req for that shield.
I may be mistaken but found that decrify works “safer” than amplify. Yes it give less damage multiplicator but instead cripple mobs to degree than then weak and slow plus (again I could be mistaken here) decrify brakes physical immunites (Make life of your merc so much easier).
CE use to be god-mode (long before hammerdins climb on the top of the PvE food chain) it still reasonably great but need some enhancements like Amplify or Decrify
As for gear - like everyone already said any +skills (spirit-spirit-lore no brain as a cheapest option) gamble for ammi or craft casters one (with +FCR) same goes for the belt - imo it have to be crafted casters belt or arachnids (that not comes easy). Everything else - resist/FHR
Yes Decrep is the ‘safe’ curse for those who feel they need to slow things down to control the area better. Amp does better for damage when you don’t feel you need to slow things down.
Breaking it down:
Amp Damage lowers physical resistance by 100
Decrepify lowers physical resistance by 50 and slows the target.
As you can see Amp does more damage increasing your killing speed etc…There is a comfort level when running a summoner where you are no longer concerned that your army will be blown through by whatever you are fighting. At that point you don’t need to Decrep, you can amp and be totally safe. Part of this is what level your skellies are another part is just how comfortable you are.
Immunities: lower resists works on a 20% efficiency for immune monsters. What this means is Decrep will lower the immunity by 10 and Amp will lower it by 20. If the monster has resists of 100 Decrep will break the immunity, if it has resists of 110 Decrep will not work, you need Amp to do the job. At 120 resists you can’t break it and you need a different source of damage.
My recommendations for using Decrep: Starting off with Bosses: you decrep them. Between Decrep and Clay golem you slow them down so nothing hurts your army.
If you have lvl 20-25 skellies you probably want to decrep Lister’s crew. Your skellies may not make it through them and your better safe than sorry. As your lvl of skellies goes up you don’t need to worry about them as much. Frenzytaurs can use some decrep as well.
If you don’t have a Dim vision at about lvl 10, you can use Decrep to slow down the piercing kitties, gloams and leapers. I prefer Dim for them as it shuts them down but slower is better than full speed. I personally have lvl 13 curses with just 1 pt invested (trangs gloves, Blackhand Key and +9 to all necy skills.) At very high end gear you can get +18 to all skills easily giving lvl 19 curses with 1 pt invested.
For just about all other situations I perfer Amp, but I also use a controlled chaos method of playing…I like the chaos.
Spirit for a Necy is generally not needed. It works if you are buffing with CTA + Spirit but by that time you are close to getting Enigma and that will give you the ST you need to get the Monarch equipped. Shrunken heads will come with the +2 to skills that you want while running the necy. I have a rare shrunken head with +2 necy skills at the moment. Homu is better in most measurements, better resists, block rating, mana per kill, mana recharge etc. Spirit can help you hit telly breakpoints but if you are using telly that much you are bypassing things, you can just use the CTA/Spirit on switch and then move to Homu/other for fighting…
You will probably be able to make a Spirit long before you find the rare shrunken heads to Homu though.