Any high-tier builds with CONSISTENT damage-output?

After starting out with a Rathma/Jesseth pet-based setup, my Necromancer is starting to feel the inherent limitations of such a build. I want to at least be able to manage at T16 and equivalent rifts without a great deal of struggling, but sticking with this sad old scary-spooky-skeletons lineup just doesn’t seem capable of getting there…

So I looked through Icy Veins for some ideas, and… well, it seems like all the high-end builds are just different variations of the same equation: (Simulacra-Reservoir X Shadowhook) + (LotD-Frozen Lands X Krysbin’s Sentence) = 10 seconds of absolute omnipotence. And then a 2-minute cooldown. Well, not QUITE, of course, since the various builds tend to involve copious amounts of CDR and various skills, passives and legendaries designed to further reduce the downtime…

But nonetheless, I’ve always hated that kind of playstyle, switching between long periods of ‘couldn’t hurt a fly’ and short periods of ‘everything in my area-code just exploded’. Nor do I care much for spending half my playtime just dashing around and trying to shepherd together a suitable number of foes for me to unleash my ten seconds of being the One-Punch Man on.

I much prefer a steady, ongoing damage-output without too much in the way of peaks and valleys - even if it’s ultimately less efficient in the final reckoning. But are there even any decently effective Necro-builds along those lines?

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I literally just posted a question on if I should post my Uriel build for the Necro or not. Using only Corpselance, golem, and LOTD, it consistently deals enough damage to 1 shot most enemies on torment 1-6, and 7-10 it takes 2-10 shots depending on the enemy, or 1 usually for crits. A single LOTD is enough to clear almost every Uber boss by just standing in place on Torment 10 lol

Umm… that’s very nice, but I was asking about builds that can manage T16. Which is, like, six whole T’s more than you’re talking about. My current pet-build can also tear through everything and everyone like a bone chainsaw… up to around T12, T13-ish. Those last few T’s MATTER. =_=

Ah okey, I’m going more for solo necro, and don’t have access to every toy in the game yet, not even a pet XP

You answered my question tho, yep I’m still in the noob stage

Have you looked at Lord Fluffy’s Blood and Essence Necro build? It is a Pestilence and Captain Crimson build that has 100% uptime on Land of the Dead so everything is frozen so it has good survivability due to everything being frozen. LoD Mage and LoD Corpse Lance can both steamroll T16 once you get decent ranked gems and ancient gear. All of those builds are extremely reliant on CDR to have LotD available. I played Necro last season and the LoD Lancer / Corpse Explosion build that I had running was LOADS of fun for 4-man T16 runs, just setting off CE ALL the time, and using Lances for elites.

The LoD Corpsemancer build I had was:
Leoric’s, Corpsewhisper, Aquilla, Flavor of Time, Grasps of Essence, Vigilante Belt, Nemesis Bracers, CoE, Golemskin, Krysbin’s, Trag Oul’s Fang, Stuart’s and Bone Ringer (any phylactery)

Cube Messerschmidt’s, Dayntee’s and Johnstone

Trapped, Gogok and LoD

Aura of Frailty, Close Quarters, Frozen Lands, Brittle Touch, Flesh Golem Blood Rush Potency

Stand Alone, Dark Reaping, Blood is Power, Commander of Risen Dead

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Blood and Essence? Sounds intriguing… where can I find it? It certainly isn’t on Icy Veins, and while Lord Fluffy has a LOT of builds in the Necronomicon right here, I don’t see any of that name. I honestly can’t see how Perma-LotD is possible, either - even with lots of CDR and Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, bridging the gap between 2 minutes and 10 seconds seems a tall order. Maybe with In-Geom and enough Elites… but then you’re dependent on there being ENOUGH elites, and being in constant motion… well, either way, color me curious!

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I largely play solo and build accordingly.

(Honestly not sure why you bring up the LoD Mage and Corpse Lance builds. I have no doubts about their effectiveness, but they’re exactly the kind of ‘burst damage sheepdog’ setups I’m trying to AVOID…)

With max cdr in every slot plus Captain Crimson, you can have about 71% cdr. With the cdr passive plus Zodiac and Messerschmidt’s procs, LotD is readily available.

Off the top of my head it used:
Pestilence helm, shoulders, gloves, chest and boots
Captain Crimson belt and pants
Zodiac and Krysbin and Squirts
Nemesis
Trag Oul’s Fang
Bone Ringer (any phylactery)

Cube Messerschmidt’s, Corpsewhisper and RoRG

Trapped, Zei’s and Gogok

Brittle Touch, CS Enforcer, Frozen Lands, Cannibalize, BR Metabolism and Early Grave

Blood is Power, Rathma’s Shield, Spreading Malediction and Final Service

With CS on NumLock you can get lots of easy zodiac procs and your curse helps to trigger blood is power to help reset LotD.

If that’s all off the top of your head, you’ve got an impressive head-top indeed… an interesting proposition, certainly. Forgot about Messerschmidt, I’ll admit! Not sure if I see the sense of Bone Ringer, though - with Brittle Touch as a primary attack, Lost Time is surely the obvious pick, if only for the speed-bonus.

I remember looking at the Bone Ringer for my pet-heavy build, but quickly reached the conclusion that if my spoopy boys were attacking the same target long enough for the bonus to climb to a useful point, I was in trouble regardless. Comparing it to the similarly-themed Bane of the Stricken, meanwhile, just makes that special affix seem incredibly sad. Damage rises per second rather than per attack, only affects the skeletons rather than making the target more vulnerable in general… bleh! Honestly, the necromancers really suffer from an absolute dearth of decent Phylacteries, especially when you look at the immense selection of powerful Sources, Quivers and Mojos that other classes have available… :roll_eyes:

Agree about Bone Ringer, any phylactery will do (and Lost Time would be ideal). The reason I tend to use Bone Ringer is that it always rolls with Crit Chance so that is 1 less variable since you want ancient, CC, CDR, Corpse Lance and a high damage bonus. The same philosophy is true about phylactery for LoD Mage build except you want Skeletal Mage damage instead of Corpse Lance damage.

The general problem with the necromancer class as a whole is that 2 of it’s skills are FAR more powerful than every other skill available, Singularity Mage and Corpse Lance. Since LotD gives you unlimited lances while active and unlimited essence while active (with Devour), builds are driven to stack ridiculous amounts of cdr to reset LotD asap. Sadly almost every other skill gets ignored since their power pales in comparison to the 2 offending skills I mentioned.

death nova lod necro is strong atm and isn’t as cooldown reliant as the other ones. It has a bit of a learning curve but when you get used to it its fairly strong.

Load Death Nova has excellent trash clear potential but it has significant shortfalls in single target damage, like a RG without adds. The same is true for the Inarius generator build. Both can deal a lot of damage to large packs but it gets more and more difficult to kill high health Rift Guardians. Most Death Nova builds that I’ve seen have slotted Corpse Lance and LotD as a means to RGK.

So, I finally finished leveling up the requisite gems and gave the suggested build a try. It’s definitely an ‘all-or-nothing’ sort of proposition, isn’t it? If LotD drops entirely, you’re basically helpless - your only non-corpse-dependent means of attack are your skeletons, and on high T-levels, they basically do nothing. All you can really do is hope that you can manage to push the cooldown of LotD back around before you run out of Essence and/or die.

Two things trouble me in particular. Firstly, getting the jewelry I need is proving a headache - you basically need a Squirt’s and either Krysbin or RoRG that comes with a socket OR 7-8 CDR from the start, and I haven’t had any luck so far - what I had lying around didn’t fulfill the requirements either. Which means that my build is short a solid 16% CDR right now, and it’s pretty noticeable.

Second… you suggested numlocking CS, and I can see how that’d help, racking up Zodiac-seconds fast while the constant Cannibalizing keeps your Essence from dropping… but I can’t make it work! I can numlock Cannibalize easily enough, but not CS, and if I try to lock BOTH, neither work. I’m guessing it’s got something to do with CS demanding a valid target…?

Either way, I can certainly see the charm of the build, but between Zodiac and Messerschmidt, you’re reliant on mob concentration for getting your cooldowns reset on time. Hit a dry patch, and you’ll soon find yourself dropping out of LotD with dangerous amounts of time left on the cooldown… maybe not a big problem in GRifts, but could certainly make bounty-runs dangerous!

I never used the build for bounties. I only used Blood and Essence for T16 farming and GR speeds until I had a full LoD build up and running (both mage and Lance / CE variants). For bounties I used to use an Inarius Lazymancer build. The build had a ton of movespeed via Stuart’s and had good enough area damage via Bonestorm and good single target damage via Lance, but T16 was not easy. T13 4 man bounties were a breeze though and I would regularly be almost done with my 2nd act when the rest of the public game finished their 1st act.

As far as NumLocking CS, yes it does need a target to trigger but you want everything cursed anyway so your mouse is rather busy with Frailty and targeting mobs with the curse sends the skeletons in that direction. The skeletons are not dealing any damage, they just proc Zodiac.

Fluffy’s recommendation when he posted the build is to focus EXCLUSIVELY on cdr rolls and if you lack the optimal Crit rolls or something else needed, better gear will eventually drop.

I’m still not sure how to make numlocked skellys work. I tried targeting a… well… target and doing the trick, but it still didn’t work. They attacked that one target, and then… nothing. Next target I pointed at, no reaction. What I’d really like to do is to numlock them along with Devour, just so I don’t have to pound that button twenty times per second, but like I said, I can only make that work if I’m not trying to numlock the skeletons too. What you say suggests that it should be in a state where merely mousing over a valid target would cause the skeletons to automatically trigger, but that just doesn’t seem to work for me, for some reason… I wonder what I’m doing wrong. >_>

As for focusing on CDR rolls… that’s easy enough for most gear, but the jewelry is the troublesome detail. Unless you’re saying that I should prioritize CDR over sockets? Considering how potent all three gems are, that seems a stretch…