Death Knight: Hardcore build

Necromancer
1

I admit this is mostly theory crafting, but I have a concept for a build and if I ever get the time to finish it I would name it the “Death Knight”.

Heres the tl;dr version

–In my opinion bone spirit is a better more suitable replacement for LoD and I want max survivability. For me success is not dying in a maxGR…and I can worry about completion later lol. Effectively this is a varient of the LoD-Corpse build.–

Its been a long time since I played D3 so I started from scratch a couple days ago on seasonal Hardcore.

Therefore I have trouble evaluating if my Necro is strong or if he’s average. And until I get to greater rifts I cant really test that, maybe someone else could.

Now that my necro melts stuff at Torment 2 and can tank 3 aggressivly affixed elite swarms. Ill probably do a power level grind in secheron to 70.

My theory is that all characters are basically the same if built the same. Only dmg difference is skills and some minor adjustments to items.

For the Death Knight concept I want to do Innarius Set.

The idea is he is constantly damaging with bone armor, nova, bone spirit and corpse explosion.

He is his own tank so the Scoundrel is taken, the Crit Dmg skill works great with the cool down timing of Bone spirit.

The passives are chosen to maximize the DR.

I want a 1:10 ratio for all-res : armor.

I sacrifice vitality first then damage to achieve this.

But because Necro with stand alone is effectively the only character to get 3int/2str for every level due to armor being +100%, I have ended up sacrificing more str/dex and keeping some int/vit for the build.

Now I cant yet speak to how the necro will perform against GR.

But as you can see on my profile (Sithicus) my gear is trash and he still melts through mobs of elites in regular T2.

I havent taken him to T3 yet because I only play hardcore, so always have been extra cautious.

But I can stand in arcane sentries and they are little more than a tickle at T2 with this trash gear.

The concept was originally to have a 2:3 vit to int ratio.

I also sacrifice crit chance rolls by taking the scoundrel and seek survival rolls to replace them.

When trash mob creates a corpse the build chain reacts corpse exposion to obliterate the whole mob.

The poison nova is for attack speed reduction on enemy, and the bone spirit is for taking down elites or trash mobs to start corpse.

With crit cloud from scoundrel the bone spirit can take down an elite boss in about 1.5min which feels really long still but for game play is pretty solid. For GR - I am going to just need to finish the levels and get some real gear first.

Im not sure if in that case I should change the rune to the bone spirit.

Lastly, I’d really just like pointers on the concept and on the progression of stats.

I am not fixated on innarius set but I like the idea of including bone tornado to the build. But all the other equipment would be designed to get as much effective hit points and effective healing as possible with the actual goal being to survive highest level GR possible without necessarily finishing the GR.

I want to prove that the Death Knight build can be the greatest tank in the game.

2

Inarius is probably the least tanky build and my personal most hated set.

3

I have no experience with it and want to try it out for the bone armor. With how tanky this necro has been with this build so far I am curious how it scales into decent gear.

Right now hes tanking better than my straight up tank builds for barbarians and crusaders at this current progress.

The thing is I been gone about 5 years. I have a wizard right now thats pretty tanky.

So im making an invoker crusader to get a feel for what is a baseline present day.

4

Without being 70, and without max gems, gear etc… It’s hard to really take this build seriously, because I have no idea what you’re planning on equipping with it, and can’t see what your life or toughness would be etc…

You have 3x poison damage, 1x cold, and 1x physical. You don’t have a stun or knockback. This feels like a melee build, but you’re using Siphon Blood instead of Grim Scythe.

Rigor Mortis only needs 1 poison ability to trigger it, but using Bone Armor Dislocation would give you a 4th poison ability and an aoe stun, allowing you to either replace the other poison abilities with something stronger, or equip Nayrs Black Death to make use of the poison ability damage bonus.

It definitely feels like a tank build rather than a damage build, i’ll give you that. But you have nothing in the cube and haven’t got your sets yet. So anything you do at this point is irrelevant for your end-game journey.

Will this even survive in to T16? I would say no based on the current setup, but that’s mostly because you wouldn’t actually be able to kill anything.

The Inarius set is one of the least tanky at the moment. If you want a high health pool and high toughness, then Trag’Ouls with the Guardian’s set will put you right up there with 10-15m hp (or more if specifically geared for it), and anywhere up to 20bn toughness. That will survive in GR150 without any major issues, but then you’d need to change you entire talent setup to blood / physical to compensate and actually do damage.

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