Anyone else excited with the SimulaSpear set?
I read the props and dying to take it for a spin, just for the playstyle.
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I’ll keep playing Rathma + Jesseth SM cause it’s been my build for a long time.
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Would you try it?
Or Rathma is your favored style?
In Hunter my favored style is Mantle, but I would want tp try the new set, too.
Curious and all.
I love it when they introduce new content, and I get to see if it fits me.
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i just hope for it not to be a bugfest like typhoons veil used to be. When proper testing was almost impossible and it ended up being way too bad compared to the other classes new sets strenght.
And especially not way too strong so they cripple it one season later completely 
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Yeah, Rathma is my favored style, so if I get the new set I’ll try it… but I’m not going to farm it. And I’m not going to change my set and build, since I don’t like how the new set works. I prefer my actual style. But, who knows, maybe I like it and keep it in my stash just in case.
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I’m eyeing how well I can leverage Briggs’ Wrath, Decrepify (Enfeeblement), Bone Spear (Blighted Marrow) and Bone Prison procs to crank the damage way up. Since they will make up most of the damage though, a lot is going to depend on how well the Simulacra can play along, and if their casts work the same way as mine do. On the plus side, they give at least one cheat death for free, maybe two, so there is a chance they won’t be trash for Hardcore, unlike how Necros in general have been so far.
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I have never played a Bone Spear build before. This could be the 1st time.
So, what are the items for this build?
I assume we’d use the Cycle scythe, and the Maltorius scythe. What about off-hand?
If you go that route, I don’t think the offhand matters, though you could always use the one that gives some extra movement speed from cold skill hits. You will also obviously need Haunted Visions to keep the set working, and for solo you will likely need Briggs’ Wrath to group enemies up to make the most of each Bone Spear cast. I’m wondering though if the slower, heavier hits from a two-handed weapon might be worth looking at, especially since using something like Reilena’s Shadowhook rather than the Scythe of the Cycle would free up a skill slot.
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For group play you could cube Maltorius and equip Nayr’s. If you use the poison LotD, then you have one additional poison stack and 2 very big multipliers to Bone Spear. For solo, SotC and any well rolled phylactery is probably the way to go. The big question is which rune on Bone Spear. The exploding one has good AD procs, the multishot rune has good potential for clearing lots of trash, and the Blood Spear rune has additional life cost which can help bring LotD back faster from the passive. Assuming the standard gear slots for set pieces, you’ll likely use Masquerade gloves, shoulders, helm, chest and pants. Captain Crimson boots and belt. Haunted Visions, Krysbin’s and Zodiac. Bracers are possibly Nems or Reapers, Spike makes Bone Spear expensive to cast. Cube Spike, Leoric’s and RoRG. Stack CDR everywhere for as much LotD availability and damage bonus from Crimson.
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With the Blood Debt rune for Simulacrum, it will take a lot of casts of Blood Spear to add up to much, especially since Haunted Visions will already be getting you 1% of the way there every second regardless.
As a side note, you could use Jesseth’s set in place of SotC and get the same damage numbers while potentially benefitting from a freeze on each new target, at range, which would probably get you more uptime for Krysbin’s Sentence as compared to Bone Armor. It would pair well with Zei’s Stone, for even more stuns, and a more long range play style.
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During the 10 seconds of LotD you’ll lose 10% life from HV plus if you cast 4 spears in that time (lol, there will be a LOT more than 4) each of them is 2.5% life to get you the 20% to trigger the passive. Plus each Bone Spear will trigger zodiac to help reset LotD.
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The passive needs 100% though, not 20%. So in my mind, it is more a question of if reaching that threshold faster is better, or if you would get more out of using the Crystallization rune for Bone Spear, so you get more Bone Spear casts for the Zodiac to use. 30% IAS is nothing to sneeze at.
If you are playing long range, and mostly aren’t getting hit, you might get 20 casts in with Blood Spear while in LotD. Then you are still need to burn off 40% of your life, but now your cast rate is WAY down, so you are maybe getting 1 Spear every two seconds. So you’d need about another 18 seconds or so before you’d hit the 100% mark, which if you had 50% CDR otherwise, would net you 12 seconds of cooldown. But you only had 30 seconds to burn on LotD anyway, so 18 seconds, plus 9 extra from Zodiac procs would only leave you with 3 seconds, meaning a lot of the time from the passive would be wasted.
With Crystallization, you’d get 30% more casts the whole time, so you’d get 26 while in LotD, and then you would continue 30% faster, so you would have LotD off cooldown in around 15 seconds, without Blood is Power. If you wanted to play dangerously, you could keep Blood is Power and just hope you got hit enough to trigger it for even less time between LotD casts, or you could take some other passive, possibly Swift Harvesting to cut into those 15 seconds even more without having to intentionally get hit.
Edit: The downside of going the LotD route though is you wouldn’t have room for a curse skill, would be giving up 2 jewelry slots and a belt slot to make it work, and lose out on whatever stats you aren’t getting in exchange for CDR. So you would be noticeably squishier, and have to use casting volume to make up the difference in gear, while being sandwiched into fewer skill choices. I’m sure it is possible, but I’m not yet convinced that it is the best path for this set. I guess we will have to see once this comes out.
Edit 2: After thinking this through, I’m convinced that CoE would be a better strategy than LotD in this case. With this set, you will have a minimum of 400 essence, more than enough to spam Bone Spears straight through a CoE rotation without pausing to use a generator, which is the same pace you would have in LotD. But CoE is going to give up to 3x damage, and is up 33% of the time, so as long as you are able to refill your essence in the 8 seconds of down time, you will be able to have the same DPS with CoE all the time as you would while in LotD, and there will always be at least some downtime on LotD, plus CoE would let you use curses, for 15% effective bonus damage via Frailty.
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Oops, my mistake. We’ll see what is best once they get the ptr up and running.
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Are you thinking Captain Crimson plus Masquerade? The damage buff from CDR is nice and the RCR can make Bone Spear cheaper to allow more spears (while increasing the builds already significant toughness).
If going the LotD route, Crimson’s set is the only logical way to go. But it will give less defense than Dayntee’s Binding would (because obviously we wouldn’t spec all out for RCR), and the bonus damage from CDR will have to try to make up for whatever percentage of downtime you have, where your overall DPS will drop a ton.
So ultimately it will boil down to how that balances out. Bone Spear casting is going to be limited by attack speed not cost, in either build, though cost will affect how much generation you need to do in the off times of either setup, and therefore how many extra casts you can cram in. Getting 50% uptime on LotD would be pretty good, but that plus the damage bonus for CDR with Crimson’s is going to have to balance against 1) easier gearing, 2) whatever extra benefits you can get from not stacking CDR on gear, 3) a jewelry slot in place of RoRG, 4) the fact that CoE should balance out the same as 100% uptime on LotD as far as cast equivalents go, and 5) the skill you can slot in place of LotD (which looks like a curse to me, but I won’t pretend I have gamed out the optimal setup for that build, so maybe something else). I just don’t see the 50%-60% extra damage from Crimson’s covering that much ground, especially since Blood is Power doesn’t seem like it will add to that number, since it isn’t a flat CDR bonus.
I think the single largest question will be whether you can sustainably spam Bone Spear without LotD. If so, I think Crimson can be bypassed (though the RCR would be useful too). If not, you need Crimson for the huge 20% CDR alone.
I personally truly hope that there is a way (generator?) to use Bone Spear without relying on Devour in LotD.
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If this Set requires LotD to do GR100+, I’d be a DH next season…
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Succinctly put. Necro and that cooldown…not fun. Too much of that already.
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or, even worse:
instead of cdr you then stack rcr and hope for enough corpses to fuel your spears. THEN doors and low density will be a problem 
I think the single largest question will be whether you can sustainably spam Bone Spear without LotD.
I’m pretty confident that spamming through CoE rotations should come out the same as spamming 100% of the time without CoE, because you will do 3x the damage 1/3 of the time. With the extra essence you will get from the Simulacrums, I don’t think you should have any trouble casting Bone Spears constantly for 4 seconds, and then using a generator to refill within the next 8 seconds. If you somehow have 0 RCR and no extra essence, you could still cast 10 Bone Spears before you bottom out.
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