reasonable idea (i forgot necro only has 3 elements in the COE cycle…)
I’m definitely curious if your Simulacrums will generate Essence for you when you use Grim Scythe with HV. That could generate a LOT of Essence if it does.
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My thought precisely. Which may even remove completely the need for LoTD which I would highly praise.
That was I can focus on RCR like on my WD / DH for more toughness and to get more BSpears out during burst CoE cycles rather than going all out on CDR ONLY for LOTD.
Hope this will truly be the case with new set, cheers! <3
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Have we taken into account anything like skeletal archers buffing attack speed?
I really like this set because I actually see it coming with 3 sources of decent damage.
Obviously bone spear.
But grim scythe could work really well as it hits 3 times at once.
And then you’ll have mages as well, archers or poison look really good.
Would it be worth while to try to build a hard hitting attack for all 3 elements and using CoE?
Try to get permanent uptime on convention with say cold from archers, poison from scythe and physical from bone spear.
Maybe juice all of them a little with the new stone of jordan?
Swipe away trash with scythe and build essence, summon archers then spike elites with spear.
This particular set isn’t going to be doing any significant damage with anything but Bone Spear. If you want a Grim Scythe build, it is going to be either with the Inarius set, or LoD/LoN. The only potential application of Grim Scythe with this build would be to get essence quickly, especially if the Simulacra also gather essence for you. In general, it is rarely optimal to gear for more than one major damage dealing skill.
If you wanted to try to boost attack speed, I would think the Frost Scythe rune for Grim Scythe would be a reasonable choice, and it would pair well with the shorter range play style you would need to use with Scythe of the Cycle.
Edit: Totally unrelated note, with as tanky as this set is likely to be, I wonder if running something like a Cord of the Sherma would be a viable strategy to get more uptime for Krysbin’s Sentence higher damage bonus, since you shouldn’t need the Crimson’s set, which would take the belt slot.
I think I am just desperate to avoid land of the dead.
I’m definitely going to give grim psyche generator build a try. The mages will probably just be there to dump essence for toughness then build up with scythe and hose the screen down with razor teeth.
Should at the very least work well for t16.
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Good points. I forget that Necro CoE is 4/8 rather than 4/12.
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That could also be the solution, though with Bone Prison, wouldnt we want this build to fight at long range? Maybe work Zei’s in there?
I will definitely be trying for a long range build with this set. Bone Spear, Bone Spikes, Skeletons with Jesseth’s set, and not even bother with Bone Armor and Scythe of the Cycle. The baseline of 24 essence per cast of Bone Spikes means you shouldn’t have any trouble refilling essence after CoE, since it will only take 1.5 Bone Spike casts per Bone Spear cast to get back to full, even with no RCR beyond paragon. In theory you could also go with Nayr’s instead of Jesseth’s, and still get the same total bonus, since you don’t need any of the effects from the phylacteries, but you would be more likely to waste more CoE time due to the slower cast rate.
Have to check out the proc rate of bone prison with teeth.
If you have you and your 2 sims firing dozens of teeth out, you should be procing bone prison often which will kick off krysbins sentence.
Should do some good damage.
With all the damage reduction we’re getting from the set, getting in close to shred with grim scythe should be safe enough.
I am definitely going to try this as a close range build. I feel fine firing bone spears at point blank range 
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At close range, I think that the Shatter rune for Bone Spear would be more effective than Teeth, since teeth wouldn’t spread out much until it is farther away from you. Grim Scythe for generation should certainly be viable, and the Dual Scythes rune would help group up enemies to hit with your Bone Spears, or Frost Scythes to get more attack speed. Either way, it should be viable to play this set in close, with better resource generation when you have groups to Scythe for essence. I expect that setup will struggle more against single targets, i.e. RGs, unless Haunted Visions lets you get the essence that your Simulacra would generate with their scythes.
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Without a 6 piece set bonus affecting them, they will do comparatively little damage.
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Yeah. It would be really hard to try to overcome the huge 30,000% damage bonus each Simulacra would get for its Bone Spears, but for nothing else. Other skills can provide other benefits, but they will never do damage on their own.
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In D2, Bone Spear Necro would line up obstacles and then barrage spears like WW1. I would have to imagine this build will look to be more like that than Impale/AoV style shotgun.
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I’m really hoping that hitting a group with a curse while using Brigg’s Wrath will leave them grouped up enough to hit most of them with a single spear. Blighted Marrow rune could get some out of control damage with good enough grouping. And hopefully if the grouping works, the Enfeeblement rune on Decrepify will keep them grouped up long enough to get multiple hits in. Just have to hope that Bone Prisons spawning won’t push other enemies away from the trapped ones…
I sat down and thought about this a bit more, and realized that I calculated things incorrectly for LotD with this set. My mistake is that I didn’t account for the “free” casts someone would get from having full essence at the end of LotD, and being okay with having zero essence when it starts, so they could spam freely even after it fell, which should improve their efficiency greatly. Basically, if I assume that people aren’t getting off more than two Bone Spears a second or so, there is going to be an achievable level of CDR and RCR that will enable them to never use a generator, except for Devour while in LotD.
But, that doesn’t invalidate my point about spamming in CoE cycles essentially being as good as spamming non-stop without it. So the CoE version of this build would need 1 jewelry slot (for CoE), and 1 skill slot (for a generator), while the LotD version would need 2 jewelry slots (for RoRG and the Zodiac), 2 skill slots (for LotD and Devour), and a belt slot (for the Crimson’s set belt). By the way, I still think you could get away without trying to use Blood is Power, being able to burn through the full cooldown just from Zodiac procs.
The LotD version is going to be much more essence efficient, and actually possibly more tanky at least for a good portion of the time (the Voracious rune for Devour would crank RCR up over 60% for 5 seconds after you run out of corpses, and obviously give that much DR from Crimson’s set). But its extra two equipment slots and one skill slot aren’t going to give it much in the way of extra damage, probably somewhere in the 60% range.
Being able to drop a primary skill completely is definitely going to help people who want to try this with LotD, but I think the CoE path is going to be more flexible since it will necessarily have down time, and it will be able to easily fit in a few different bits here and there to make it easily adjusted for different purposes, and quite possibly be stronger overall.
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If sims will cast your generator too and give essence from it, you should fill up from 0 to full in ~6-8 seconds, otherwise we’ll see (haven’t played sim on necro with generator before so no clue).
Best thing about this set seems to me that there might be more than one effective way to play it.
There will be a meta build but I think there will be a lot of good builds that can be used with it as well.
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Currently, Simulacrum only duplicates secondary skills, but with the change to Haunted Visions they will now duplicate Grim Scythe in place of Skeleton Mages. Definitely still an open question if you will get Essence from their hits though. But all of the generators should be capable of restoring the cost of a single Bone Spear with less than two casts, given appropriate conditions. So however many Spears you throw out in a CoE rotation, you shouldn’t struggle to get all that essence back before it is time to spam Spears again.
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And if the essence generated with grim scythe also counts towards the GS offhand that necro have, the LoD GS SM will be top notch 
Theres a 50/50 chance of LoD being top notch anyways this ptr i guess