I have literally spent over a billion gold testing different builds, I have found that I enjoy theory crafting more than just looking up a meta build and going with that.
I also refuse to use Mendeln + Bone prison. This is straight up a bugged mechanic and will be fixed. Good luck anyone who is currently running this because funny enough Mendeln is actually pretty hard to proc without bone prison.
However, I got to admit I must be terrible at theorycrafting. Every build I have made ends up being fun but mediocre. I struggle to pass lvl 60 NM dungeons.
Until today.
I did a lvl 80 NM dungeon. First try, with only changing my Aspects + skills. My paragon board and nearly all my armor has stayed the same with 1 gear change. So super unoptimised.
Necro Deep freeze
My current experimentation is max CC. Stuns, freezes, immobiles, slows etc. All stacked and utilisng Aspect of shared misery + Unique Frostburn.
It actually works REALLY WELL.
It is surprising how much CC Necro actually has. Utilising Tendril + Iron golem + Decrepify + Crippling Darkness + Frostburn, you get an insane amount of CC and shared misery means every effect is hitting basically every minion. The damage you and your minions are taking goes down by 90% easily.
It is not perfect, I need to optimise damage badly. You will find it hard to die but some elites with their BS affixes will drag on fights but the important part is you will eventually win and your minions won’t die.
I am not going to link a full build yet, as the build is only a couple hours old but just wanted to share the potential i think it has, also I am pretty excited about it.
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I think it’s implied here, but Blight + Void + Umbral works very well with the above and basically free with a well rolled Umbral aspect. No reason not to use Mendeln in this case as Blight comes with a solid 40% lucky hit chance while constantly clustering things for CC and the inevitable AoE procs. I’d miss my Howl from Below though.
Yep, I am using Umbral. Basically all my skills generate a net resource gain. My main skill is blight, which I can infinitely cast while there are a descent size mobs alive.
The build heavily relies on lucky hit, which you wouldn’t think blight would be good at due to it being a DOT, however it seems to still be superior to Sever especially as it can proc blighted aspect reliably.
I have played around with the aspect of empowering reaper + Greaves of the empty tomb but the results are fairly inconclusive. It is definitely not a straight upgrade to just simply using blight.
Currently I am just playing around with a couple of potential aspects. I just ran a couple more NM with smiting aspect for 40% increase CC duration. Once again, very good but may be overkill. The survivability is already very good with this build.
Currently I am debating whether I need to keep bone storm/shielding aspect.
Blight has two parts to it and I’m not sure which can LH, maybe both. It sure feels like it’s the initial hit that can do it, I don’t know if the pools do.
It is weird but I agree.
From what I understand about lucky hit, for DOTS is is spread for its duration. So a DOT with 50% lucky hit over 5 seconds would only have 10% lucky hit per second.
However, blight has both DOT and impact damage. So I assume you get the 40% lucky hit on impact and then you get additional 40% lucky hit sprad across its duration.
This still makes it much worse than the likes of Bone spear, as that has a base lucky hit of 50% but not DOT, all shards + piercing get that lucky hit procs.
Obviously all this could be completely wrong.
That seems to be my experience. I’d say it’s even with bone spear with the void aspect for stacking multiple enemies if they exist, but bone spear will always win in terms of damage. I invariably gravitate towards shadowblight and the blighted aspect with such builds so I try to keep shadow bone storm / shield which also has decent lucky hit chance / tick rate since the initial hits are not really a DoT. Never really tried frostburn since I got Howl from Below early and it’s super convenient; frostburn can fit well though.
Odds are everybody running bone prison will just swap to bone spear for their proccing needs, unless it gets annihilated too.
I have tried that pretty extensively… It is not that good.
Well it is a million miles away from the current build using bone prison. I got around lvl 60-70 nightmare before hitting a wall. Maybe someone could build it better but it felt like it required a TON of tradeoffs.
I was trying a CC build just before my ring of Mendeln dropped and I gave up and used the ring because it’s so much better. Minions just don’t do enough damage without the ring. CCing everything definitely helps them live but some nightmare dungeons have mobs that can’t be CCed and bosses can’t be CCed so I think the CC build is not going anywhere really. Also there is diminishing returns with some CC and they become unstoppable to it.
Well a lot of the CC is reliant on lucky hit… Decrepify + crippling darkness + Frostburn.
So the question is… Why not run both? Mendeln slots right into the build practically.
I was running a bone spear + Mendeln build before this current build and I also gave up on it. It had great single target and group damage but was incredibly squishy and got bricked by a lot of elite affixes.
My minions were getting perma frozen, blasted by fire, blasted by lighting etc. Mendeln is great but it doesn’t do anything against minions inherit weakness against CC which nightmare dungeons have a sickening amount of. The only answer I could find is to hard CC them back. This allows you to take your time and proc Mendeln legitmately without abusing Bone prison which is obviously going to get fixed.
One of the overlooked features of the void aspect is that it is a ‘soft’ CC with no diminishing returns. It’s actually pretty easy to lock down even CC immune elites if you can keep shifting them around with blight pulls as it kind of disorients them for a half second.
Spear still out-damages mendeln + prison, so unless they hit spear with the nerf hammer, they’d be pretty hard to justify touching prison tbh
This is Blizzard we’re talking about. They’ll destroy both.
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Prison and ring have done T100 and killed Uber Lilith multiple times.
No one cares if bone spear does x% more damage when ring and prison can clear all content and is more fun to play and even safer in hard content like T100.
LUL
If you can proc Lucky Hit for Aspect of Shared Misery and Lucky Hit for the Frostburn, you could also proc Lucky Hit for the Ring of Mendeln.
Sorry, but I prefer the Ring of Mendeln. Minion is written all over it. It is the main Unique of the Minion Build.
And btw, Bone Prison is not bug’d. It’s not 100% to proc Mendeln ring from Bone Prison. Bone Prison has high chance to proc Mendeln, so is the Tendril. Putting Tendril and Bone Prison on the same build would make Ring of Mendeln to proc more often… more often but not 100%.
Here’s a video of my Mendeln procs. Pay attention when it procs. It would usually proc after Bone Prison and Tendril has been thrown. If Bone Prison is bug’d, Mendeln would proc right away immediately after the Bone Prison is laid down. But no, it’s not. Mendeln proc comes a little later.
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Are you using Bloodless Scream? I want to try this build eventually. Frostburn + Bloodless Scream looks like a fun way to play a shadow/chill/freeze necro.
The point of the build is that is works alongside ring of Mendeln. Most of the CC is triggered via lucky hit and conveniently so is the ring.
Also, no. Bone prison is 100% bugged. It has zero lucky hit value and can also trigger lucky hit without dealing any damage.
It doesn’t get much more bugged than that. You never know they might make it a feature as I think bone prison is fairly lacking otherwise but I wouldn’t count on it.
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The only bug in there is that they missed to put in the lucky chance on the tooltip. When you put Blight inside Bone Prison thru the Aspect, it brings damage just like how Miasma from Corpse Explosion works and just like how it triggers Shadowblights bonuses.
Fyi, it’s just missing the tooltip. It’s low priority on the fix as it’s working correctly.
Btw, with Bone Prison locking mobs inside the prison, with tendrils stun, Mage skellies’ chill/freeze, occasional stuns from an ability with regular decrepify, the Minion Mendeln build is CC extravaganza plus the nuke. Way more fun than most builds for Necro.
Have you not tested? You don’t need miasma! It works without it.
Also the aspect puts blight in the prison with all its effects. There is no magic going on but blight also doesn’t have close to the lucky hit people are achieving with bone prison.
You don’t understand the Blight Mendeln build. We put tendril inside the Bone Prison. All mobs pulled in would be on blight. And when the skellies attack (with flesh eater and fueled by death which is triggered immediately when with Black River) , they trigger Shadowblights immediately plus my 180% damage increase from Aspect of the Blight. Add in Blighted Corpse Explosions… i use Black River for more powerful explosions and when Mendeln procs, that’s where Million Damages came from. There’s tons of sources for lucky hits to proc… from me, my 11x minions, my blights, my corpse explosions. Mendeln has no choice but to proc.
You just dont know whats happening in there becoz youre not playing it. Now you know.
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