This build is still a draft plan.
‘Stand Alone’ is a good tip, and probably you are right, that ‘Hellbent Commander’ is not that useful. ‘Abhorrent Decrepify’ is worth considering, and probably will be a cornerstone for a lot of cd builds . The main questions, how often can it tiggers the cd reduction in 1 minute, as it’s a double rng, from both Lucky hit chance, and it’s own 15% chance.
I still believe that ‘Decompose’ is just important for the build. Though probably 1 pont is enough on it. Also ‘Flash-Rendind Aspect’ is probably better then, ‘Rotting Aspect’ in single target.
Basically the main dmg comes from Blight. It needs an essence builder. ‘Bone Storm’ on it’s own, can be active around 20second/ every 1 min. The rest of the time, you kill with overlaping CC and Blight.
‘Decompose’, giving a bonus single target shadow DOT. Helps in bosses, and to faster stack up ‘Shadowblight’
Also i choosed slow effect on ‘Decompose’ over minion dmg, to maximise ‘Terror’ bonus. For it i got Immobilise form ‘Blight’, stun from ‘Iron Golem’, and ‘Decompose’ adding slow.
Staying in one place also not an issue as i have 15% bonus movement speed non-stop from ‘Reaper’s persuit’
It’s a solid build. The only part that is a bit weird is the shadow passives with Reaper’s Persuit, Terror, Cripling Darkness and the choice of the Skeletal mage. It feels a bit contradict.
You build around your minions and non of them deals shadow dmg. If you want those passives to be useful, i’d use stun shadow mages, and you can change ‘Cripling Darkness’ to ‘Bloom’. This set up would get better bonuses from those passives.
Also you only use corpses to make minions, so Reaper’s corpse generation should be enough.
If you don’t really need those shadow bonuses, and would build around bone mage’s sacrafice cycle sum->dmg->die->corpe->sum, then i’d use Aspect of the Embalmer, and passive Gruesome Mending and Transfusion, so you and all your minions get healed all the time from this cycle.
ya i messed up with the mage choice sorta but im told skeles do actual shadow dmg anyways but im not totally 100% . if so , gearing for +shadow damage will buff the skele dmg too.
the mage thing was kinda more diversifying my damage profile but could easily go to shadow mages.
What about the Rapid Ossification passive? Reducing the cooldown on bone prison might be tough, but you could probably shave 6-9 seconds off of bone storm, depending on how much essence you can get.
You need 4 cast of Blight, and around 14 seconds cast of Decompose, then 4 more of Blight cast to gain 1 sec cd on Bone Prison with Ossification. Also you have 16seconds to do all this, as that’s the cd of 5/5 Bone Prison.
If you have Flesh-Rending Aspect it’s aboit 7-8sec Decompose. That’s the limit on bosses. On mobs if you have Rotting Aspect added, and do it on 3+ tragets, it’s about 3 second cast of Decompose. However we still talk about a single second of cd reduction. It may worth it for Bone Strom, but not for Bone Prison.
With 3 points in it it is 1.5 sec per 100 essence, so this would get you a 3 sec cooldown reduction. If you could get the essence regen up to the point where you are getting 100 in 8 secs (with flesh-rending aspect) you can spend it in what, another 4 secs? So every 12 secs you’d get 1.5 cdr, which would mean 6 secs out of every 48. So drop bone storm, have it consume 8 corpses to get more duration, fire away with blight and get bone storm back up 6 secs early. That could mean an extra cast of bone storm in a lot of fights. You could push it more with other resource regen sources, and with a better roll on flesh-rending.
Also, I think it procs when you finish spending the 100 mana, so assuming that you always fire bone prison when it is ready, you are likely to get 1-2 procs per cooldown of bone prison. So maybe you get 4.5 secs less cooldown every 2 casts? That’s like +15% up time on it.
Feels like I’m a minority that wants to go pure blood with:
Hemmorage, Blood Lance, Blood Nova, Blood Mist, Iron Maiden, and Blood Wave as my active skills; then have the rest of my points spent into buffing them/buffing solo damage/survivability.
LoL, i totally missed that. Based on this calculation, even with 3 sec reduction is a good deal for bone prison. as it’ll be around 13 sec, not counting the item’s cd stats.
For Bone Storm it’s even better. It would mean i could use Bone storm for around 20 second/ every 50sec.
Something like this is what I will aim for but it really depends on what drops I get and how things feel. I can’t really look at an aspect or ability and get an idea of how good it will feel to me in game.
I think blood lance and blood surge is probably overkill unless it turns out that blood lance with blood skill buffs can be much stronger single-target damage. It also seems like Decrepify would be better there, for the DR and the cdr.
I really like that bonestorm build. And I like the idea of trying a minion-heavy build. And I want to like the blood build, though it currently doesn’t seem as strong. CE is just such a classic and still seems so strong that I’m not sure I can play necro and not take it. There really is a lot of pressure on the skill bar for minion necros though.
I enjoyed Blood Lance after they buffed it my only issue was that the aim felt wonky sometimes. It also didn’t have good AOE clear vs huge groups of mobs. Especially when stuff would just drop on you like a cursed chest. So I was using CE to deal with that and it worked well. I guess Blood Surge could take the place of CE but then Blood Lance might not feel needed.
I see decrepify on so many minion builds, and it makes sense, as it can boost minion damage by 10%.
However, I also recognize the passive skill down the tree where blood orbs heal minions for 40% of the overall healing.
For me, personally, if going for a minion build, I’d probably go Hemmorage for my builder, and Blight for the spender. Since blight can increase minion damage by 15%, and while I’ll be losing the 10% from decrepify, I’ll be generating blood orbs to run over and give my minions extra healing.
Also, Blood Lance would be for single-target and Blood Nova for AoE.
Yeah I think it’s the competition for essence that makes it a problem. Like CE with blight pool + Blood Lance or Blood Surge + CE with the stacking damage rune would seem like they make more sense. The nice thing about using lance and surge is that they both benefit from blood passives and +blood skills, though, so as long as you aren’t really planning to use both at once the competition may not be a problem.
I just love CE… Also, corpse tendrils could be interesting with blood surge too, since it only needs the one corpse.
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