Anyone have recommendations regarding specific builds for Necromancer late-game (not endgame because I’m not in WT4 yet)? I don’t have the legos for the Bone Spear build, and it seems awfully hyper-focused on damage throughout with zero incorporation of defensives, but I digress. Any help would be very appreciated!
TIA! 
Minion focused with corpse explosion. Invest most skills, passives, paragon, gear towards beefing up your minions. Aspects split between minion ones and general offensive/defensive ones for yourself. Very well balanced, very safe, bosses and everything dies fast and you’re rarely in danger. That’s the build I made for myself and it works perfectly around the level you mentioned. Haven’t looked at any guides or anything so maybe it gets worse later but I’ll worry about that later.
Up to and until chou enter wt4, minion build is very reliable and good.
I was using:
Skeleton
Golem
Blood mist
Decrepify
Army of the dead
Corpse explosion
Start the fight with curse. By then, the minions would have gone in and started generating corpses. Then just corpse explosion, while you buff the minions every 6 seconds. The decrepify will reset AotD quite often, so use it on elite packs.
Later on (50 to 60), or when you feel that CE isn’t strong enough, you can slowly transit to bone spear/bone spirit as main damage. Just swap CE out for BS. You don’t need any basic skills as you can use skeletons to generate essence.
Along the way you will collect bone/blood legendaries which may help your transition.
My Necro just hit WT4, lvl 69 - I’ll just recommend what i play currently 
I’m playing with guaranteed overpower:
Skeleton
Decrepify
Corpse Explosion
Blood Mist
Hemorrhage
Blood Surge
Paragon Board:
1st the one with more Damage on Elites
2nd the one with Overpower Damage +50%
Though I might have to change it up, cuz my minions just get clapped right now,
might be because i have only 2 ancesteral items right now though.
Not yet decided on what the 3rd paragon board will be either ^^
Can someone please link to a hardcore necro summoner build? Also, is it viable to play a necro with 1H + shield?
I play 1hand + shield and doing great. After comparing different setups I feel like the extra defenses from the shield stats are worth the SLIGHT dps loss of using focus/2hander. Shield seems to be a lot more competitive than you would think. Shield increases your main hand damage by 80% which is actually huge. Depending on your mainhand weapon you might actually do MORE damage with a shield than with a source/2hander surprisingly.
You can’t put offensive aspects on shields though so that’s worth keeping in mind if it affects your build. You might have to juggle around a different setup or forego something entirely.
Random fact - salvaging a legendary shield gives you both weapons AND armor crafting mats at the same time making it by far the most efficient item type to salvage (and gamble for).
I’m out of town for the Holiday, but I’m definitely going to give this a shot when I get back, thanks!
Thanks a million! I appreciate it.
Minions are turning out to be surprisingly good for leveling my HC Necro… yeah, I know they’ll eventually hit a wall and I’ll have to transition but at level 30 they’re still lots of fun. I even scored a pair of legendary boots from the Butcher that gave me two extra minions so now I’ve got 11 of them fighting for me… I’ve invested in thorns and it really chews thru mobs with ease.
I’m level 55 and my minions get wrecked, but if I stay on top of it (WT3 currently) they’re manageable. The only problem is when there are no corpses around to raise them…
i use bone spear build and just add a shield with a good def aspect. works good just remember you don’t block when your CC’d
What is your build? Minions work well into 60s and 70s and WT4.
I use bone spear build but use minions to generate essence, and even with absolutely no skill points to buff them, they didn’t get wrecked at 55 in wt3.
In a dedicated minion build (with optional corpse explosion or some other skill), minions survive just fine. You generate A TON of corpses (I can spam corpse explosion nearly infinitely and same goes for the minion mage ability). And if all else fails your Army of the Dead revives all your minions from thin air and generates a bunch more corpses.
You can’t really expect baseline minions to perform as well as ones you actually invest skills/gear/paragons into.
Dang!! I didn’t know that you don’t block when CCed!!! Thank you much !! In HC and tier 4 monsters just 1 shot you….it is ridiculous LOL
Shield block is only 20% chance which is pretty pathetic but I still use a max-level one (20%*60%=12% average direct damage reduction, in addition to shield defensive stats, and shield aspect). If you’re relying on that to stay alive you’re already dead. Your character should be tanky enough not to get 1-shot by like 99% of the stuff in the game. Anything with a % chance to reduce/avoid damage is gravy on top of ACTUAL defenses, to help reduce your chances of dying but you can’t be relying on them.
I absolutely hate the entire practice that fextralife does but I did enjoy one of their necro builds while playing HC. If you look up “blightlord” fextralife necro it worked very well. It’s blighted corpse explosion with minions for a bit of protection. You play based off of shadow damage. The only big downside is right now minion AI just walks all over the place and won’t focus on anything you want it to. Until that is fixed it’s almost better to just stay away from necro.
Necro works just fine. It would be better with a way to focus minions attacks when needed (and also if they had more aoe damage resistance) but lack of it certainly doesn’t break the class. In my case I almost prefer they “walk all over the place and attack whatever” because then everything gets agro’d onto minions and not me, giving me plenty of safety to set up a massive screen-clearing combo. And anything single target just vaporizes (poor bosses).
I had the butcher attack me at level 65, walked by all of my minions and just started beating the crap out of me. I tried to back up and have my minions help or do something and they just attacked other things, slowly started to die and the butcher did work. If I could have had the power to pull them to me or pick what they attack I’m pretty sure I would have easily lived through the encounter.
Both corpse tendrils and all 3 golems can setup/reposition the fight to various extents. I always end up with monsters-minions-me pretty much exactly where I want everyone to be. If you’re not using at least one of these tools effectively then that’s on you.
I’ve killed the butcher countless times now. He is easy but quite time consuming. Only died to him once in beta at level14 when I didn’t even know about him lol. If you’re attentive to subtle warning cues, you even often know when he is about to come before you actually engage him.
Also note that he pretty much always IGNORES all your minions so even if you could focus him it wouldn’t do anything for you. If you manage to get him surrounded with minions he will just knockback them all away and keep going after you. Don’t know if it’s an oversight or intentional - but he would be stupid easy if he targeted your minions (just like every dungeon/act boss). My necro can face tank him for a good while so when my minions are all nearby and my cooldowns are ready I just tank him myself, while we all lay heavy damage into him, then he scatters everyone and I go back to kiting him back and forth through my minions till we are ready to repeat the process.