- doing a pure minion build.
- i’ve read a lot about necrotic carapace.
so…
- changed warriors to reaper 2.
- changed golem to bone 1.
- mages remained cold 2.
- no hewed flesh passive.
even with this setup the build up of fortification feels wrong. sometimes it just ticks once or twice and stops (minions still fighting, corpses still drop). sometimes, while corpses fill the floor, nothing happens. no fortification build up at all.
do you know how i can make this skill work properly?
(with minions only! no additional active skills)
or is that not possible?
AotD helps a lot but in general its a worse ult then Bonestorm, as does having a barrier to protect your fortify and hp pool while in combat.
Having to potion because of lost life usually results in you losing fortify, so a barrier assists in this as you have to pot less because the barrier takes the sting out of the hit, and therefore fortify is maintained.
Do you know whether the damage done to a barrier (assuming fully fortified) gets reduced by the -10% dmg from fortify and other % dmg reduction while fortified, or do these reductions only act on actual life lost?
im pretty sure mitigation is calculated before barrier, and barrier before health. otherwise you would always insta lose your entire barrier to the tiniest hit.
I have always built fortify under this assumption.
Dmg reduction yes, but my guess would be that dmg reduction while fortified is slightly different since it only applies to the portion of health that’s actually fortified (if you have 50% fortify on 100% health and gets hit for 100% health in damage the 10% dmg reduction only applies to the 50% fortification, in contrast to dmg reduct while injured I think). Let’s say you have 50% fortify on 100% health + a barrier, does the dmg reduct apply? What about 100% fortify on 100% health + a barrier? Someone should test this lol
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Fortify
Barbarians, Druids, and Necromancers have access to a unique source of Damage Reduction that comes with its own set of mechanics to increase their defense. There are a number of skills, passives, and Legendary Aspects that can give you some amount of Fortify. When your Fortify is greater or equal to your current Life, you become Fortified. Fortified characters have 10% Damage Reduction. This number can be increased by the
Defensive Stance passive and by Sapphires socketed into armor. When you are Fortified, incoming damage reduces both your Life and your Fortify by the same amount. The amount of Fortify you get can be increased by Bonus Fortify rolls on Rings and Helmet. Keep in mind, Damage Reduction while Fortified does not interact with the damage taken to your Barriers.
lifted from max roll. So yes it doesn’t reduce the damage taken by your barrier as I had presumed. I think all other forms of damage reduction do take effect before barrier, though this is based on a fairly brief google search^^
But barrier and fortify are not totally unsynergetic. So taking damage to your health pool reduces fortfiy by the same amount, so by using a barrier you give your necrotic carapace time to rebuild fortify as you are taking no damage to your health pool and therefore to your fortify stack. When the barrier expires or is depleted you have regenerated your fortify to full and now have the 10% damage reduction.
Well, the Reaper mod is only producing 1 corpse. The amount of corpses on the floor is misleading because there’s corpses from killing monsters and those don’t count towards Necrotic Carapace. The easiest and most effective way is to use Bone Mages 2 and allow them to die.
okay. seems like some testing is needed 
thanks for your answers! i am digging into it.
update.
after some tests, this is what i came up with. (just the results of some bossfights, 60+ vaults, helltide and stuff.)
necrotic carapace is some kind of a broken promise right from the beginning.
if you go with one of the choices (reapers 2 or bone mages 2 or bone golem 1) the fortifying goes stupid or just superslow.
if you choose to go with all three adding some +% fortify generation, things work out somehow. not cool - but working.
so my final conclusion is:
necrotic carapace is either a broken skill or intended to be stupid.
making it work is sacrificial and i don’t know if it’s worth it.
Ok biting more bullits and doing more testing. xD
My current max health is 17,386. Necrotic carapace maxed at 6% and testing with ghastly blood mist that generates 3 corpses. I should expect 17386 x .18 = 3129 fortify when I come out of blood mist. Sure enough, I have 3129 fortify when coming out of blood mist.
Second test: Reap corpse every 4 seconds. I should expect 17386 x .06 = 1043 fortify every time reap creates a corpse. Sure enough, I get 1043 fortify when I reap to form a corpse.
Third test: decompose 1.5 seconds for a corpse. Same thing. Expect 1043 and gain 1043.
Fourth test: Army of the dead spawns 14 corpses. So I should expect 14 x .06 x 17386 = 14604 fortify. And sure enough… I get 14064 fortify.
Fifth test: Reapers. Use one reaper and wait for one corpse to spawn expecting again 1043 fortify. Confirmed 1043 fortify (ignoring the 100+ hits to actually spawn a corpse because reapers are bugged but that’s a different problem)
6th Test: bone mage killing itself. What I should expect is 20% of my health fortified as the mage dies plus another 6% from the corpse it generates for 17386 x .26 = 4520. Result: 4520.
Bone Golem: can’t test in training room and too lazy to test in the real world. However, I use him on my own build and without actually doing testing, it seems to me that his corpse creation is actually based on either one of two things:
- His base life instead of his max life as the tooltip says
Or
- His max life before any damage mitigation is calculated (I lean towards this one)
Or
- Both
The reason I suggest this is that I can cast his taunt ability and watch him spawn 5/6/7 corpses and his health bar not drop a single bit. But regardless… I can watch my fortify go up when I use bone golem + necrotic carapace so it appears to be working (without actually testing cause I’m too lazy).
Conclusion: Necrotic Carapace is working perfectly as intended. If you are using it as your soul source of fortify, you need 100/6=17 procs to top off your fortify for the 10% damage reduction. You’re not going to get 17 procs in quick succession unless you’re stacking multiple sources of corpse generation via one of the above mentioned methods or if you’re using army of the dead which happens to be the worst ultimate in the game sadly. So if you’re going to use necrotic, you ought to build around it or have other sources of fortify in your kit. In my experience, the 18% given from blood mist is a solid way to top off your fortify in the infinimist build when you take a small bit of damage between mists while setting up your decrepify/corpse tendrils etc.
Just as a reminder: hewed flesh is not a skill and thus should not proc necrotic and enemies dying and a corpse being formed is also not the result of a skill and thus also does not proc necrotic.
thanks for this lochensky. it’s great to see how you’re crunching the numbers.
now i know that i didn’t do something wrong. necrotic carapace (necara from here on) is just an awful choice for fortification but well, the only one for the necro (i guess).
i had the target to gain full fortification as fast as possible. i would be happy if one of those three minion types could maintain a solid and constant build up of fortify - but that’s not working out - in order to get a result close to the set target, i have to give up my free choice of minions and therefore i said, that necara is either intended to be stupid or somehow broken. i didn’t meant, that the numbers aren’t correct.
The current meta is running some form of corpse explosion build and having the exhumation glyph in your build which gives 4% fortify every time you consume a corpse. This plus sacrilegious ring gives very nice upkeep on fortify as well as a bit of damage reduction and big corpse explosion damage on top.
I ran Blood-Drinker in season 1