I am enjoying playing my no-minions Blood Necromancer surprisingly much despite typically being an all-minions type of person.
But, I have noticed some issues in late T3 and especially going into T4 as a Blood Necro, mainly because I play a Blood Surge Necro as well.
All my damage comes from Overpower and my two ways of guaranteeing Overpower rely on being Healthy (above 80% Life) which becomes increasingly hard in T4 content.
The ways I deal damage are:
- Paranormal Blood Surge
- If an enemy is damaged by Blood Surge’s nova while you are Healthy, then gain 1 stack of Overwhelming Blood. When you have 5 stacks of Overwhelming Blood, your next Blood Surge Overpowers.
- Rathma’s Vigor
- Increase your Maximum Life by 10%.
After being Healthy for 15 seconds your next Blood Skill Overpowers.
I am currently level 63 with 5,349 Life and a lot of damage mitigation/reduction but it is still a hassle to stay above 80% Life at all times to make sure I can deal damage.
And this is despite having a lot of Blood Orbs to pick up, potions, various forms of self-sustain based on % Life and so on.
I am not a squishy Necromancer in the slightest as I soloed the 70 capstone dungeon at level 58 while face-tanking the mechanics and only dying during moments of being heavily chain-CC’d.
My suggestion to help make Blood Necros more viable at endgame would be to start by improving Rathma’s Vigor in two ways:
- Update its Mastery to be something along the lines of:
Your Life is increased by 10% and you are considered Healthy while above 65% Life.
Gain 1 stack of Rathma’s Power each second you are Healthy.
At 15 stacks of Rathma’s Power, your next Blood Skill Overpowers.
Basic Blood Skills can no longer trigger Rathma’s Power if you have allocated 3 Skill Points in Imperfectly Balanced.
The latter effect is to help Blood Necromancers who focus on Core/Macabre/Ultimate Blood Skills for damage to not waste Rathma’s Power on Hemorrhage when using it as your Basic Blood Skill to generate Essence.
While also allowing Blood Necros who want to use Hemorrhage as their damage ability to do so as Imperfectly Balanced only affects Core Skills.
- I am unsure if this is intended or a bug, but the 15 stacks of Rathma’s Vigor fall off when switching areas, essentially wasting 15 seconds of waiting.
This happens when moving between areas in the open world and entering dungeons alike, it happens very frequently especially during Helltide and outdoor content.
Please make the stacks persistent between areas.
2 Likes
Having a lower Healthy threshold definitely would help with staying within range of actually doing damage with the overpowered blood skills.
I also feel like if Rathma’s Vigor procced a little faster it would feel so much nicer. Even at 12 stacks I feel would be better because waiting the 15 full seconds above 80% health just feels like such a slog where half the time it’s inadvertently activated (Hemorrhage like you say, and in my experience the follow-up blood surge nova from the blood-bathed legendary).
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I use Hemorrhage as my main essence generation and it falls off. Which one are you using.
Other skills don’t seem to really synergize well with blood nova play style for me personally.
Hemorrhage is the worst possible option to use as a blood necro because of poor design choices regarding Rathma’s Vigor. Every 15 seconds your next blood skill overpowers and therefore if you run hemorrhage, you have a chance of wasting those valuable 15 seconds on a basic attack instead of a devastating aoe core skill. Blizzard needs to rework Rathma’s vigor so it actually makes sense to run Hemorrhage on a blood build.
2 Likes
I also have Hemorrhage but I barely use it, my main form of essence generation is Grim Harvest, since I got Howl from Below I use Corpse Explosion a lot. The only time I ever use Hemorrhage is when literally everything I have is on cooldown and there’s an enemy at 5% health that can die easily.
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Yeah I definitely feel that, I’ve been running Corpse Tendrils and Explosion, as well as Bone Prison and Blood Mist. The idea is just to pull everyone into one area and use an OP Blood Mist, OP Blood Surge, or just spam Corpse Explosion. I tried looking through to see if anything else would work with what I’m currently running and I honestly didn’t see anything.
lvl 63 with 5.3k health is outlandishly high.
I have suspicions youre lacking some raw damage stats, which is causing packs to live longer than they should, and forcing you to run into situations where youre spent.
In most cases the whole screen should just be getting deleted before you even have an oppurunity to take any relevant damage.
i find if youre playing Blood Surge, the ideal setup is this:
Corpse Explode 1 skill point
Blood Mist w corpse generation(and exploding mist)
Bone prison(for vulnerability and essence generation)
Hemmorage for Fortify generation and ranged Essence generation.
Reap for when you dont want to waste your rathmas vigor charge on Hemmorage, or have a large enough pack where 1cast of reap will generate a ton of Essence, and proc whatever affixes you have relative to basic abilities.
The ultimate abilities are virtually useless to Blood Surge necro so theres no point in taking any of them.
Decrepify costs essence(ew)
Iron Maiden is bad.
It just makes sense to take two basic abilities.
Reap is the basic ability that flows well with Blood necro.
Hemmorage is the only reliable Fortify generator in our kit, and Blood Necro gets ALOT of extra damage from being heavily fortified.
Take both.
Overpowered Blood Surge and/or Overpowered Bloodmist is all you need to take down bosses, and elite packs. Making Blood Wave or Bonestorm redundant wastes of space on your toolkit.
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I agree, that was the main reason I use Hemorrhage until I started using the paragon glyph that provides 7% fortify on blood orb pickup. So I started using the legendary that gives a chance to drop blood orbs on using a corpse.
Never thought of using reap tho, I might try that out.
Agree that rathmas vigor could be slightly more powerful specially considering that the other two key passives have support from legendaries (nothing that new items from season cannot solve)
Being said, I would make a small tweak, that THE PASSIVE DO NOT TRIGGER WHEN BREAKING OBJECTS!! i lost the count of times that the passive went off because I broke a vase with hemmorage while moving through the world…
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I think you are underestimating some of these things, friend.
Corse Explode 1 skill point
I actually maxed this out because I have some gear with + to this. It’s now 12/5. Hits like a truck and obviously generates essence. I also have Fueled by Death and Flesh Eater which massively increases my damage.
The ultimate abilities are virtually useless to Blood Surge necro so theres no point in taking any of them.
Because I have aspect of Inner calm, the one that gives you +30% damage when you stand still, I find Bone Storm really really good with Shielding Storm.
Iron Maiden is bad.
It does really amazing things that I find.
- Causes you to generate essence rather than use up.
- Heals you when enemy dies which synergizes well with Aspect of Untimely Death
- Stuns enemy hitting you when you use Torturous Aspect.
Decrepify costs essence(ew)
I can also go this route and use it to lower cooldown of Bonestorm which I use alot for shielding.
Reap is the basic ability that flows well with Blood necro.
Yep, The guaranteed corpse it produces on the first hit is amazing for my playstyle.
But anyway, those would awesome buffs to have for Rathma’s Vigor. Accidentally using it on Hemorrhage is why I prefer Reap.