Updated Minion Build

Necromancer
1

d4builds.gg/builds/13a3fda2-91ab-4958-8f0e-8b0080130ca9/

Stat Priority

  1. Vulnerable Damage: Minions get 100% of this bonus.
  2. Intelligence: Minions get 100% of this bonus.
  3. Critical Strike Damage: Minions get 30% of this bonus.
  4. Armor: Our best survival stat.
  5. Summon Damage: Minions get 100% of this bonus.
  6. Thorns: Our highest secondary damage source
  7. Thorns to warrior and golem: Increases the effectiveness of thorns.
  8. Critical Strike Chance: Minions get 30% of what is shown on the character sheet.
  9. Attack Speed: Minions get 30% of what is shown on the character sheet.
  10. Damage to: Minions only get 30% of damage to slow, chilled, frozen, stunned, close, distant, etc. If we get 100% damage to healthy, minions get 30%. This makes additive stats nearly worthless for us in the long run.

Gems

  1. Weapon: Emerald for critical strike damage to vulnerable which has near 100% uptime.
  2. Armor: Topaz for the immense damage reduction while crowd controlled which is where you will likely die.
  3. Jewelry: Skull for armor as it is the best damage reduction stat we can get as an intelligence class.

Skills

  1. Reap: You can go decompose here but the damage reduction and instant corpse generation at the start of a fight to get raise skeleton and corpse tendril off is the better option.
  2. Decrepify: This increases our stagger rate with Enhanced Decrepify and cooldown reduction with Abhorrent Decrepify. Our reapers and bone golem proc lucky hit often which means nearly no cooldowns on big packs.
  3. Corpse Tendril: We take this more for the stagger from the amazing 3 second stun and Vulnerable uptime than anything else. It is nice that we can take Aspect of Grasping veins which is one of the largest multipliers for this build. It gives 6% critical strike chance and 60% critical strike damage to our minions. This is a multiplier and why bone is able to crit into the millions.
  4. Army of the Dead: We take this for the high lucky hit chance, corpse generation, and army resummon. It also gives us a nice dps boost with unyielding commander that makes single target dps sky rocket.

Minion Types

  1. Reaper Upgrade 1: Reapers deal the same damage as skirmishers but have cleave on basic attacks and deal damage in a line on heavy attacks. We have so much CC in this build that we are constantly reducing the cooldown on the heavy attack. The AOE beats out skirmishers upgrade 2 every time unfortunately.
  2. Cold Mage Upgrade 2: It is our highest CC option providing chill, freeze, and vulnerable. Coupled with Corpse Tendril, you will have 100% uptime on vulnerable which is our main damage multiplier.
  3. Bone Golem Upgrade 1: The corpse generation is fantastic when starting a fight from range. It appears to activate based on premitigation damage. So as soon as it runs in and taunts everything, you get a corpse without it dying. Bone is the only golem with a cleaving basic attack and while I liked blood golem upgrade 2, it is slower in clear and provides less survivability at the end of the day.

Skill Tree

  • Hewed Flesh: We need bodies for the Army.
  • Spiked Armor: This gives our minions 7.2% Weapon damage as thorns.
  • Grim Harvest: Just a means to keep our essence up while spamming Decrepify.
  • Fueled by Death: A permanent damage buff.
  • Death’s Embrace: A permanent damage buff and reduction. “Works off where a monster is in relation to your minion.”
  • Amplify Damage: More damage for using our abilities.
  • Necrotic Carapace: Free fortify. We generate a good deal of corpses.
  • +4 Corpse Tendril: Extra damage and lower cooldown on our largest damage amplifier from skills.
  • Kalan’s Edict: Shadowblight gives us a measly 2 second damage buff after we reap. If you somehow were able to reap every 2 seconds, sure. You will be casting to start a fight and during a cooldown, which we don’t have much of. Kalan’s Edict is a direct 30% attack speed buff to our army and really improves dps.

Gear

  1. Sword and Board: We want the attack speed, thorns, armor, and extra armor gem slot. A two hand sword gives us far more critical strike damage and a better roll on Aspect of reanimation. The truth is that minions don’t crit enough and their top end damage in perfect gear is only 60,000. We are focusing on consistent damage and survival to clear content. At the end of the day the choice is yours, though Aspect of Hardened bones doesn’t have a slot without a shield and that plus Aspect of Disobedience really keeps the army from evaporating on screen.
  2. Everything Else: Get as many direct bonuses to minions, summons, skeletons, and golem. Then use the list above to fit everything else on your gear. The nice thing about minions is because they get so little from a large majority of stats we can really pinpoint what makes a good roll on our pieces. That being said, all stats and Intelligence are going to give us the most after vulnerable and critical damage.

Sources

  1. How Necromancer Minions Work in Diablo 4 | 9 Hours of Testing Damage Stats Special Abilities - YouTube
  2. Reddit - Dive into anything

Final Thoughts

I can not in good conscience recommend you play minions only as a build at the moment. With so little top end, reliance on uniques that may never drop before season 1, and slow clear, it just isn’t in good moral judgement for me to advise you attempt this. I bought Diablo 4 because I enjoy the skelemancer class fantasy the most of any type of play style in an ARPG. This is my passion and love being poured into attempting to make this viable. But I have made spreadsheets, watched countless videos, and tried even more builds. Minions at the moment are gimped to being a utility piece used solely to proc lucky hits, resource generation, max essence, damage reduction, corpse generation, or missile defense. You can do more damage at level 50 with a few bone aspects than you can with perfect rolls on power level 999 gear at level 100. If you really love minions like I do, go or it. It still scratches that itch and while slow can clear content. I just don’t want to steer you toward this without a warning. If you are looking for a speed sigil, being able to crit in the millions, or ever do uber Lilith, ignore this guide.

13 Likes
2

Just want to say thanks for all the research you’ve been doing. been keeping a eye on your findings and its been helping improve my minions a bit, Minions are not great but fun atleast and this has made them a bit more dealable.

3

First off. Well written guide, was a good read! <3
It took me a long time to finally accept defeat and realize I’m trying to make them into something they’re not. You further realize that when you analyze their AI behavior.

I thought my minions was doing ok until I tried something else. I then quickly realized that minions in their current state in D4 was never intended as a build, but just a damage sponge utility for my Necrowizard.

4

Without unstoppable on your build, you are going to die a lot of times.

Skels, golem, army of the dead, blood myst, decrepy and plagued CE, is all you need. You can change decrepy, army and CE for other skills, but skels, golem, and myst are basically mandatory.

You can play with darkness but needs two mandatory offensive aspects and you already need 8 aspects on minions (including the ring) or 9 including howl from below. Bloodgetter, hardened bones, coldbringer, frenzied death, viscious, reanimation, mendeln and unyielding… so your 6 offensive slots are taken, if you go darkness, be prepared do compromises.

About 2 handers despite what everybody says… don’t use them, except if you get to the point where minions do 100% of the job, and you managed to do a 100% passive build.

  1. You lose an aspect slot for the ability to x2 an offensive aspect which is not that great, because as a minionmancer you need all the 6 offensive slots, so be prepared to sacrifice things like the +1 mage of the amulet or howl from below, or the super boost to minion speed while army of the dead is active.
  2. You lose the affixes you could have on the second hand, which is a huge loss.
  3. You get slow, super slow. The good thing about CE is that it’s free, two handers are nice for builds that use expensive skills like bone spear, but CE it’s free. You want howl from below and spam CE all you can and put as many skill points on CE as you find (I have plagued CE at 9 atm).

You want a CE machine gun, not a CE pistol :laughing:. The faster you spam CE the more lucky hits, the more ring exploding and the more cdr from decrepy. It seems that minions can only proc lucky from the reapers super attack and thorns, so be sure to use them and bring some thorns amount (Mendel has thorns, so that’s all the thorns you need).

If you use a shield, you get 80% bonus on your main hand, if you use a focus, the damage of the focus adds to your main hand so you are not that far away from a two-handed on damage per hit, which is what buffs your minions damage, and you get the benefit of having another weapon adding more affixes and another offensive aspect slot.

Shields get + attack speed to minions, which is huge, but they use defensive aspects, so atm is better to go with a focus.

PS: And most important, the build is fast&fun.

1 Like
5

“hey bro, why dont you play a different build dude?”

some people man smh

anyway

@Bactyrael

nice guide - i keep hearing people like thorns a lot AND i keep hearing people say they fall off hard - how far have you pushed this build?

6

Awesome job man. I love it

7

What gear can I get vulnerability on? I’m thinking just farming gear on my barb to give to my necro lol

8

Not far tier 22 world tier 4. My minions don’t hit very hard, capping at like 16k on a nice critical strike when the stars align. Thorns does fall off hard. It is just bonus since picking up additive damage is nearly worthless. Basically you will always get more damage output from thorns than say 1-3% damage to injured.

After updating my spreadsheet, minions are maxing out at about 60,000 in perfect gear. My damage formula might still be wrong but it seems pretty much on the money now with my current gear.

The problem is that minions have low base skill damage, 90% of their bonuses are nerfed to 30% value, and there are no core skill multipliers available to us. People talk about the ring of mendeln, but it is a really dire hunt with how rare it is ATM. I don’t even have it and I am pushing 120+ hours. I am going to make a post soon talking about how they need to change minions to be both balanced and competitive. As of right now I expect blizzard is going to keep them weak in fears it will make Necro the best class as everyone will go them.

9

so t22 is when you wanna transition from thorns gear? give or take

on the whole minon thing - i assume they gonna increase base damage or maybe make “+% minion damage” etc mulitplicative or maybe make em get 100% stats inherited

im carefully optimistic for the big balance patch, before that i dont wanna theory craft too much

mendeln i think is fine for the most part - what i personally dont like about it is that its actually a spell and not a minion attack afaik - its in a weird place where you actually want sturdy minions for the build but theyll be hitting for mere hundreds of damage while mendeln procs go for millions of dmg - i guess that works for a unique “chase item” tho

10

I think I could push higher in better gear. I am sure I could clear up to level 100 tier 25-30. Its how efficient it would be. As far as the ring goes, I don’t know enough about it to say really. Like does the damage proc at once on the first hit, can it crit, vulnerable bonus, etc. Because if minion builds are just the rimeheart of Diablo 4 it doesn’t help us even if you could potentially find it.

Future content is going to outscale doombringer and ring of mendeln like effects just like how manald and rimeheart got outscaled except in rare cases where archon could buff them to crazy but still gated values. I’m saying it is a terrible band aid fix to make Necro use lucky hit instead of getting a dedicated build path.

11

i dont think ring of mendeln is really meant as a band aid for minion builds, its too weird for that - more like its own thing you can craft a unique build around

12

I’ve got a few rings of mendeln and using a 792 atm hitting about 200/300k using max mages with corpse tendrils vulnerable + crit. It’s a massive difference of how much your minions end up hitting when it does trigger.

13

Props for the great information, thanks.

Also, Blizzard, maybe put in the same effort into your game.

Just a thought.

EDIT: Why Skull in armor over Ruby? (specifics)

14

Topaz in armor is generally considered the best choice (the op said this as well) because crowd control is very dangerous, and topaz gives you a lot of DR while cc’d.

Why not Ruby? Ruby isnt a bad choice, but they dont give that much extra health. And dr is basically extra health. And huge dr when you need it most is generally thought to be more useful for survivability than a small amount of health all the time.

Skulls are put in jewelry for the additional armor (which is also damage reduction)

15

How does the AotD 63% Lucky Hit Chance work? Is that passively applied all the time to your minions just for taking that Ultimate or is that bonus only applied only during the AotD active 7 seconds?

Not debating for or against taking this, but did want to note it’s not free - costs talent tree point(s) which could’ve gone to something else.

16

Ghostly skeletons run at and explode on a target. I have no idea how many but I do notice it proc a decent amount which helps on elite packs. The damaging or ghostly skeleton portion is the lucky hit.

1 Like
17

Do minions get full benefit from +damage % (just plain +damage), or only 30%?

18

They get 100% of the damage provided by intelligence. Anything besides critical strike damage and all damage “from intelligence”, is gained at 30%. So if you have a 10% damage roll on gear I “believe” they get 3%. I have no earthly way of knowing when it comes to defensive stats.

1 Like
19

like Bactyrael said - its only 30% as well for plain “+xx% damage” - gear or board doesnt matter

same for “+% physical” and every other modifier that you can see on your stat sheet (at least the offensive ones)

tested it myself and it seems to general consensus too

so the only full benefits are
int - crit damage - vuln and everything that specifically says “minions”

20

So what causes reapers and bone golems to proc lucky hit often?