0.7.9 Bone Curse-Buff Lich Build

After playing around with the new Bone Curse a bit, I ended up having a build that is well suited for the new Monolith Quests and is fun to play, at least for me :slight_smile:

What this build is about

The whole idea of this build is to use Bone Curse kinda like a Damage buff by using the Cursed Limbs node, so that we apply Bonbe Curse on hit with other skills.

Using Cursed Limbs combined with Illusion of Pain node means that we always crit on hit
(when it triggers the Bone Curse hit), deal +150% more Damage with Bone Curse, and still don’t need to wait for the cooldown that comes with this node to run off before we can apply new Bone Curses on enemies.

A third important thing to do is using a spell that hits at least twice, so that we apply Bone Curse on our target and trigger the Bone Curse hit with just one cast. For this I use Rip Blood with Blood Splatters.
Maybe a quick attack could be an alternative, but i didn’t try it out yet.

Skills

Bone Curse


Our main damage comes from this.

  • Illusion of Pain: always crit + 150% increased damage = a lot of damage :grin:

  • Cursed Limbs: 5 points to compensate the cooldown. Note that this doesn’t apply Slow or Mark for Death or cause Bone Eruption (I’m not sure about Ruptured Corpse).

  • Oppressive Gaze: I just went for maximising damage With the left skillpoints. Since we apply Bone Curse on every enemy hit with other skills, we can use Oppressive Gaze and still curse groups. Mark for Death is only applied on enemies we cast on Bone Curse directly.
    The area increase is useless when using this node.

  • Instead of investing ponits in Oppressive Gaze for max damage, we could for example max out Iron Maiden :metal: and invest points in Marrow Thief and Bone Feast or Crippling Anguish for more defensive nodes.

Rip Blood

Used for applying Bone Curse and causing it to hit

  • Eviscerate and Splatter for 3 hits per cast
    → 1. hit: apply curse, 2. hit: curse hit + apply curse, 3.hit: curse hit + apply curse

  • Rest of the points: Life leech, mana, cast speed.

Transplant

For mobility and survivability.

Reaper Form

This will boost our damage and kinda gives an extra live.
We will be in Reaper Form most of the time.
I went for some armor and protections with Soul Shroud and Vile Shroud.

Death Seal

Even more damage boost.

  • Corrupted Consciousness, Desperate Shroud and Deadlock for damage and protections boost

  • Moratorium: 3 points for max duration

  • The Quick and The Dead: Haste for 8 seconds

  • Death Wave does some damage on its own (still after recent nerf), but is not our main damage source. Primarily i saw it as an additional way to apply Bone Curse and cause it to hit. It’s not as effective as Rip Blood for doing that.
    We could use the skillpoints for more defensive nodes like Skeletal Sheath and Flesh Pact instead of Wave Frequency and Area. This could actually be more useful for higher Arena waves, since we try to keep distance to enemies there.

Passives

Acolyte

Lich

I didn’t try to opt out the Passive points aswell as the Active Skillpoints that much yet, it’s just partially leftovers of a previous Death Wave build plus what i found to be useful.

Equipment

Offensive Affixes

cast speed, spell damage, physical damage, crit multiplier, physical damage while transformed

Increased damage while transformed on Idols is obviously very useful.

Bone Curse deals spell damage and physical damage without Misery node.
Crit chance is not necessary because of Illusion of Pain node.

Defensive Affixes

I’m running a protections and health defense instead of a Dodge defense,
so i use a lot of added protection, added healt, set protection and set health.

As always, 100% Glancing Blow and some crit avoidance are good to have.
I also recommend increased cooldown recovery speed on helmet and increased cooldown recovery speed for Transplant on idols.

Useful Uniques (contains spoilers)

The new armor Woven Flesh is really nice for this build. It gives us a lot of life leech and the 85% Glancing Blow allows us to put more set protection affixes on the rest of our equipment.
It’s dropped by the Boss of the Fall of the Outcasts Monolith.

Murama’s Hilt is another useful new Unique for this build, but doesn’t make that much of a difference. I ended up using a rare relic with defensive affixes instead.

Playstile

We just stay in Reaper Form as long as we can and use Death Seal as often as we can. Just be careful with Death Seal while not being in Reaper Form.

Our main damage comes from Bone Curse. We simply cast it as soon as the cooldown runs off, so we can just put it on auto cast (num lock).
Most of the time it’s not necessary to directly aim on enemies with Bone Curse, but it can be useful in bossfights because of Mark for Death.
We apply Bone Curse with Rip Blood by using the Bone Curse node.

Keep your distance to enemies and try to dodge their attacks manually, when dealing with dangerous enemies. Transplant comes in handy for doing so, especially in Bossfights.

This way, i’ve made it to wave 180 in the Arena on first trial with this build and was able to complete lvl 100 Monoliths. Though i had to change out balanced protections for specific protections in Bossfights.

Have fun with this Build and feel free to post more optimised versions of it :slight_smile:

Edit: i won’t be able to play for the coming 6 weeks, so don’t expect me to update this…

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