Tired of dying all the time? Want to start laying down the pain with your own skeleton army? Maybe reach high in the arena? I present you my tanky firemancer build. Get ready to embrace a huge ward pool, above average mobility and so much DPS you’ll be lacking FPS to display it all (no joke, your FPS will take a hit with 100+ minions).
Arena leaderboard: https://i.imgur.com/vliNRVn.png
Gameplay: Last Epoch - Bear's Tanky Firemancer (0.8.1i/Necromancer Build) - YouTube
Link to the build: Necromancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
How it works: The build is enabled by a few key components such as minion health regen which increases Wraith longevity significantly before they expire. Another key is the mana soak from Drain Life on minions and enemies to sustain your massive casting speed to Summon Wraiths. These are Flame Wraiths granted by your Adorned Idols giving your wraiths a higher HP pool, more damage and ability to attack from range. Dread Shade, Summon Bone Golem and Transplant are supplementary skills that increase our damage output, defensive capabilities and mobility. Two unique pieces of equipment turn us into a formidable tank: Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living. Our gear is crafted towards high HP, intelligence, cast speed, minion health regen and all round resistances.
Indepth Analysis:
Gear:
First off, this build is never lacking DPS and will melt enemies at all stages. The bottleneck later on will be your survivability so the prime focus will be increasing our defenses while picking up some convenient minion damage as we go. The gear is optimised to achieve 75% resistance everywhere except poison (the least important resist). While Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living are not required, they take the build to the next level. You can turn a 2500 HP pool into 5,000-6,500 ward with those two uniques. When you hit level 100 monoliths you may find it essential to have these two uniques or you’ll die frequently.
Unfortunately, necromancer doesn’t have reliable ways to leech health. There are some ways I experimented with passives and item leech but they fit into spell builds better so converting our HP into a huge Ward pool gives inherently high survivability. The bigger the ward pool the more ward you regen at any moment.
Minion health regen is critical and should be prioritised as it enables Wraiths to stay on the field much longer.
Cast speed will be crucial in our build as the faster we can summon Wraiths the larger our army can become.
Intelligence not only scales the damage output of our Wraiths but increases Ward Retention and so our survivability.
Another key piece of the build is using adorned idols with Chance for Summon Wraith to summon a Flame Wraith instead. If you get sufficiently high rolls you can get 100% chance with two idols. Flame Wraiths have a ranged attack, larger hp pool and do more damage than normal wraiths. Range > melee any day as they’re far less clunky than melee minions. The other idols pick up on extra health or ward retention, some extra resistances of your choice to meet the 75% target and I like to pick up Chance to Marked for Death on Minion Hit for one of the idols. With 100+ minions it’s basically a 100% chance for Marked for Death on enemies which helps our kill potential.
Blessings:
These have been selected in such a way to optimise our defensive capabilities. There’s some flex picks like The Age of Winter timeline where you can go for physical resistance to meet the 75% target. If you had some godly rolls on your equipment you go with my suggested blessings but don’t feel bad if you choose some resistances.
The armor blessings have some insane synergies with Dread Shade and Transplant that I’ll talk about in the skills section.
Skills:
Summon Wraith:
Firstly, the Minion Health stat is not very important and won’t make a huge emphasis throughout the build. My Wraiths ended up surviving for about 45 seconds before they expired and I calculated that every 100% of minion health increase was only something like an additional 2-3 seconds of life, so basically not important at all considering the investment.
My build for Summon Wraith increases their damage output, reduces their decay, gives leech and increases critical chance which synergizes with the leech from the passive node River of Bones.
Drain Life:
I’ve been playing this skill with 18 points because it’s primary focus is to turn it into a cast spell with Dark Shackles, soak mana with Grim Harvest, and ensure it leeches no health with Lay Waste. I originally played this while also leeching health without Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living but as soon as you get those uniques and transition to a larger HP pool you won’t want that health leech anymore. The skill also requires a large mana cost to activate so a larger mana pool from items or blessings can help the flow of the ability in combat.
Summon Bone Golem:
This can be a flex pick if you want to take something else. I took it purely for the threat generation from Tower of Bones; having two of these golems running around draws a lot of attention that would be on you otherwise. Other nodes can benefit your Wraiths as well such as Amalgam of Primalists and Unnatural Speed. I tried theory crafting other skills that could fit in such as Bone Curse with Bone prism - making a bone prism around you for safety while your wraiths deal with enemies outside. Or Rip Blood for Blood Infusion but the choice is yours.
Dread Shade:
This skill is such a great support skill. It gives you and your minions increased attack/cast speed/damage and Martyrdom is huge - 25 armour for each point of intelligence. Your minions will always be hugging you with dread shade and the aura is specced big enough it’ll reach you and all your minions. With all the intelligence we have stacked you’ll find your damage negation will increase significantly while you’re in Dread Shade’s aura. Those blessing for extra armour synergize as well giving you further survivability.
Transplant:
This could be argued as another flex pick but I personally love it. Transplant gives you mobility to move around maps and can get you out of sticky situations. It’s been specced to take advantage of Bone Armor that lasts for 7 seconds and increases your armor and damage negation. We also pick up Last Laugh for +60% minion damage for 4 seconds. Other choices don’t really matter so I put points into extra detonation damage.
Passives:
Make sure to pick up every node of Minion Health Regen in all trees. As soon as you have Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living pick up every node of ward retention. You’ll find that along the way you’ll pick up resistances through some of the passives which will make it easier to hit the 75% target.
Gameplay tips:
Minions become walls, use it to your advantage. When you have enough minions on the field they’ll make impassable barriers from melee enemies reaching you or tanking certain ranged shots.
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