Berserker bleedy bloodwraiths

Concept
Berserker wraiths, with damage and attack speed buffed greatly, applying bleeds, poison, damned (and even plague/ignite if you use the right gear) with each attack, and they swing very, very fast. The main reason I like this build is the playstyle - you don’t need to target anything in the heat of battle. You can just line up your buffed wraiths before moving forward, and then hide behind your golem while the wraiths kill for you. It is one of the few builds I’ve tried which can reliably do level 70 echoes with a level 60 toon and not much gear.

The plan I’ll never get close to:

Testing build lvl 64, with rubbish gear:

Skills
Summon Skeleton - archers for decent backup damage, and mana gain, and to cast sacrifice on
Sacrifice - to get us blood wraiths with super high bleed chance and damage increases
Dread Shade - To get us 6 super wraiths, 100% damned chance, huge damage and large attack speed buffs
Blood Golems - to get us life on hit, and be a nice taunter to hide behind
Skeleton mages - I used these to provide a bit of freeze chance and chill for defences.

Items
Anything will do, really. You can go for minion damage and aggressive stats, or make yourself a bit tankier. You really just need enough mana to cast skeleton > sacrifice > dread shade regularly.
A good item is doublet of onos tull - it theoretically reduces the length of long boss fights, but so far no boss fight has lasted long enough for this to be necessary.

Passives
You need necro passives to rush to dread shade. These can either be physical damage or minion life/regen. Take all minion attack speed nodes available. The attack speed not only synergises well with all the Dot per hit, but also makes the wraiths good vs both dense mobs or scattered enemies/ beefy single targets.
You can work towards the minion melee poison nodes, which in theory should make wraiths last a lot longer, and should have them do a lot more damage.
In reality, my level 64 testing build seems to have the wraiths doing about the same damage and surviving about the same time whether you spec into the ‘rotting army’ poison resists, or the lich ‘serrated bones’ and ‘desolation’ for bleed chance and damage over time.
This seems strange, as the poison resist should dramatically increase the wraith uptime by limiting the effect of ‘everlasting poison’ from dread shade. Wraiths that have 0 poison resist start their everlasting poison ticks at 5 damage taken. Wraiths with 70 poison resists start their everlasting poison ticks at 2 damage taken. Yet both seemed to last around 25 seconds…
Either way, the damage should all come together by about level 75.

Some numbers from the level 64 testing build
A blood wraith gets hits of 150 and Dot up to 2.5K and lasts a long time
A blood wraith with dread shade gets much faster hits of 450, crits of 1K and Dot of 10K and lasts about 25 seconds
6 blood wraiths with dread shade hit fast enough that the numbers are hard to see, but it seems to be Dot of around 58K

Related themes
The pure poison melee minions also using dread shade on wraiths

Llama8 helping with the option of bone curse

I’d probably swap out Skellie Mages for Bone Curse (spec’d for cull, bleed, chill & some freeze, though the latter is less impactful since you have a limited number of mobs hitting the target), add some chill & possibly slow to your weapon (which will be applied by Sacrifice’s explosion, not sure if Bone Curse’s damage proc’s your chill/slow, I’d have to check after I take the dog for a walk).

I’d also put a few points in Mark of Punishment for Mark for Death when your Wraiths/Skellies die, though since you don’t have hundreds of them you’d need more points to help keep Mark for Death up consistently.

No, Bone Curse doesn’t proc anything “on hit” such as chill or ignite (probably because it’s an ailment, therefore can’t proc other ailments, given that’s what the skill tooltip says…). :frowning:

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