SKELETON & WRAITHS ELEMENTAL ARMY BUILD:
UPDATE:
Stuck @ 600c
Swapped out Wisp Weaver for Unearthed Arms/Rites of Undeath
Added Locus of Death for Wraiths
INTRO:
Introducing the Necromancer Elemental Army build which is my go-to character that I’ve been playing while waiting for the next cycle. This scratches the itch that the Necromancer mastery provides which is commanding an army of undead.
Skeletons will bring ice damage and Wraiths will bring fire damage. All will be applying Damned/Frostbite to help carry their dps which comes from critical strikes.
This build uses a lot of uniques. It’s doable without them but the uniques is what makes the build shine and feel fun to play. A lot of the uniques can farmed from Blood, Frost, and Death pretty easily.
PLAYSTYLE:
This is a very active-style minion build that involves you actively buffing your army with Dread Shade/Chaos Bolts. The Revenant will act as a tank to draw aggro and benefit from the high amount of melee flat damage from our weapon. Flame Wraiths add additional DPS and can be used to draw aggro. Whenever a minion dies then we get a stack of frozen vengeance from Apogee of Frozen Light which we proc through Chaos Bolts’s node Reaper of Mayhem.
This is 58% more cold damage along with frenzy that we will proc consistently.
Frozen Eyes of Formosus provides us with increased cold damage and the ability to freeze enemies. Chaos Bolt’s node: Gate provides all minions with 100% frostbite chance and you only need 30 stacks to have an increased chance to freeze enemies.
Gate from Chaos Bolts also provides our minions with 100% damned chance and we add a dread shade with Duskheart providing another 100% chance.
Minions will sustain themselves through River of Bones. You still need to move them out of AOE attacks but otherwise they’ll hold up pretty well.
EDIT: We spawn the Revenant by using Veins of Malice so that everytime we cast a spell (Chaosbolt / Dread Shade) we will take a hit of 5% and this procs the Revenant summon.
Check the Revenant cooldown as well. I start engagements with summoning flame wraiths ahead and popping chaos bolts on the enemy to spawn the Revnant in front of mobs. Once everyone is engaged then I’ll send some bolts onto the skeletons.
REQUIRED UNIQUES
The main uniques/set items the build uses and has synergies with are:
- Apogee of Frozen Light
- Lich’s Scorn
I use Frozen Eyes of Formosus for cold damage + freeze and Boneclamour for ward generation plus the dexterity to proc Reaper of Mayhem.
Skeletal Mage’s Teleport + Minion Traversal Affix will help this build play more smoothly and make the positioning around Dread Shade less tedious.
I’m doing a low-life setup for EHP which are ExSangiunous and Last Steps of the Living.
T6+ Experimental Minion Transport on boots will help make this build play smooth and without it clear speed takes a hit.
ElEMENTAL ARMY VS T4 JULRA
ISSUES/CHALLANGES:
You need to find ways to fit in dexterity to proc Reaper of Mayhem. I find that anything around 10-15 dexterity is more then enough to proc harvest reliably.
Necromancer has very few defensive layers if we exclude the minions so this build requires attention and finesse to get the most out of it. This is by no means a meta build and you’ll need to know how to evade dangerous telegraphs and mechanics.
Boneclamour + Ward Gen Nodes will help sustain a little bit but the margin for error is small once you’re going past 200c. I run Wisp Weaver + One Foot In The Grave to help keep ward gen up.
The ability to freeze is another defensive layer, but as you can see, at 500c due to health scaling the chance to freeze falls off hard. If I had LP3 pieces I was farming for I’d be able to fit in more inc minion freeze rate and help get the rating to 2k+ levels.
Skeleton Archers dying quickly is a double-edged sword here since their deaths provide us stacks of Frozen Vengeance but our archers are our DPS so forgetting to resummon them will hurt. In the video, you can see how my DPS dropped off when I lost more than half of my archers.
