I’ve recently returned to last epoch just before the 1.0 release. So far I’ve been running a putrid wraith turrets build with the new helmet + the wraith staff. After reaching empowered mono’s I’ve got pointed out to me that the putrid wraiths have 0 damage scaling on their bolt. Even though they have a big ‘more’ multiplier themself this has made me realize my build will basically be extremely gimped for high corruption pushing.
I than started thinking about another Necro poison build and found out about Lethal Concentration. There have also been a lot of buffs to the rogues in 1.0. So I fiddled around in planners a bit and than found old Dr3adful build on these forums and tried updating that.
I’ve come up with 2 versions and I really don’t know which has more potential.
Skelly rogue poison + bleed: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ozwVv8vA
I skip flat melee damage in tree and on weapon because once you’re geared minions will hardly use melee attacks if I’m right (a lot of CD reduction for minions). Not sure if this is optimal though.
Any feedback is welcome! Please point out any mistakes I’ve made aswell. Would really like to know the reasoning for why things are suboptimal or won’t work! I’m loving this game and theorycrafting fun (off-meta) builds is what I enjoy the most. Fairly unexperienced thouh so probably making quite some mistakes.
I’ve finally just gotten the spear. Also got a 1 LP Death Rattle and some pretty sweet exalted chests and helmets for the crit version. So I’m about to start leveling a new necro for that. Will post here how it feels, but should be good with all the 1.0 buffs if Dr3ad already liked it in 0.8.3.
I’ve just reached empowered monoliths at level 75 and this is by far the most fun build I’ve played. My gear is still pretty crap and I need to see how defensives (mainly health and healing effectivesness) and minion health and leech scale into late game. Damage seems more than enough so will probably cut that down a bit to feel more safe.
[Necromancer, level 100 (Release / 1.0) - Last Epoch Build Planner ])This build is WAY to damage oriented, by the time you get this kind of gear you will be at well above 200 corruption and your skeletons will die like files. I am at 210 corruption and I have to invest pretty heavy into minion defenses and +minion health regen and phalanx just to keep the summoning down to a dull roar.
Yeah, I’m not playing that version. I’m going the crit way because sustain should be way easier with ‘river of bones’ and 100% crit for minions. Add to that the leech from the spear, the ring and the healing from aura of decay (minons are all melee on purpose because of that) and I’m curious to see how well it does. But I’ll definately adjust along the way and post an update when I get to 300 corruption.
You were right, defensives for both skeletons and me is already an issue before 300, corruption. Granted I still have extremely bad gear, I dont see version 1 working for end game. I made a version 2 with a lot more defence. Skipping the crit, damage isnt an issue at all.
Really looking forward to playing this. Unsure about the legendary boots. Citadel boots with %armour might be better. Same about the helmet, not sure how much it adds over a regular profane crown with int, vit, %life and %armour. I’ll see what drops for me.
EDIT: might have found a breakthrough, will update later.
Alright, back again.
Made it to 300 corruption with pretty sweet gear. Unfortunately the build isn’t performing well for the gear level it has (see the planner for my gear). Certain mobtypes that have a lot of ground AoE just obliterate your minions. Especially the mounted fire javelin dudes are very bad. Bossing is going very well and T4 Julra dies in about a minute. But it just doesn’t feel great to play. You always have to wait for your minions to catch up and the aoe on harvest is to small to feel safe. I’ve tried dropping the move speed on it for life and ward on curse enemies for mapping. There just isn’t really a reliable way to quickly curse everything unless you manually do it. Also tried taking more minion health regen in tree and on belt combined with dropping the more life for me and less minion life node. Although minions do survive better than, you’ll hit a wall 50 corruption later.
I’m glad I tried it but I’m done with necro for a while. The small minion armies just don’t really seem viable. It’s definately playable but it’s slow and annoying.
At the moment if you want to rely on your summons the only good necro builds are full necrotic wraithlord, or full fireturret wraiths, there are a few outliers as bone golem curse (but thats you casting and the golem just being there to cast the spell on). Necro minions are popcorn, they need to completely change dread shade and buff minions to account for it, as is because of that single (required) spell they think minions are good. While the AI has become a bit better than it used to be, melee minions are still trash. The devs seem to believe that necros should only be relying sacrificing minions. Unlike a lot of other classes uniques that just change the base damage or similar, necro uniques all focus on getting rid of your minions to make one slightly stronger or massive negatives to get a slight positive (except wraithlord)
Minion mancers need to many things to work unlike other classes that only rely on themselves, Player hp, player movement, player resists, player crit avoidance, player ward, (and depending on the case player damage) then they also have to have minion hp, minion movement, minion resists, minion crit avoidance, minion damage, idols to change the minions type.
The problem with the lethal concentration staff is you need to focus all your points and items into minions to have them do damage and survive, if you focus on poison then they don’t do damage and don’t survive but they do more poison. The tradeoff is not really there.
Yeah, I agree with all your points. I hate that you kind of feel forced to play one big minion instead of an army of smaller ones. It feels really bad all of them can die in a single AoE.
I haven’t been able to thoroughly test it yet, but it seems like the bone armour minion node is pulling a lot of weight. I’m already speccing into a lot of minion CDR, so it has a lot of uptime. I’m playing with 4 warriors and 4 rogues now at 400 corruption without a problem. I did loose some dps but it feels better and more smooth in the end.
If I were to also snapshot aura of decay and play double golem with heal node I think I can push over 500.
I hate snapshotting but tbh it is basically a feature and you’re really gimping yourself if you don’t use it.
I made a full on Cold necro build in the planner with a lot of freeze multiplier. Really curious to see how that turns out. I’ll play it after I reach the ceiling with this.
both cold army and fire army end up in about the same place, with fire getting a bit higher level minions if you go all in on it since acolyte is the only class that cant dual wield. Cold has a bit of a problem with a certain boss that ignores freeze so its big feature is negated. If you get to a point where you cant get hp 1 shotted then there is a 2 hand axe thats hilarious for minion armies as you have a up to i think 30% chance get back 50 hp per minion attack so when you have 9+5 + whatever other minions your basically always getting a huge amount of health back
