Hello, this is Dr3ad from Epoch Builds. Sadly this write up is going to be smaller than normal as I have just been hired for a job and wonât be able to put as much effort into small things like this. But I will keep this quick and precise.
Lethal Concentration is a new unique added in patch 8.3 (farmable with echo rewards from Reign of Dragons timeline, its very easy to farm as theres only 2 targets in the pool!), and it has 3 things going for it. 1st, it lets your minions leech 8% of their poison damage as life, this is huge as poison minion leech wasnât accessable before like this. 2nd, your skeleton rogues get your increased % in poison damage. This doesnât matter that much sadly for this build as were more focused on keeping your minions alive. 3rd, Jade Dust. Jade Dust is a buff you recieve on harvest hit, it gives your minions 50% global poison chance, but this is tripled for throwing attacks, this is important for later.
Rogues are cool. They have 3 different cooldown abilities and a basic melee attack. A teleport on a 8 second cooldown, a shuriken attack (like the basic shuriken from rogue) that has a 4 second cooldown and 2 uses, and acid flask (same as rogue skill but smaller aoe) with a 5 second cooldown. Now at base, your skeleton rogue will be doing a lot of basic melee attacks. We donât want this. Melee minion AI sucks rn, and its better if they stayed at range. So we grab minion cooldown recovery in the skill tree and on idols, allowing our rogue to spam his abilities. This is important for DPS as his 2 damage abilities are throwing attacks, benefiting from the extra 100% poison chance from Lethal Concentration. They feel amazing for clear and blow up packs of mobs quickly, while still having comparable single target to other minions.
Death Knights are just extra for clear. Since we build into minion cooldown recovery speed, their hungering souls ability + necrotic mortar with less cooldown is insanely strong for clear, this + rogues makes farming monoliths a breeze.
Aura of Decay is mandatory, as having 100% extra poison chance and 150% more damage for your minions is monumental, not to even touch on healing from the 8% of missing health healed as life node. This is why we run healing effect. Its our main sustain source for the build since we dont do damage, so we cannot leech ourselves.
For gearing we mainly want to get intelligence and minion HP, as our damage is solved by lethal concentration. Healing Effectiveness first, then go for Healing Effect + Minion Cooldown idols for deep endgame.
Sorry this is so brief, but I gotta go to sleep as ive been up for 26 hours at the typing of this sentence, as I was trying really hard to get Crit Phys Warpath done, which it is. Thank you for reading, and if you liked the written guide, consider leaving a like and a comment on the video as well, as thats the best way to support my build creation spree!
This has been Dr3ad, from Epoch Builds, and Iâm off to make more builds!
Excellent to see people trying out the new Uniques and Necro skills to great effect, and congratulations on the new job, Dr3ad! If youâre able to answer some questions, Iâd love to learn more about how you were able to get such great performance with this build:
What do you consider to be âgoodâ enough damage to handle the content youâre facing? I saw that you had roughly 500K DoTs, but what would be the case if you were playing a minion build that just relied on straight Crits?
I see in your planner that you only have roughly 65-80% resistances. Is slightly undercapping resistances not that much a factor at all, especially comparing it to getting more Health? Itâs hard for me to get over the âcap the resistances at all cost, especially considering Mark for Death shred,â which makes it a lot harder to remove a piece of equipment with a T5 resist even though I could use better stats like Critical Strike Avoidance or getting up to 2.5K Health.
Iâm surprised you didnât need idols with minion cooldown recovery, since you emphasized how important they were. In that case, is it not worth it to have those stats in idols because theyâre sufficient in the Skeleton and Skeleton Mage skilltree?
You mentioned that the Magesâ Hungering Souls + Necrotic Mortar were good for clear. Is that because of the extra poison hits due to the projectiles, or are Hungering Souls + Necrotic Mortar good enough damage on their own? I remembered not being really impressed with Necrotic Mortarâs damage when I tried it.
You mentioned that Necros are meant to be âslowâ compared to other classes. Are you referring to the last of a great movement skill? No â133% movespeedâ like Iâve seen from other classes? The damage is just not there? Or is it just the tedium of having the minions actually get to where you want to pilot them for maximum clearing effect.
Thanks again - itâs really nice to see whatâs required to take a Necro minion build to sufficiently handle endgame.
No, being under capped is less punishing than in other games. That said, capping your resists is usually pretty easy since you need 2 t5 affixes per resist less however much you can get from passives and implicits. Getting 100% crit avoidance is probably more important since crits from mobs will do double damage.
so ZDPS farming corruption is 100k dps or less. Good is 200-500k, anything more than that is regarded as very good, at least by my standards. No dummy builds, so my numbers gravitate around these numbers. Usually 1-2 minute shade fights are what are considered good between 100-300 corruption. After that the kills become slower due to how the scaling functions.
So when I gear, I try to keep everything within the 65-75% range, as thats about the sweet spot. Obviously cap your resistances if you can, but as mr @Llama8 said, crit avoidance is more important. Usually you can ignore mark for death thanks to the new affix on belts, cleanse ailments on potion use. Because of my strict uploading schedule of 2-4 days per build, sometimes I make sacrfices to make things faster. Sadly resistances is one of the easiest to cut.
So minion cooldown recovery is important, but healing effectiveness is way more important for not dying. Aura of Decay healing is your only reliable source of sustain so having that as high as possible is mandatory, while eventually phasing out to healing eff + minion cooldown recovery speed idols later will almost double yoru dps.
So for trash in monolith, most minion abilitites do not pierce. It is a rarity. So the more projectiles usually the better. Rogues are good, but having even more projectiles spamming is better for clear. You want a lot of overkill, thanks to the fact nothing ever pierces (most the time). Necrotic mortar isnât that good but its in the way for minion cooldown recovery speed for your hungering soull spamming, so its 100% required to make it feel good.
Slow as in, you need to kill things as you move along in the mono. Since every single attack on your minions is single target focused, getting overwhelmed is the quickest way to die, and rushing through monoliths especially without transplant or proper defenses like a shield or bastion of honour you can very easily screw yourself by moving too fast through monoliths. This is the upper end of clear speed for necros, as thats the sacrifice for having relatively safe bossing. Its not slow because of MS, its slow due to the playstyle. You have damage, but the mechanics underlying how minion AI and how no projectile pierces for skeletons, is what makes it difficult to clear fast as a skeleton only build.
I love the idea of a poison necro. I have been looking into one for weeks now so Thank You. I was wondering if you have a loot filter in mind? I have no idea how to make one sadly, mostly because I am new âenoughâ to the game that I donât know the items well enough to know what to exclude or include etc.
I know you are swamped so know that I mean no rush, just hoping.
The larger problem is trying to get gear upgrades that donât completely screw me over resistance wise. A problem I have is that I have a gear (say a chest item) that has really crappy prefixes, but a T5 resist. I canât just take off the equipment because my resistance goes from 90% to 40%, but my offense is crippled because I canât get any equipment with good offensive prefixes (which are the rare class-prefixes like +base minion critical chance).
Itâs even harder if I have rings that give 2 T4 or T5 resists, because I want to replace them with Crit Avoidance or Health (since you can easily be stuck with 900 Health by level 80 if youâre not actively seeking Health bonuses), but canât get all the resistances to mesh together, and finding that one rare item that actually gives you what you need is hard to get.
Iâm only recently starting empowered monos, and I just canât stop dying, because I feel like I have multiple holes I need to patch (getting that Crit Avoidance + enough health while not screwing over my damage or resists), but the monos keep stacking "+% elemental damage + 4 different types of +% damage and more crit chance. I donât know if people farm regular monos before trying empowered monos, but I hear about how easy it is to run empowered monos, then I try it and get rekt (also, I hate Embermages with the heat of the meteors they use on me)
All part of the learning process, but knowing how much damage is sufficient is helpful. Probably replacing the catalyst Iâm using (for Intelligence and Ward per second) with a Shield will raise the survivaility enough that I can keep doing the good loot farm.
