Lets BOOM! Sacrifice Skeletons Low Life Lich 0.8D

Acolyte
1

Haven’t found any sacrifice skeletons builds on forum, so I decided to do my own.

Important: I’m currently only 83 lvl with this build, so haven’t conquered all 100lvl monoliths. However Reign of Dragons was conquered at 82lvl easily. For now I have 3850 non decaying ward and about 4500-5000 ward during fights
I’ll update the information as soon as I reach 95-100 lvl.

PROS:

-good damage
-huge AoE
-enormous amount of ward
-max resists
-weapon and shield needs only 2 and 3 affixes respectively
-you do BOOM! (lets explode those skeletons for their stupid behaviour :smile:)

CONS:

-negative armor if bone armor not active
-no dodge
-you need to cast three spells to deal damage
-Exsanguison (and some other uniques) needed

Build planner link (min-maxed): https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/NKBgNvQa
My current gear: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/lPQDL8Q0

Build Mechanics:

Cast summon skeletons twice then explode them by sacrifice. Use transplant periodically for buff, defence and mana gain.
We gain at least 450 ward per Sacrifice cast with a 10% chance to gain additional 130 ward on nearby death (i.e. an average additional 78 ward form skeletons and much more from defeating mob packs).
Mind Catcher form Skeleton tree grants us mana sustain. Additional mana sustain, defence and damage boost comes from transplant.

Skills:

Summon skeletons:

Our first main skill. We need to cast it twice for 6 skeletons to be summoned. Casting it only once (thus summoning only 3 skeletons) can cause mana issues.

Sacrifice:

Our main damaging skill.

Transplant:

Damage boost, defence and mana.

Rip Blood:

Just a synergy for transplant. We are not casting Rip Blood ourselves. It gives us more than 200 ward per Transplant cast and damage boost(if there are enemies).

Aura of Decay:

Not a very good skill but I can’t find anything more suitable for this build. Shreds our armour to almost negative values, but also gives 60 poison resist, reduces enemies armour, chills and slows them.

Passives:

Acolyte:

Necromancer:

Lich:

Gear:

Body:

Exsanguison. The mandatory item. I absolutely do not recommend to start this build if you dont have this item.

Helmet:

Boneclamor Barbute
Or Profane Hood. Good prefixes are: Intelligence, Armor. Good suffixes are health, any resistances except poison and necrotic.

Belt:

Chains of Uleros
Strands of Souls

Boots:

Last Steps of the Living.
Farm Formosus to get 'em as soon as you can.
Untill that use any with int/armour prefixes and health/hybrid health/resists(except poison and necrotic) suffixes.

Weapon:

Divine Sceptre or Prophecy Wand (use one with most adaptive spell damage).
Prefixes: increased physical damage and increased spell damage.
Suffixes are not neccessary. Some good suffixes are: Mana/blind on hit/chill on hit/increased stun chance

Shield:

Bloodrust Aegis.
Prefixes: increased spell damage.
Second prefix is not neccessary. Increased crit chance can be good, but you can just use no second prefix at all for easy craft.
Suffixes: resistances (except poison and necrotic)

Relic:

Stained Tome.
Prefixes: intelligence/physical damage/spell damage
Suffixes: health/resistances (except poison and necrotic)

Rings:

Ruby Ring or Gold Ring.
Prefixes: intelligence/spell damage/hybrid health leech/
Suffixes: health/resistances (except poison and necrotic)

Amulet:

Ruby Amulet.
Prefixes: spell damage/physical damage/physical penetration
Suffixes: health/resistances (except poison and necrotic)

Idols:

Best are 4 Large Immortal idols with both health affixes and Ornate bone wirh damage at low health and health leech.
Any other idols with ward retention, health, damage at low health, physical damage are also viable.

Blessings:

two variants for each. First is better.

Black Sun:

Health
Spell Damage leeched as health

Ending the Storm:

Ward per second
Elemental Resistance

Reign of Dragons:

Increased Physical damage
All Resistances

Leveling:

Till level 29-30 level as you wish. Afterwards put 10 passives into Necromancer skill tree to obtain Sacrifice. In Lich tree get Hollow Lich node as soon as possible. It allows you to get health leech affixes and nodes.
Try to get Chain of Uleros belt as soon as possibe. Without it potions can kill you.
In Summon Skeletons tree prioritize to get mind cather (to gain mana) and Empty the graves (to summon 3 skellies per cast), afterwards get those +1 skeletons nodes.
You will have mana issues till you can summon 6 max skeletons, so transplant pale blood node will help a lot.
Get some items with mana suffixes (mana, mana regen, mana efficiency) at early levels. It will help to sustain mana.
At 49 lvl you can specialize Aura of Decay. Get Decrepify node here at first for Armor Shred instead of Poison.

1 Like
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If you’re using Exsanguinous, you don’t want leech as that will increase the amount of hp you have and therefore reduce the amount of ward/sec you have. That would free up some prefixes on your rings as well for “chance to apply Frailty” (reduces the damage you take & if you’re hitting with 6 explosions you’ll have good uptime on the bosses).

Edit: Ahh, I see you’re converting leech to damage. I’d still probably take 1 affix slot for Frailty.

Bone Curse is a good skill and it won’t bork your armour! It’s also a physical spell so synergises with Sacrifice. Something like this would give you cull @ 12% (very useful for bosses), 100% chance of armour shred on bone curse damage & 3 spare points to put somewhere (chill, slow, etc)
https://imgur.com/HaTgr3V

5 points in Elixir of Hunger is more likely to benefit you than Grave Thorns, since you’re not doing anything related to minion damage, and the hp from Elixir of Hunger will get you a bit more ward.

3

And you will die after potion use in case of health gained on hit =) I have tried this at first but due to a lot of sudden deaths decided to go in Grave Thorns instead. Grave Thorns also increases minion life which helps skellies not to be one-shoted right after summon before you sacrifice them.

I thought about it. But pressing another button while always casting skellies-sacrifice to survive is not for me. It can be good for boss fights but absoletely useless in other situations.

4

When i did an aura of decay build some months ago i found that you can use Shroud of Obscurity if you havent found Exsanguison yet at least in the start of monoliths… i still havent been lucky enough to have Exsanguison drop for me D:

5

So how has this build been impacted by the recent patch?

6

Sacrifice was nerfed hard. We’ve lost about 50% of damage. I need several days to check if it is possible to mitigate damage nerfs with new items.

7

Yeah, that is a bummer. Nerfs are hard to swallow. Were that many people even using Sacrifice?

8

Have you actually checked the damage in-game or are you just going on the skill node changes? It’s possible that they were changed to “proper” more damage nodes & as such have lower numbers.

https://imgur.com/kRg3L6W
By far the best alt-text…

9

Before nerfs I had 7 points in Soul Shatter (105% more), 4 points in great sacrifice (140% more) and 3 points in Punishment (60% more). Multiplicative damage is x7.872
Now I have 5 point in Spul Shatter (75% more), 4 points in great sacrifice (60% more) and 3 points in Punishment (45% more). Multiplicative damage is 4.06.
Those changes from “more hit damage” to “more damage” grants nothing to us as we are not dealing DoT.
I’ve put 3 remaining points in Altar of Flames to get +18 fire damage. And even now I’m dealing 20-30% less damage to dummy which is huge loss.
So my only hope is new uniques and maybe one item with +1 to sacrifice to put additional point in Altar of Flames to get another +6 fire damage.

10

But what damage are you actually doing in 0.8.1 compared to 0.8? It’s possible that the Sacrifice damage nodes weren’t “proper” more damage. I know that they went through all the skills & any old damage nodes that weren’t “more” were changed to “more” so that they would work with the tooltips. I’m hoping that’s what’s happening here & if that is what’s happening, then just going by the numbers won’t particlarly help (especially if that Soul Shatter 105% was actually coded as an “increased” rather than a “more”).

11

from about 30-35k per one skelly sacrifice before to 21-25k for now (on Dummy)

12

Wow. I’ve just noticed that there is no way to edit my initial post. What’s a pity.
I’ve checked new items and affixes. Bad news: there is nothing new suitable for this build. Sacrifice affix is only for body armor thus can’t be used. Everything else can’t give us more damage.
So for 0.8.1 we have 20-30% damage loss and slightly increased defences. The build can be still viable as at lvl 90 we do about 150k damage per BOOM and we have 6k+ ward. But it is not so strong as other builds (we have really slow casts with only mediocre burst damage).

13

It is a bummer they hit us this hard. I’m still waiting for things to click. I’ve played The Division long enough I dont care all that much when a dev comes along and breaks my toys. This game has some filthy synergies.

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