Looking for Necro Build

Been experimenting with a necro build and I can’t get one down I like.

I tried;

spirit plague
blood curse
skeletons
skeleton mages

and some various spells for my 5th; hungering souls and wraiths.

I tried going all fire with fire archers and fire mages. I tried going cyromages, ice archers, and freeze on blood plague. I also tried deathknights and rogues.

Main thing that was bugging me is I’m not sure there’s a good way to get the damage types all right where I’m not wasting the bonus minion damage somehow, or wasting some synergy.

Anyone have any recommendations for a build that uses both skeleton skills and the 2 curses with any old 5th skill thrown in? Also needing help on passives and what to get versus avoid.

Thank you very much.

Spirit Plague is a nice skill, but it has no synergies with minions. It’s a dot that is mainly scaled with necrotic and dot modifiers (also adaptive spelldamage).

I tried to make it work with minions, too. But besides some enemy debuffs like slow and less damage dealt, there’s nothing in it.

Always helpful is to provide some kind of info, how far you are in character progression. What’s your current level. What are your stats (including minion stats in this case) and what exactly you are struggling with. Damage output? Survivability of minions? Your own survivability? What do you mean by bonus minion damage?

The necro uniques and sets are mainly boosting a playstyle that focuses on either melee minions or ranged because the affixes specifically say (minion melee damage or bow attacks. So focusing on one is good.

Good skills to buff your minions (besides bone curse you are already using) is dread shade (can also be build to be cast on your enemies so it doesn’t drain your minions) and rip blood. Rip blood has a nice minion buff route bottom left side. You can synergize it even with bone curse to automatically proc. You can do this by skilling the left side of the bone curse tree (rip blood cast on fall off of bc). To make sure bc falls off regularly you need to take also the nodes “falls off after 6 hits”. Everytime you see a rip blood proc you recast bc on your enemies.

Good nodes for bc are also mark for death and the armour shred nodes as well as the killing threshold.

Necro is 45 atm. Just looking for more damage and better synergies. Dread Shade sounds like a good idea, so I’ll check that out. I like melee minions, so I might go that route.

Right now my gear is just a hodpodge of stuff, but its mostly minion damage, health, dodge, and armor. They are pretty tanky, often not losing a single one or just 1 or 2 on a boss, but my damage seems low.

Of course, my other character is a blade dancer who is 69 with 650% critical damage modifier so it may not be a fair comparison.

there is one extremely powerful interaction with spirit plague and minion builds, and that is the “ward granted when you hit an enemy affected by spirit plague” node… since the damage from bone curse counts as you hitting an enemy, using that node and keeping bone curse and spirit plague up can sustain a pretty high amount of ward.

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If you stack ‘Minion Damage’ it applies to all types of minion damage such as ‘Minion Physical damage’

however ‘Minion Damage’ has lower rolls than specific damage types

I have a wand with T6 Minion damage - 90% (89-105%) and also T5 Minion Physical 90% (89-122%) I predict T6 Minion physical would be up to 150% maybe

So just stack minion damage for now until you specialize more

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Dread Shade really is good. It can provide a 60% more damage modifier to your minions. This is really huge because it is multiplicative with all other damage modifiers.

The damage of your minions scales a bit better when you get some flat minion damage. Theres some in the necro passive tree. You should absolutely take these nodes. Also watch out for this:

and

That flat damage doesn’t seem like much, but since you get a lot of increased damage from your passives and other gear, it has a decent impact.

On my melee minions build, I went with Skeleton Rogues (get rid of archers and warriors) and skilled in the acid flask node (applies armour shred). Armour shred also can be applied with bone course. For mages I use death knights. I did not go with the mortar or the hungering soul nodes because I felt like the cast time and the relatively low damage output result in a lower average dps.

Instead I tried to max attack speed (also with the skeleton rogues).

Wraiths are really awesome, too. They can deal good damage and you can really get a lot of them. The downside is that this is a very mana intensive playstyle.

raw suicide please link your wraith build thanks alot!

Sorry Dude,
Haven’t got a Wraith build running currently. But there are several cool ways to build them:

  • Go right tree with summoning as much as possible with a single cast. Focus on %health instead of decreased decay, because since the nerf, it doesn’t make much if a difference if you have put 5 points into it or 0 (tested it and got only 2 wraiths more in average).

  • There are cool idols that grand chance to cast a flame wraith instead of a normal. You can get to 100% with 2-3 idols. These guys shoot fireballs and fit perfectly into a ranged minion build

  • You can also use the node that roots the in place. This way you could spawn a kind of 5-7 headed hydra that shoots fire towards your enemies

  • You could also use the skeleton mage to automatically sacrifice your wraiths. Or make a sacrifice build yourself (but this is a whole different skill and gear setup)

  • Wraiths work well with a ward build, since they die constantly and grand you ward thought the Acolyte passive. By recasting them regularly you can take the necro passives that grand ward on minion skill use.

I hope this helps. I don’t have any guides, but I try to answer any questions as good as possible.

Maybe search for a @boardman21 guide. But since the last he made was pre nerf, I don’t know if it’s still working.

Or do something really crazy and try yourself :wink::laughing:

hey, take a look at my lastest minion guide. hope it can help you a bit. ive tried for a really long time almost all combinations. just never tried the spirit plague ward on hit combo. might try it as well but dont really want to remove dread shade as its a huge boost for my minions.

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