Ranged wraith totems

[grimlock9999]

Run around planting stationary wraiths, which scale flat damage with a bit of armour shred.

Intro
Superb build for casual players - easy to cap resists, easy to play, very flexible with gear, no targeting and full damage output while you kite circles of death. Can kill things ahead of you so you don’t have to backtrack to pick up shards and loot.

Necromancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner

Skills
Summon skeleton → Skeleton archers with all the extra skeleton and more damage nodes
Skeletal Mage → Take the flat damage, the extra skeletal mage, then go for pyromages if that’s your thing, cryomages if you like the chance to freeze and stun.
Summon Wraith → go for flame wraith nodes, mana efficiency, added necro damage and locus of death to make them totem style
Golems → take the blood golem, all the taunt nodes. His job is to draw aggro and give you life on hit
transplant → take bone armour, minion damage, pools of blood and 30% mana back on cast.

Passives
Take all the minion attack/cast speed nodes, some minion regen nodes, then all the armour shred nodes and all the minion flat damage nodes. Cap it off with vitality, then minion resists and armour per minion. You also want ‘veins of malice’ to give them frenzy when you transplant.

Core Items
Reach of the grave - to keep your skeletons and skelly mages alive
2 X flame wraith idols - to guarantee a flame wraith every cast

I found the unique ‘Melverns writ’ to fit well - it’s nice to have a crossbow guy help you out and the archers hit very hard with this item equipped.

Affix targets
Whatever you can find or craft which includes:
Resists, Health, Vitality, life regen, minion regen, mana (scales well with transplant), mana regen, armour, move speed, minion damage, minion levels, minion life, crit avoidance.

Playstyle
Cast wraiths way ahead of you. They start clearing things while you and your ranged minions catch up. The wraiths are great for blocking projectiles. Anything that rushes you gets taunted by the golem. If you are in a bad spot, transplant away. If you are out of mana, transplant. Your cast speed is great, so it you hit a screen full of baddies, just spam all your mana on wraiths, then transplant to give them all frenzy, and recover some mana.

[Llama8]

Interesting that you’ve gone for lots of hp regen & vitality. Have you thought about swapping one of the skellies out for Zombies & going to the bottom right for lots of ward & 30% chance for a Zombie on minion death?

I’d also suggest putting a few points (2-5) into Mark of Punishment for chance for Mark for Death on minion death which will proc quite a lot with Wraiths. Even 2 points is usually enough to keep it up on bosses.

[grimlock9999]

Allow me to explain a quirk of mine - I resist certain conditional offerings pretty stubbornly, especially ones with opaque descriptions like ‘nearby’. In POE, I once wrote some feedback that might explain it a little more if you care to read - it still seems pretty relevant to this game which has things like spires bombarding us from miles away.

Hence, I never have and probably never will test ‘mark of punishment’ while it is conditional on an RNG, a minion dying and that minion being ‘nearby’. (Mark for death also seems easy to find on idols.)

Regarding ward in it’s current form, it’s also a pretty conditional defence - it either puts you on a rushed timer to do something while it is up, demands that you find enemies constantly, or forces you to spam buttons constantly to generate it. As someone who likes to hover over items, get distracted by thinking about a new build mid mono run, or pet my cat, do a bit of work, cook or listen to podcasts while I play, that means I will never play a ward build.

(Also, the zombie ward generation scales off their life, and we have no synergy investing in life for wraiths that are stationary and our other minions which use lifesteal as their defence.)

[Llama8]

The mark for death passive is conditional on minions dieing but the nearby thing isn’t an issue. It’s only really useful on bosses but that’s where its trivial to keep up with wraiths. You don’t need it on trash and for the cost of ~2 points you get an additional 25% more damage.

I removed all of my minion hp/int gear & was able to sustain ~2.5k ward (though this was with only 2% of Zombie max hp returned as life to me), as compared to ~6-8k, so I’d have though an additional 2-3k of EHP would be quite useful to you if pushing high monos or arena. I’d also argue that if you don’t see it as your main defence but something that you have in longer fights then getting distracted isn’t an issue, though I do also get how seeing the blue bar decay might make you feel as though you want to keep it up.

Since ward is my Zombie Necro’s main line of defence then yes, I’d want to stack it up at the start of a mono then start running through.