YouTube Build Guide + Gameplay : Skeletal Mage Sacrifice Necromancer, 300+ Corruption, Last Epoch Build Guide Patch 8.3 - YouTube
Timestamps :
00:00 - Intro
03:39 - Skill Rotation
04:34 - Skeletal Mages
06:23 - Summon Skeletons
08:15 - Dread Shade
09:15 - Bone Curse + Aura of Decay
10:49 - Passive Tree
14:14 - Gearing
Build Summary :
Hello, this is Dr3ad from Epoch Builds, and in today’s forum topic we will go over Skeletal Mage Sacrifice Necromancer, the official replacement of Projectile Necromancer as I had to retire it until the future.
So about a year ago now, one of the best performing build guides on the channel (in terms of overall reception from the community) Projectile Necromancer, was made. Sadly due to changes and the huge Dread Shade nerfs recently, it makes it almost impossible to make Projectile Necro push past 200+ corruption without insane amounts of gear. This makes it so there is a void there where it was, a good skeleton build. But that’s where Skeletal Mage Sacrifice fits in. This archetype has been around for a long time, about as long as I’ve been playing the game. I think it was Ottsor who was the first one to play it back when ward was good, but ward isn’t really good anymore so it was sleeper for a long time. But now that Projectile Necro went the way of the dodo, it makes room for new stuff.
If you did not know, inside Skeletal Mage’s tree, there is a node that allows it to cast sacrifice on a friendly skeleton warrior or rogue. This is where all of our damage and clear comes from. Its a base version of sacrifice, but the beautiful thing about it is it has a 40 base phys, and has 200% added damage effectiveness. which means scaling flat minion damage is a very strong way of scaling your damage. And since a large majority of your flat damage is physical (thanks to an ivory mask which gives us 15 adaptive which then gets doubled) We also get flat from a lot of other places as well, but definitely the flat phys is carrying hard with all the free armor shred we get as an Necromancer.
We also get access to Bone Curse, which when applied to our minions is giving them 50% more phys damage, which is absolutely nuts for us. Then of course we can use a singular dread shade setup, as since Mages are so tanky the 100% increased damage taken isn’t too much of an issue.
The skeleton loop with the mana is also very strong, giving us an infinite well of mana to do whatever we want. It gives us a lot of single target potential, as just holding right click the skeletal mages can just keep casting sacrifice for us. And since each little sacrifice is an explosion with actual AoE, it means our clear is a lot better overall than other minion builds.
We also get the luxury of running a Deathrattle, which gives us 30 flat HP per time a minion dies, which is very good for us since we are looping through so many. This also on top of the 100% minion crit multi brings our dps much higher than what the projectile necromancer could ever achive.
All in all, I am very proud to showcase this, as even through some of the worse nerfs we’ve ever seen for necromancer, I can still find plenty of builds rising to the top in terms of corruption pushing. Can’t wait to work on the next necro.
Leveling Guide :
1-16 : Necromancer, Level 16 (LE Beta 0.8.3e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
Sadly due to the nerfs of Wandering Spirit your early game leveling is going to feel much worse than normal, but if you can get to level 16 and bear with it, your leveling then gets way easier. We use Skeleton Archer’s for damage and have rip blood in the back slot preparing for when we swap to zombies at 16.
16-40 : Necromancer, Level 40 (LE Beta 0.8.3e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
Now that you can setup zombies, now the pain train starts. You can summon the other random minions at your disposal, whatever you want between mages, skeletons or Golem, but all of your single target and clear does come from Zombies. They literally will carry you from the moment you put them on till level 50-ish. Use rip blood on a boss or trash to gain mana back, as that means you can spam more zombies easier. After you finish Tomb of Moridatus and finish all your side quests, you should be able to swap to skellie sacrifice and start respecing.