Items
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Head
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Shoulders
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Amulet
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Torso
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Wrists
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Hands
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Waist
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Legs
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Feet
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Rings
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Weapon
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Offhand
Kanai's Cube
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Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang
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Grasps of Essence
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Ring of Royal Grandeur
Hi all, hope you're enjoying the Necomancer beta.
Fair warning, I am not a pro player, just someone who's been playing D3 since launch and Necro beta since the first round of invites. With this build, I've cleared GR 77 -- I'm sure in better hands or with some minor adjustments, it could go higher. Let's get into it.
SKILLS:
Decrepify: I use this to activate the Dayntee's bonus and for general defensiveness. I like using the Borrowed Time rune and getting a big stack before I use Land of the Dead, but if you prefer another rune, go for it. There's flexibility here.
Bone Armor: Dislocation is pretty much mandatory for this build and coordinating your bursts by utilizing the Krysbin's bonus. It's super useful to have a guaranteed crowd control every ~10 seconds to blow up some supercharged corpses.
Corpse Explosion: The Tsar Bomba. The big one. Hide under your desks. By stacking the Inarius damage increase with the Grasps of Essence bonus, the Johnstone bonus, the Krysbin bonus, and the Corroded Fang bonus, this hits with 100 megatons of blasting power.
Devour: This is basically just here to help stack your Johnstone stacks while in Land of the Dead. I use the Cannibalize rune because it makes you significantly more durable during your LotD stack phase.
Command Golem: This big guy is the engine that keeps your Corpse Explosions humming. By using the Moribund Gauntlets, your golem is dropping a corpse at his location every second. You can do the Scrooge McDuck dive/swim through corpses if you so choose. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's an option. I personally like the Flesh Golem rune because when he wanders off, you can command him back to your location and he'll drop you a pile of fresh corpses. I think you can make an argument for the hard CC of Ice Golem or Bone Golem, but you already have an on-demand stun on Bone Armor, so it seems a little superfluous to me.
Land of the Dead: Use on cooldown to generate Johnstone stacks. You'll do less damage while in Land of the Dead because of Johnstone's mechanics, so it's not really a DPS cooldown in and of itself, but it's necessary to make the build work. Rune selection is not great here. You can go with Frozen Lands for more Krysbin procs or Plaguelands for the damage, although I've read reports that the damage on Plaguelands is bugged right now, so your mileage may vary.
CUBE:
Weapon: Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang is probably your best option here. It's a flat 200 percent increase on anything you curse, and since you're not using essence for damage otherwise, you can curse all the things. If you'd rather go sword and board, you can wear Trag'Oul's with a Lidless Wall for the additional poison damage and crit and cube Reilena's Shadowhook instead. My thinking is that the bonus on Reilena's is flat and therefore better to wear than to cube, and also that using a 2h will generally produce better numbers for your Corpse Explosions.
Armor: Grasps of Essence are, in my opinion, required here. You can cube either the Grasps or the Moribund Gauntlets, but again, the legendary affix on Moribund is flat, so it's easier to find a good set.
Jewelry: The three rings you'll want are Krysbin's Sentence, Ring of Royal Grandeur, and Unity (for solo) in whatever configuration you choose. If you want to live dangerously, you can forego the Unity in favor of a Convention of Elements for more burst damage. For a group play defensive bonus, you can cube/use a Wisdom of Kalan or Lornelle's Sunstone for additional mitigation.
ITEMS:
Armor: You'll want Inarius pieces at all slots except gloves, where you'll want the better of Grasps of Essence or Moribund Gauntlets. Not a lot of room for alternatives here. Corpse Explosion damage is available on chest and shoulders (it's not an option yet, so I listed Corpse Spiders damage in the priorities as a stand-in). I'm not having any issues with Johnstone stack uptime at 27 percent CDR, but I could see a build potentially stacking heavy CDR and dropping Devour in place of something else.
Jewelry: Not much in the way of options here. Johnstone is mandatory and ring choices are listed above.
Weapons: Weapon optimization is pretty standard. This build doesn't require anything special in terms of stats, so I'd probably look for percent damage, int, and area damage on your main hand/two-hand.
Gems: Diamond in helm, topaz or rubies in chest and legs depending on whether you're looking for offense or defense, and emerald in weapon, of course. I took Bane of the Trapped because this build applies crowd controls constantly, Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard because Inarius doesn't really have a lot of recovery, and the third gem is flexible. I've been using Mirinae, but Stricken and Powerful are good options too. Use what feels right to you.
Paragon Priorities
Core
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Movement Speed
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Maximum Resource
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Primary Stat
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Vitality
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Offense
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Cooldown Reduction
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Critical Hit Damage
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Critical Hit Chance
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Attack Speed
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Defense
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Resist All
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Armor
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Life
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Life Regeneration
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Utility
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Area Damage
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Life on Hit
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Resource Cost Reduction
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Gold Find
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Build Guide
The playstyle for this build is fairly simple. You'll want to, as soon as possible, use Land of the Dead and spam Corpse Explosion and Devour for the duration. This should put you somewhere in the neighborhood of the cap of 200 Johnstone stacks. While Land of the Dead is on cooldown, just throw down curses on everything that moves and run around, build and maintain your Bone Armor and Grasps of Essence stacks, and blow everything up until it stops moving.
Most of the complexity in this build lies in golem control. Because your golem is providing the bulk of your explodable corpses, you either need to stick with him or use his active ability to force him to where you want him to go. Veteran witch doctors will be familiar with this management due to Gargantuan AI. You'll get a feel for when to reposition the golem as you get more comfortable.
You can also use the golem in burst combos with your Bone Armor stun. If you come across an elite pack, you can throw him into the middle of the elites, use your Bone Armor, and while the stun is still active, fire off a couple of Corpse Explosions. With non-optimized gear, I'm seeing 600b crits on targets affected by hard CC *per exploded corpse.* Standard crits run somewhere around 200b.
This basic setup also works with the Blood set and the life-spending Corpse Explosion rune. For a more single-target oriented build, you can swap Grasps of Essence for Corpsewhisper Pauldrons and Corpse Explosion for Corpse Lance. The principles are the same. I've found Lance builds to be a little slow for solo clears, but you can pump out an obscene amount of damage on a single target, which could be valuable for group play.
That's all I have. Good luck and have fun out there.
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Posted Jun 30, 2017Sure. I still have a few pieces to put together on live, but I'll post one when I have the full set together.