Items
-
Head
-
Shoulders
-
Amulet
-
Torso
-
Wrists
-
Hands
-
Waist
-
Legs
-
Feet
-
Rings
-
Weapon
-
Offhand
Kanai's Cube
-
Bloodtide Blade
-
Requiem Cereplate
-
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac
I've included a few other gear options for people to mess with. Until your gear is up to snuff for dealing with all the elites generated by Nemesis Bracers, Ancient Parthan Defenders are a good stand-in. If you have a good Hellfire but not a Wisdom of Kalan, then Dark Reaping and Fueled by Death are possible 5th passives. Cord of the Sherma is a decent defensive belt stand-in until you farm up a 2.6.1 Dayntee's. I listed Bone Ringer as the recommended Phylactery simply because it comes with Crit Chance as a fixed primary, but it's just a stat stick in the build so really any Phylactery with good rolls will work. If your damage really outscales the content, consider wielding Bloodtide Blade and cubing In-Geom.
An alternate take on the build is to use grouping effects like Ess of Johan and Brigg's Wrath. Brigg's Wrath is just fun with Aura of Frailty for an Ess effect, and the actual Ess does well with Death Nova, too. In either of these cases Strongarm Bracers become an attractive option, and if you are using actual Ess so does the Unstable Compound rune for Death Nova. There is insane synergy between Avarice Band, Aura of Frailty, and Brigg's Wrath, so another option is to use Boon of the Hoarder and Goldwrap in an Ess setup. This requires a lot sacrifices in the jewelry and gems, and is enough of a divergence from the posted gear that it should really just be a separate build, but I mention it here just because the ever-expanding Aura is a great way to pull spread out enemies into Nova range.
Gems are Diamond in head and Topaz everywhere else. Priority for primary affixes is generally Socket > Death Nova %, Poison %, Crit Stats > Area Damage, Cooldown Reduction > Intelligence > Defensive Stats. The phylactery doesn't need a socket, and depending on what flavor of the build you end up with you may want to assign higher priority to cooldown reduction.
I intended the build for T13 speed farm, but I've also taken it into harder GRs to test it out. It clears trash and elites in traffic super fast, but it gets hung up on tough lone elites and rift bosses. Bane of the Stricken is a good replacement for Bane of the Powerful in this case, but the biggest hurdle to harder content is resource stability. In 1v1 situations, Obsidian ring, Bloodtide Blade, and the general damage vs cost scaling of an AoE ability like Death Nova all plummet in efficiency. It may be possible to overcome this limitation with enough Cooldown Reduction to give near-permanent Land of the Dead uptime, but failing that I think the build just isn't cut out for really pushing GRs.
Paragon Priorities
Core
|
Movement Speed
|
|
Primary Stat
|
|
Maximum Resource
|
|
Vitality
|
Offense
|
Cooldown Reduction
|
|
Attack Speed
|
|
Critical Hit Chance
|
|
Critical Hit Damage
|
Defense
|
Armor
|
|
Life
|
|
Resist All
|
|
Life Regeneration
|
Utility
|
Area Damage
|
|
Life on Hit
|
|
Resource Cost Reduction
|
|
Gold Find
|
Pretty self-explanatory. The build likes Attack Speed but doesn't manage to fit much in the gear (just the fixed primary on Krysbin's sentence), so Paragon and Gogok attempt to make some of that up. I wouldn't invest in Max Resource unless you find yourself running out Essence before you generate enough corpses to Devour. Resource Cost Reduction certainly helps, and you might want it before Life on Hit depending on your current sustain.
Build Guide
If you ever wished your Blessed Hammer Crusader were actually a Necro, this is the build for you! I shelved this build a month ago for being underpowered, but improvements to Bloodtide Blade have made Death Nova a potentially devastating AoE farming tool. This may be viable to push GRs as well, but it struggles with Rift Guardians. Right now I can only present what I've tested, and it certainly works for GR60s and T13 groups.
In a large group of enemies, Obsidian Ring will refresh the cooldowns of Blood Rush and Bone Armor very quickly, so the basic playstyle of the build is to teleport around, stun a group of enemies, then burst them down and move on. Because Obsidian Ring refreshes those two skills so quickly, most of its ticks will hit the Land of the Dead cooldown, so this becomes almost spammable as well. Because of the regularly available stun from Bone Armor's Dislocation rune, Frozen Lands becomes almost redundant. I have shown the build with the Plaguelands rune for more Damage, but this is pretty flexible and can be tailored to suit individual playstyle. Invigoration doesn't help much because Devour is already free for the duration, but Shallow Graves and Land of Plenty are both potentially useful.
Because Bone Armor can be cast every couple seconds, the build can easily maintain 15 stacks for a good chunk of Damage Reduction. However, Scythe of the Cycle can just as easily deplete the remaining Bone Armor duration, resulting in the loss of all 15 charges. Make sure you keep spamming Bone Armor as much for the stun as the duration refresh.
Comments