How much power Master’s spellblade gives to this build after the nerf??
Another announcement: the final planned section of the guide has been posted, so the guide is now officially content-complete. Next up: development for V2.0 of the build. I’m fairly certain there’ll be enough changes to justify being a V2.0 instead of a V1.1.
The newly-posted Pet Devotions section of the guide has recommended T1 and T2 devotions for all pet builds - I’d definitely start with those if you’re not using Widow and lightning conversion.
The main gear you need for lightning conversion is simply the Stormbringer of Malmouth, which can be easily crafted once you have high enough reputation with Malmouth Resistance. Using Arcane Bomb is worth it even if all you have is the Stormbringer.
Grimtool simply reports the average roll, which is incorrectly reported for this item. (Post-nerf average roll is -30 RR.) In the guide, I suggest re-rolling until obtaining at least -33 RR or higher. As Ceveth mentioned, the highest possible roll is currently -37 RR.
That actually looks pretty good considering the double overcap, although clearly the skill points are showing lots of signs of being spread too thin. The question would then become whether reaching max overcap for WotC was worth all the sacrifices that had to be made.
For Clairvoyant’s Hat, I think it’d realistically be a requirement to replace it with something else that also has CDR, considering how reliant we are upon fast resummoning to maintain skeletons.
Most other builds use the Overlord’s but I like the Bonescavengers for the extra pets and to overcap Raise Skeleton. It really depends on how important WotC is to the final build. One thing I’ll note: bound spirits from Bonescavengers do a lot of vitality damage, which is used very effectively via conversion by our build. I think this decision is, like the relic decision, very dependent on what the final build looks like it needs the most.
As for the “of Kings”, keep in mind that the suffix also provides a pretty hefty +% damage and +% speed proc, and that stun resistance can be annoying to find. I don’t find the other bonuses on the armor-only version of Caged Souls to be nearly as useful, except for the skill bonus obviously.
The nerf costs the build 12 RR (from 49 max to 37 max on spellblade), but the new max on spellblade is still 9 RR higher than Manticore (28 RR).
Any merit to the Hysteria relic instead of Guile at 25? Or is the flat damage aura too good for that many skellies?
Concerning the step for lev 21. I would have thought it would be better to have one Enchant flint and one Vicious spikes ( empowered impaling weapons).
Spikes to ramp up the damage of the archer skeles ?
So… any way to incorporate this instead of Master’s Spellblade?
http://www.grimtools.com/db/items/9465
Not sure if there is a way to make the 1/5 chance to proc work for this kind of build though. If there is, that thing is freaking insane in that it’s both flat reduction AND % target resists reduction. Aaand it has some of that CDR.
Shame the ring slots are taken up as well.
There are a lot of rings that provide that particular stat that would work well with Bone Harvest’s application.
*Oh, right, Viper and lightning conversion. So this build doesn’t need any of those lesser shreds.
For this build (and necromancer builds in general), flat damage will increase DPS more than an additional pet at lower levels, especially given the relative low base damage of pets early on and the shortage of flat damage bonuses at lower levels.
Archers don’t actually inflict much piercing damage. From the Necromancer Abilities guide:
[/li]
You can see that their default attack is actually physical/vitality just like warriors and revenants, and they only cast their piercing Deathbolt once per 3s or so.
On the other hand, Enchanted Flint is superior because:[ul]
[li]Arcanists inflict 100% fire damage, and Enchant Flint significantly improves that damage, especially at lower levels and damage multipliers.[/ul][ul][/li]
[li]Enchanted Flint not only adds flat fire damage, but also flat burn damage to all pets. Even though pet DOTs aren’t displayed, stacking burn DOTs using so many different pets produces significant DPS against bosses.[/ul][/li]
Not for this build as is - Bone Harvest is our method of applying RR, and with Mindwarp’s 20% chance of applying RR and RR duration of 5s, we’d need to reduce Bone Harvest CD down to less than 1s before Mindwarp becomes feasible. It’s strictly designed to be a melee RR weapon. I wrote about this elsewhere:
what do you think of this as a replacement for the spellblade?
How integral has Behemoth been for your sustain?
There’s a pretty sizable difference between up to 37 flat RR and 18 flat RR. As a comparison, Manticore is 28 flat RR.
Giant’s Blood is far more useful in this build than most because it’s running very consistently thanks to TD resets (and ensures that we have a large positive regen of 400+ despite Hungering Void). If you look at the active buffs in Gladiator video, you can see that I have 3 devotion procs (Shepherd’s Call, Hungering Void, and Giant’s Blood) active the vast majority of the time, which helps provide the build with its balance of DPS and survivability.
[QUOTE=DaShiv;580192]There’s a pretty sizable difference between up to 37 flat RR and 18 flat RR. As a comparison, Manticore is 28 flat RR.
thx for the reply, but that is not what i meant…
i wanted to know how thevale piercer is doing i an whole as a replacement.
i know it gives us less RR, but in exchange we get vitality damage for our char and all damage / attack speed for our pets, we get 1 additional skeleton and +3 to will of the crypt ( maybe negligible)
so waht is your oppinion on that?
If you’re asking specifically about the Valepiercer, whether mathematically the additional skeleton and other bonuses make up for the lost RR, then it’s a pretty resounding no. Keep in mind that the hellhound can only debuff one enemy at a time compared to the AOE debuffing via Bone Harvest.
If you’re asking on a more general level - about whether the spellblade can be replaced at all - then I think it’s a maybe. It certainly would’ve been a hard “no” pre-nerf.
I thought TD didn’t affect devotion skills?
TD certainly does iirc.
I put together a quick reference chart for CDR:
TD falls into the “CDR Reset” category and Giant’s Blood falls into the “Active Devotions” category, so TD affects Giant’s Blood.
EDIT: Updated chart, see posts below.
The last time I did some testing for TD, it worked for Active Item Skills (manually activated Granted Skills assignable to a hotkey) but not for any devotion skills. Because if it did affect devotion skills, then TD could affect itself. :rolleyes: Guess I’ll go test again…
If the skill cooldowns were set after all skill effects have been been fired (i.e. as the final step of the process), then TD would not reset its own CD. It’s pretty easy to verify that TD does indeed reset other active devotions just by looking at devotion uptimes.
My understanding is that item cooldowns were specifically made never to be affected by any CDR for balance reasons, but I’d certainly be very interested to find out otherwise.
EDIT: Just looked closely at the purple Sovereign icon in my quickbar during the Gladiator video and it does indeed look like active item skills are being reset by TD. Nifty! It’s obvious that they’re not affected by traditional CDR, but perhaps they’re also affected by CDR Chance.
Yup, it looks like we’re both right and wrong! 
I did some testing with Dryad’s Blessing to confirm that TD does affect devotions skills except itself of course.
For me this changes everything (again; the first time was when Superfluff informed me that it affected active item skills) and I’m not going to complain too much about the unannounced nerf to TD from 15 seconds base cooldown to 16 seconds.
Our main goal is still reaching an high as possible lvl on the summon skeleton skill because it is our biggest damage source even after the nerfs? Right?
Updated the imputed DPS for the Mad Queen video today: the previous Monster DB value of 6.7M MQ health had erroneously included the 4-player scaling bonuses. Monster DB has since been updated with single player MQ having health of 4.9M, resulting in an imputed DPS of 960k for our 5.1s MQ kill.
Yes - for the current build, reaching 26/16 Raise Skeletons is still the single largest boost in DPS.
Very detailed guide ever !
We can make a book with this.
Special GD Pets Book from DaShiv.
Crate should make a Special Myhtical Off-Hand Caster with that book 