Finally got this to work smoothly, The Korvaak burning blade defiler meme, no doubt this was exactly what the developer intended with this weapon.
Important Notice: There is absolutely no other point to this build than creating the most ridiculous amount of fire particles on screen ever!
You must use spam BWC at all time, otherwise you are not properly committed to this!
Do not max out skeletons entirely since, you want to spawn mages primarily, not the strongest skeletons. when you have a good amount of mages shower your enemies with flares and meteors, before activating your mortar barrage, then spam cocktails on the whole bunch, make sure to play drunk and use very poor targeting, you want to light up the entire bossroom, so don’t forget the empty corners! If you are a streamer you want to make this look as epic as possible on camera, doing damage is secondary. Once in a while drop a cocktail on your own head to confuse your enemies, but you don’t want to look like a clown by dying, so the build is hardcore viable.
SR70 is really easy actually, but I’m a terrible at kiting, a good kiter can do SR75 with this, in SR70 you don’t need to kite much
I actually finished SR75 almost with Grava down to 20%, but I wasn’t going to enjoy repeating it.
This build works best with 9 skeletons all summoned simultaneous, I tried wendigo gaze = 11 skeletons, didn’t work, physical mortar trap was useless and spam BWC is too weak in SR without some really good mortar dmg. make sure to get 2 mortars by going over the softcap.
Hybrid meme fire skeletons defiler doing deathless SR70. How broken are pets again?
Interesting devotion route. Korvaak is not very meta in pure pet builds, but I guess it is quite good for hybrid builds.
Also gear looks pretty reasonable to obtain SSF. How long did it take to farm all those Caged Souls rares? I guess @RektbyProtoss was not wrong in assuming that fire skeletons defiler would be a good starter build for beginners.
I have to admit that I was expecting a video to illustrate the guide to maximize the amount of fire particles on screen. I had fun with your description though.
@Evil_Baka: good point, love the deep investigation in skeletology, swapping one …untamed
for …caged souls can get it to 25 but 26 is going to be hard.
@dumb_eboy: this was a theorycraft with lots of retries to get it right, many failures,
however I have leveled in hardcore to 100 the kymon kennelmaster build with mostly the same items, for rarity I use now the same logic for all my builds single rare MIs and only double rare common redeemer. If the player just likes to play the campaign a lot of affix strength can be dropped compared to Sr70-75, so it wouldn’t be very hard from that perspective. I’m pretty sure builds like these are impossible to make with purple items.
Suggesting any Defiler as starting build is a bad idea.
Going in hybrid territory is always risky, I like OP’s idea of fire Defiler but certainly these types of builds are reserved for players with more experience and gear.
You are almost convincing me to do a ssf fire skeletons defiler just to see how far I could push it.
I agree with you, however, that defiler is far from ideal for pets and any class that involves 2 pet masteries would be superior. My point was regarding the discussion on the beginner build guides compendium from @Ulvar1, where people noticed that the only classes that didn’t have a beginner guide were Sorcerer, Druid, Witch Hunter, and Defiler. Sorcerer, Druid, and Witch Hunter are very synergistic classes that just happened to not have a guide, but everyone was memeing on how ssf defiler is bad and there was no consensus on what would be the ideal budget build for it. That’s when @RektbyProtoss suggested fire skeletons, but the idea was taken as a meme (maybe rightfully so).
The idea behind my post was by no means to suggest such a non-synergestic class as Defiler as the go to pet mastery for a beginner. In fact, I agree with Nery that suggesting defiler for any starting build is probably a bad idea. I think that the point of a starting defiler build is more like, if for some unknown reason, a beginner decided that demolitionist and necromancer would be a good combination (maybe tried to copy an endgame build guide from the forum without having the gear), then he would have a beginner defiler build to fall back to, without having to reroll and start everything from scratch.
Yeah, I can see that working out, especially with the current buffed skeletons
But personally, at that point, it might be better to just solo Necro all the way to 94 while putting points in Demo just for the stats from the mastery bar
Necro is definitely the main mastery and you could level with solo Necro as you said. Do you level as vitality skeletons then? That physical damage converted to vitality damage from Master of Death really annoys me.
I am pretty inexperienced with pet buids, but Demo should become useful when you start using Korvaak’s Burning-Blade and switch to fire pets. At that point, flame touch and temper should be great to buff the flat damage from your skeletons. The RR from Thermite Mine and BWC also become quite important when playing fire pets. The thing that annoys me the most about this build is that Master of Death ruins your physical to fire conversion, so you are probably better off without an exclusive skill.
I came up with this sketch (with a lot of ideas taken from gargabolo’s and rekt’s fire skeletons build, and your budget necro from Carnival) for a budget fire skeletons defiler: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/gZwordbZ. Considering it has zero affixes on the MIs, it looks like a decent budget starter. I am just not sure how the damage/survivability will be since I am inexperienced with pet builds. Also not sure about my devotions. I took Bysmiel Bonds because I didn’t think another 3 green devotion and some extra points in Ulo would be worth it, but I might be wrong. I have two sources of flat RR (with the exact same value btw), which is also quite questionable.
How about Wyrmclaw? I run a necro / arcanist who drops OFF for massive fire RR then the fire skellies murder everything. It’s hilarious and I think the Wyrmclaw works well? But then again the bonuses to that book you use look great too for a sorceror
Wyrmclaw is one of those things that doesn’t look special or anything at first, but happens to be a “useful anywhere” kind of item. So definitely agree.
Since this is a hybrid pet build it, makes different choices than a defiler pet build, there are many variations possible some more hybrid than others, wyrmclaw, terrnox book etc.
I had not gotten to writing a leveling guide yet, but with the right approach most players will be able to do it.
this build can be leveled in normal early as physical build even following a similar concept. Physical isn’t great but it is good enough for normal difficulty. You need to stay in normal for a long time, this is not a build to move up quickly, you want lots of devotion points and a burning blade first, so that the transition to fire can be done properly. tree of Life will be very important on higher difficulty.
So you need to do at least the main campaign + large part of FG in normal, you get a devotion reset potion during the FG main quest which makes the transition cheaper.
Most demolitionist skills are physical and necromancer has physical RR in spectral wrath, so you start with shepherd’s crook, which gives purple, which is perfect since then you can get maul of the bear quickly. You can support the physical skeletons with temper, grenado and/or your weapon with firestrike.
The main issue with defiler for hardcore is no active heals, you can level as single-class vitality necromancer but siphon souls is not so great for hardcore anyway. For hardcore my plan for early game would be pistol+shield. Why? because my main attack will be grenado and the pistol keeps me away from my enemies, it will be a pistol with reduced resistances debuff on it, so that the gun shots boost the pet dmg while grenado is on cooldown and I don’t need to use BWC yet, saving the skillpoints. The shield will unlock various active and passive defenses elsewhere in the game such as the fortress relic.
Also on hardcore I wouldn’t use budget gear with low armor like in the sketch, heavy redeemer items with the right affixes are much better, best replacement for warding zantarin mantle of the wild would be warding heavy redeemer shoulders of the wild.
Lol i don’t get how it could be a difficult build … I have been playing virtually the same build and it’s the easiest thing to level … just get a few skellies and you’re good to go. Necro was my first ten levels then demo and then alternate from there. Just skellies and cocktails. Easiest gameplay ever. Everything just dies.
Thanks for sharing, in my experience getting all resistances worked out in ultimate is always the hardest part, but that applies to any build with pets.
Oh yes, always the hardest ! Just a question, did you try parts of the lost souls set for this build? I wonder if 3/4 of the set would make a difference … I am also toying with the idea of dual weilding the lost souls and burning blade so I can have the full Lost Souls set and burning blade, but it would mean no Zarthusallan book which would hobble the fire aspect.
I have not tried pieces of lost souls, but not sure why i would want to, the 3p bonus is vitality themed and the build has enough physical resist. I also happen to like this helmet more because it makes the gameplay much smoother if you summon many skeletons simultaneous.
Without zarthuzellan codex, spam BWC will be too weak in endgame and should be changed to transmuted BWC just for RR. This will make the build less hybrid if swapped for a pet item, more like a pure pet build with mortar support. Nothing wrong with that, in the end this is a style choice. I like to hit different themes with my builds, some are more focused on roleplaying or maximizing strength. For this build, fun gameplay with a comical tone was more important than getting the best SR rating.
