I tried a few different devotion paths to eke out more DA/Energy regen, but they all wound up about equal in practice. I went with the one that was most convenient for me resist-wise.
Grimtools didn’t seem to match my in game stats a few places but oh well, close enough.
I kind of doubt that DPS total from my screenshot (was just standing in town with permanent buffs turned on), that just seems like a little much. Basically just a dead-simple caster that focuses on Necromancer abilities instead of being an aether Arcanist using the Necro for support…been there, done that, wanted to look at different skill animations lol.
Game play consists of holding down right-mouse for Drain Essence and occasionally stopping to pop Ravenous Earth. If something manages to out damage Drain Essence healing use MoE. Biggest downside is Drain Essence only really comes into its own with the Uroboruuk set and the Hex Launcher for the skill buffs. I leveled this mostly as a summoner and Bone Harvest.
If not playing hardcore, I would 100% replace Mark of Divinity with something else.
And thanks to everyone for helping to tweak the gear/skills/devotions
Can you do the gods Mogdrogen and Ravager with this build? I am currently trying to build a necromancer godslayer build, so far with little success. I tried minions first but even under the best circumstances they just die faster than you can respawn them and eventually you are overwhelmed. I wanted to try a heavy life drain build either centered around essence drain with arcanist or reaping strike + harbinger with nighblade as support next.
My theory: with enough gear and resist penetration you should be able to get Mogdrogen/Ravager down to sufficiently low resis to life leech about 8k hps, at which point you just need to avoid getting onesho, which should also be possible.
You could in theory ( I haven’t tried—made this to be a nearly immortal hardcore farmer, I’m a lil skurred to make the attempt lol) but I’m fairly sure you’ll run into energy issues with those 2. You’ll eventually have to stop casting DE and kite to regen energy, being pretty vulnerable doing so. I facetanked mad queen with no issues if that’s still any kind of metric, but she dies fairly quickly too.
It would need gear/devotion tweaking to try and keep DE going 100%’of the time for me to really want to try.
Hmm, I hadn’t considered energy that much, thought since this costs less than half of AAR that you could prolly just spam it entirely with some ecotoplasms, owl 2 point and energy potions. Now I’m not so sure any more. Idd I see you have pretty much 0 MS and couldn’t even briefly disengage during mirror. Bummer.
Changing the boots at least would be workable and maybe try ones that proc “oh shit” run away skills. Energy regen is a pain, everything else dies so fast it was a non issue for me so I didn’t even bother trying to get it higher. You’re kind of limited gear wise since changing the set pieces could tank DE damage. In soft core at least you can try a different medal as Mark of Divinity isn’t as clutch.
As it is DE can be sustained a decent amount of time, but on hardcore not having a guarantee that I can keep it up as long I need it is bad news in that situation. I could try when I get home from work and alt-f4 like a lame ass if things go bad :/.
A couple of things I can think of that you could test:
1 Your skills have no weapon damage, so dropping points from fabric of reality to get more on IEE will help with mana regen a lot, hurting you dps only marginally from slightly lower %aether which is already at 2170% (would be something like a 5% damage loss total?)
2 You could drop the Toad constellation, again with an even minor damage loss than fabric of reality, and go for a few points on Targo for some extra armor and health and DA, or even Harvestsman’s Scythe for the health and energy regen (probably not needed with more points in IEE, and you already regen health from skills).
These two options could improve energy sustain and overall survivability, since your only real risks are getting oneshot from high crits and not having enough energy to lifesteal though skills.
Edit: also consider Wayward souls instead of giant’s blood: it’s a little less healing, but on a shorter cooldown and with extra DA on proc. It would also give some extra points you could use to move from Lion to Tortoise for even more tankiness.
Edit 2: going wolverine will yield around 200 more DA with around 500 less HP, Targo will give 100 DA, 500 more HP and 100 more armor.
Taking down one point fabric of reality will allow you to cap IEE, going from 120 to 130 energy regen. Dropping one point on Targo for Harvestman’s scythe first node will lose you 20 DA, 300-400 HP and bump your energy regen to 140 (this is compared to the Targo setup with IEE maxed, the previous comparisons were with your original setup).
Also, if you use ravenous earth mostly for the resist reduction, you could take away a few points off from the main skill and put them in mark of torment for an extra “oh shit” button. One point will be enough to put it at 6/10, beyond that point it doesn’t scale as well, but survivability is still very important.
I’ve actually done the math, and so long as one substitutes Reaping with eternity and gets 2 points in owl you can get to 44% skill cost reduction with a 250 energy per sec cost on drain life, so you have 140 energy cost per second, multiplyed by your cast speed. At the same time you have about 120 base energy regen per second with buffs on, which you can get to 135 with more ectoplasms, and another 90 from spamming spirit potions, leaving you at a total 225 energy regen per sec.
So it is actually possible to spam cast the drain so long as you switch out a few devs, components and maybe drop some cast speed, considering one usally has some small amount of downtime anyway you will propably be fine with any cast speed.
Edit: Indeed I forgott about IEE, which can also serve as an energy tool. I think I’m actually gonna try this since this build looks very promising in terms of surviveability and sustain.
Shaman would work fine, but most of my damage is aether via gear altering Drain Essence . I prefer almost all my builds to use either arcanist or soldier on hardcore…circuit breakers and damage immunity are worth 10x as much.
It nets you more OA/DA/Health/Armor Absorption/Maxed Stun resist. Removes Manticore since it doesn’t stack with the debuff from Foul Eruption. You gain Wendigo’s Mark, Wayword Soul, Arcane Bomb and Arcane Barrier while keeping Giant’s Blood and Will of Rattosh. You also debuff enemy damage by 25% with capped Decay as well.
Seems like a pretty good setup, but won’t work so well with Drain Essence until you get the set at level 94…
You need more cunning for the gun, or find a good substitute. For the rest it seems to work pretty well. I would personally prefer to drop a the elemental damage constellations for more DA and resistance. Like dropping quill and crab and take throne (which caps chaos res) and 4 point into wolverine, that’s a 200ish DA increase at the price of 500ish health, which shouldn’t be too crucial for survival since you’ll still be above 14k.
Forgot about the cunning requirement! Changed that and I had already swapped out the Quill and Toad devotions for Behemoth. Arcane Barrier from the Crab devotion is underrated and probably could be better than the added DA. We’ll see from testing!
Thanks for pointing out the lack of Cunning for the gun.
Heres the updated build based on everyone’s suggestions. Spamming spirit elixers gives 100% Drain Essence uptime with the few gear/devotion tweaks, as well as netting me quite a bit more DA and a touch more OA via changing gloves (which buff Drain Essence a further 743 vitality damage and +2 skill, resulting in higher dps than before and letting me move more points into IEE).
I’m leveling as pure necro atm since I can’t decide the route to follow.
Shaman was in my mind the better idea but your build seems way more sustainable in the long run…
I’m a bit afraid to commit to arcanist at that point w/o any items.
Shall I ?
