I’m having trouble finding a good subclass synergy for a 2h melee Necromancer; as well as difficulty suiting the Cold/Vit combination on Bone Harvest.
Reaper not cutting it?
Yeah but in endgame reaper is fully supported by the deathguard set that force you to go for acid damage instead of cold/vit… Or perhaps you have some ideas of items/set that could support a cold/vitality focus in endgame?
2H reaper works great. not seeing why the existence of a DW-based set for a gimmick endgame build somehow invalidates 2H reaper builds.
i mean, i never got the full deathmarked set in the vanilla game and yet i had multiple different nightblade builds that finshed ultimate and got to max level.
There is Soulrend that boosts both cold and vitality I think, though it’s mainly cold, that’s good for reaper, but it will be outperformed by spellbreaker.
i’m trying to run a 2h vit ritualist right now. works fine so far, nowhere close the endgame yet though.
lots of rr and with the new wildblood crusher your weapondmg is vitdmg aswell.
This is what I am working off of right now, not claiming it optimal or anything:
http://www.grimtools.com/calc/q2MgWzZm
haven’t done it in elite ultimate but its destroying Veteran (i.e. he is in greens you can get reasonable two hander phys to vit conversion fairly early) better than any build I have previously used, including good builds taken off this forum.
First off throw the whole bone harvest optimizing idea out the window. Just focues on minimal bone harvest and hitting really hard instead. This mean you go pure Vit. The transmuter is not really worth it, Vit is alway better for a Necro than cold and necro has no real synergy with cold even though it can transmute it on two skills. No bonsues no debuff res, both of which necro has for Vit. The transmuter is only non-detrimnetal in certain extremely narrow cases.
Second off devouring earth is FAR FAR FAR better than bone harvest. Not only is it very good AOE it is also excellent single target damage when you place it directly under something’s feet and finally it is probably the best Devotion procer in the game so putting a low recharge devotion on it like twin fangs works excellent. It is pure vitality damage off the bat, the posion/acid parts are very minimal, it hit with multiple fragment and has a longer duration than recharge this makes its usage mechanics far better than bone harvest. You can always have it up and after the 3 seconds it will do as much or more damage than bone harvest (depending on fragment hits) and in addition it can have a massive damage debuff.
You can still use bone harvest at its base level, maxing it out would do roughly double the weapon damage, but having those points in Ravenous earth instead is far better. Basically 50% more damage (since you have have like 140% weapon damage on base bone harvest). By hitting extremely hard with your basica attack and having it be all Vit anyway and having a massive -Res you its still ectremely useful for its AOE and taking the transmuter is actually counter productive. This is also useful since it will be one more AOE life drain.
There are other variation on this such as making room for Blight Fiend for its DA debuff (about equal to flashbang) or whatever.
I didn’t realize it at first but Ravenous Earth, while not spammable, is incredibly strong.
I am not sure if this build has enough defense for highest level crucible, it does have a ton of life drain and can wind up with decent DA, kinda lowish armor though. We will see. Probably someone else can tweak it up some.
here’s my 2H reaper:
http://www.grimtools.com/calc/p25W6WxZ
currently about halfway through elite (just arrived at fort icon). worked all right with selffound greens and yellows all the way through veteran. gave him some legs from the stash to speed up elite. basically, he’s pretty much flying through the content right now.
So i’m assuming your main attack is ABB? than default weapon swings inbetween casts? I see you’re scaling vit and cold; would it be better or end game to focus on like one or the other?
right now, that build doesn’t even have a proper main attack. if anything, i guess bone harvest will be the main attack (it’s propably the only attack that i will max eventually). i packed a few +skill items so i currently have +4 to all NB and +2 to all necro skills, which helps a lot with a build that is somewhat spread out over many different skills. SS, ABB, RoS and BH all hit fairly hard.
it’s a work in progress. i guess cold would make sense as the main damage type, but the build also has a decent chunk of acid/poison and vitality/decay in it and some aether, too. the weapon isn’t ideal - it’s pretty strong, but it has acid as base damage. a similar weapon with focus on cold (soulrend for example) would probably give me more damage overall.
for now, i picked some devotions that boost all of those things. i also simply wanted to try some of the new devotions to get a feel for it. the stats are pretty straightforward, but you have to use the devotion powers for a while to understand if they make sense.
might drop rattosh in favor of leviathan ultimately (don’t think i can squeeze leviathan in with the remaining points i haven’t unlocked yet).