Hello all, first time posting as I would like some advice regarding my first HC SSF character.
It is a Necromancer (single mastery still) and I have tried to figure it out as I go.
I have just entered Elite difficulty and my resistances seem okay so far.
I have two main questions:
What should I choose for the second class? I’m not sure if I want to go occultist as it has even more pets to manage. I feel like I need something to keep me alive. I played normal vet for act 1-4 and then I did act 7 in normal. Nearly died to Korvaak in 3rd phase.
Am I doing this damage conversion thing correctly? I found this double rare weapon “Korvaak’s Burning Blade” which has this damage conversion for pets from phys/vit to fire. I understand that you dont want to go over 100% on conversions. So if I find any other items that convert from one thing to another I should avoid it right?
Would really appreciate any feedback on things I should change in terms of skills/gear/devotions and also recommendations on certain blue items I can look out for or any MI’s I can farm.
Screenshot in game (showing the actual resistances):
Necro is very bad at healing pets which will become an issue on higher difficulty,
so you need shaman or occultist for that. you don’t need their pets if you don’t want them, you need blood of dreeg or wendigo totems.
also with korvaak burning blade you want a class with -% elem resist debuff skill, so you want curse of frailty or wind devils
I wouldn’t recommend a pet build in hardcore. Death is permanent so you need to build tank/resistances for yourself, but you also need to get bonus to all pets devotions (and items) with % damage, which doesn’t really work. The necro skeletons also die very easily later in the game (past level 50/55 they die instantly) so you need to get devotions and items with bonus to pets % resistances and health.
On top of that, you don’t have enough skill points for both pets and yourself. You need to aim for 26/16 summon skeletons, 12 in undead legion, 10 in call of the grave, 16 in blight fiend, 12 in rotting fumes, 12 in blight burst, but also 10 in blood of dreeg, 10 in bonds of bysmiel, 10 in manipulation. You just won’t have enough points.
I recommend you go Reaper or Death Knight as there are a bunch of builds online that have high survivability and damage.
In general, for 2nd class pet build necro, you want occultist as it has a lot of pet bonuses (curse of frailty, heal with medium cooldown, 2 damage auras, 2 pet bonus skills with massive bonuses, and very high damage pet abilities). If you go shaman, you will end up with more survivability for youself though.
yes it does, it has no controlled healing, no circuitbreakers, low base health regen, no pet aggro, it is all offense, this builds want to kill everything before it becomes a problem, which is not safe for hardcore
also it isn’t even a burning blade build, so even for damage it doesn’t match
Thanks for the replies. I have already found that the skeletons were dying a lot more and was getting by just constantly resummoning them but now I understand the problem.
I guess I could go with occultist and see how far it takes me. Maybe I could get it to kill Kreig and get the saviors merit at least.
If I go down this route is it maybe better not to use the korvaaks burning blade and not worry about damage conversions and focus on a different weapon/damage type?
Otherwise I could respec into a deathknight or similar and build it differently as a non pet build.
not sure what you are worried about, the korvaak burning blade actually simplifies things since it will 100% convert to fire and you don’t need any more items for that, otherwise you need to consider converting skeletons to vitality.
also occultist supports fire dmg very well, ideally you can remove blightfiend and replace with hellhound, so the build will be skeletons for damage + hellhound for tanking/aggro,
also rhowan’s crown is better than manticore with elemental build
you can put some points in wolverine to get more resistance on your pets + poison resist from blood of dreeg should fix most of your health issues.
I have used many of Maya’s builds in HC. Obviously the builds she has in GT are all end game min-maxed builds but they are good as a general blueprint for leveling too. There are many faction items or MIs that suffice nicely while farming for the end game set up.
Thanks so much. I was staring at the skill point allocation thinking what I should remove to include the occultist and you’ve just made that very easy.
I have respeced to your guideline now.
Where should I put my next skill points as I level up?
Any more tips on which devotions I should work on next?
I tried like 3 diff HC runs with a blademaster, blitz soldier, and then finally with a pet conjurer (using mayas build: ). I just used her guide to level them and used w/e pet stuff along the way. I can concentrate on dodging everything while the pets put in work. I’m going to jinx myself and die, I debated posting this lol, but so far so good. I’m at L100 on ult doing AoM atm. If all else fails try maya’s pet build guide. GL.
you are either going green+blue or green+purple right now, so for tier 3 devotion probably eye of korvaak or mogdrogen are your best options, most of your resistance went up, but chaos went down on skellies, (dog has 30% innate chaos), so overall you can mainly focus on getting more damage and some chaos/aether resist,
mogdrogen combines well with empty throne to fix those issues or alternatively eye of korvaak with staff of rattosh and ulo, also
for skillpoints you still have curse of frailty to fill out, and you can go to 50 on occultist for manipulation and some %DR on yourself from possession
There is no such thing as “Hardcore” build.
You can build tanky or prioritize damage, sure. But anything that works for softcore will work on hardcore since no one is going to make builds that can barely survive just because death is not permanent in softcore.
It is a MayaTM build, I have yet to make anything that is not defensive/lazy focused.
It is not an all offence, want to kill everything setup by any stretch. You just stand back and watch bosses dance around, getting their AI bugged by skeletons and then die.
considering the amount of HC players’ build deaths, either you’re saying no one has yet to make an actual good HC build, or being a bit hyperbolic with the “never” part
And i find it stranger still the arbitrary set of requirement you put forth as demanded or necessary for HC, when loads of HC builds or “HC approved” builds don’t feature such, ie you’re being entirely subjective on what constitute a HC build
The mistake might then be from also simply never having played some/“all” of Maya’s builds? - because, atleast for my experience’s part, you’d understand what being said re defences and being enough for HC etc
yes, it’s called aether cluster, we have that on SC too
you are correct I was being hyperbolic, it was a way of expressing the small but important difference in mindset when playing HC vs SC
also the list of features I proposed for HC builds was not meant as a list of ‘requirements’ that all need to be met
but (in my subjective opinion, based on my piloting skills) the endgame state of the linked build does not propose enough defense systems when it is translated to a midgame HC SSF state where the player will still have many gaps in its gear quality.