The whole idea behind doing the class was sparked by a recent complaint about the necromancer not being able to really go melee/summoner and wanting to try something I thought would be absolutely nonviable ‘a life steal regenerator tank’.
Necromancer seems like such an obvious choice for life steal as most of the time it’s saddled with vitality damage and with Night Blade having a heal, lots of multihit and ‘hampers’ due to a pierce/cold focus it looks on paper to be a winner combination for it.
So how does it do…
around level 30 with a multi hit warder I’d at least be @ 1kdps & it’s sitting at 0.5kdps, which while is not the whole story as damage varies by proc; it does seem to struggle verse some bosses.
I attribute this to ‘spreading the base’ (lower specific damage but to more enemies) which is a function of the build.
I have a feeling Life Steal works like this Attack->absorb/deflect/avoid->commit reduce life->% life return by amount reduced; meaning you don’t really want to hit overly hard because more damage than they have life reduces efficiency while striking more with less damage increases it.
Simply put you can only steal what is actually there to take so more small bites reduce waste.
You want to aim for the highest efficiency on return, which is difficult because of the %chance to be used common throughout the build; partly offset by using things that have a small cool down anyways (so no real loss).
With this build trash mobs are little more than D2 light health potions turning minion spawning bosses advantage against them (I currently use more energy potions than health and for a non caster that’s kind of saying something).
Overall I’d say this build is functional, but not exceptional.
You can do it, it will live if you avoid boss triplets; it’s just not as enjoyable as an aether ray glass cannon or the superior dps of a melee multihit retaliate/reflect warder (which synergises so well because retaliate is handled by devotions and multihit primarily from gear/skill).
-Further notes for improvement
It should become naturally better with higher levels as extra devotions are lent to more damage skill synergies or retaliate/health pool/defense.
There’s a whole skill to max out at the end of necro for lifesteal and for an optimized framework it probably does surprisingly well.
Add on a heal circuit breaker or two and as many components as will fit and it should get plenty of kilometage (death to Imperials!) experience wise.
Also the skeletons are pretty weak sauce, but they are there under the premise that there are only 2 types of enemies.
Those in melee having their life sucked out and the rest that should be kept waiting patiently in line (not getting free hits in).
Let me know what you think.
Attachment: Last Breath Level 33 viable Liche (vampiric reaper).jpg