I took to recycling the mess 1.1 turned my old WH cabalist into and decided to check out the new Lost Souls skelemancer concept.
And it basically doesn’t deal damage.
I tried different setups and ended up with this https://www.grimtools.com/calc/0V0Qp8aZ . I tried dw with Hagaraz and Veilpiercer, tried Reaper of the Accursed, the fire revenant book (Og-something), Dirge of Arkovia, different items and components, and nothing seemed to lift it from the oblivion of non-damage. Help.
(EDIT)
After some help from the comments below I made this a megafunkyass main game build:
Credits go to FunkyGandalf for the idea to use Fleshwarped Archive. This is the item to use with Lost Souls. Though it disqualifies the build as a crucible farmer, it seems Lost Souls was never gonna be one anyway. Also, credits to Maya for the medal and the others for the gloves and relic.
The build is fun to play and deals with main game no problem. It won’t do much good in Crucible because pets are regularly resummoned and lose blessings.
Gameplay is simple. Sprinkle CoF+RE, approach, attack, blow up a dog, repeat. DA is problematic so can’t be too stingy on proccing Spectral Wrath.
The offhand in gt is impossible ofc but anything with pet stats will do. Bad affixes shouldn’t kill the build.
Happy to receive more comments on other possible ways to utilize Lost Souls especially how to make it crucible viable. Thx for reading and contributing.
In my opinion, your build is just bad. Pants, book and medal should be changed. You probably should change your rings too, but not sure about it. This build has almost no RR, so if you won’t get Manticore you won’t deal damage (55% vitality RR is like 20% elemental RR).
Taking in account that there are trash mobs that have literally 149 vitality resist… Nope. Also, I wonder how many times will a pet build get hit (unless it’s Crucible-focused). From my experience, pet builds usually get hit once/twice before stuff dies.
I’m back and just as I thought. Medal messes up resists big time (solvable but very thinly - anyways good idea, thanks) and Manticore isn’t worth dropping 200+% pet damage from Shepard. But even if I could keep the res and the Shepard it would solve nothing.
It’s not about not enough. 1100% minus buffs and specific type dmg is low, which I know, but this build works like lvl 60 defiler. You can’t do one wave with 4 blessing and banner. All heroes+ feel like nemeses. I must be doing something wrong and it’s certainly not Barbaros pants…
Sidenote: trash mobs don’t have 149 vit res. IIRC max is Kuba and Zantarin with 101. EDIT: sorry, Ravager has 136. But afaik Ravager isn’t trashmob.
I just went back to my Cabalist who has the complete set and she is stronger than ever. Sure, I changed some things - totally dropped the Blight Beast, added the points into the Hellhound’s attack skills and Call of the Grave. Also stopped using Reaper of the Accursed and swapped to a Mythical Grimoire of Og’Napesh. I have plenty of pet damage to vitality conversion that he scales nicely with the others, and Hellfire does boost his Fire attacks, plus his defense buff skill nicely protects my pets.
Skeletons can still be wiped out by some attack types, like aetherfire on the ground, but I just fought Grava’Thul on Ultimate and he never managed to kill all my pets not even once.
Why do you use Overlord’s Iron Grip? It is more for Shamans. Use Bonescavenger’s Deathgrips, they are tailored for Cabalists.
I also used Shadowfiend’s Cord but now swapped to Spiritseeker’s Cord, the bonuses are better.
Mogdrogen’s Ardor… I dunno. Dirge of Arkovia gives a super strong pet that hits hard, has tons of HP and can immobilize enemies.
Why waste points in Ravenous Earth? Put 1-1 points into Bone Harvest’s first skills then more into Soul Harvest, nicely boosts pet vitality damage on proc.
You can also do better on rings than those two - Spiritbinder’s Glyph has a great proc Vitality pet damage booster. I also use Voidwhisper band but will swap with something more Necro themed once I can get it. For a medal, Overseer is craftable from a faction, and far better than this.
I also took out Manticore since there is little use of it without the Blight Beast’s acid/poison damage needing a boost. I rather instead invested the points into Typhus. Helps pet survivability with resistance boosts.
You might use Foul Eruption for that (provided you keep Ravenous Earth). No idea how well it would work as i never played a build like that but it might be an option to consider.
Hmm… thanks, man! That sounds very fun and I’ll definitely test it.
That’s probably what I’ll do after I give up on Lost Souls and go back to Dark One RE Cabalist (read: Foul Eruption only works with fully dedicated RE builds)
The problem is those mob vitality resist, 125% base and you can only reduce at best ~100, so you still have 25% resist left. You might as well go for lost souls for the attack and cast speed on skeletons then just full on chaos with 2 rings of void + fiendgaze tome for 100% conversion then byismel’s domination relic.
Why is that important? Most enemies save for undead are not that resistant to Vitality damage.
But if you want resistance reduction, I use Elemental Storm (Rhowan’s Crown) with the skeletons, since all the mage skellies do elemental damage and that devotion celestial skill does the same damage and it also reduces elemental resistances.
Or if you want vitality resistence reduction, max Curse of Frailty’s Vulnerability, it does that. Honestly I never needed that many points in it. My build does fine on Ultimate, and I don’t play in crucible. As long as I can kill any Nemesis or Boss, I don’t much care to min-max things.
Did Bonscavengers, too. Can’t hardcap Will of the Crypt.
The vitality damage bonus to ALL pets is frankly more in the long run than +3 to a skill that you can also get from elsewhere.
Overlord’s Iron Grip is better for a Ritualist or Conjurer, as the physical resistance to Primal Bond helps a lot against physical enemies.
Pretty sure Shadowfiend is BiS here.
What does BiS mean? I mean I know it means two in french but…
Did Dirge, too. All skills and pet res are better after all. And run speed.
I take a new pet over resistances or skills any day. Especially with the crowd control skills it has. The golem does Vitality damage too, so it benefits a lot from your necromancer skills.
Doesn’t seems that efficient with skeletons though, since the cool down is quite long (1.5 second?) and you want all your skeletons to trigger a devotion as often as possible.
Since the nerf on flame torrent, flat damage devotion like fiend-fire might work the best if your skeletons have like +150% attack speed.
Anybody knows if conversion mods to pets convert dmg on devotions bound to those pets? I mean, if I bind Flame Torrent to dogs, will its fire convert to vit?
