The Lost Souls set got some massive skeleton buffs in the last couple patches. They got more health, damage, attack speed, casting speed, 30% physical resistance and you can have three additional skeletons on the field.
So my mind got busy with how to make the tankiest skeletons possible.
Sounds like an oxymoron? You are not alone, I feel your cringe.
But consider that we can have up to 13 skeletons now. Thats four castings of Raise Skeletons so we’d do good by providing some sort of life insurance.
In terms of equipment, the core of this build is the Lost Souls set and the M. Beastcaller’s talisman. Lost Souls gives us another hellhound, the talisman applies permanent extra threat to them. That makes three permanent aggro magnets.
Everything else is just playing by ear. You want max resistances for yourself (obviously) and good resistances for the pets.
In terms of devotion, we focus on Tree of Unlife and Ishtak.
Everything else is there in order to grab the requirements for those two devotions or it powers up your pets.
With Tree of Unlife, all of our pets have a huge bonus to passive HP regeneration and if we get hit sufficiently, everyone gets healed and/or all pets taunt for 6 seconds.
This build has 19 pets overall.
The revenant can apply Shield Defense, the raven has a 30% Elemental Resistance aura and the skeletal servant… ist just kinda there. The relic he comes with has 30% HP for pets though.
The leveling order I used went like this:
16/16 Raise Skeletons
12/12 Undead Legion
1/16 Summon Familiar
5/10 Curse of Frailty
1/16 Mend Flesh (its an AoE heal now)
1/12 Storm Spirit
1/16 Blood of Dreeg
1/16 Summon Blightfiend
1/12 Rotting Fumes
1/10 Call of the Grave
1/12 Blight Burst
12/12 Master of Death
12/12 Will of the Crypt
10/10 Vulnerability
1/12 Bonds of Bysmiel
5/12 Aspect of the Guardian
12/12 Manipulation
12/12 Bonds of Bysmiel
12/12 Storm Spirit
1/16 Summon Hellhound
12/12 Hellfire
12/12 Aspect of the Guardian
10/10 Curse of Frailty
1/12 Spectral Binding
10/10 Spectral Wrath
Im not much for Shattered Realms so I cant tell how well this build is going to work there. I did manage to beat Gladiator (only wave 150) though and Story Mode was a breeze.
My PC sucks too much for videos so here are some pictures. ^^
Changing some points out (12/12 master of death, for example) should help, putting points into blood of dreeg to get at least 16/16. More is also good for skeles, because they scale amazingly with flat damage. But 16/16 should be really big for the heals. That’s the majority of pet survivability generally. Healing Rain does help, but more healing more better.
Also if you want hellhounds to pull more threat, you should really get Ember Claw 1 point. It also gives them much better AoE as they hit multiple enemies with ember claw.
Other than that, glad you’re having some success with this. Tree of Life is something I went for on some of my first skele builds as well, and it’s quite nice to help keep skeles alive. We need more skele builds on the forums honestly too.
There’s probably other improvements to be made, but I’ve got a bit to work on myself
When I started out, I thought Blood of Dreed would be necessary to keep the skeletons alive. But once you can pop Healing Rain and ramp up the resistances, these guys can actually tank a fair amount of damage.
I just keep BoD up and they can waltz through pretty much anything.
I might need to replace a couple skellies after a boss fight but thats it.
I’ll look into the flat damage aspect but trust me, they dont need much extra healing.
I also tried Ember Claw at one point and I didnt really notice much of a difference. Im not sure how the extra threat aspect from the medal works mechanically but I felt safer with an extra point in Aspect of the Guardian. ^^
I’ve actually ended up overcapping MoD on some of the Lost Souls setups I’ve tried for the extra DA. They don’t strictly need it, but going for SR 80+ every little bit helps.
In addition to what uber said, you need more RR. On Lost Souls I prefer Eldritch Hound for the flat RR, but you can also use Manticore or Raise the Dead for the meme-factor, but Eldritch Hound is the best option. For Lost Souls builds using chaos you’ll want Eldritch Fire also.
Yeah. It could do 75 before the buffs it was really slow, ~15 minutes per shard. 80 isn’t super reliable even now due to how hugely inconsistent SR difficulty is, but 76 is very repeatable and fast with a Lost Souls good setup, as is sub-7 minute gladiator.
