With this Lost Souls build, the player is a bit tankier than my more offensively oriented Beastcaller’s setups. It tends to do a bit better in SR because all pets die in SR at some point. The Lost Souls is designed to resummon pets at a decent rate, where as with Beastcaller’s you’re much worse off if your pets die. On the other hand, Kaisan is an extreme problem for Lost Souls, and effectively unkillable if you don’t get to fight him one-on-one.
The average Crucible clear speeds from both are about the same, but Lost Souls is faster best-case and slower worst-case. Beastcaller’s is more reliable in Crucible because once you get the hang of it, none of your pets are ever going to die. With Lost Souls you will occasionally lose some skeletons which will reduce your power until you re-apply buffs. It can still do 3x runs with re-summoned skeletons, but it does slow down a little.
Overall, I prefer Beastcaller’s for Crucible and Lost Souls for SR.
You really can’t afford to lose the +1 Necro skills. Without it, you don’t have either 26 Raise Skeleton or 23 Reap Spirit without making some other sacrifices that end up costing quite a bit.
Skill modifier conversion applies first, so First, Will of the Crypt converts 34% of the Skeletons physical to Vitality, and Shard of Lost Souls converts 100% of Hellhound Physical and Fire to Vitality.
After that, general conversion applies all at the same time. You end up with 75% Physical to Vitality (Beacon of Lost Souls + Master of Death), 50% Physical to Chaos (Fiendgaze), 100% Cold to Chaos (Fiendgaze), and 50% Fire to Vitality (Beacon of Lost Souls). When you have conversion totaling over 100%, it is normalized down to 100%. so 75% + 50% becomes 60% + 40%.
This second round of conversion applies to what is left of the physical, so it’s converting 60%/40% of the 66% that was left after Will of the Crypt.
The total damage split in practice is ~70% vitality, 30% chaos (based on numbers from Grim Internal).
I am surprised that reap spirit is quite splashable to most necromancer pet build now. Also it’s quite a shame that all reap spirit item mod dont apply to the pet itself. Same with mod on call of the grave and bond of bysmiel.[/QUOTE]
Thanks!
The duration boost took Reap Spirit from almost never used to usable almost everywhere. It was a very nice change, imo. Huge for QoL, and it adds a lot of flexibility. The itemization for Reap Spirit can be hard to work into pet builds without some big sacrifices though.