Having spent quite a bit of time away from GD, decided to dust it off for another play-thru.
Before i took my break, i decided to try a summon-based necro, focused on skele’s as my main fighting force, backed up by the big zombie (dont remember the specific name) if i played pure, or a briar thorn summons if i decided to go necro/shaman.
I distinctly remember the skele’s melting once i started getting into mid-game content (steps especially) followed by my (now) solo big guy getting over-whelmed. I had gear w/ all the pet bonus’s i could find, taking devotions that offered bonus’s to pets as well.
Also remember being annoyed by my skele’s not being able to be summoned in at max number. Had an initial 3-max summon, wait for skill to cool-down, then had to do a 2nd summoning to get my max number, even if this meant un-summoning 1 or 2 from the 1st batch.
Any of this changed over these past few updates? Can i sit back and smirk as my boneheads tear thru the fools that dare oppose me? Assuming i once again max-build around summons, of course
I don’t remember Necromancer ever being not viable. Your thread name and description literally describe two different things.
(thread name) Skeletons were never weak (unless they had to be buffed after release, don’t remember), and overall all pet builds prefer going Necromancer if they want to deal the most damage.
(thread description) It still has the huge cool down, yes. I don’t know a single person that’d say that this recharge time is reasonable.
Nothing significantly changed about skeletons. Things you don’t like about it are limitations placed on the skill to offset it’s strong points. If skeletons could tank the same way as blight fiend and briarthorn they would had been op. If using a skill summoned the whole army then cooldown would had needed to be increased. Think of skeletons as disposable things. They die - you summon new ones.
Other summons like Raven, Hellhound, Briarthorn and Blight Fiend had been improved in May.
Skeletons are still much the same. Powerful early game. Decent mid game (but specific bosses can drop all of them in secs leaving you defenseless…hardest boss in elite was Conley by a mile) and the downright absurdly powerful end game (but a there are still a few areas where losing the entire skele swarm instantly is a thing. Especially to big Aoe bleeders like Kuba)
I don’t know how much time off you took but there’s one thing that changed about skeletons in one of the updates last year (was it 1.0.4.0?): bulk of their base vitality dmg was moved from the base node to the third node. It had some impact on how much investment is now needed to bring them to full power and of course on gearing. Top skeleton builds these days usually don’t bother maxing them out completely instead focusing on support.
Skeletons are still powerful but even more than before require fine-tuning and careful choices regarding gear, distribution of skills and devotions (especially in terms of resistances).
Also, Ritualists are a few leagues below Cabalists and solo Necro isn’t even on the map. Your problems might stem from the fact that you chose all the wrong classes. If you wanna sit back and watch your pets tear through stuff - this doesn’t really happen in GD but the closest would be Conjurer. Necro pet builds are some of the hardest to pilot in the game.
My advice would be to focus on pet resistances, find a healing mechanism, and get another tanky pet’s aggro skill. While the skellies are weak to damage, you can often draw aggro with your other summons or even yourself. At that point your biggest problem are aoe attacks which they can survive if they have the resists and are getting healed.
They aren’t that bad. Biggest problems for me were the lack of poison resist and the lack of burst healing, both of which come down to not having blood of dreeg access. There is an ugdenbog augment that solves the poison resist problem…although you have to be in the poison bog to grind the rep to buy poison resist :eek:. For healing I found wendigo totem to be amazing. It takes getting used to the position aspect, but once you do, it’s supper effective.
Anybody have a recommendation for healing my pets, then? I still have a basic idea of how to build for a summoner, but dont think i stuck w/ it long enough to really consider having a healing strategy in-place as part of the overall package.
Wendigo Totems - but do require that both monster and skeleton are within its aura. If you get blood pact, they can get some serious attack dmg to health (and also flat vit dmg and +% vit & bleed dmg) and you don’t have to have a monster within Wendigo Totem radius for blood pact to work.
…is shifty for skele-Ritualists once AoE pools show up. Besides, skeleton power lies in steamrolling everything before it has time to do much harm - or WT to do much good.
Best thing is time dilation and stacking cdr for resummoning capacity. Don’t work well in Crucible as you lose blessings. Anyways, all attempts at making skeletons last are bound to fail outside top tuned Witching Hour Cabalists where - with good piloting - everything dies insta-quick before it can unwind.
Good news is they are REALLY good at being the victor in kill or be killed scenarios. Steamroll Glad 150 even w/o the good piloting (once you get the right legendaries ofc)
151-170 gets hairy if you aren’t really good at piloting, too much AoE in exotic damage types coupled with resist reduction (and getting them resists in the first place has very exacting requirements)
Also keep in mind that they still steamroll most* of the content in main game, even w/o the specific legendaries…but those few fights they don’t man do they suck. Retreating through a TP mid Conley fight to regroup is just humiliating but while leveling I had to do it in both normal and elite.
