Hello everyone!
Ever since Malmouth came out I have been single mindedly pursuing the goal of creating a necromancer build that would be able to clear ALL content in the game deathless, including Ulgrimm, new Nemesis, the secret Thornsbury q boss and the two gods, because lets be honest any idiot with a bit of perseverance can just clear the main story in ultimate, it’s the secret bosses that really count.
Well, after over 100 hours of experimentation I’m about ready to call it quit because nothing I have tried has come even close to achieving that goal. The best I managed was clear everything except gods, and I have yet to kill Kupa deathless. I wanted to present here everything I tried so far and why it eventually broke apart, as well as maybe get some people on board for brainstorming since I am running out of ideas.
-
Summoner Nec:
I have tried 4 different variations of summoner necromancer including the unimaginative skelemancer and the hungering rain necro and I must say those builds are really good for everything except when you actually need your build to be good. This is a general problem that has always wexed me about minion builds, that when you actually apply some proper pressure they just fall apart. Did kill Ulgrimm though -
Drain Essence Nec:
150k paper dps sound great in theory. Reality is unfortunately much grimmer. Your actual dps is much lower and with perfect gear you maybe heal for 4-5k hps tops, which is decent enough to clear all the lower content, but the low overall defenses cause you to just randomly evaporate once one of the heavy hitters actually decides to hurt you and you go from 15k hp to 0 in less than a second. -
Lifesteal reaper:
Exactly the same problem as drain essence nec, except you are even more prone to just dieing to burst. Higher damage and amazing sustain though if you do it right. I tried to replicate the record 4 minute mog kill with this build using extremely high lifesteal and resist reductions, which worked really well right up the moment I took a stun and 12k hit to the face and had to restart in town. Doesn’t help that this happens like all the time and not just with gods. Now if I could figure out a way to make it about 3 times more tanky I’d have a godslayer right there
4 Aetherfire DK:
Gear dependant but extremely solid overall, this is the build with which I actually managed to take the fight to the lesser ascendants since it combines high defenses, good burst and decent mobility and sustain. I managed to kill Kupa with just one death and a lot of kiting, could even have avoided dieing, but the gods are beyond reach.
These are atleast the builds which had some amount of success. An honorable mention goes out to Vitality Ravenous Earth ritualist, which can faceroll almost the entire game comletly self found and untwinked while doing incredible amounts of dmg. However as the survival is merely good it also buckled under the assault of smth really scary.
My two remaining ides are a Max CDR spellbinder with 50% cooldown reduction, the new eternity relic for an additional 1 sec cdr every 4,5 sec and mirror + mark of torment always cycling between one or the other, giving you either Invul or permanent 60% dmg reduction with defensive devotions and as much armor as you can get your hands on, but I have no idea yet what to use as dmg and sustain source in that build.
The other is just doing a Tank with necro offspec, which would likely work, but it’s kinda lame since you might aswell drop necro alltogether there.