u/devindran

Are there too many 'great' items sitting unused in your stash? Do you wish you could throw on as many uniques as you could possibly carry on your person?

Do you want to do the following:

1. Dust off that Golden Epiphany seal that's been sitting in the corner of your freezer since you got it on day 1?

2. Run around taking burning damage but not giving a damn (mostly)?

3. Shatter all the mobs and their grandparents?

4. Juggle between 7 different charms depending on your mood?

If so, I present you, my frozen leftovers build.

Build | Pit 127 | T12 Mephisto

Why I like this build:

1. Singularity but colder - I love the dynamics of Singularity mages more active playstyle. I did a Bone Singularity variant that's a lot easier to play than the Big Beautify Bone Mage that was posted here before.

2. Darkness without Black Shroud - Azurewrath ignores all DoT damage, so a big chunk of it is lost if you use Black Shroud.

3. Blood-mad + lucky hit engine - Until it's fixed, I wanted to play this as much as possible, but the bone version is too squishy.

4. Azurewrath + Signet - This is possibly the last season Azurewrath will be of any use unless they revert the nerf. Signet also is one of those dream items we wish can fit into a build but Necro frost builds still arent top tier.

5. Charm swapping - Tibault's Will, Blood-mad Idol, Locran's Talisman, Fist of Fate, Bloodless Scream, Endurant Faith, Rustbitten Dirk can be used as your needs dictate. Easily swap between your specialty as you deem fit.

6. Tanky - Able to face tank without having to constantly spam mages for shield like I have to with bone mages.

Caveat: Bone still has a higher damage ceiling from what I can tell. Getting the right gear (mythic) and charms (can't reroll the affixes) may take a while.

Hope to hear some feedback on what you think and where I could further improve this.

Given the information we have so far, looks like the combination of Leoric's crown and Stone of Jordan will make or break the meta.

The 2 strongest splinters for damage (Hellfire and Anguish) complement each other well, and should rightly be put into the helm.

But this leads to a couple of problems for the 2 best builds this season.

1. Blood wave already struggles to crit cap with current gear, losing out another 75% crit chance from the splinters (before considering the crown or mythic version of it) would be harder to make up.

2. Singularity bone mage or most minion builds will have to lose undercrown to use Leoric and the boosted splinters. The combination of Pact of Bone, Litany of Death and Bone Storm can negate the crit loss but you still end up cutting almost half your dps to make up for it.

I think Golem will really be in a sweet spot to utilize most of the splinters. I dont see a cap to the number you can equip so assuming you can put on as many as you can slot.

The desecration set is also getting buffed so more damage and survivability will be available there.

One key point is your charms should try to roll +macabre so you also boost your bone storm ranks for more crit chance and attack speed.

I like the idea of the 2 splinters (sin and anguish) reducing your max essence and increasing your essence cost which means I can spam Summon Mages non stop to do 3 things

1. Kill a minion for the purpose of Pact of Bone

2. Cycle through 100% max resource usage for faster Que regeneration

3. If we needed to be more tanky, we can go with 2pc waking touch to allow our minions to soak the blood-mad damage, and cycle the mage to constantly swallow it.

Thoughts?

PTR notes looks bland. Some damage buffs to DoT builds but no major fixes to existing issues.

No new interesting abilities to theorycraft.

Blight, soulrift and darkness bloodwave remains unplayable.

1. Blight needs to have desecrated ground instead of defiled area.

2. Blood wave cooldown is ridiculously long. Even when specced to generate tonnes of orbs plus fastblood, I cant get it to cast fast enough. Against bosses its even worse.

3. Soulrift just doesnt do enough damage even with Unmaker. Hopefully the damage buff improves it.

Craft NMD keys with Rupture affixes and run those.

OR wait for the realmbreaker world boss

OR (try to find the realmbreaker event in Helltides.. this one is the slowest IMO)

Complete the respective events to get to the deathtoll chamber. Kill the boss.

This guarantees you superior boss keys now.

Do the reaper boss for mythic chance.

RESET YOUR DUNGEONS. <-- this is to reset the Deathtoll Chamber

Repeat step one.

Did the WB and completed the chamber, went to a helltide event that spawned another chamber, ended up in the same completed one.

They just run around whacking some loner mob instead of the nice group of monsters I conveniently grouped up for them.

When I command them to focus on my target they all swarm in for 1 second then go off again in every direction.

Undercity is so stressful because you know they can one shot the time extension mob or goblin which you are standing right next to and pointing neon signs at it but they would rather go pound on some rando demon.

How hard can it be to code "boss > elite > regular" when choosing targets? And stick on the target I choose till its dead.

End rant.

Has anyone figured out which helm is better for mages/warriors?

The guides say undercrown but the multiplier difference is huge.

Looking for suggestions on a build that can use this. I'm leaning towards a minion build that uses 3pc waking touch, but not sure if it would be better than a unique charm.

Nice guaranteed affix when there's a cold variant of the skill available. /S

Oh well, at least its not ranks to AotD.

Sucks to have to roll this one off if you want to play cold (and I was able to do 115 with cold this season without any of the overpower engine).

I see many builds that heavily use overpower skipping this board. Is it bugged?

As I've posted before, I am currently working on getting Azurewrath + Signet to work on a necro build.

The one I had the most success with so far is Frozen Army (links below).

But in trying to gear for it I realized that compared to the other 3 ults, you cant get more ranks to AotD outside of brawler and vex, maybe +skills which is impossible to get.

This is the first season I've actually enjoyed AotD and it is doing decent damage, but I really feel the devs went out of their way to ensure we cannot get more ranks to this skill.

I even tried using 5 piece desecration bonus but AotD turned into Profane instead of Macabre which you cant gain ranks for. Charms giving +minion instead of +summoning.

Bare bones build planner: https://maxroll.gg/d4/planner/4src2303

Pit 117 boss: https://youtu.be/jEPEnj7tdiQ?si=dCXx73HG9IuXrNA7

Pit 116 butcher: https://youtu.be/nLrl-wl6sLM?si=XLRpzmlZxQqIanL2

I think this was the most fun build I've done this season. Inspired by getting Signet of Pelghain and Azurewrath to work for Necros despite the bug with Azure, this Shatter build has a lot of room for improvement considering some of my gear was not even masterworked or had temper crits (woe is my forgotten soul count after numerous builds).

Working on the planner if anyone is interested in it.

I see the build on Maxroll has it but not sure if its purpose is just to help stack souls or does it increase the damage as well?

I tried Sever and Blight using the cold damage, with and without Bloodless scream as a charm.

Only my own damage, minions were sacced.

When the boss dummy staggers, I do some damage on it, but after stagger wears off, I dont see any explosion.

I can confirm it works on Elites, just not Bosses. On the sorc subs they say it works on bosses.

Can anyone confirm if Azure works for Necro?

Our strongest aspect (reanimation) does not work with them since they keep dying.

I would love to explore bone minion builds but it just takes way too much effort to keep them alive long enough.

What's the purpose of getting regular uniques in T12? Just more clutter on the ground for us couch co-op players without loot filters.

I'd rather see only ancestral gear drop at this point.

The only other use for non ancestrals is if you could upgrade a few of them into the same ancestral unique (with a specific mat of course).

I've tried several ways, either without Selig (500 essence) or with Selig (1000) essence.

Bone spirit still hits like a wet noodle.

Unless there's a stealth cap to how much damage it can get from essence, I should be sitting at 3000 multiplicative damage when I cast bone spirit.

I'm lucky to see hits in the low billions though.

It seems like Aspect of Glynn's Anvil (DR per stack of Resolve) would be really great for Necros given that we can temper Max Resolve stacks.

But the information sheet looks off when I try to check it on console.

It seems to max out at 14 resolve stacks even if I have more from gear.

But more importantly, how does a Necromancer build stacks?

I only see Aspect of Dominance as a viable choice (Resolve when you CC). Is there any way to build stacks directly from the skill tree/paragon?