[3.10] Necro Poison Wander

Ever since I’ve seen the Oblation Belt I wanted to make a build that utilizes the three main offering skills. Each of them are powerful buffs that only apply to your minions, and you can only have one up at a time. However, with the Necromancer Ascendancy (or the Scion, to a lesser extent), you can gain access to these powerful buffs. When coupled with the Belt of Oblation, you can run all three buffs at once.

Spirit Offering is our best offering. It offers both offense in “% of Physical as extra Chaos,” as well as defense with both a decent amount of all elemental resistances, and more potently, an “on demand” heal in the form of “x% of maximum life as extra maximum energy shield for each corpse consumed”. The extra Chaos damage is one part that will allow this build to use poison ailments as it’s main damage source. We try to stack as much “gained as extra chaos” as we can. I’ll explain more later.

Bone Offering is our next best offering. It’s going to give us an additional chance to block, as well as healing us when we do. When paired with a Lethal Pride of Kilova we can double our block chance. In addition to a shield in our offhand, it will allow us to cap attack blocks and give us 50% chance to block spell damage. Unfortunately, the Keystone Glancing Blows will make us take 50% of blocked damage, rather than 0. However, the heal on block affect should help mitigate this in our favor. Having a high block chance is important, and I’ll explain why later on.

Flesh Offering is our last and least important offering. This will net us around 22% movement speed, as well as roughly 22% attack and cast speed. It’s a nice little extra but that’s all. Due to the Corpse Pact Ascendancy node, you’ll be stacking cast and attack speed as fast as you can consume corpses.

Our main attacking skill will be the new Kinetic Bolt. Kinetic bolt has the unique effect that it’s damage can be increased with increases and reductions to spellpower, at 150% of the value. This is nice, but our tree doesn’t take any spell power increasing nodes, so the effect won’t be put to much use here. However, it does allow us to swap to other wand attack skills if we find that it doesn't do well.

We will also be using the new Spellslinger Skill gems in order to generate Corpses and cast a few other spells as well. Our main corpse generation will be in our shield. We’ll link Spellslinger, Desecrate, and Spell Cascade in order to provide 10 corpses every .5 seconds. This setup has a lot of synergy with the Ascendancy nodes we’ll be taking. Corpse Pact will allow us to chill and shock enemies near the corpses we spawn. Since we have control on where to spawn them, we have on demand constant chill/shock effects on bosses and mobs. Plaguebringer passive will give us 10% more damage as well as 10% reduced damage dealt by enemies.

We’ll of course be consuming these corpses via our Offerings. In order to achieve this, we’ll be using a rare wand with the bench craft “Cast a socketed spell when you use a skill”. We’ll be linking Spirit Offering to another Spellslinger group, and this wand group will consist of Bone Offering, Flesh Offering, and Animate Weapon. Animate Weapon is getting a buff and should play nicely with our last Spellslinger setup. We don’t want to link Animate Weapon up to a Spellslinger group because our second grouping consists of Blade Vortex and we don’t want our Blades being consumed as soon as they spawn. A 5 second cooldown is just enough time to build up Blade Vortex stacks and have a steady stream of animated weapons being replenished.

Our next setup will consist of the other grouping of Spellslinger spells. This time, we’re going to use Blade Vortex and Spirit Offering. Spirit Offering is in this group because it’s our most important and powerful offering. Casting it every .5 seconds allows us to constantly have a source of healing via extra energy shield per corpse, as well as it’s synergy with Desecrate that should give it the full 5 corpse effect of 15% of maximum life as extra energy shield. On a character with 5,000 life, we’re looking at a 750 energy shield heal every .5 seconds. This will also allow us to consume 40 corpses “recently” (in the last 4 seconds). This will synergize well with the Corpse Pact node, giving us a hefty 80% increased attack speed!

Our next group is mainly defensive and reactionary. It will consist of a Cast When Damage Taken gem and Phase Run. If we get 30% movement speed from our boots, a Flesh Offering active, and trigger our Phase Run, we’ll be running at 111% speed! We should be able to achieve 65% movement speed with just our items, passives, and Flesh Offering active. Our last two gems are more for utility. Blood Rage is taken for Frenzy Charges, and Blade Blast is taken as an on demand nuke. If Blade Blast doesn’t work out due to low damage from no supports, then I’ll replace it with a movement skill.

Our last setup is our best friend the Agony Crawler. He will be supported by Added Chaos, Damage on Full Life, and Minion Damage. He’ll end up reserving half our mana, and because of this, there are a few uniques that are required to run this build.

------------ Gear -------------

The first item we’ll need is a Circle of Nostalgia with “Herald of Agony has x% reduced mana reservation.” You’ll want this in order to bring his 50% reservation down to around 30%. This is important if you want a Crawler that’s supported with damage supports. You should be able to maintain 40 stacks of virulence, so he’s worth investing into.

Our next required item is the Broken Faith shield. It gives us 8% of Physical Damage as extra Chaos damage, as well as Unholy Might when we block. Unholy Might will give us 30% of Physical Damage as extra Chaos, which is our biggest source. The buff will last 10 seconds, which is more than enough time to block again, especially given our Lethal Pride gem doubling our chance to block.

Last but certainly not least, is the Leash of Oblation which will allow us to run all three Offerings at once!

There are a few other items worth mentioning.

There are three unique flasks that I recommend running when you can afford them. The easiest is Coralito’s Signature. Next would be an Atziri’s Promise with a perfect 20% Physical as extra Chaos roll. Last is the Witchfire Brew which is a good alternative to a despair on hit. The last two flasks should be a life flask and a utility flask.

Lethal Pride of Kilova will also grant us a Keystone that allows us to cap out block chance. We only need to block every 10 seconds to upkeep Unholy Might, so this jewel is more of luxury than anything else.

Your wand will want as much Physical DPS as you can achieve, and don’t forget to leave a suffix slot open for “trigger a socketed spell when you use a skill” bench craft. The best way to craft this wand would be to fossil craft (Aberrant + Serrated + Corroded).

We benefit hugely from added physical, so you’ll want added physical damage on everything that you can (Rings, Amulets, Gloves, and Jewels). Fully buffed we should be hitting 83% of Physical added as Chaos damage.

You’ll also want a Bone Helmet with +3 to minion gems, -9% chaos resistance to nearby enemies, and 5% reduced mana reserved. The best Delve craft should be spamming (Aberrant + Bound + Pristine). Your Herald of Agony will be socketed in your helm since gem levels boost his damage by a considerable amount.

Your Chest piece should be Hunter influenced because you want the mod “% increase effect of your Offerings”. (Serrated + Pristine + Maybe Metallic) Ideally you would want the -15 mana cost of skills depending on how the mana cost of Kinetic Bolt is. If we manage to get the mana cost down by stacking -mana cost on jewels and chest, we should be able to forgo the enlightenment in our gloves setup and run one more spellslinger spell.

The PoB link I’m providing is just a testing ground for gear and skills. The gear I chose is maxed and obviously not something achievable. It’s just for testing purposes!

PoB Link: https://pastebin.com/0uix3Yxr

Thanks for reading this far, and I would love some feedback!

Isn't having that many things attached to spellslinger going to reserve a absolute shit ton of mana?

I think it's 15% per spell reserved

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Rockell wrote:

I think it's 15% per spell reserved

Yeah i understand that part. What i mean is that it's going to reserve a lot of mana + crawler and i understand there are reductions but will you be bale to spam cast kinetic bolt on top of those costs and keep mana going?

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moon_nmh wrote:

Isn't having that many things attached to spellslinger going to reserve a absolute shit ton of mana?

So, HoA will reserve around 50% mana with those supports, and with a Circle of Nostalgia ring with the ~35% reduction should bring that down to 30%.

Desecrate + Spell Cascade will reserve 21% (20% with 5% reduced mana reservation on helm enchant).

The second setup consists of two spells that don't have any supports, so they're at a base 15%. These are socketed in a 4 gem link, so we have an option of an enlighten, even though it will only drop the % to 14%, with the 5% reduction dropping it to 13%.

Our two other Offerings + Animate Weapon are in our wand with "Trigger a socketed skill when you use a skill" modifier, so they don't use any mana reservation.

That means we have to worry about HoA, Desecrate, Spirit Offering, and BV.

30% + 21% + 15% + 15% = 81% mana reserved.

I really do like this and it sounds very promising. I'm most likely going to league start with this so let's hope kinetic bolt carries :D

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moon_nmh wrote:

I really do like this and it sounds very promising. I'm most likely going to league start with this so let's hope kinetic bolt carries :D

I plan on league starting this, but I would be cautious with this unless you're prepared to struggle.

A few of the Uniques and mods needed are going to take a bit to populate in a fresh economy. Not to mention, a high phys dps wand is going to be hella expensive, so that's something to keep in mind.

This build won't feel good until you've got your uniques and wand with the trigger spell on skill use mod.

Not to mention, there's still a few things that could change, especially as I try them out during the leveling and end game process.