Working From Home Necromancer - Last Epoch Build - Patch 0.7.7F

Hey everyone this is Thyworm with a new build for Last Epoch, the Working-From-Home Necromancer. Necromancer is probably the most requested build guide on my channel, so here you go. If you are enjoying Last Epoch content, consider subscribing. Let’s start with the build philosophy.

[build philosophy]

I created the perfect build if you’re ‘working from home’ and want to play Last Epoch at the same time. Because what better option than necromancer, with an undead army doing your bidding, which requires only one hand? I always love playing necromancers, because it’s such a relaxed play style. And now that a lot of us are working from home, you can command all those minions and buff them at the same time, with a single skill. Working from home, single-handed, just a mouse, and it’s all super smooth.

Which brings us to the pros & cons

Pros:

Nice, lazy play style

Requires 1 hand, ideal for working from home

Strong minions that clear content fast

Easy levelling

Cons:

Not great for arena, as minions die after wave 100

Squishy

This necromancer is all about summoning the undead, using transplant as both a buff & escape tool, using Ward as a defensive mechanism and just having fun seeing our minions do the heavy lifting. This is my take on a necromancer, designed so you can experiment further. Maybe even use 2 hands. I’m using the necromancer set, because it’s surprisingly effective. I’m using a bunch of uniques, just to get ward. This means it’s not a super beginner friendly build, but I’ll give replacement options in the gear section. And I will explain my choices extensively, as usual.

The build is focused on frontloaded damage, with a lot of skeleton crit damage. We increase the base crit of our army, and crit multipliers, so the minions do quite a lot of damage and leech health. All minions are melee as well, which means they’re close to the enemies, so we can easily buff them with rip blood that we cast on enemies.

Let’s look at the passives.

[passives]

Main stats for this build are minion stats, of course. Intelligence is good as well, because it helps our ward retention and provides minions with health and damage.

So, take 8/8 forbidden knowledge, for intelligence. 5/5 dark rituals, because minion attack speed is hard to get otherwise. Take Sole Aegis, because it scales really well. 4/10 Mania of Mortality, granting us ward on minion or enemy death, 10% of the time. This is a very decent ward generator actually, because our summoned wraiths constantly die. Finally, 4/4 unnatural preservation, for the ward retention.

You take 8 points in the Lich tree, into Crippling insight. 16 intelligence is pretty massive, because that’s 64 minion base health, 64% increased minion damage and 64% ward retention. And the rest of the points go to Necromancer.

Take 8/8 Risen army, for minion damage. Take 5/5 Reclamation of Souls, which provides ward retention and gives 35 ward each time a minion dies. This synergizes well with summon wraiths, because they die all the time. Take 2/8 Blood armour, for some flat minion health regen and because we need to get to 5/10 Mortal Tether, for minion Health and for the final node of this chain, Unbound Necromancy, giving us an additional skeleton.

Then, 5/5 Frantic Summons, for increased attack and cast speed. Follow the chain, with 5/5 River of Bones, which turns minions into crit machines. It also works for you, but we don’t really cast spells that do damage, so for us it’s not relevant, but for minions it’s a very good node, because it provides leech, helping our minions sustain. Follow this up with 10/10 Heresy, for intelligence and even more crit.

On the right side of the tree, we take 3/8 Tyrant, just so we can get to Tyrant’s Legion, 2/2, giving us 2 skeletons for our army. I took 2 spare points into Cling to Life, for some minion survivability. Finally, take 5/5 Veins of Malice, which provides a big buff to your minion army for 5 seconds, every time you cast a spell. As transplant is a spell, this synergizes well. Your minions have haste and frenzy for 5 seconds, and this proc has a 10 second cooldown, which means that effectively your minions are buffed half of the time.

Skills are up next

[skill specialization]

We summon skeletons, skeleton mages and wraiths. And we buff those, using transplant which casts rip blood, which both buff our minions.

Let’s start with the skeletons.

I turned these guys into rogues, because rogues are very versatile and quick. Archers and warriors are disabled.

Take 5/5 sweeping strikes, increasing skeleton AOE and damage, and then enable the rogues. Go south, 3/5 Necrotic Conviction, for more damage, then take Hollow Walkers, for more skeletons. Disable archers and take Dread Phalanx, reducing the number of minions by 50%, but increasing their damage by 80%. Mathematically, that seems like a good deal. It’s also good to note that Last Epoch rounds up, so if after taking this node, you can summon 3,5 skeletons, that means you can actually summon 4 skeletons. Finally, go west, take 5/5 Unholy Rage, because attack speed and movement speed is just very good on minions. Increase the skeleton limit by taking Marrow Walkers, take Lone guardian for the crit increase and finally disable skeleton warriors as well.

This leaves you with a quick, fast, shuriken throwing teleporting skeleton army, which we will complement with more melee minions from the Skeleton Mage tree.

Normally, the mages are ranged units that use magic, but we’re turning them into melee death knights. To do this, take 5/5 Celer Mortis, for movement speed and crit chance, take 3/3 grey merchant, for more crit and health leech on crit, take order of death for another mage, Take 1 point in shadow wardens just to get to the Death Knight node, enabling these units. To buff their base damage significantly, take 5/5 flaming attacks, granting them 20 base fire damage. The last couple of points go into the west side, take 1 point into splintered dominion, just to get to 3/4 Argonautic speed, for more increased attack speed.

We increase our army even further, with more melee minions, this time with the temporary wraiths. You want to summon a lot of these at once, and you constantly want to summon these guys too, so use autocast for this, with the numlock trick. First order of business, get more wraiths. Take 1 point in Locus of Resurrection, summoning the wraiths at the cursor. Take 3/3 Dark Scythe, increasing their attack speed. Take Echoes inside, summoning more wraiths, and follow this up with 3/3 army of wraiths. You now summon 7 wraiths with a single cast, which is really nice. We move west in the tree, take 5/5 Reapers, for base damage in the form of flat necrotic damage. 20 flat damage is no joke. Take Wraith Bringer, 4/4, because we need to cast this fast and we need it to cost less mana, and finally take 3/5 Necrotic hunger, increasing the wraiths necrotic damage.

Our last 2 skills are the by now classic combination of transplant and rip blood, but this time we’re using it to buff our undead army. Starting with rip blood.

Take Eviscerate, for the blood splatter. Take 6/7 Crimson Flood, increasing the AOE, making it hit more minions. Take blood infusion, granting our minions a buff when they get hit by blood splatter. It increases their damage by 30% for 4 seconds. Take 3/3 infused frenzy, giving our army frenzy, which increases attack and cast speed. Take 3/3 hemophagy, granting our minions health leech. I had a few points left, so I took 2/2 Necrotic unity, increasing rip blood damage quite a bit, 8% increased damage for every minion we have. That’s normally around 40 minions, so for 2 points I’m getting 320% increased rip blood damage, which is actually significant. We round off the tree by taking 2/4 arcane absorption, just to get to Rip Spirit, which converts the physical damage to necrotic damage. It also makes the effect of rip blood a nice blueish color, so you can easily see where it hits. And finally, take Arcane fortress, which ensures we’re not taking health from rip blood anymore, but ward, which is good, because we’re a ward build and we’re using the Exsanguinous, so we don’t even want health.

Finally, to trigger rip blood, we use transplant. This is actually the only skill we’re casting ourselves. Get the rip blood nodes first, so take 1/3 acolyte’s fervor, just to get to 3/3 dance of blood, casting rip blood at the departure location each time you use transplant. We then use transplant for more defences and to generate a few more minions for our army. Take 3/3 bone armour, which grants armor and reduces incoming damage by 12%. Take 2/2 plated bone, increasing that effect even further. 3/3 apostasy increases the bone armor duration. We buff our minion damage with transplant as well, with 3/3 Last Laugh, which increases minion damage by 60% for 4 seconds. Top it off with Simulacrum, which creates a temporary bone minion every time you transplant. Take purgatory, turning that minion into a permanent one, and finally 3/3 ivory court, granting you up to 4 bone minions. And while these bone minions don’t really do all that much, they do benefit from all our minion stats and once they die, they grant ward to us. It synergizes well and there’s not much else worth taking in the transplant tree anyway, at least for our build.

[Gear]

Let me start up front by making a few general remarks

First, it doesn’t matter what gear you have, as long as there are minion stats on it. Gearing a necromancer is extremely easy. Minion affixes are plenty. During the campaign, you will be fine with just generic minion gear.

There are a few jewellery pieces you want to use as base items. Turquoise rings and amulets, primarily, because they have implicit minion stats. You could boost minion damage and health by 100% by using these base items.

A necromancer wand is very nice to have. Spell damage doesn’t affect minions in any way, nor do any of your other stats, apart from intelligence. Crit chance doesn’t give your minions crit chance, unless it specifically says so. This means that a level 70 wand doesn’t offer you anything in terms of minion stats, compared to a level 4 wand. You’re better off crafting a bunch of minion stats on a necromancer wand.

I’m making use of a lot of uniques and the necromancer set. I already collected this set before I created the character and I used it for levelling. This won’t blow your mind, but if you equip two of these set items at level 12, you will have an extremely smooth levelling experience. Butter, silky smooth. To my surprise however, these items hold up until very late game and at level 75, I’m still comfortably using this set. It’s got decent stats and the set bonus plus the affixes on the items, provide your minions with 19 flat damage, which is normally really hard to get. I thought the set would fall off, but it doesn’t. 3 crafted items may be better, but this works too.

For jewellery, I took 2 unique rings that drop all the time. The Hollow Fingers allow me to summon 1 extra skeleton while providing good minion implicits. Once again, 2 crafted rings here may be better, although you’d lose 1 skeleton in your army.

In terms of defences, we use exsanguinous for ward, the barbute helmet for the same reason and a high-level aegis, once again for ward. I chose ward defense here, because it’s pretty decent and not hard to maintain. I made a controversial choice to not get glancing blow capped. Normally, I would never advise this, but here I feel it’s different.

I did a bunch of testing and the reason why I die, isn’t because of incoming damage, but it’s because of minions dying and then enemies piling on top of me. Once my minions are dead, I’m dead. With this reasoning, it doesn’t make much sense spending prefixes on glancing blow, so instead I’m using either uniques or prefixes for minion stats. So far, this works, up to wave 100 in the arena and around 30 consecutive monoliths or so. This does mean that you sort of need to know where the damage is coming from and that you actively dodge projectiles, because if you don’t, you take a lot of damage.

For late game, you need minion dodge rating on your gear in particular. You can get massive amounts of flat minion dodge rating, and I suggest you take that opportunity. Because minions take a lot of hits, dodge helps and it’s much better than % increased health, if you have the choice. After incorporating some minion dodge on my gear, they survived in the arena for much longer.

If you don’t have all these fancy uniques, just focus on minion stats on gear, combined with intelligence. It’s more than enough to get you started and I’m sure you’ll pick up the unique pieces sooner or later, especially if you start farming the monolith.

My idols all provide base crit chance for minions, because we’re focused a lot on minion crit synergy. It’s in their skill trees, and my passives make them leech health if they crit, so base crit on idols works well. Finally, make sure to get at least 1 marked for death idols, so your minions have a chance to apply marked for death. Even 5% is enough, because your minions hit so fast and so often.

[Levelling]

Levelling is easy, because you summon minions and get minion stats on your gear and that’s all you need to do. You can just use the skill tree I provided, and the passives I provided, and you’re going to be totally fine.

I created a build diary on levelling as well, so check that out to see how I did that.

Finally, the play style during end game

[play style]

Here’s the build in action.

Before you start, make sure to summon your 6 rogues, your 4 death knights and your 4 bone minions from transplant. Then set your wraiths to autocasting, using the numlock keys. Now you’re all set up, you can go back to work and play Last Epoch with just one hand.

If you have 2 hands available, you could target your minions towards your enemy of choice using A. But that’s tedious, I find. I usually just let my minions decide what they want to kill, they’re smart enough for a bunch of brainless corpses.

For the pro one-handers amongst you. A decent tactic is to lead the charge of your army, and then when you encounter enemies, you transplant back into your army. This way, you debuff the enemies, you buff your army, and you’re safe. You can repeat this on bosses, and then the rip blood also usually hits your minions, increasing their damage and leech even more.

It all comes nicely together in this build and I personally find it very satisfying to watch. It’s not the most minion damage you’ll see in your life, it’s not the most exquisite build ever created, but it just works and it’ll get you far into the end game. Particularly Monoliths are really easy to farm with this, although it may lack some speed.

I hope you have fun with the build and that the guide was useful. Thanks for watching and making it to the end. See you all soon! Bye bye.

4 Likes

Nice guide.

Death Knights are really cool. I love their style :grin:.

For survivability of minions I tried skeleton warriors with full skilled bone armor. It’s less damage but they live a lot longer and also buff your other minions.

As I am leveling my Beastmaster and like the active fighting with my companions a lot, I also tried to find a necro build to do the same. During leveling I used hungering souls a lot and it was relatively effective. But at higher levels as a necro I don’t do any damage. There’s just no skill that has synergies with necro gear and skill tree. (Or let’s say I haven’t found one, yet). So I think I’ll try a Lich for this purpose.

This is something I haven’t seen yet. All actual Lich builds revolve around Soul Feast and have no minions. Maybe a minion based Lich is no candidate for 400+ Arena. But I also like fun builds like you have done a few, too.

So perhaps, when you are bored, you might want to do a Lich build “Beastmaster Style”? :blush: I’d love this.

i’ve thought about this actually, especially with the arekk’s bones weapon. that’s made for that stuff, I feel. Could be fun. First i’m working on a serpent strike guy now. Started that yesterday, and it’s pretty crazy

Yes, it’s a very nice skill (especially the serpent that you can summon with it). Also I like the animation a lot.

What did you take after Unbound Necromancy? I cannot get Frantic Summons until I have 4 more points.

unearthed arms

Thanks, I ended going through the video again and saw the 8/8. Appreciate your work!

yes, I forgot it in the voice-over, so it’s not your fault :stuck_out_tongue:
Glad to hear you like the content, I really appreciate that!

are there problems in having too many melee minions? They can block each other and many of them end up doing nothing, no?

My experience is that there seems to be a cap of how many melee minions can attack a single target at once.

Also my melee minions die faster in the arena when enemies have heavy aoe attacks. Your ranged minions are more in a safe distance.

With only ranged minions it’s harder for yourself to not get aggro because they don’t approach your enemies like the melees do.

I tried both, full ranged and full melee. Now I am running a combination of both, that works very well.

You gimp your minion damage a bit, though, when you use the necro uniques or set weapons because they just work for one type of minion.

Yea the Reach of the Grave and the Pebbles set really want you just to use Melee or Ranged only. I wish we have something that encourages a more balanced setup. Arek’s Bones seems interesting as we can try to have a balanced setup with all physical damage so minions can benefit from Armor Shred, but the penetration mechanic is currently not in a good state.

I wanted melee minions for the synergies, like the buff, the set, etc. But it’s true that in high arena, my entire army gets decimated by a rime giant. It is what it is, right? I’ll be making a few more with some variations, I was mostly surprised how well that set holds up around end game monolith farming.

Indeed. I used it for 1-2 monolith runs, thought it’s too weak and put it into my stash. I gave it another try after your vid and have to say that its not bad. And I am using it right now again.

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