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Diablo 3 Necromancer & Season 11

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I decided to jump back into Diablo 3 again. My main reason for returning is to check out the new Necromancer. I waited until the beginning of Season 11 (just a few days ago) to take the plunge because I like the idea of starting fresh.

Since the Necro is the main reason I’m playing, I want to highlight a few of the things I really like about the class and where the game is at right now.

Necromancer Class Overall

Diablo 3 Necromancer IconThe Necromancer was one of my favorite characters to play in D2. I love pet classes and passives. Although the Necromancer is anything but passive, there’s still a nice element of sitting back and letting your skeletons smash stuff.

Necros use a resource called Essence, which must be harvested from corpses. The essence mechanic isn’t really different than any other expendable resource, but how it’s obtained is really cool.

Corpse Mechanic

When monsters die they leave a corpse that the Necro can utilize in a number of ways. Depending on your build, you might blow those corpses up with a nostalgic Corpse Explosion ability, or you might harvest them for essence.

This makes for a fun and unique mechanic for Necros that no other classes utilize.

Necro Style & Gear

The Necromancer is just perfect for Diablo games. We’re already talking about death, undead, demons, and the Lord of the Underworld here, so a Necromancer simply compliments everything about the game.

Necromancers look awesome. The style of their gear fits right in with the theme — especially Reaper of Souls.

My Necro Season 11 Gearing Up Build

Necromancer Season 11 Gearing Up Build

This is my Season 11 Necro Gearing Up build that I use. It’s really straight forward minion build. The goal is to eventually roll into a very similar build using the Rathma set. I’ll post about that in the coming days.

Key Abilities:

This build uses a builder like Bone Spikes, and uses the standard Skeleton minions. A few key abilities below make up the build’s bread and butter.

Skeletal Mages (Singularity) – 3500% weapon damage for 250 essence. Mages wreck elites and rare mobs. The melt packs like butter too if I have my volatile death curse on a pack. Without these, I find my killing speed is really, really low.

  • Bonus Note: I really recommend a Circle of Nailuj’s Evol to make these work well. This gives you TWO mages for the price of one, meaning you can summon TWO mages that deal 3500% weapon damage. Without the ring I’d probably go Skeleton Archers.

Devour (Cannibalize) – Consumes corpses and restores 10 essence per corpse (and 3% HP with cannibalize). I use this to keep my Essence as high as possible in order to maximize my Skeletal Mages.

Frailty (Volatile Death / Scent of Blood) – Curses enemies in a radius killing them at 15% health. When they die, because of Volatile Death they’ll explode for 100% weapon damage. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but in packs this pretty much clears them all. Scent of Blood is a higher difficulty alternative to increase minion damage.

Leveling Up a Fresh Season Necromancer

Leveling up a new character can be daunting. I’ll be the first to admit that the prospect of 1-70 wreaks of burnout for me.

The trick that I found to level up quickly is doing Bounties. You might be tempted to run Rifts, but I really, really recommend Bounties for two reasons:

  1. Bounties have higher mob density than Rifts. I find that Rifts constantly put me on maps that have fewer mobs (unless you’re lucky to get a certain map). Higher mob density + Leoric’s crown = EXP.
  2. Once you unlock the Cube, Bounties give you the materials you’l’l need for Cube recipes. You can never have enough crafting materials.

D3 General QoL Improvements

One main quality-of-life improvement that stands out right now is the crafting material tab. Instead of this crap filling my inventory or bank, it’s going into a special pocket/tab for materials and all stacking/registering as a number. If they could just do this with gems, that’d be nice.

Season 11 Game Plan

I hit level 70 last night. I can easily clear Master rifts in a timely manner with crap gear, so I think it shouldn’t be hard to grind out my Rathma set.

We all know how this story goes: Play for a few weeks to a month, burn out of killing the same mobs over and over, and wait until another season. But at least this time around there’s a new class!

  • Still fascinated how Star Citizen has raised over $155m now. Selling vaporware as far as I can tell and doesn’t even rate a mention on this blog. It seems like it would at least be interesting. But maybe that’s just me. I have no dog in the fight. No money spent. Not going to play. But fascinating.

    • I have absolutely zero interest in it, and it really does appear to be vaporware. I’ll pay attention and comment when there’s a game to play.

  • So happy you finally got back to Diablo to check out the necro! Take advantage of the convert rare feature in kanai’s cube to gear up (if you have a good stash of death’s breath). There is definitely something so very wonderful about a good chain of corpse explosion. <3 Also, the behind the scenes feature of making the necromancer is neat too, if you have a few minutes to spare. 🙂

    • Corpse explosion is really powerful. At times I’m weaving it into my build and seeing if it outpaces mages.

      I hit 70 so right now I’m pushing in the Torments with relative ease.

      Such a fun class and addition to D3!

  • So…what’s up about Albion Online ? You sold it out to us pretty solid a few months ago, but now that it’s released, you haven’t said anything.

    Was this a sponsor for you back in the day, hence the past-but-now-absent hype ?

    A quick copypasta found in a previous blog of yours about the game: “We’ll join an alliance in-game at launch and have lots of fun.”

    • Harsh! No sponsorship. In the history of our blog we’ve been paid to write one blog post for one game and it was disclosed: Titanfall (original).

      I logged over 200 hours in Albion Online. Was brought into Alpha as press, bought my way into Beta, and then bought the actual founders release pack.

      My playtime the past 3 weeks has been sporadic. I have an hour or two here and there to jump into a game which sadly doesn’t gel with Albion Online’s playstyle. When I can settle into a routine again I plan to play — heck I paid for it and really enjoy it. 🙂

      • Good to know. Thanks for answering. I wondered if the game was still holding well or if it went junk.

        It’s the kind of game that could interest me, so I’m following it from afar. Doesn’t look like it’s made for soloing, though, so the mental barrier of entry is higher for me.

      • The lack of solo support is a huge reason I can’t feel like jumping in right now. Contrast that with a game like UO where I felt like I could play solo (and most people did) any time I wanted and still make progress.

        Albion Online is really about alliance Pvp. Sure, you can technically be a trader or a crafter and never pvp… but that’s really not “playing” Albion Online… that’s “avoiding” Albion Online.

  • The Rathma Mage builds are really strong compared to many other classes this season. Without an ancient weapon I’ve already done an 83 GR solo. My gear has tons of room for improvement and augments should make it even better. I think it’s likely the bottom of the solo Necro leader board will be over 95 by the end of the season.

  • Im actually pretty excited to try your build out! Haven’t played Diablo 3 in a long time tho, might screw up 😀