Summoner Necromancer Guide

While every Stat in the Desirable Stats column is useful for this build, we highlighted the Priority Stats in Teal so you can easily identify the Most Important Stats on them.

Hover over any Item to see a pop-out with the full Item description.

The areas below are efficient farming locations that make use of the build’s strengths. Other farming spots might not be as effective due to Immunities or bad layouts. These areas are strong without a Sunder Charm.

Anything that has a ✔ in the "Starter" column can be farmed with the Starter Variant.

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Ubers

This build is capable of farming Uber Tristram and the Mini Ubers before (See the "Ubers" Build Variant):

Your Mercenary serves an incredibly important role to the overall success of your build. They can be a front line tank, provide a pivotal Aura, and/or deal Physical Damage to kill enemies with Immunity to your Skill set.

Act 2 Desert Mercenary

Infinity, Might

Use a Desert Mercenary with Might Aura to deal with enemies that are immune to your main damage source.
Equip him with Infinity to reduce enemy Resistances and Defense with Conviction Aura, drastically boosting damage.

Mercenary Gear Options

Your Mercenary needs maximum Resistances, Life Leech, a high damage Weapon, and high Defense and/or Damage Reduction to stay alive reliably. Cannot Be Frozen is also a great stat for maintaining Mercenary DPS and leech. Ethereal gear is preferred since it doesn't lose durability.

The Mercenary is hard to keep alive until you have the minimum gear recommended in this guide. Remember you can drag Healing Potions onto the portrait, or shift + 1/2/3/4 to directly feed them a Healing Potion from your Belt. The Mercenary also gains bonus Resistances from Thawing Potions and Antidote Potions.

If your Mercenary dies in battle, you can revive them from any of the Mercenary NPCs in each Act. This does come with an increasing cost, capping at 50,000 Gold. Keep that in mind and decide if the Mercenary is currently worth the cost.

General

• Use your Mercenary and Golem to kill the first few monsters in a lower danger Area, to create your army of Skeletons. Eldritch the Rectifier is a great pack that is always next to the Frigid Waypoint.
• Tip: Once you have Nihlathak’s portal available in Act 5, you can quickly summon your Skeletons by entering this portal and using the bodies of the Reanimated Horde before they revive themselves.
• Your indirect damage comes from your Minions and Mercenary killing monsters for you. AmplifyDamage greatly increase your DPS.
• Your direct damage is achieved through corpseexplosion. This Skill has a Physical and Fire Damage component.
• Because of the Physical component, your damage is enhanced by AmplifyDamage as well.
• You quickly clear large swaths of monsters, which in turn gives you more corpses to target with further corpseexplosion.
• terror applies a fear effect to all non-elite monster types, quickly removing unnecessary trash monsters from the equation as your Minions focus on killing high priority targets.
• claygolem is an amazingly sturdy speed-bump and a 1 point wonder, as Golem stats scale with increasing difficulty.

Immunities

• Decrepify drastically reduces Attack Speed, Physical Damage, animation speed, and Physical Damage Reduction of affected monsters. amplify damage has an even larger impact on Physical Damage Reduction.
• lowerresist reduces enemy Resistances, most notably, their Fire Resistance which can break their Immunity. This allows our corpseexplosion Fire Damage component to kill otherwise Immune monsters.
• Flame Rift and bonebreak allow us to never face Immunes while farming, and increases our effective corpseexplosion damage.

Late-Game

• Your irongolem can be made from any metal based equipment. This includes Runewords made in metal bases. A common Golem is made from an Insight Runeword base.
  • Note: as the irongolem can die/despawn between games, it’s advised to only create them out of item types you can afford/replace.
• With Teleport you can selectively reposition your minions when you Teleport to a new location. Note: Depending on Minion type, your Minions/Mercenary become “stuck” to the spot you have teleported so you often have to move from this spot to allow your Minions to spread out.
• In Multiplayer, your Minions act as a damage soak for your whole team. Make sure to position your Minions in high danger areas and choke points to create buffers between threats and your team.
• For Uber farming, lifetap becomes the priority over amplifydamage. This gives your team, Mercenary and Minions greater sustain.

Faster Cast Rate (FCR)

Faster Cast Rate speeds up your casting animation for spells. Aim for at least the 125% FCR Breakpoint. Note: FCR only controls the animation speed of the Character, and not any internal Cooldowns spells have.

Faster Hit Recovery (FHR)

Faster Hit Recovery increases survivability. Aim for at least the 86% FHR Breakpoint.

Faster Block Rate (FBR)

Faster Block Rate is not required for survivability in this build, but early breakpoints can be utilized.

For all Hardcore gameplay, your primary focus is increasing your Resistances, Damage Reduction, Chance to Block and Maximum Life. This can mean sacrificing overall power level for a more secure playstyle.

This build can become Hardcore viable with key changes to the Skills, Stat Point allocation, and items. Review the changes below before building this character, as they may differ significantly from the normal build.

Stat Point Changes

• We allocate 128 Stat Points into Dexterity by level 99 to achieve 75% Block Chance.

Skill Point Changes

• We allocate Skill Points into bonearmor and its synergies boneprison / bonewall for more protection against Physical Damage.

Item Changes

• Use Homunculus to maximize Chance to Block and Faster Block Rate.
• Use Shimmering Small Charm of Vita for more Maximum Life instead of Better Chance to Find Magic Items.
• Use String of Ears Demonhide Sash for Damage Reduced by x%. This is especially important when using bonebreak.
• When using Flame Rift, offset the reduction to our Fire Resistance by swapping to Ruby Small Charm of Good Luck for targeted Resistances.

• raiseskeleton Stats increase in accordance with the Difficulty of the game the Player is in.
  • Base Life of the skeletons increases by 9 in Nightmare, and by 21 in Hell. (21 -> 30 -> 42)
  • Base Defense Rating increases by 1 in Hell. (5 -> 6)
  • Base Attack Rating actually decreases by 1 in Nightmare, but then increase by 1 in Hell. (5 -> 4 -> 6)
• raiseskeleton Stats are also calculated at the time of casting. If your Character received + Skills from a buff, the Skeletons they summon have increased Stats even after the buff has run out. Furthermore, Skeletons can be buffed after they're summoned for even higher Stats.
• Skeletons can be summoned even if you are at the maximum cap for total Skeletons. This replaces the oldest summoned Skeleton in chronological order. They can also be Unsummoned using the unsummon Skill.
• Skeletons have a % Chance to Block depending on a random number generation when the Skeleton is summoned. Although there is a Skeleton model that has a Shield, that is not an indicator that the Skeleton itself is actually "equipped" with a shield.
• Skeletons cannot be raised from Blood Hawk Nest, Gargoyle Trap, or Tentacle Beast corpses.
• "Uber" Bosses (Act Bosses and Ubers) deal massively increased damage versus Summons. Skeletons rarely survive concentrated damage from these monster types.

• Revive Stats are negatively affected if the Character's level (cLVL) is less than the Monster's level (mLVL) of a targeted corpse. The Revive 's mLVL is calculated based on cLVL instead of the mLVL and their Maximum Life is multiplied by cLVL/mLVL. This decreases their Chance to Hit, their damage, and increase their Chance to be Hit.
• Revive Stats are calculated at the time of casting. If your Character received + Skills from a buff, the Revive they summon have increased Stats even after the buff has run out. Furthermore, Revive can be buffed after they're summoned for even higher Stats.
• Revive can be summoned even if you are at the maximum cap for total Revives. This replaces the oldest summoned Revive in chronological order. They can be Unsummoned using the unsummon Skill.
• Revives maintain the majority of their Monster's AI and special abilities. This is very useful when targeting Monsters with Crushing Blow as a static ability. Try targeting Urdars in Act 4 River of Flame and Act 5 Frigid Highlands as these Monsters tend to spawn close to the Waypoint.
• Revive cannot be raised from Minion of Destruction, Oblivion Knight, Putrid Defiler, Suicide Minion, Leaper, Blood Hawk Nest, Gargoyle Trap, or Tentacle Beast corpses.
• "Uber" Bosses (Act Bosses and Ubers) deal massively increased damage verse Summons. Revive don't receive the bonus % Resistance from summonresist but their base and bonus defensives give them better survivability than other Summons.

• Amplifydamage reduces the target's Physical Damage Resistance by 100%, which can drop a Monster's resistance to -100%. This effectively doubles your Physical Damage dealt (and in many cases more than double).
• Amplifydamage breaks most Physical Immunes unless they are naturally Physical Immune and spawn with the "Stoneskin" Affix. i.e. Ghost monster types in Hell.
• Amplifydamage increases 1/2 of the total damage from corpseexplosion because 1/2 of the damage dealt is Physical. It also increases all damage from your Skeletons, Mercenary, and Revive's Physical attacks.
• Skill points in Amplifydamage only increase the radius of effect and duration of the curse. At max level Amplifydamage applies to the entire visible screen and last long enough that you only have to cast it once per screen typically.

• The damage dealt is split 50%/50% between Physical and Fire Damage. This means only 50% of the damage benefits from Amplifydamage.
• Monsters with an Immunity to either Physical or Fire Damage can still receive damage from the other damage type of corpseexplosion .
• Each Skill Point in corpseexplosion increases the radius, with the Fire Damage having a slightly larger radius than the Physical Damage.
• This damage is not blocked by Physical obstacles.
• Damage is calculated using the base Monster type's average maximum Life. This means Player's count and Champion/Unique/Super Unique status does not increase the damage dealt. Damage does NOT scale with Player's count making corpseexplosion less efficient in Multiplayer.
• If the Character's Level (cLVL) is less than the Monster's level (mLVL) of a targeted corpse, then the damage dealt is multiplied by a variable (cLVL/mLVL) which reduces the total damage dealt.
• corpseexplosion is considered a Fire Skill for items which give + to Fire Skills, but not for items which give +% Fire Skill Damage or Fire Mastery.

• bonearmor absorbs Physical Damage after it's calculated and before it's applied to the Necromancer as damage.
  • This means after the character's Physical Damage Reduction calculation, but before any other sources like energyshield.
• Physical Damage accumulates up to the maximum value provided by bonearmor and any excess damage is dealt to the Necromancer.
• bonearmor can be recast at the maximum speed of the Necromancer's Faster Cast Rate, with no Cooldown. You can theoretically negate all Physical Damage as long as you recast bonearmor faster than the incoming source of Physical Damage.
• Recasting bonearmor replaces your current pool of armor with the maximum value.
  • If you cast bonearmor with any source of + to All Skills (like a Skill Shrine) and then recast bonearmor after the buff has run out, you replace your higher maximum value with the current maximum value.
• bonearmor only negates the Physical Damage component of any incoming damage source.
  • If Nihlathak casts corpseexplosion your bonearmor does NOT negate the Fire Damage portion of the skill's effect.

• teleport allows a Player to select any square within the total range of the visible screen and teleport to that location, bringing any Mercenary or Minions with it. (Other than Traps).
• You are able to teleport an even farther distance by holding down right click and opening either the Attributes or Inventory screen and dragging your mouse to the edge of the screen in that window, while casting.
• Teleporting is not obstructed by walls or other impediments but can fail if your cursor is not completely passed those impediments when cast.
• In single player, clicking the Escape key after teleporting can give you enough time to determine if you are in a safe location before continuing. If you teleported into a sticky situation, consider Save and Exiting and try again .
• Depending on Minion type, your Minions/Mercenary can become “stuck” to the spot you have teleported so you often have to move from this spot to allow your Minions to spread out. Get into the habit of moving backwards after every teleport to give your Minions this opportunity.