LoD Corpse Explosion Necromancer Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. This is a Legacy of Dreams build whose success is heavily dependent on this gem's rank. The first order of business is to equip a Legendary or Set item in every slot to take advantage of its power. Make sure to not have any Set Bonuses equipped or the gem will be nullified and you will deal no damage! Farm speed Greater Rifts (in under 5 minute clears) to find the items and get this gem as high as possible. Above Rank 25 ancient pieces of gear will give you even greater power.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. Create a level 1 Necromancer and gamble for Grasps of Essence
2. Goldwrap and Dayntee's Binding
3. Aquila Cuirass
4. Steuart's Greaves and Ice Climbers
5. Stone Gauntlets
6. Razeth's Volition and Homing Pads
7. Nemesis Bracers and Ancient Parthan Defenders
8. Any Legendary Phylactery, preferably Lost Time
9. Krysbin's Sentence, Briggs' Wrath and Convention of Elements
10. Leoric's Crown
11. Blackthorne's Jousting Mail

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Two-Handed Axes to get Messerschmidt's Reaver
2. Create a level 1 Demon Hunter and upgrade Swords to get In-Geom
3. Two-Handed Scythes to get Nayr's Black Death
4. Scythes to get Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang
5. Amulets to get The Johnstone, Squirt's Necklace and The Flavor of Time
6. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.
   
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur (for your follower)
• Act 2: Illusory Boots and Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)
  
  

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. Spend your materials getting items with better rolls and/or ancient quality.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang
• The Johnstone
• Krysbin's Sentence
• Convention of Elements

• Legacy of Dreams is the Legacy of Nightmares Set in a gem, which frees up two ring slots at the cost of removing a legendary gem. Due to the rings available to us this is a great trade-off to take.
• Bane of the Trapped is a staple that grants us a 60% separate damage multiplier.
• Bane of the Stricken helps us kill the Rift Guardian. As long as you don't need more than 2 minutes to kill it you can equip Bane of the Powerful instead.
• For Nephalem Rifts, Boon of the Hoarder is always a default include specifically due to its amazing synergy with Avarice Band and Goldwrap.
• Pain Enhancer gives us 3% Attack Speed for all bleeding enemies within 20 yards. This is very strong in group play with large monster density. The alternative is Gogok of Swiftness for more consistency and toughness.

• Grim Scythe Cursed Scythe applies curses for our Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang and Dayntee's Binding bonuses as well as counting as a stack for Nayr's Black Death.
• Corpse Explosion Close Quarters is our primary damage dealing skill, we will take the Poison rune for even more damage from Nayr's Black Death.
• Bone Armor Dislocation provides 30% damage reduction and activates our Krysbin's Sentence on our Poison Convention of Elements cycle.
• Blood Rush Potency can be taken for mobility and increased armor.
• Land of the Dead Frozen Lands allows us to cast our Corpse Explosion at will, while also freezing enemies on our screen.
• The last skill slot is usually filled with Bone Spear Blighted Marrow for another stack of Nayr's Black Death or a curse depending on the setup.

• Spreading Malediction gives 1% increased damage for every cursed enemy.
• Blood is Power helps reduce our Land of the Dead Cooldown by 20% based off damage taken.
• Stand Alone gives 100% additive armor with the 250% from Stone Gauntlets and the 25% from Paragon points.
• Eternal Torment makes curses cost 50% less and last forever.
• Final Service allows us to cheat death.
• For speed content you can drop Eternal Torment for Fueled by Death.

¹ Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 750,000 Life is recommended).

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

While the rotation is fairly easy to perform with practice, it requires you to understand the multipliers in play. First with Nayr's Black Death in the cube we need to rotate our Poison skills before the Poison Convention of Elements cycle arrives. You'll finish by casting Land of the Dead Frozen Lands and Bone Armor Dislocation at the start of Poison to get infinite corpses and to activate your Krysbin's Sentence before unleashing with Corpse Explosion Close Quarters to blow everything up.

Make sure to stop spamming Corpse Explosion 1 second before Land of the Dead ends to avoid consuming The Johnstone stacks. Drag the Elites forward to another big pack of monsters, and when your Land of the Dead is back up, repeat the rotation.

This build has a lot of toughness which makes it great for Hardcore. To become more tanky, put more Paragon points into Vitality and drop Eternal Torment for Final Service. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

Corpse Explosion is complicated when trying to maximize your damage output, due to The Johnstone mechanics. First of all, here are a few simple key points to be aware of:

• Corpse Explosion costs no essence and does not have any sort of internal cooldown. As long as you have corpses at your disposal, you can keep firing it.
• Each cast of Corpse Explosion triggers 5 corpses in a quick chain reaction over 45 frames, one corpse every 9 frames. This means a single cast of Corpse Explosion is enough to fully stack Grasps of Essence after 45 frames.
• Close Quarters makes corpses explode around your character instead of where your mouse cursor is, so it is important to stand in the middle of the monsters.

As it is not possible to produce enough corpses to sustain Corpse Explosion, Land of the Dead has to be used and creates a rotation-based playstyle. It is easy to understand why Cooldown Reduction becomes an active damage stat for Corpse Explosion: the less you wait your Land of the Dead cooldown, the more rotations you can do. As usual, those rotations are synchronized with Convention of Elements for a maximum damage output.

The Johnstone is where things become interesting. This item grants you 50 stacks of Macabre Knowledge after your Land of the Dead expires that you'll use on your next rotation. Macabre Knowledge buffs the damage of Corpse Explosion by 200%. Each corpse consumed by the skill will consume one stack, and each cast consumes 5 corpses, which means 10 casts of Corpse Explosion are going to consume all our Macabre Knowledge stacks.

Understanding this last point is the key to maximizing your damage, we have a rotation burst playstyle based on Convention of Elements meaning all our damage is concentrated into a 4 second window, or 240 frames. It now becomes obvious that being able to cast all 10 Corpse Explosions buffed by Macabre Knowledge during the Convention of Elements window is going to be a tremendous damage boost.

The answer to that is Attack Speed and Breakpoints. Corpse Explosion has FPA Breakpoints and does not have any Attack Speed Coefficient so that you can get your Breakpoint by rounding up the result of the formula FPA = 60 ÷ APS.

For instance in a typical group setup using Gogok of Swiftness and no party buffs or Attack Speed rolls on items with 1.63 Attack Speed, you have a 60 ÷ 1.63 = 37 frames Breakpoint on Corpse Explosion, meaning you can cast 240 ÷ 37 = 6.47 Corpse Explosion during the 4 second window of your Convention of Elements cycle. Remember that corpses explode in a quick chain reaction, starting after 9 frames and then every 9 frames over 45 frames, so the higher Breakpoint you reach, the more casts will overlap, so it would be worth to start casting around half a second before CoE already. For the purpose of spawning an Oculus Ring, doing it even earlier is fine as long as you don't waste more than 3 casts before your Poison cycle.

Using Pain Enhancer, reaching much higher APS values is easy in a good rift with high monster density. Reaching 2.61 Attack Speed (28 stacks) allows you to get the 60 ÷ 2.61 = 23 frames Breakpoint which enables you to perform 10 Corpse Explosion casts within 230 frames or 3.8334 seconds. In that case, you should cast Land of the Dead right when your CoE cycle starts to get 100% efficiency from The Johnstone.

Unfortunately, some corpses from your last casts are always going to be out of the Convention of Elements cycle. In order to get full efficiency on both The Johnstone and Convention of Elements you would need to get 3.16 Attack Speed (42 stacks) to reach the 19 frames Breakpoint on Corpse Explosion, allowing you to cast your 10 Corpse Explosions in less than 195 frames (3.25 seconds) so that the very last corpse explodes within the 240 frames window. Unfortunately it is unrealistic and not worth it to get that much Attack Speed especially with Nayr's Black Death giving more value to a 4th Poison skill than Skeleton Archers.

• Give 100% damage bonus for each Poison skill you've used in the last 15 seconds. Each skill has its own timer, meaning you have to hit each Poison skill once every 15 seconds to keep maximum stacks.

• As you spend life with your skills or take damage from enemies, you stack up a hidden counter towards 100% life spent.
• Each skill has a separate counter. Blood Is Power counter is reset when the skill has fully cooled down or when you die.
• After you reach the threshold, a skill's cooldown will be cut by 20% flat of its base cooldown (after Cooldown Reduction has been applied).