Trag’Oul 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. Gather the full Trag'Oul's Avatar set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Trag'Oul's Avatar set
2. Grasps of Essence
3. Jesseth Skullshield
4. Krysbin's Sentence and Convention of Elements
5. Nemesis Bracers

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

1. Scythes to get Jesseth Skullscythe and Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang
2. Amulets to get The Johnstone
3. 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
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship (for your follower)
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Aughild's Authority, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)
• Kill Malthael to acquire the Reaper's Wraps crafting recipe

• 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 Gogok of Swiftness or Bane of the Powerful instead.
• Zei's Stone of Vengeance provides a great separate damage multiplier to this build as it grants first stage benefit at 0 yards and not 10 yards.
• Gogok of Swiftness can be used instead of Zei's Stone of Vengeance. It allows us to reach the 36 second Breakpoint on Land of the Dead and the 26 frames Breakpoint on Corpse Explosion while granting us a hefty 30% dodge chance.
• Enforcer is used to buff the damage of our Blood Mages in the T16 setup.
• For Nephalem Rifts, Boon of the Hoarder is always a default include specifically due to its amazing synergy with Avarice Band and Goldwrap.

• Corpse Explosion Final Embrace is our primary damage dealing skill.
• Blood Rush is at the core of Trag'Oul's Avatar playstyle. It provides us with incredible mobility and healing capacity as well as a 100% Armor buff and a way to produce corpses.
• Land of the Dead Frozen Lands allows us to cast our Corpse Explosion at will while also freezing enemies on our screen to proc Krysbin's Sentence.
• Grim Scythe Cursed Scythe applies curses for our Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang and Dayntee's Binding bonuses while helping us to stack Bane of the Stricken.
• Command Skeletons Dark Mending is used during solo push to get the bonus from our Jesseth Arms set.
• Simulacrum Reservoir is used for a better damage burst if you're playing with Reilena's Shadowhook.

• Spreading Malediction gives us 1% additive damage for every cursed enemy.
• Blood is Power helps reduce our Land of the Dead cooldown by 20% based off damage taken, allowing us to reach the 48 second Breakpoint on Land of the Dead.
• Eternal Torment makes curses cost 50% less and last forever.
• Final Service allows us to cheat death.
• Overwhelming Essence is great for more damage if you're playing with Reilena's Shadowhook.
• For speed content you can drop Eternal Torment for Fueled by Death.

¹ Aim for a decent HP pool (at least 800,000 in Solo Push) as Trag'oul's Avatar doubles that amount.
² Only put points in Maximum Essence if you play with Reilena's Shadowhook.

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. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
4. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
5. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
6. 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 manage timings properly. You need to use the time between your Land of the Dead rotations (synchronized with Convention of Elements Physical cycle) to scout, pull and gather as many monsters as you can together. Make sure to always Grim Scythe to curse enemies.

When you are ready to perform your rotation:

• Use Land of the Dead Frozen Lands right before (about half a second) your Physical cycle.
• Cast 1 Corpse Explosion in order to stack your Grasps of Essence, to proc an Oculus Ring and to jump into it.
• At the start of Physical cycle, immediately unleash with Corpse Explosion Final Embrace 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 for your next rotation.
• Drag the Elites forward and pull as many monsters as you can.
• When your Land of the Dead is back up, repeat the rotation.

This build is not Hardcore friendly considering it literally uses its own life to do damage and does not have any damage mitigation. The stop and go, high-risk high-reward playstyle is not appealing either. One of the best ways to increase defenses for Hardcore is to put more paragon points into Vitality and never forget the Final Service passive. Take a look at the Legacy of Dreams variant (see Guide) which is way tankier!

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.
• Final Embrace creates spiders running to nearby monsters and exploding. We need to use this rune due to Trag'Oul's Avatar as it is the only rune that consumes life.

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 with 2.33 Attack Speed, you have a 60 ÷ 2.33 = 26 frames Breakpoint on Corpse Explosion, meaning you can cast 240 ÷ 26 = 9.23 Corpse Explosion during the 4 second window of your Convention of Elements cycle. This means you should not cast Land of the Dead more than 1 second before your CoE cycle and not cast Corpse Explosion more than twice. 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. In that case the last two corpses of your second cast before Convention of Elements will happen during CoE.

Reaching 2.61 Attack Speed 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 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.

• 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).

• Reilena's Shadowhook provides this build with a very significant damage increase based on our Maximum Essence. Make sure your Weapon and Off-Hand both have Maximum Essence as secondary rolls and that you're using Simulacrum Reservoir and Overwhelming Essence to get it even higher.