Infinimist Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.

There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of three School's (Eldritch, Growth & Decay and Psyche) tags, that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.

Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

• The Cycle - This cycles between dealing bonus damage to an enemy, or healing you for greater sustain. At higher ranks, it does both. Slot this in if you're having issues staying alive.
• Hex of Shattering - The Damage Reduction is great and it is the most consistent way to apply a Hex.

Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.

Best-in-Slot Occult Gems

• Elder Sigil - Grants a damage multiplier for Corpse Skills.
• Vulture Talon - Increases the speed of your DoTs damage application.
• Friend of the Bog - Grants additional Intelligence, Maximum Life and the Unhindered status.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Wicked Pact, Heart of Anima, Toadling's Wish - Each adds a bonus to the potency of the three different Power types. Adds a decent increase to damage output before you can craft higher tier gems.

Skill Rotation

• Cast Decrepify at a distance to ready a group of monsters for your simple and deadly damage combination... Enter Blood Mist and run through packs of monsters. Your build handles the rest for you.
  • Blood Mist generates Corpses as well as your combination of high Lucky Hit Chance and the passive Skill Hewed Flesh.
  • The Corpses are automatically used for Corpse Explosion which procs from your Explosive Mist aspect. Everytime Explosive Mist consumes a Corpse, it lowers its cooldown when the Skill ends.
    • With a long enough Duration of Blood Mist, enough Cooldown Reduction on gear and enough Corpses consumed, when you leave Mist form you can immediately cast Blood Mist again.
• Upon leaving Blood Mist, immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on an available Corpse to Crowd Control everything. This helps to reduce incoming damage and allows you to maximize your DPS windows.
• Whenever it's off Cooldown AND you're engaging a monster pack, use Soulrift. The Barrier generated from this acts as a second round of "immunity" in that you're safe to manually cast Blight and Corpse Explosion. Once Barrier is running low, enter Mist form again and repeat.
• Passing through the pack of enemies to pick up any Blood Orbs helps to maintain your bonuses from the Paragon Board. Maintaining the buff only requires you to pick one up before five seconds has elapsed.
• When in doubt Blood Mist out! Reposition and end the Mist early by clicking the Skill again, once you're ready to re-engage. A great tactic is to generate a Corpse during this time then immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on it for more safety.
• Blood Mist quickly damages enemies all around you in a small radius. While the damage is inconsequential, it's a valuable source of Lucky Hit Procs, so try to keep monsters corralled to maximize these instances.
• Against single targets, you may find that you run out of Corpses due to the rate of consumption with Black River. If this happens, focus on spamming Blight into a target while you have Barrier and Soulrift active.
• While using Howl from Below the Corpses you consume become projectiles that seek out targets, and cause Fear which moves enemies outside of your Corpse Radius. Make sure to reapply Corpse Tendrils often to keep everything bunched up.

Book of the Dead

Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Infinimist Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Vex = More Skill Points increases your damage and decreases your Cooldowns.
• Igni + Ohm = Allows you to proc this Runeword on demand for another damage bonus.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Yom can be used to help stagger bosses more quickly to activate damage vs Crowd Controlled targets.
• Mot for damage reduction, Xal for more Maximum Life, Zec for better Soulrift uptime, and Qua for movement speed are all great options to fit your particular playstyle.

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees. You can have one Hired Mercenary that accompanies you into battle, and one Reinforcement Mercenary that triggers a selected Skill from their Tree based on your Skill use or other conditional event:

Hired: Subo

When Subo's Molotov hits an enemy, it grants a Damage over Time multiplier. This is also triggered by Snipe.

Reinforcement: Varyana

Varyana is a great source of Lucky Hit Procs to trigger Abhorrent Decrepify, especially against a single target.

To enable the Infinimist Necromancer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Infinimist Necromancer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

This section is designed to guide your Infinimist Necromancer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

I Keep Running out of Essence!

Essence per Second and Resource Cost Reduction

Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Resource Cost Reduction reduces the cost of every skill by a percentage equal to the total on your gear. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second. To completely replace the Essence loss of 1 cast per second you need 40% Resource Cost Reduction. This would allow you to go "infinite", meaning you would never run out of Essence. When casting your skills more than once per second, you need more of both stat to achieve this equilibrium.

Grim Harvest

Whenever you consume a corpse via Corpse Explosion, Raise Skeleton or Aspect of Explosive Mist you generate Essence with this passive. You get to recoup resources while applying DPS. It's a great two for one!

Early on, Essence Per Second on your gear helps to offset the loss of resource from

How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?

Abhorrent Decrepify

With your multiple sources of overlapping Damage Over Time (DoT) effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of CC'ed enemies so your Skills hit as many targets as possible, with as many damage instances as possible.

How Does Corpse Explosion Damage Work?

Corpse Explosion deals its damage over a total of six seconds. All DoT effects deal damage twice per second. So Corpse Explosion's total damage is divided by twelve and then applied to any enemies in its radius, over that duration. You can have any amount of Corpse Explosion effects stacked on top of one another and they all independently apply their damage to all enemies, but only show a single damage instance which is the summed total.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life. Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for Resistances.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

Mechanics

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

• While the mechanics are signifantly more nuanced than this, and many things in game slightly obfuscate the truth, understanding Lucky Hit Chance is fairly simple.
  • With Advanced Tooltips activated in your Gameplay Settings, you can see a Skill's innate LHC.
  • Not every Skill has a LHC even though things may cause those Skills to deal damage.
  • A Skill must apply damage to a target to have a chance to trigger LHC.
  • LHC effects do not have LHC and can't trigger other LHC effects.
  • Skills check for LHC EVERY time they deal damage to ANY targets. There's no limit or "one per cast" mechanics.
• To calculate the chance of triggering something, you take your Skill's LHC, multiply that by (1 + (Total Bonus Lucky Hit Chance / 100)) and then multiply that by the Effect's LHC.
  • Corpse Explosion has an innate LHC of 25%.
    • HUGE CAVEAT HERE: Damage over Time effects show an expected chance of applying Lucky Hit Chance over the total length of the Skill's duration, at least once, to a single target. So [Corpse Explosion is "lying" a little bit. Its chance of applying Lucky Hit with each damage tic has a .8% chance.
  • The Mythic Variant gets 61.6% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • The equation is .8% * (1 + (61.6/100)) * 15% = .193%. But it hits the target a total of twelve times with its tic, so the total chance to trigger it once per cast is (100% - (100% - .193%)^12) = 2.29%.
    • This seems low but you can stack pools, which can all deal their damage simultaneously and drastically increase your chance of proccing something once per second.
    • You trigger roughly 1.6 Corpse Explosions per second and they each last 6 seconds. Over this duration you can stack eight pools increasing the chance to proc Decrepify once per second, per target up to 18.32% of the time.

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Attack Speed Caps

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Necromancers, these two caps include:

Cap 1

• Attack Speed on Gear
• Attack Speed from Paragon Nodes
• Elixirs
• Kalan's Edict for Minions
• Golems - Bone Sacrifice
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine

Cap 2

• Accelerating
• Rapid
• Rathma's Chosen
• Reap
• Blood Lance
• Hemorrhage
• Howl from Below for Corpse Skills
• Blood Attack Speed Temper

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Stagger

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

The Infinimist Necromancer has enjoyed a long history of powerful, meta-shifting relevance. The interesting engine Corpse generation, Lucky Hit procs and big Corpse Explosion payoffs can lead to incredibly satisfying gameplay.

In Bocca al Lupo!

Written by MacroBioBoi