Infinimist Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Necromancer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Belial's Eye Beams - Deals Corrupting type damage, which we scale naturally on this build with Wither.
Modifiers
- Wandering Death's Chest Beam - Executing non-Bosses vastly improves your clear speed, especially in the Pit.
- Sinerat's Flames - Adds a large multiplier for Shadow damage.
- Andariel's Flaming Skull - Scale DoT damage.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - When speedfarming the Pit, the additional Blisters help to clear Elites/Bosses faster. The additional targets they create also help in triggering Lucky Hit Chance procs.
- Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - When speedfarming, the additional cooldown procs for your Ultimate helps with Soulrift uptime.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Blight primary purpose is to grant a 20% damage multiplier while giving you something to cast to generate Corpses and proc Lucky Hit Chance.
- Corpse Explosion makes a large pool of Area of Effect Damage Over Time (AoE DoT). Keep monsters inside of the area to stack on the damage.
- Corpse Tendrils Slows, Stuns, makes Blood Orbs and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes more effective.
- Soulrift grants Barrier, generates Essence, applies Vulnerable and grants a Damage buff over its duration. Cast this whenever it's available.
- Decrepify Slows, reduces incoming damage, Stuns and reduces your Cooldowns via Lucky Hit mechanics. Cursed Aura automatically spreads this onto targets in range.
- Blood Mist is your source of Unstoppable, as well as an amazing survivability tool since it grants Immune for its duration. You want to be in Mist form as often as possible.
- Decompose generates Corpses and can pull enemies from far away, even with a single tic of damage, instead of fully channeling.
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.
- Decompose can be fully channeled against single targets to help speed up Corpse production, or used to pull far away enemies closer to the pack that you're stacking damage onto.
- 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
The Infinimist Necromancer sacrifices its minions to gain additional damage scaling. Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Reapers for Shadow damage, Skeletal Mages - Cold for Vulnerable damage and Golems - Bone for Attack Speed.
- If you're feeling squishy or playing on Hardcore, sacrificing Golems - Blood for Maximum Life and Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for Resistances are great ways to beef up your survivability.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Necromancer Class Overview.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
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.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Scourge
- Exploit
- Sacrificial
- Eliminator
- Abyssal
To Level 46
- Scourge
- Exploit
- Eliminator
- Sacrificial
- Abyssal
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
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.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
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.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
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. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed etc. have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that progression step.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 100% Chance for Corpse Explosion to Deal Double Damage.
- 50% Blood Mist Duration
- >50% Lucky Hit Chance Bonus
- >2,500 Intelligence
- >20 Ranks to Corpse Explosion (Including Ranks to Corpse Skills)
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- >8,000 Life
- 100% Movement Speed (Including Movement Speed During Blood Mist)
- >60% Soulrift Duration
- 65% Cooldown Reduction (In Stat Sheet)
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.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
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.
Begin here if you just made it into Torment 1 or are coming from our Leveling Guide! Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats. Disobedience helps with this.
- If you find a Slower 2-Handed Weapon (Sword, Mace, Scythe) with great stats on it, don't be afraid to use it until you find a good 2-Handed Axe. The Slower attack speed is less impactful on this build since it doesn't impact Explosive Mist's proc rate.
- If you do not have Cursed Aura yet, make sure to keep Decrepify applied to all enemies, whenever you engage a new pack or more monsters aggroe onto you.
- Cooldown Reduction on your Helmet helps with better uptime of Blood Mist, Corpse Tendrils as well as Soulrift. Try to time your damage bursts during these timers and focus on resetting their cooldown with Decrepify whenever possible. Dont cast Soulrift until you have to, so it's up during dangerous combat scenarios.
- Before the build becomes truly automated, manually casting Corpse Explosion and spamming Blight happens more often than not. Especially against single targets.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestral Legendaries, Paragon points, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Both of the recommended Uniques for this build drastically change the gameplay experience, while adding on additional power.
- Black River requires you to have multiple Corpses available when Corpse Explosion triggers, but grants a huge damage multiplier PER additional Corpse consumed past the first one. Always make sure to generate multiple Corpses before casting Corpse Explosion.
- Howl from Below make your Corpses more efficient by carrying them with your between packs, and moving them onto mobile bosses. The effect turns your Corpse into a projectile that runs to a nearby target before it explodes. It also applies a Fear effect that can cause enemies to run outside of your Skill's radius. Make sure to reapply Corpse Tendrils to keep everything grouped up nice and tight.
- Embalmer Aspect is here to activate Blood Begets Blood node, passively.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Shroud of False Death and Heir of Perdition offer MASSIVE damage scaling and Lucky Hit Chance. The All Stats helps to reach every bonus in the paragon board.
- Make sure to double check your Resistances and Armor when equipping these new gear pieces, to maintain your caps. The +1 Passive skill ranks from Shroud of False Death also boosts Spiked Armor.
- At this point, your ability to permanently stay in Blood Mist can be hindered a bit without a good amount of Cooldown Reduction on your gear. You need to become accustomed to relying on the Barrier generation from Soulrift to bridge the gap until you Cooldown's are refreshed.
The Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- Important difference for this setup is the use of the Jah Rune to gain access to Teleport for even faster blasting!
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your DPS decreases significantly when you're dodging their attacks.
- This setup is HYPER optimized, meaning that every recommended Greater Affix and Masterwork Crit is tailored to hit the exact caps that are necessary. This allows you to swap more Masterwork Crits to + Ranks on Skills and other damage increases. While you may not see a difference at lower tier content, these changes make the differences between highest possible Pit Tier clears.
- Removing Explosive Mist from the amulet lets you add another Offensive Aspect to your kit, while granting the 50% bonus to your strongest damage scaler.
- You need to manually cast Corpse Explosion on this setup, while Blood Mist is relegated to pure survivability and mobility use.
FAQ & Mechanics
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.
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
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.
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.
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
- 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.
- Corpse Explosion has an innate LHC of 25%.
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
- 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.
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.
Summary
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!
Credits
Written by MacroBioBoi