The Shadow Summoner Necromancer combines the devastating power of Shadow Damage over Time (DoTs), with the unrelenting swarm of Undead Minions, that shows what it truly means to be a master of Life and Death!
The Key Passive Shadowblight now triggers from the attacks of your Skeletal Mages - Shadow which opens up the full potential of this build. Relying on continuous damage and Lucky Hit procs from Corpse Explosion, you're able empower your Minions in a multitude of ways! Ring of Mendeln is particularly impactful, bringing some much needed burst potential to your kit.
This build transitions well from our Summoner Leveling Guide since it uses similar Legendary Aspects found in the Codex of Power. This is meant to focus on the Minions themselves and how to scale them. Focusing more on the Necromancer's own damage and scaling can be much more impactful for people looking for a more active playstyle!
The combination of DoT and high Critical Strike/Vulnerable damage output means you consistently push easy through content. Learning how Minions interact with your different stats and buffs is the key to your success!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Summoner Necromancer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Necromancer play style, check out all of our Necromancer Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
Recommended Stones
- Tempest - Incredible single-target attack with fast attack speed.
- Efficiency Support - Increases your critical strike chance tremendously.
- Breaking Support - Provides you with Vulnerable and additional instant Barrier destrruction.
- Arcing Support - Spreads your Breaking Support and therefore Vulnerable on multiple enemies.
- Flash of Adrenaline - Permanent damage multiplier after a certain Governing Stones and Tuning Stones level.
- Duration Support - Helps making the combo permanent.
- Tactical Support - Helps making the combo permanent.
- Safeguard Support - Provides additional Damage Reduction and can also be up permanently.
Alternative Stones
Many other options are possible to support this build, including different Governing Stones to apply the effects. Feel free to experiment!
- Poison Support - Increases your Seneschal Construct's damage.
- Mockery Support - Helps defensively by taunting the enemies and grouping them on your Seneschal Construct.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Blighted Copse Explosion turns its explosion into an area of Shadow Damage over time. Stacking continuous DoTs maintains maximum DPS. Corpse Explosion helps to proc Shadowblight faster and gains you the buff from Blighted Aspect which your Minions gain 30% of. It also greatly increases the damage from Ring of Mendeln procs. (This uses the Necromancer's stats for damage scaling and not the Minion's!)
- Corpse Tendrils Slows, Stuns, applies Vulnerable and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes more effective.
- Decrepify Slows, reduces incoming damage, Stuns and reduces your Cooldowns via Lucky Hit mechanics. Your cooldowns quickly recover, allowing for maximum uptime on Vulnerable from Corpse Tendrils, and the Golem's ability.
- Raise Skeleton and Golem must be on the skill bar to summon these Minions. Each also has an activation ability that is used continuously during combat for maximum efficiency.
- Bone Storm grants 20% Critical Strike Chance to help your Minions and Shadowblight crit, 15% Damage Reduction and powerful interactions with Defensive Aspects. Bone Storm should be permanently up during combat. With the ability to quickly reset its cooldown via Decrepify, it increases your overall damage output, survivability and continues to proc all of your buffs and effects.
- Shadowblight Key Passive is the true MVP of the build. Its proc is an instantaneous damage source that can Critically Strike. This adds a lot of damage to your kit and allows you to stack more damage stats on your gear for better output.
- Hewed Flesh gives you an avenue for generating enough Corpses to sate all of your Corpse consumption needs. Stacking a ton of Lucky Hit Chance Bonus makes this passive efficient enough to not stall out on optimal gear.
- Gloom and Terror help to add on damage, while Reaper's Pursuit speeds you up and Crippling Darkness helps to stagger bosses and CC enemies in a fight.
Book of the Dead
There are 3 different Minion types you can choose to summon or sacrifice, located in the Book of the Dead. The Shadow Summoner Necromancer chooses to summon each type of available Minions to bolster its power and survivability. Reaper Warriors deal cleaving AoE damage and generate Corpses. Shadow Mages benefit from your Shadow Damage stats and proc Shadowblight. The Bone Golem has amazing survivability and a powerful AoE attack.
IMPORTANT:
Your Minions gain 30% of any Stats, Buffs or bonuses the Necromancer gains for itself. If you have +10% Shadow Damage on a Ring, your Shadow Mages gain +3% Shadow Damage. But if a tooltip references the Minions directly, or the Stat refers to Summons/Minions, they receive 100% of that bonus. In the example of Abyssal the Necromancer AND the Minions deal 10% additional Non-Physical Damage. Your Minions do not gain 30% of the 10% you inherit from that Glyph. If an effect increases the damage a target takes (Revenge) that applies to the Minions with 100% effectiveness. See the Video Guide below for more information!
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specialization in our full Book of the Dead Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
Decrepify has the chance to trigger off of every damage instance including all of your overlapping Damage over Time (DoT) effects. It even triggers from monsters attacking you and the Thorns damage you may have on a Shield. This level of Cooldown management allows for realiably expecting for any and all Skills to be available when needed, even in crucial moments.
Grim Harvest fuels the low Essence cost of Decrepify. Grim Harvest passively refills your Essence which means you never have to worry about your Essence generation.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
You need to level up your Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Darkness
- Control
- Scourge
- Golem
- Territorial
Level 21
- Control
- Scourge
- Territorial
- Darkness
- Golem
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Progression & Variants
When you start diving into the Endgame Shadow Summoner Necromancer build, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Blighted Akkan's Grasp - Hawezar
- Grasping Veins Corrupted Grotto - Kehjistan
- Inner Calm Raethwind Wilds - Scosglen
- Reanimation Aldurwood - Scosglen
- Disobedience Halls of the Damed - Kehjistan
- Ghostwalker Broken Bulwark - Scosglen
- Unyielding Commander's Faceless Shrine - Hawezar
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Frenzied Dead - Gamble Focus
- Decay - Gamble Focus
- Blood Getter's - Gamble Boots
- Occult Dominion - Gamble Boots
- Coldbringer's - Gamble Boots
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
- Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet drastically increases your AoE damage output, as well as your kill speed against Bosses. This procs continuously from your multiple DoT effects. It's ability to Critically Strike allows it to benefit from more damage multipliers, that easily slot onto the build.
- Ring of Mendeln adds huge damage potential to your build by utilizing the Lucky Hit Chance mechanic making your Minions hit like a truck. This ring is used in the Speed Farming, Late Endgame and Boss Killer variants.
- Lidless Wall adds a new way to drastically increase your Speedfarming potential but requiring constant enemy engagement to maintain its bonus Bone Storm. While increasing survivability from Barrier Generation and Damage Reduction, it also provides a significant boost to your Shadow Damage output and spreads your damage even further across a battlefield.
- Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul brings back a powerful Malignant Heart power from Season 1. The auto-casting skills needed to be equipped on your Skill Bar to function. This automates a lot of the build's primary gameplay loop to increase efficiency and damage output.
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build:
- Harlequin Crest does not fit well onto the Shadow Summoner Necromancer but if you don't have a powerful Helm, absolutely use this until you find a perfect match for the variant you're playing.
- Andariel's Visage fits easily onto the build and offers an interesting method for managing survivability. The DoT application also helps with Speed Farming.
- Doombringer an incredible option for Tankiness and overall survivability that requires you to sacrifice damage output.
- Ring of Starless Skies is a close contender for best uber unique for builds that use Resource. This build does not use Essence to generate damage.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
Coming from World Tier 2, you can already have a good array of Legendary Aspects imprinted on key gear pieces to help smooth out gameplay and set you up for success.
- Blighted Offensive Aspect on an Amulet adds the biggest total damage multiplier you have for this build.
- Offensive Aspect of Grasping Veins gives a massive amount of Critical Strike Chance and a decent damage multiplier.
- Aspect of Inner Calm and Aspect of Reanimation are lower level damage scaling Aspects that you can use if you have extra materials for imprinting.
- Aspect of Slaughter grants movement speed as long as you haven't received damage recently.
- Make sure to upgrade your Weapon, Boots and Amulet at least 3 times to help buff high-priority stats.
IMPORTANT:
You need at least 1 source of Thorns damage on your gear somewhere so that Abhorrent Decrepify can proc from enemies attacking your Minions. This is one of the largest sources of the build's overall efficiency. If you cannot find Thorns on a Chest piece, you can substitute 1 Skill Rank of Terror for Spiked Armor.
Skills
Before you have access to the powerful Aspect Aspect of Ultimate Shadow, Bone Storm offers little to your kit. You have to opt for Army of the Dead instead to benefit from Unyielding Commander's Aspect to further empower your minion's damage and survivability.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects, allowing you to pilot a much stronger version of this build. Additional Legendary Aspects are used to fill slots that may be replaced with Unique items later on.
Gear
- Aspect of Decay brings a huge amount of additional damage to the build and nets you better output from your Critical Strike Chance and Damage.
- Aspect of Frenzied Dead is holding the slot for your eventual Ring of Mendeln.
- Aspect of Ultimate Shadow drastically increases the damage output of the build while also increasing the importance of your Golem, since the little guy gets a Storm of their own!
- Coldbringer's Aspect adds an interesting addition of CC from your Mages now that it works for any Mage type.
IMPORTANT:
You NEED at least 1 source of Thorns damage on your gear somewhere so that Abhorrent Decrepify can proc from enemies attacking your Minions. This is one of the largest sources of your build's overall efficiency. If you cannot find Thorns on a Chest piece, you can substitute 1 Skill Rank of Terror for Spiked Armor.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects and Unique items, unleashing the strongest version of this build. Be prepared to grind to access some of these highly sought after items!
Gear
Transitioning to the Late Endgame version of the build entails replacing your gear with higher Item Power, finding perfect combinations of affixes and replacing Aspects with perfect versions of those same Aspects.
- The biggest change is the incorporation of Ring of Mendeln as well as Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul. These rings provide a massive amount of burst damage and gameplay automation, respectively.
- We no longer need another source of Thorns damage to proc Abhorrent Decrepify.
- The Damage value on Mendeln is the base damage used in a calculation that scales off your Necromancer's stats and NOT your Minions'.
- Attack Speed becomes even more important on your Minions so that they never waste multiple procs from the ring on a single attack, since they do not stack.
The Gauntlet variant is designed to provide the highest damage possible, while constantly moving at high movement speed.
Gear
- It is incredibly important to squeeze every little bit of damage out of your gear. You can accomplish that by incorporating stats on gear pieces which usually prioritize damage reduction or utility such as your Chest or Helmet slot.
- Make sure you are Movement Speed capped at 200% total Movement Speed. If you are not, you use +% Movement Speed After Killing an Elite on Boots and if that is not enough you also run it on the Amulet.
- Since Shrines will be present during your Gauntlet runs, Shrine Buff duration on Boots and Amulet are highly important.
Skill Tree
- Min/maxed to absolute fastest version possible.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons below Tier 45.
Gear
The build sacrifices survivability for mobility. Luckily, you can rely on your undead horde to absorb the brunt of your enemy's attacks.
- Replace your Boots Aspect with Wind Striker to trigger whenever you gain critically strike.
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet replaces Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul to add on another AoE burst damage option.
Skill Tree
Remove two points from Hewed Flesh to max out Reaper's Pursuit for even more mobility.
The Nightmare Dungeon Push setup allows you to dive into much deeper into Nightmare Dungeons where the difficulty increases significantly! It aims to become as tanky as possible while maintaining high enough damage output to achieve the highest tier Nightmare Dungeons.
Gear
To be able to push into more dangerous content, you need to stack more defensive Affixes onto your gear. Prioritize getting +xx% Total Armor on the Helm and Chest. Pants may require an additional Maximum Minion Life affix. Damage Reduction or Total Armor on the Amulet, as well as Damage Reduction on the Off-Hand. This slot is often overlooked for this stat. Also make sure to cap your Resistances with up to two different rolls on your Boots.
The Lidless Wall or even a Legendary Shield with more defensive stats and Aspects can be used to further boost your survivability! Even though you keep your Minions alive, the normal Lucky Hit chance is high enough to still proc it consistently.
Gameplay
- The Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul helps to make sure monsters are fully CC'ed by auto-casting Corpse Tendrils for you.
- Always prioritize making room between you and the monsters instead of maximizing Close status for damage, when engaging particularly dangerous monsters.
- Initiate every fight with Decrepify before anything else to minimize Cooldown lengths and the monster's damage output.
AVOID THESE Nightmare Dungeon Affixes
Before you go into what you should change on your build, take a look at Nightmare Dungeon Affixes that you HAVE TO avoid for a successful push:
- Monster attacks from a distance reduce your Armor by 7% for 6 sec, stacking up to 35%.
- Monsters take 40% less Shadow damage.
These Affixes are bad, but not unbeatable:
- Monsters take 40% less damage from close targets.
- Monsters take 60% less damage from Critical Strike.
- Crowd Control durations vs monsters is reduced by 40%.
- The duration of Vulnerable Effects vs monsters is reduced by 60%.
- Monsters become Unstoppable when life drops below 30%.
The Mendeln Summoner + Infinimist Endgame Variant seeks to maximize the damage potential of Ring of Mendeln by scaling the Necromancer's damage, while slightly reducing your AoE Shadow Damage. The payoff adds a lot of Single Target damage, while needing to invest slightly into the survivability of your new minions.
This Variant assumes you have leveled all of the required Glyphs for the Paragon Board and have the gear to support its play style!
Since the Ring of Mendeln uses the Necromancer's damage and NOT your minion's, you're able to readjust how you scale the build's damage and functionality. This pairs incredibly well with X'Fal's Corroded Signet to add on even more consistent proc damage.
With the changes since Patch 1.1.1, your Minions are able to survive high Nightmare Dungeon damage, including oppressive AoE damage, with much less investment. You can reroute a lot of those survivability stats back into the Necromancer.
Skill Tree
You need to move some points out of Darkness Skill damage scaling and survivability to make room for the investment into your minions. You offset the loss with some important adjustments.
- You no longer rely on Corpse Explosion for damage at all, to make room for the Blight skill on your bar.
- Blight becomes your primary proccing skill for both rings since it deals instantaneous damage AND damage over time with every use. Your Blight pools stack and each apply their own lucky hit and damage.
- Skeletal Mage Mastery and Skeletal Warrior Mastery help to keep your Minions alive, and you reallocate the skill points from Stand Alone + Memento Mori since they don't provide any benefit.
- Reallocating points from Terror into Death's Embrace brings more survivability while dropping a nearly useless damage scaler.
Paragon Board
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Gameplay
The gameplay loop looks pretty similar to the base build's loop but gain awareness for the key differences below:
- Spam Blight whenever you have Essence, and always make sure that there is at least one Blight pool under your target to benefit from the 15% damage multiplier.
- Manually cast Reap to gain Damage Reduction and a Corpse, Corpse Tendrils to apply vulnerable and group up monsters, and Raise Skeleton as a Corpse consumption tool. This is your primary source of Essence generation, and maintains the majority of your buffs during fights.
- Make sure to re-summon and heal your Minions with Raise Skeleton activations throughout a fight as well.
The Boss Killer setup for the Shadow Summoner Necromancer adds on additional Critical Strike Chance to drastically increase the proc damage from X'Fal's Corroded Signet.
Gear
X'Fal's Corroded Signet has a massive Shadow Damage proc when triggered from your many Shadow DoTs that can Critically Strike and benefits from all of your multipliers and modifiers on gear. While Ring of Mendeln similarly benefits, and continues to proc like normal.
The chance to apply Slow on your gloves helps to Stagger bosses more quickly, and is an easily overlooked optimization for the build.
Paragon Board
Swap Territorial for Essence to boost your proc damage when it successfully Critically Strikes.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Make sure to stack more survivability stats on your Chest, Pants and Amulet by using Maximum Life, Damage Reduction and Total Armor stats.
- Consider using a Shield that has as many Damage Reduction stats on it as possible. Add Protecting Aspect or Aspect of the Protector to the Shield for more protection.
- In the Paragon Boards, select additional Armor Nodes in Rare clusters whenever possible.
- Only farm Nightmare Dungeon content that is a few Levels above your Character until you're comfortable farming higher difficulty content.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
- Critical Strike Chance: Stacking xx% Critical Strike Chance helps your Minions successfully crit as well as your sources of instantaneous damage. Remember that the base 22% damage proc of Shadowblight can Crit AND Offensive Aspect of Decay eventually increases those procs to deal 300% extra damage. Minions have a base 50% Critical Strike Damage and gain 30% of your bonuses.
- Vulnerable: Minions gain 100% of your Vulnerable damage bonus. This makes it an incredibly important stat for both of your primary damage sources. Stack as much of it as you can!
- Crowd Control: Since all of your damage occurs in an area, pixel pulls and grouping of monsters becomes a direct damage scaler. This also allows us to benefit from every "Damage to CC'ed Enemies" affix in the game when Corpse Tendrils, Decrepify or Crippling Darkness procs.
- Attack Speed: Increased Attack Speed increases the rate you cast all of your Skills. It decreases the length of time before Tendrils is on the field and how quickly you can cycle through your Skill Rotation. It's a high value stat. Minions gain 30% of your bonus Attack Speed.
- Don't Get Hit: Make use of your range advantage and hit enemies from afar. By stutter stepping on the edge of your range, you can avoid most projectiles that come your way.
- Armor: A great deal of defenses comes from your Armor. The Aspect of Disobedience can help to increase the effectiveness of it. Make sure to get as much Armor on your gear possible.
- Damage Reduction: In all of its forms, this stat is important to stack after Armor. Since you apply a continuous stream of Shadow DoT, you gain access to a unique DR type. Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Affected by Shadow Damage Over Time wins the world record for longest stat line that can save your life.
- Unstoppable: You only have one way to gain Unstoppable and that's from Blood Mist. Cooldown Reduction helps to "scale" this defensive mechanic by making it available more often.
- Fortify: Necrotic Carapace allows you to passively gain Fortify while the Reaper Warriors generate Corpses from their attacks.
- Resistances: As an Intelligence main stat class, the Necromancer naturally accrues a lot of Elemental Resistances. Make sure to reach the 70% cap in World Tier 4, and use Maximum Resistance buffs against particularly deadly enemies and content.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You don't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the required stats.
- Helm: Occult Dominion
- Maximum Life
- +xx% Total Armor
- Cooldown Reduction
- Lucky Hit Chance while You Have a Barrier
- All Stats
- Intelligence
- Chest Armor: Disobedience
- Maximum Life
- +xx% Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Shadow Damage Over Time-Affected Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Minion Life
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Gloves: Decay
- Attack Speed
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Critical Strike Chance
- Shadow Damage over Time
- All Stats
- Intelligence
- Pants: Shielding Storm Implicit: Potion Grants Barrier
- Maximum Life
- +xx% Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Shadow Damage Over Time-Affected Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Boots: Blood Getter's Implicit: Max Evade Charges
- Movement Speed
- Elemental Resistance
- +xx Ranks to Corpse Tendrils
- All Stats
- Intelligence
- Dodge Chance (Against Distant)
- Amulet: Blighted
- +xx Ranks of the Gloom Passive
- Movement Speed
- Minion Attack Speed
- +xx% Intelligence
- Cooldown Reduction
- Rings: Ring of Mendeln Prioritize a high roll on the unique effect, Lucky Hit Chance, Minion Attack Speed and Maximum Minion Life in this order.
- Otherwise Look For: Frenzied Dead & Decay
- Maximum Life
- Critical Strike Chance
- Minion Maximum Life
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Damage to Close Enemies
- Vulnerable Damage
- Main Hand : Ultimate Shadow Implicit: Lucky Hit Chance (Wand)
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Damage to Close Enemies
- Damage to Slowed Enemies
- Damage to Shadow Damage Over Time-Affected Enemies
- Off-Hand: Grasping Veins Implicit: Cooldown Reduction (Focus)
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Lucky Hit Chance while You Have a Barrier
- Maximum Minion Life
- Cooldown Reduction
- Critical Strike Chance
- All Stats
- Intelligence
This build benefits the most from the following consumables:
- Elixirs: Heady Assault Elixir
- Type I Incense: Sage's Whisper
- Type II Incense: Soothing Spices to cap Resistances, Reddamine Buzz
- Type III Incense: Chorus of War
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 about the Shadow Summoner Necromancer.
What Stats do my Minions inherit?
What Scales the Ring of Mendeln Proc?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about the mechanics of your build.
Corpse Explosion
Video Guide
Hungry for more Guides?
Necromancer Guides
Summary
The Shadow Summoner Necromancer melds the worlds of AoE Damage over time, with a powerful Minion horde and continuous Crowd Control. Once you're lucky enough to drop the Ring of Mendeln, your total damage output sky-rockets!
- Raise Skeleton and Golem both need to be on your Skill Bar to summon these Minions. Each Skill has an important activated ability that you should be using all of the time.
- When all else fails, spamming Corpse Explosion eventually kills most things in the game. Make sure to have enough Skeletons alive to act as a.... bone-wall to keep enemies at bay.
- Abhorrent Decrepify allows for all of your Cooldowns to reduce incredibly fast. Get ready to spam Skills faster than you ever have before!
- Practice makes perfect! Don't be afraid to run slightly easier content of Nightmare Dungeons to get the flow of the gameplay loop.
- Happy blasting 🚀!
Credits
Maintained by Chronikz
Originally Written by MacroBioBoi
Reviewed by MacroBioBoi