Inarius Poison Scythe 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 Grace of Inarius 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. Leger's Disdain
2. The full Grace of Inarius set
3. Goldwrap and Dayntee's Binding
4. Ice Climbers
5. Steuart's Greaves
6. Depth Diggers
7. Krysbin's Sentence and Convention of Elements
8. Nemesis Bracers

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

1. 2-Handed Scythes to get Nayr's Black Death
2. Scythes to get Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang
3. Amulets to get Haunted Visions, Wisdom of Kalan and The Flavor of Time
4. 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
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Cain's Destiny and Sage's Journey (for your follower)

• Simplicity's Strength provides us with a colossal 100% separate damage multiplier and 4% life steal on our primary attacks, making it mandatory for all variants of the build.
• Bane of the Trapped is a default inclusion for this build since it provides 60% increased damage.
• Bane of the Stricken will be taken for solo pushing to kill the Rift Guardian.
• Boon of the Hoarder is used for the T16 build as it grants us a 30% Movement Speed bonus and lots of extra gold.
• Pain Enhancer will be used in high Tiers in groups to boost Attack Speed and increase overall DPS in high monster density.

• Grim Scythe Cursed Scythe is our damage dealer that applies Curses for our Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang and Dayntee's Binding bonuses.
• Simulacrum Blood and Bone summons 2 Simulacrums that duplicate our swings thanks to Haunted Visions.
• Bone Armor Dislocation provides 30% damage reduction and activates our Krysbin's Sentence on our Poison Convention of Elements cycle.
• Blood Rush will be used with either Potency or Metabolism for mobility and proper positioning.
• The last 2 skill slots vary from version to version. For more damage you'll want more Poison skills to activate Nayr's Black Death, take any of the following: Bone Spear Blighted Marrow, Death Nova Blight and Skeletal Mage Contamination.
• In T16, Devour Devouring Aura and Frailty Aura of Frailty are used for synergy with Fueled by Death and to activate Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang before you swing for the first time.

• Spreading Malediction is a nice additive damage buff.
• Eternal Torment is great to keep our curses active.
• Swift Harvesting provides a nice Attack Speed boost.
• Stand Alone gives a significant armor boost.
• Final Service can be used to cheat death.
• For speed content Fueled by Death is great when paired with Devour Devouring Aura.

¹ Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 750,000 Life is recommended).
² You do not need Maximum Essence because Simulacrums ignores Essence generated for Leger's Disdain.

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 mainstat (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. With Enforcer equipped on the player it's much easier to keep followers alive even without an immortality relic. The 90% damage reduction counts for them, too.
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.

With these in mind, let’s get into our recommendations for this build.

T16 Enchantress

For T16 we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives Cooldown Reduction, allowing you to spam your abilities more. Since this is T16 content, she’ll stay alive with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, Attack Speed, and a Cheat Death.

Stat Priorities:

Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress.

Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed.

Key Items:

• The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
• Nemesis Bracers: For extra Elites, Death’s Breaths and In-geom procs.
• Avarice Band: For the insane pickup radius.
• Ring of Royal Grandeur: To complete our sets.
• Gloves of Worship: For 10 Minute Shrine Buffs.
• Sage’s Journey: For double Death’s Breaths.
• Cain’s Destiny: For 25% more Greater Rift Keystones.
  
  

GR Pushing Templar

For Greater Rift pushing we recommend this Templar setup for the sustain from Heal, 10% increased damage from Onslaught, and the very powerful cheat death mechanic from Guardian. This is the only follower build that stacks Cooldown Reduction because it works with Heal. Since we take the immortality relic, we do not need any survivability stats.

Stat Priorities:

Since we have the immortality relic, we do not need to stack survivability on our Templar.

Strength > Cooldown Reduction > Attack Speed.

Key Items:

• The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
• Nemesis Bracers: For more progression from Elites.
• Oculus Ring: For 85% increased damage.
• Unity: For 50% damage reduction if you're also wearing one.
• Ice Climbers: To make your follower immune to Freeze and Immobilize effects.
• Leoric's Crown and Captain Crimson's Trimmings: For more Cooldown Reduction on Heal.
  
  

To survive, always make sure that Bone Armor is fully stacked. The combination of Grace of Inarius and Wisdom of Kalan gives you a massive total of 90% damage reduction! Also, summon your Simulacrum right at the start of every run.

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. Then use Bone Armor Dislocation to activate your Krysbin's Sentence before swinging Grim Scythe.

When you are not dealing damage, use Bone Spear Blighted Marrow to lure more enemies to you. Gather them up and repeat when you have enough. Be aware that your own swings will barely deal any damage and instead almost all of it will come from Simulacrum. The reason for this is that they ignore the Maximum Essence cap for the damage calculation of Leger's Disdain which multiplies their output way beyond what you could achieve. This is also why you don't try to spend any resources before swinging - you'd just fill up entirely with a single attack anyway.

The most important optimization for your DPS is the positioning of your Simulacrum. Keep an eye on them and make them run or teleport to you before you want to DPS. It's no use to swing your scythe in the middle of the pull if they are hidden in some corner. In some cases, it might be useful to stop attacking for a little bit to allow them to catch up. The more enemies you hit with their attacks, the better, because this is the only way to deal significant damage with this build.

Finally, even when you are quite tanky yourself, your Simulacrum can die quite easily from hard-hitting single attacks like Grotesque explosions, so try to position them away from these attacks to avoid re-summoning them as the Cooldown is very long.

This build has good survivability and can hold up in hardcore, especially while using Final Service as a back up plan. The main way to become tankier for hardcore is to put more paragon points into Vitality.

• Haunted Visions will make this skill drain 1% of your maximum life every second. If you are unable to pay this cost (i.e. you are below 1% HP when the cost is applied), the Simulacrums will despawn. In case you are running Final Service, this means you will very rarely have the event where your cheat death did not proc but you lost your Simulacrum and it will be on cooldown.
• Simulacrums will cast your Secondary Skills and Grim Scythe when you do.
• Simulacrums positioning is critical for this build! They move close to you whenever you are not casting an ability they can cast and warp to you if you are moving too far.
• Simulacrums can proc area Damage but do not benefit from Pet Damage.
• In combination with Leger's Disdain, Simulacrums do not care about your Essence generated, always getting the full benefit of the 12 Essence per enemy hit for the stacking 80% separate damage multiplier.
• Extra curses can be applied from their Cursed Scythe, helping you to get all three of them on all targets.
• When hitting enemies affected by Leech, your Simulacrums will also heal you. This provides insane recovery with some density.
• Your Simulacrums scale with your character's toughness and can die from monster damage when it's too low. Especially large bursts of damage (e.g. Grotesque explosions) can rip them apart easily even when you could survive that damage yourself, so be mindful about such situations as the cooldown to resummon them is very long.

• Simulacrum ignore how much current and maximum Essence you have. This is fantastic news because they will always get the full benefit of Leger's Disdain. That's why it's better to simply swing again at full essence (having 2 Simulacrums attacking at full power) than to waste time trying to dump essence to increase your own damage.
• All three swings happen at the same time and deal full damage even if one swing is enough to kill some of the monsters.

• Each stack of this item has its own duration (15 seconds).
• As this is just slightly longer than the Necromancer's Convention of Elements rotation of 12 seconds, you want to make sure to activate all of your Poison skills at least once every cycle.
• The stacks add up as one combined multiplier (100% per Poison skill used).