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Build Guide

Season 21 came with some great updates for the Necro class, and two of the major changes were the huge buffs to the Pestilence and Jesseth Arms sets where the former got its Corpse Lance damage bonus doubled and the latter went from only boosting minion damage by 400% to now boosting all of your damage by the same amount. With no defensive buffs added to the Pestilence set, the already squishy set was pushed further into glass cannon territory, allowing us to produce even bigger damage while still getting one shotted by just about anything that looks at us.

Well, if it’s squishy they want, squishy they will get. Here comes the ultimate glass cannon build, the squish de la squish, the Kamikaze Necro.

PROS

• Fun, challenging and different playstyle that develops your skills as a player
• The wave of revives and lances you generate, combined with the high damage output makes you feel extremely powerful
• Super easy to gear for as you can replace Critical Hit Chance on every single piece of equipment
• Will allow you to clear GR 100+ and, depending on your skill as a player, also speed farm GR 90+ in early season, with non-legendary gear, 0 augments, level 80 legendary gems and 800 paragon.

CONS

• Super squishy.
• Not for the lazy player as you need to be concentrated at all times in order to stay alive.
• Will make you hate instant-damage dealers like Thunderstorm.

Like most Corpse Lance builds out there, the Kamikaze revolves around using the Pestilence set in combination with Devour and permanent uptime on Land of the Dead in order to constantly be sending lances flying at our enemies. Where this build differs is in the choice of remaining skills, runes and, most importantly, in the fact that we use the chest piece Shi Mizu’s Haori for 100% critical hit chance when below 25% health. This might just be one piece of equipment, but it changes our playstyle entirely and is what leads to our damage shooting through the roof.

Instead of relying on enemies to get our health pool below 25%, we use the Corpse Lance rune Blood Lance to cause self harm (2% health loss per lance) and make sure EVERY SINGLE LANCE we generate results in a critical hit. And, as you can see in the linked video, we are generating a craaazy amount of lances; most probably the most you’ve ever seen in any build. If you’re interested in the numbers, here’s a quick, non scientific, breakdown of the amount of corpse lances (1750% base damage) and blood lances (525% base damage) we can manage to generate any time we have LotD activated and an enemy to target:

The Pestilence 2-piece set bonus generates one corpse lance for every corpse we consume, making it our main corpse lance generator.

Devour consumes about 20 corpses per second for as long as we have LotD activated, thus producing 20 corpse lances per second.

Revive (an incredibly underused skill that I believe should be fit into every Pestilence build) seems to consume at least as many corpses per second as Devour but I haven’t yet come around to studying it in slow motion. Both Devour and Revive can be cast while moving, making them essential for my T16 and lower tier GR speed farming version of the build: The Blade Runner (Link coming soon).

Actively casting the Corpse Lance skill generates 12 lances per second when hitting the 2.01 attack speed breakpoint, which we can do without breaking a sweat thanks to being able to replace all Critical Hit Chance stats on our gear for Attack Speed. Since actively casting Corpse Lance also counts as consuming a corpse, the Pestilence 2-piece set bonus generates yet another lance for every one of the 12 lances per second mentioned above.

Last but not least, the Blood Lance rune generates one blood lance (30% the damage of a corpse lance) for EVERY corpse lance generated above. In rough numbers, that’s 64 corpse lances and 64 blood lances generated every second, with 40 of each lance type being castable while moving around.

Now this crazy amount of lances and damage comes at a cost, which is the aforementioned squishiness. There is absolutely no way to keep control over our health pool when generating that many life draining blood lances, which means that we won’t be finding ourselves just below the 25% health limit but rather at 1% health almost the entire time. This is problematic since we need at least 2% health in order to generate a blood lance, which is why we need to find means to heal ourselves without ever getting over that 25% barrier. My current solution for this problem is to try to keep my total hit points as low as possible while stacking Life on Hit on items, with the ultimate goal being to have my healing level be just below that of my self harm. I am however open to all suggestions and would love to get your ideas on how to further develop this part of the build in a comment below.

Being at 1% health can make it sound like we have absolutely no defense and will die all the time which really isn’t the case. We simply don’t build any of our defensive skills around traditional passive stats like damage reduction, armor, life and healing. Instead our defensive tactics revolve entirely around not getting hit or, when we do get hit, making sure the hit does not make us lose a single percent of damage. What will keep us alive are the following skills and tactics:

• Land of the Dead - Frozen Lands will make sure all enemies on the screen are frozen for the duration of the skill, with the exception of Juggernauts who can go to hell.
• Rathma’s Shield will grant us immortality for 4 seconds each time we cast Land of the Dead which, if we’re playing the build right, we will do every 8-12 seconds. Delaying our cast of LotD by a single second can be what allows us to fight through an elite attack burst so we need to cast them wisely
• Command Skeletons allows us to block enemy path and create a distraction for enemies to target instead of us
• Fighting from as far away as possible will make sure enemies target our minions instead of us, all while buying us time to dodge ranged projectiles coming our way. Keeping our distance also makes sure we get the maximum damage bonus from Zei’s Stone of Vengeance
• Blood Rush allows us to warp past or away from dangerous area effects. (NOTE: Make sure to use the Hemostasis rune that removes the life cost or we will not be able to use the skill when our health is too low)
• When all of the above fail, Final Service will allow us to cheat death once every minute.

CONSOLE PLAYERS

If, like me, you are playing on console you will need to tweak the build slightly in order to make it work. Not only does the numlock trick not work on console but the Command Skeletons skill behaves in a different way than on PC, causing our character to stop moving. The changes we need to do are the following:

Instead of manually casting Devour we make use of the Devouring Aura rune for one less button to maintain pressed. The way I play it, and find to be the absolute best, is to set Corpse Lance to one trigger button, Revive to the other, and Command Skeletons to the far right thumb button. I then keep Revive maintained at all times, mash Command Skeletons and hold down Corpse Lance until my character starts moving by himself or I need to dodge something.

I hope you will want to try out this build and give me your feedback so that it may be improved further. Thanks for reading and have fun!