Minion Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
Last Updated:October 12, 2024|Change Log|FAQ
Looking for a build that's so low-maintenance, it practically plays itself? Meet the Minion Necromancer - your personal army of undead minions will pamper you like royalty, defending you from danger and carrying you through the deepest, darkest levels of The Pit. Say goodbye to the days of your undead friends ditching you mid-battle because now your Minions are so tanky they can stand up to the denizens of Hell!
This Necromancer build is a pure summoner which relies almost exclusively on the damage of its Minions, fulfilling the ultimate undead army commander fantasy.
Your undead army will consist of Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers, Skeletal Mages - Shadow and Golems - Blood while Ring of Mendeln is the star of the show.
Soulrift is the newest Ultimate Skill addition for the Necromancer and it is incredibly powerful due to fixing your Essence, Vulnerable and defense through Barrier all at the same time.
Ring of Mendeln finally has its time to shine in Season 6, since it scales off your Minion's damage! Put all of those massive multipliers to good use, while gaining big clear speed through AoE damage.
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.
Season Theme
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Reap and Decompose are not part of the build but the Skill Tree requires you to invest 2 Skill Points in the Basic Skill section to further advance down the Skill Tree.
- Blight provides a 20% Multiplier for Elites and Bosses. Do not spam this skill, just cast it before its duration runs out.
- Raise Skeleton consumes a Corpse to always maintain your maximum number of Minions. This also applies Flesh-eater. While you are at the maximum number of Minions, use this skill to buff your minions' damage by 30% for 8 seconds and instantly heal them for 40% of their Maximum Life. Blood Getter's grants you x22.5% damage, which you pass onto your Minions.
- Decrepify applies a powerful CC effect that also causes Lucky Hit procs to reduce Cooldowns on your Skills, which can also be triggered by your Minions. Prioritize casting this on any new monsters, or when it runs out. This also greatly reduces incoming damage and makes kiting monsters easier.
- Corpse Tendrils is the best CC option in the game. This does not consume a Corpse and should therefore be used before you consume the last available corpse.
- Soulrift provides a 30% damage multiplier, solves Essence, Vulnerable and your defensives with its Barrier.
Skill Rotation
- Run forward while your Minions mow down every enemy you encounter on your way to your destination while you cast Soulrift for Vulnerable and Barrier whenever it comes off cooldown.
- The most powerful utility tool to group enemies is hands down Corpse Tendrils. This also applies Vulnerable, stuns and slows. Use this whenever enemies are spread out too far for your Minions to hit all at once and to make sure Vulnerable stay on your targets.
- Decrepify is another extremely important and powerful skill. Decrepify Lucky Hits reset your cooldown which comes in extremely handy when you want to keep Soulrift up permanently.
- Raise Skeleton generates Essence and applies a damage multiplier to you and your Minions. This is extremely important to maintain throughout every fight. You can see a small bar that shows the remaining duration of the buff above the Raise Skeleton skill itself.
- (On Elites & Bosses) Blight is not used as a damaging tool and is instead used for its damage multiplier Supernatural Blight.
- (On Elites & Bosses) Use Raise Skeleton often to keep Flesh-eater up as much as possible and generate Essence.
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 Minion Necromancer chooses to utilize Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers for more attacking Minions, Skeletal Mages - Shadow for their damage multiplier and Golems - Blood.
Your Minions gain 100% of any Stats, Buffs or bonuses the Necromancer gains for itself and 100% of Minion specific stats.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Book of the Dead guide.
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.
Minion Necromancer Endgame Paragon
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
- Essence
- Deadraiser
- Amplify
- Eliminator
- Exploit
To Level 46
- Eliminator
- Essence
- Exploit
- Amplify
- Deadraiser
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
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 Minion Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cem + Gar - This is needed to Crit cap your character. For this you need to Evade every 4.9 seconds. Make sure to you have the "Attacks Reduce Evade's Cooldown by 1.5 Seconds." implicit.
- Bac + Mot - Every 10 meters you walk spawn a Dark Shroud which provides amazing Damage Reduction and stacks.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Moni - Solid Offering generator if you do not have any alternative available.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Mot- For even more defense.
- Zec - Good option early game when your Soulrift is not yet permanent.
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 and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
- Hired: Raheir
He provides amazing damage multipliers with a high uptime.
- Reinforcement: Varyana
You choose Earth Breaker for more crowd control whenever you engage Elites and Bosses since it is linked to Blight.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Minion 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
- 70%+ Attack Speed, not counting Frenzied Dead
- 1600%+ Critical Strike Damage
- 2600+ Intelligence
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- 5,500+ Life
- 160%+ Movement Speed
- 100% Soulrift Duration
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Minion 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 Minion 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.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. 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.
- Do not spam Blight. This skill is only used to apply the 20% multiplier to Elites and Bosses to squeeze out more damage.
- Raise Skeleton not only provides a 30% multiplier on its own, but also an additional 22.5% multiplier with Blood Getter's because it bounces back to your Minions. Additionally you restore Essence through Grim Harvest.
- Soulrift is incredibly powerful due to fixing your Essence, Vulnerable and defense through Barrier all at the same time.
- If for whatever reason you can not sustain your Essence remove Great Feast, move Grasping Veins to ring and use Assistance on your gloves.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all 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.
- Once you acquire Ring of Mendeln your Skeletal Mages - Shadow do a lot more damage and Attack Speed on your gear becomes a pivotal damage scaler.
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
- Heir of Perdition, Shroud of False Death and Ring of Starless Skies provide incredible damage to your Ring of Mendeln procs.
This 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
- In the Speedfarming variant you exchange Mot for Jah in your Weapon.
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 damage done goes way down and they can freely retaliate.
- In high tier boss fights, beware that many of your conditional damage and damage reduction modifiers cannot activate outside of stagger phases. This means they generally deal more damage against you than regular monsters and you have to prioritize dodging the attacks from shadow bosses while you can barely scratch them outside of stagger bursts.
- In the Pit Pushing variant you sacrifice your Golems - Blood to boost your Ring of Mendeln damage even further.
- You remove one point from Skeletal Warrior Mastery to get Blood Mist as your Unstoppable trigger.
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.
What Stats improve Minions?
How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?
Mechanics
Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)
Attack Speed Caps
Stagger
Video Guide
Summary
The Minion Necromancer is a fun to play, fast-paced tactical genius that performs well in almost any scenario. With a range of tricks and devices up your sleeve, and constant resets on all of your cooldowns, you can deal with anything.
- Soulrift is an amazing addition to the Minion Necromancer by solving Vulnerable, Essence and defense by providing Barrier.
- You only really need to use Blight on Elites and Bosses. Do not spam it on trash mobs.
- Decrepify is vital for your build. Use it on as many enemies as possible to lower the cooldowns of all your other essential Skills. Your Minions proc this too!
- Use Corpse Tendrils every time it comes off cooldown to CC all Monsters caught in it and create time to breath.
- Happy blasting 🚀!
Credits
Written by Chronikz