Rathma Army of the Dead 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 Bones of Rathma 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. The full Bones of Rathma set
2. Fate's Vow
3. Bonds of C'Lena and Nemesis Bracers
4. Krysbin's Sentence, Briggs' Wrath and Convention of Elements
5. Jesseth Skullshield

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

1. Scythes to get Jesseth Skullscythe, Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang and Funerary Pick
2. Two-Handed Axes to get Messerschmidt's Reaver
3. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace and The Flavor of Time
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship (for your follower)
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)

6. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Jesseth Skullscythe
• Krysbin's Sentence
• Convention of Elements

• Bane of the Trapped gives 60% increased damage against slowed and crowd-controlled enemies.
• Esoteric Alteration gives a massive amount of damage reduction against non-physical hits, which this build dearly needs.
• The third gem changes depending on the setup:
  • Zei's Stone of Vengeance adds a lot of damage in GRs.
  • Boon of the Hoarder for the extra Gold and Movement Speed in T16.
  • Bane of the Powerful can be used in speedfarming.
  • Bane of the Stricken in groups to kill the boss.

• Army of the Dead Death Valley is our main source of damage. It has a base cooldown of 120 seconds and is reduced by 0.5 seconds every time one of your permanent minions hits and enemy. With both Command Skeletons and 10 Revives out and enough Cooldown Reduction, you are able to every seconds. Additionally, it has a powerful pulling effect to stack up enemies for Area Damage while protecting us from their attacks.
• Command Skeletons adds 7 out of 17 required minions for the Bones of Rathma set and activates the Jesseth Arms bonus. The Frenzy rune allows faster cooldown resets.
• Revive grant another 10 minions for the Bones of Rathma bonus and a bit of damage reduction.
• Siphon Blood Power Shift enables the bonuses from Funerary Pick and heals us.
• Decrepify Borrowed Time adds extra damage and cooldown reduction. Alternatively, Blood Rush Potency can be used for mobility and provides valuable toughness (in that case replace Spreading Malediction with Rigor Mortis).
• Bone Armor Dislocation gives damage reduction and activates the double bonus from Krysbin's Sentence to improve your nuke.

• Grisly Tribute is great for healing and survivability. You have lots of minions that passively heal you with this.
• Final Service is a great tool for better survivability.
• Spreading Malediction adds extra damage whenever we curse enemies.
• Rigor Mortis is useful to apply a slow debuff for Krysbin's Sentence.
• Rathma's Shield sometimes allows us to dive in without worry while protecting Squirt's Necklace.
• Swift Harvesting is used in for RGK variants to stack Bane of the Stricken faster.
• Fueled by Death, Dark Reaping and Blood is Power make a great combo for farming T16.

¹ Add Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 800-1000k Life is recommended).

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Notable Build Changes

Compared to the nonseason version of the build, we don't need Blood Rush to avoid getting stuck, allowing us to run with a curse like Decrepify instead.

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 main stat (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. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. 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.
7. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
8. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

1. At the start of a run, carefully approach the first pack of enemies and cast Bone Armor to get the damage reduction buff and stack your Bones of Rathma (4) Bonus.
2. Keep up Command Skeletons at all times, preferably on big targets like elites. Typically they will auto target after you have activated them once as long as there are nearby enemies. Cast it again when you run out of enemies to re-activate the 400% damage bonus.
3. Curse enemies you are fighting to activate damage and damage reduction modifiers.
4. If you engage elites right at the beginning of a run, skip them and look for weak enemies. Without your Revive minions active you do way less damage than usual. Gather 10 enemies and use their corpses to summon minions. Alternatively, you can also open the GR, get back out and teleport to an Adventure Mode zone to get your Revives up quickly. The best minions to revive are small, fast melee monsters such as Accursed or Vile Swarms from Act 2 Desolate Sands.
5. Use Army of the Dead to mow down your enemies. Before (to stack up Power Shift) and right after you cast it, channel Siphon Blood on the biggest targets in the pull. Use the Physical Convention of Elements cycle to improve your damage whenever possible. Try to spawn Oculus Rings by finishing off a low HP target before your main nuke.
6. Activate Bone Armor Dislocation after casting Army of the Dead to apply a stun to all surrounding enemies that boosts your from Krysbin's Sentence.
7. Use Blood Rush to move between fights and into Oculus Rings. In dangerous fights, use it often for Potency uptime.

This build is not very well suited for Hardcore and it's very difficult to stack additional toughness aside from Paragons without making huge concessions in DPS. Make sure to take the Final Service passive and stack extra Vitality to take some hits reliably without proccing.

Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• The 250% damage bonus from Fate's Vow is an additive bonus rather than a separate damage multiplier to Army of the Dead. This means most personal or group buffs (such as Spreading Malediction) have a rather small effect on this skill.
• With another rune on your skillbar and Fate's Vow equipped, you will receive both effects at the same time. The Unconventional Warfare effect lasts 4 seconds, so casting your main nuke at the start of your Convention of Elements cycle is crucial to getting the most out of it.
• Unconventional Warfare will deal the same elemental damage type as the chosen rune.

• The amount of hits done by this skill depends on the chosen rune. Unconventional Warfare's 50,000% weapon damage is the total of all hits combined, meaning it's especially strong on single target and very weak in AoE pulls. All other runes deal their total damage to all enemies in the area.
• The total amount of hits and damage done per rune is:
  • Blighted Grasp: 10x 1,400% weapon damage (per target)
  • Death Valley: 7x 1,714% weapon damage (per target)
  • Unconventional Warfare: 40x 1,250% weapon damage (total)
  • Frozen Army: 5x 2,400% weapon damage (per target)
  • Dead Storm: 10x 1,550% weapon damage (per target)

• As you spend life from your skills (from Blood Rush and Dead Storm casts) or take damage from enemies, you will stack up a hidden counter towards 100% life spent. After you reach the threshold, a skill's cooldown will be cut by 20% flat of the total (after Cooldown Reduction).
• This counter is reset when the skill has fully cooled down or you die.
• Each skill is counted separately.
• Spending life on skills doesn't scale with damage reduction, so you will still lose life in the invincible variations of the build.

• Revive minions greatly vary in their quality when it comes to resetting the cooldown of Army of the Dead through Bones of Rathma (2) Bonus.
• Fast, small and melee-based monsters are generally preferable, for example Accursed or Vile Swarms. These monsters get to attack more often for the resets.
• Revive minions vanish when you open a new Greater Rift. However, it's possible to open a GR, then step outside and gather minions from anywhere in Adventure Mode and return. This allows to greatly speed up the start of a push attempt because without the 10 extra minions you deal ~60% less damage than normal until you produce some corpses.
• For optimal results, it's best to prepare a pull of small monsters e.g. in Desolate Sands before you open/close GRs to find a suitable push attempt. Like this you don't have to waste time running around to gather monsters while the clock is ticking and can jump back in right away.