Sever Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Skill Rotation

• Cast Decrepify at range to drastically reduce your target's movement speed and damage output. This also maximizes the procs of Cooldown Reduction per monster pack, to manage your longer Cooldowns. Follow this up with a Blight bolt for the 20% damage bonus. Recast this whenever its six second duration would run out.
• Begin casting Sever into the pack where your extra projectiles can hit the maximum number of targets. While continuously casting this Skill, clicking any other Skill's button will "weave" it into your rotation. This is known of Skill Buffering and helps to reduce the total animation length of your attacks. This is a great way to cast Corpse Explosion every 5 seconds to maintain your buff uptime.
• Immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on the first Corpse generated to Crowd Control everything, as well as capping your Critical Strike Chance from Grasping Veins.
• Whenever it's off Cooldown AND you're engaging a monster pack, use Soulrift. It's only effective as long as enemies are within range, so don't be afraid to get in close and personal!
• Reapply Decrepify whenever new enemies are coming into range. Many people forget to recast this then get caught by surprise by the damage output of their target.
• When in doubt Blood Mist out! Reposition and end the Mist early by clicking the Skill again, once you're ready to re-engage. A great tactic is to generate a Corpse during this time then immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on it for more safety.
• On Controller or Console Sever tends to target the front of the closest enemy and miss many targets behind them. Casting Sever without any thumbstick input while right up against a pack makes the skill cast at minimum distance and overlaps the majority of enemies at the same time. Use this on Bosses for the best damage output.

Book of the Dead

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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 Sever Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Lith + Yom - Sever requires 21 Frames to cast and standing still for 0.3 seconds only takes 18 frames. Every time you stop to cast Sever, you trigger Lith.
• Tam + Ohm - Since you reach 21 Frame Breakpoint for Sever, you generate nearly 75 Offering per second. This requires six seconds of skill use to proc the rune, which can happen in bursts as you run from pack to pack, or while avoiding Boss mechanics.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Cir + Gar - The benefit of this Rune is that spamming "free" skills like Corpse Explosion triggers this, even without hitting a target. You can maintain certain buffs from Runes in between combats. Gar granting Critical Strike Chance is very nice when your gear cannot reach 100% chance without it.
• Cem OR Yax OR Moni + Lum - Helps to "passively" generate Essence during many scenarios where you cannot otherwise generate Resource and helps to reduce you time spent using Generators or alternative systems.

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. You can have one Hired Mercenary that accompanies you into battle, and one Reinforcement Mercenary that triggers a selected Skill from their Tree based on your Skill use or other conditional event:

Hired: Raheir

Raheir offers a ton of survivability from Valiance, and Bastion, as well as CC'ing enemies nearly continuously. They also increase your damage through Inspiration.

Reinforcement: Varyana

Varyana adds another layer of CC on demand for the build, which helps with staggering Bosses via Earth Breaker.

To enable the Sever 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

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Sever 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.

This section is designed to guide your Sever 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.

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.

I Keep Running out of Essence!

Umbral

Each unique Crowd Control effect that you inflict upon enemies triggers this aspect and generates Essence. Corpse Tendrils, Decrepify and Crippling Darkness all apply CC when used or activated. You can layer these abilities as well.

• Corpse Tendrils initially Slows, then it Pulls and Stuns. This is 3 instances of CC on every target. BUT after the Pull, the Slow is removed from the target, so you're able to re-Slow with Decrepify for another free CC proc.

Essence per Second and Resource Cost Reduction

Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Resource Cost Reduction reduces the cost of every skill by a percentage equal to the total on your gear. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second. To completely replace the Essence loss of 1 cast per second you need 40% Resource Cost Reduction. This would allow you to go "infinite", meaning you would never run out of Essence. When casting your skills more than once per second, you need more of both stat to achieve this equilibrium.

Exposed Flesh/Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primary Resource

The Aspect gives Essence on Lucky Hit for any enemy you hit that is Vulnerable. The Lucky Hit Chance Temper works on a target regardless of Vulnerable Status. This makes the vast majority of your Essence gain automatic.

Grim Harvest

Whenever you consume a corpse via Corpse Explosion, Raise Skeleton or Aspect of Explosive Mist you generate Essence with this passive. You get to recoup resources while applying DPS. It's a great two for one!

How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?

Abhorrent Decrepify

With your multiple sources of overlapping Damage Over Time (DoT) effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of CC'ed enemies so your Sever hits as many targets on the initial damage, both travel damages and the return damage.

How Does Sever's Damage Work?

• Sever has multiple damage components. The first is obvious, when you cast Sever, it attacks in a small circle around the target or area you selected. As it travels to that location, the projectile applies damage to any enemy it hits along the way. Then Sever travels back to the Necromancer and deals damage in a small circle around you. It also damages anything the projectile travels through on the way back.
• This makes Sever hit a target up to four times as long as it was in range of both circle attacks and along the path of the projectile as it traveled in both directions.
• With the addition of Reaping Lotus', the first projectile flies out and then three "mini-severs" travel out in a triangle shape. These three "mini-severs" all work like the normal Sever projectile would, dealing damage four times. The initial projectile no longer travels back to the Necromancer.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

Mechanics

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

• While the mechanics are signifantly more nuanced than this, and many things in game slightly obfuscate the truth, understanding Lucky Hit Chance is fairly simple.
  • With Advanced Tooltips activated in your Gameplay Settings, you can see a Skill's innate LHC.
  • Not every Skill has a LHC even though things may cause those Skills to deal damage.
  • A Skill must apply damage to a target to have a chance to trigger LHC.
  • LHC effects do not have LHC and can't trigger other LHC effects.
  • Skills check for LHC EVERY time they deal damage to ANY targets. There's no limit or "one per cast" mechanics.
• To calculate the chance of triggering something, you take your Skill's LHC, multiply that by (1 + (Total Bonus Lucky Hit Chance / 100)) and then multiply that by the Effect's LHC.
  • Sever has an innate LHC of 40%. The Mythic Variant gets 47.1% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • So the equation is 40% * (1 + (47.1/100) * 15% = 8.82% chance to trigger. But since Sever can hit the target four times, your chance to trigger Decrepify once is (100% - ((100% - 8.82%)^4th)) = 30.88%.

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Attack Speed Caps

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Necromancers, these two caps include:

Cap 1

• Attack Speed on Gear
• Attack Speed from Paragon Nodes
• Elixirs
• Kalan's Edict for Minions
• Golems - Bone Sacrifice
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine

Cap 2

• Accelerating
• Rapid
• Rathma's Chosen
• Reap
• Blood Lance
• Hemorrhage
• Howl from Below for Corpse Skills
• Blood Attack Speed Temper

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Stagger

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

The Sever Necromancer captured the hearts of Necro fans everywhere with its awesome visual effects and build fantasy. Who doesn't want to be the Grim Reaper of Undeath? Spam this Skill into packs of Demons and watch the bodyparts fly!

In Bocca al Lupo!

Written by MacroBioBoi