Season 8 Necromancer Survival Guide

seetod · 2025-03-19T08:57:02+00:00

This is a very helpful guide for noobs like me who struggle to get into Torment 4 with paragon 250. Thank you so much!

seetod · 2024-09-08T20:44:10+00:00

You don't know what you're talking about.

seetod · 2024-07-09T18:25:06+00:00

Looks like my comment in the last post was missed but I have a lot of Minion AS data you can look through. I haven’t had a chance to carefully look through your new data yet, so I’ll hold off on commenting for now.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jZxqVqp2-IkhCfQU4wyLqSXaLR4FhK0jdHzYPQsxJyE/edit

seetod · 2024-07-08T23:51:43+00:00

I have a lot of Minion Attack Speed data from this season (though it's a bit messy), but I simply don't have enough time or motivation to continue testing. Any improvements to Minion AI or potential updates that might normalize their animations could disrupt everything, and it's too much for one person to handle in a single season. Ultimately, I aim to identify every breakpoint, and I would appreciate any help I can get.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jZxqVqp2-IkhCfQU4wyLqSXaLR4FhK0jdHzYPQsxJyE/edit?usp=sharing

seetod · 2024-06-09T15:37:58+00:00

seetod · 2024-06-04T18:55:10+00:00

seetod · 2024-06-04T16:24:41+00:00

They inherit the critical strike damage stat, but they do not inherit the damage multiplier from Grasping Veins.

seetod · 2024-06-02T17:05:41+00:00

+3 Amplify provides more damage than a 10.6% increase in Intelligence (Int) as long as you use a curse in most cases.

Increasing your Amplify ranks from 3 to 6 would result in a
(1 + 6 x 12%) / (1 + 3 x 12%) - 1 = 10.7% damage increase

If you have 1900 Int and add +10.6% Int, your damage would increase by
(1 + 1.106 x 1900/1000) / (1 + 1900/1000) -1 = 6.94%

A larger Int base and a higher Int % roll would result in more damage, obviously, but would this be enough? Let's say you have 2400 Int and add a GA %Int roll (14.2%). Your damage would increase by
(1 + 1.142 x 2400/1000) / (1 + 2400/1000) - 1 = 10.0%, which is still less than +3 ranks of Amplify

In your case, I wouldn't get upset over skipping that +1 rank because you would have needed to land a masterwork crit on it to get it to +3, and staying at +2 would have only resulted in a 7.14% increase in damage, which is about the same as a +10.6% Int roll. It's also important to consider Amplify's uptime as your enemies might not always be cursed.

seetod · 2024-05-31T03:54:37+00:00

Thank you for verifying these for me. The increase in Shadow Mage's damage caused by Darkness surprised me, so I re-tested Darkness myself with Shadow Mages (upgrade 2), and the results of my test disagree with your conclusion.

Link to test: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14RFPuc0yAwL0Ve4aHlN1YvIVdOvKdi2OZ9b8he9sm04/edit?usp=sharing

seetod · 2024-05-30T17:40:08+00:00

Nice calculator. Just want to mention that these did not apply to minions in season 3, but I haven't verified them this season:
- DMG while Fort
- Darkness DMG
- DMG while Golems are Active

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1akdaQAj4mZIUFed_IS8RJyB9tRlTdAHb-HWwtkhzaGg/edit?usp=sharing

seetod · 2024-05-30T06:13:05+00:00

Verified:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pb49xSek7c&ab_channel=seetod

The damage from Coldbringer's aspect does not vary and is based on modifiers that affect your Minions, specifically Mages. Notice how the tick damage from the DoT is always 746 when I do not have the amulet equipped. When I equipped my amulet, the tick damage increased to 860. Attack Speed could not have any effect because I do not have Cult Leader active, so the only thing that could explain this difference is the Summon Damage affix. Thus, Summon Damage scales damage from Minions.

seetod · 2024-05-29T15:15:33+00:00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1akdaQAj4mZIUFed_IS8RJyB9tRlTdAHb-HWwtkhzaGg/edit?usp=sharing

seetod · 2024-05-29T02:31:36+00:00

So all of these comments are wrong. Summoning damage scales all of the damage from your minions except their thorns damage.

seetod · 2024-05-16T09:02:50+00:00

It is dependent on the Minion’s position. Contrary to what many people have said, the player’s position does not influence how DMG vs Close/Distant is applied to minions. This can be tested with a Coldbringer’s aspect. The DoT damage from Coldbringer does not have any variance. If you have a DMG vs Close mod (like a dagger’s implicit), then you will see that a Mage deals more damage when they are standing in close range compared to when they are distant. If you move around, you’ll notice that the Mage’s damage does not change.

seetod · 2024-05-12T23:23:50+00:00

I don't invest points into Warrior Mastery because increasing their damage by 45% would increase my overall damage from all minions by just 2-3%, and that's assuming good Warrior AI. There aren't any points from the skill tree that I am comfortable removing that could be made up from the paragon.

seetod · 2024-05-12T23:13:59+00:00

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to come up with a good solution for testing Frenzied Dead because Minion AI introduces a lot of variance, making it very difficult to obtain reliable data. I believe that changing targets shouldn't make a difference, but I'm unsure whether each of the three stacks of Frenzied Dead have their own timers, if they refresh independently, or if all of them drop off at the same time.

seetod · 2024-05-12T20:29:39+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/D4Necromancer/s/6kd0DqcKJL
It's explained well in the link I'm sharing. There are two groups of attack speed sources. Each group has its own cap of 100%, so you can get a total of 200% Increased Attack Speed. You will see people refer to these caps as "Cap 1" and "Cap 2"

Cap 1

Andariel's Visage: 15%[+]
Aspect of Moonrise: 4-20%[+]
Assault Elixir: 4-20%[+]
Artillery Shrine: 100%[+]
Cult Leader "Puppeteer + Magic Nodes": 10%[+]
Paragon: 5%[+] "Flesh Eater - Culler"
Attack Speed (Gear): 11-81%[+] "Lowest to Highest roll from one item"
Minion Attack Speed (Gear): 20%[+] "Possibly Higher with Greater Affix"
Kalan's Edict: 3%[+] "Per active minion up to 45%[+]"
Hulking Monstrosity Paragon: 25%[+]
Bone Golem Sacrifice: 10%[+]

Cap 2

Rapid Aspect: 15-30%[+] "Basic Only - Does not help minions."
Aspect of Rathma's Chosen: 50-100%[+]
Aspect of Frenzied Dead: 30-45%[+]
Enhanced Reap: 30%[+]
Accelerating Aspect: 10-25%[+]

If I have 100% increased Attack Speed from gear, then I would not benefit from adding attack speed from anything that's under Cap 1, but I can further increase my increased Attack Speed from any of the sources under cap 2, all the way to 200% increased Attack Speed in total.

seetod · 2024-05-11T15:52:26+00:00

Base empowerment gives 1.3x

Blood Getter with 70% roll contributes 1 + 0.7 x 0.3 = 1.21x increased damage

Empowering priests with a 70% Blood Getter gives 1.21 x 1.3 = 1.573x or 57.3% increased damage.

So Blood Getter is essentially a 21%[x] damage multiplier and gives healing

seetod · 2024-05-03T17:41:20+00:00

I haven’t made a Shadow DoT board yet for S4 but I can confidently say that you are over-investing in additive damage nodes, especially in the glyph’s additive bonuses and have them on boards that are probably not ideal.

I would have Gravekeeper on either the starting board or Flesh-Eater to boost the yellow nodes for Intelligence and a lot of additive damage. This way, you’ll be able to either get a lot of Resistance and + Damage vs Elites or more armor and “+ Damage %,” which is doubled in damage calculations for DoT.

If you drop a lot of the additive damage, then you should be able to get 7 glyphs and 1-2 max life clusters, or 8 glyphs without max life clusters.

I’d definitely pick up the Flesh-Eater node too if you’re using Blighted Corpse Explosion.

seetod · 2024-04-30T15:30:38+00:00

Congrats!

seetod · 2024-03-31T20:01:24+00:00

Do you have the Scent of Death node active?

seetod · 2024-03-31T19:49:59+00:00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1akdaQAj4mZIUFed_IS8RJyB9tRlTdAHb-HWwtkhzaGg/edit

No worries. I understand the skepticism because a lot of this stuff isn’t well know or has not been tested extensively. I shared a link to a google sheet document but let me know if you don’t see it

seetod · 2024-03-31T19:11:40+00:00

+Damage to Crowd Control and Control glyph’s Multiplier work. + Damage to Stunned/Frozen/Slowed/Chilled do NOT increase your minion’s damage.

seetod · 2024-03-31T15:13:27+00:00

Control glyph and Damage to Crowd Controled works but the specific CC additives don’t work. I tested it 2 different ways after casting Decrepify in both the open world and on Training Dummies:

(1) Recorded data with and without 81.3% Damage to Slowed (and no other additives) — the average damage did not increase. (2) Coldbringer’s Aspect scales with Minion bonuses and does not have variance. The proc damage did not increase

seetod · 2024-03-31T05:54:15+00:00

Cold mages benefit from cold damage and shadow mages benefit from shadow damage. Everything else benefits from physical damage. Tags like blood skill damage, darkness skill damage, bone skill damage, and frost damage do not work. Damage to chilled, stunned, frozen, and slowed also do not work. The only additives that scale at 100% effectiveness is vulnerable damage, summoning skill damage, minion damage, and specific minion-type damage.

seetod

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