LoD Singularity Necromancer BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

As this is a Legacy of Dreams-based build, you have considerable freedom in picking out the rest of your gear slots. As a rule of thumb, focus on Skeletal Mages skill damage increases across gear and Cooldown Reduction, and remember the setup's requirement for ancient items, as well as its restriction on other set bonuses. You can run individual set pieces with beneficial stats, as long as they do not form any set bonus.

The Legacy of Dreams power allows you to run any legendary item combination while not losing out on the damage amplification and reduction associated with the traditional 6-piece sets. You can obtain this power in two ways; the older way is equipping the two rings — The Wailing Host and Litany of the Undaunted — as your only active set bonus. The newer (and more powerful, since it also opens your ring slots for legendary jewelry) method is the Legacy of Dreams legendary gem.

In a setup with Legacy of Dreams, you will be wearing your two best rolled rings and cubing the third between Convention of Elements, Circle of Nailuj's Evol, and Krysbin's Sentence. Convention of Elements will provide a massive damage increase during the Physical cycle of its rotation, with an improved uptime compared to other classes due to the Necromancer's three element rotation. Krysbin's Sentence is a Necromancer-specific item that amplifies damage as long as you have a hard crowd control active; it is a major driving force behind the inclusion of Frostburn and Land of the Dead Frozen Lands. Finally, Circle of Nailuj's Evol will ease the strain on your constant resource juggling by summoning an extra Mage per cast, as well as extending their uptime.

Rounding out the jewelry, your best-in-slot amulet will be Squirt's Necklace; this glass cannon centerpiece incentivizes you to constantly keep your distance from enemies and rewards the evasive playstyle of a Skeletal Mage Necro with a massive damage bonus. However it also punishes the unwary with an amplification of damage taken.

You have two major options in your helm slot — either to boost your damage directly with a worn Cold damage Andariel's Visage, or reduce your vital cooldowns with a Leoric's Crown (socketed with a Flawless Royal Diamond for CDR). Our general recommendation is Leoric's Crown, as its general reduction of skill downtime reduces the reliance on Rift composition and particular timing with your cooldowns. Nevertheless, both are seen as viable choices for the slot.

You also face a binary choice in your boots, where you can either focus on long distance mobility with Steuart's Greaves, or improve your tankiness with the synergy between worn Ice Climbers and cubed Stone Gauntlets (the former makes you immune to the downsides of the latter). Our general recommendation is to take Steuart's Greaves for the massive maneuverability improvement it brings to lower tier GR speed farming, but when pushing the upper tier limits of the build, fall back to Ice Climbers as you transition into a Curse-using spec that drops Blood Rush.

You face a similar choice for the belt slot, where you can either focus on pure glass cannon DPS-ing with the attack speed and crit damage boosting The Witching Hour, or go for the damage mitigation route with Dayntee's Binding in the Curse-using variant of the skill setup (recommended).

Due to your constant demand for quick resource generation, the Singularity Necromancer offers the perfect environment for Reaper's Wraps. Notably, this bracer is crafted rather than dropped, making it somewhat easier to obtain as ancient and perfect its stats. The recipe for its creation drops off the Act V final boss, Malthael.

The remainder of your equipment can be roughly split into three categories: Devour items, offensive items, and your weapon-and-offhand damage items.

• You will devote two slots to Devour-related items, Requiem Cereplate and Razeth's Volition. The chest piece will double the benefits of your Devour spam—and perhaps more importantly, it will snowball its effect as the fight develops, once you reach your maximum life. Razeth's Volition grants your mages the Gift of Death and Singularity runes for free, resulting in extra Corpses for your consumption needs and allowing you to play around with the remaining three runes according to your preferences.
• A duo of generic, damage increasing items falls into the second category. Tasker and Theo scales the attack speed of your Skeletal Mage summons, while Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan will improve both damage dealt and resource generation while you are on the move — a constant requirement with this glassy, positioning-dependent build.
• Last but certainly not least, you have your weapon and offhand combo. The mandatory weapon for the build is Scythe of the Cycle, a one-handed scythe that increases the damage of your secondary skills while Bone Armor is active, but reduces the armor's duration with each cast. There is no particular offhand that you need to wear — any high damage range phylactery with the appropriate stats will do.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random.

Unfortunately, Skeletal Mage-based builds do not have a great way of utilizing the three Sanctification powers during solo GR progression (though the Golem power can be utilized in group Rat runs and T16 farm). Thus, you should simply use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). The Sanctification power outcome does not matter. In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification are your weapon, Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang, or a jewelry piece like Krysbin's Sentence.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally this is done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, but if your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that you cannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simply subtracting your roll from the 25% max. Then, maximize Essence due to the interaction with Reilena's Shadowhook. After that, dump as much as you comfortably can into Intelligence, but feel free to invest into Vitality if you feel yourself lacking in toughness.

In the Offense section, max out Cooldown Reduction, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Attack Speed, in that order. In Defense, prioritize Armor, then Life %, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Area Damage and Life on Hit first, then finish off with Resource Cost Reduction and Globe Radius.

Bane of the Trapped is a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation.

Enforcer is a pet-oriented gem that both increases your summons' damage multiplicatively and lessens the damage they take. Skeletal Mages count as pets for the purposes of this gem.

Your final slot is best occupied by the Legacy of Dreams legendary gem, which provides a scaling bonus for each legendary item equipped, as long as you have no set bonuses equipped. This bonus is multiplied for Ancient or Primal quality items, and when the gem is maxed out, it matches the Legacy of Nightmares ( The Wailing Host and Litany of the Undaunted rings) set bonus. This potent bonus allows you to play around with all your gear slots for synergistic legendary powers at the cost of a gem slot; in the older LoN setup, this socket would be occupied by Zei's Stone of Vengeance.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting the highest available level of Topazes in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally, these will all be Flawless Royal Topazes as soon as possible. As you grow in Paragon (bulking up Intelligence in the Core section) and aim for higher tier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Ruby, scaling the lacking Armor of an Intelligence-based character (Intelligence scales Resistances). There is no specific breakpoint where you do that; the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack of toughness impede your progress. Since this is a highly cooldown-dependent build, slot a Flawless Royal Diamond in your helm. In your weapon, use a Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

The Weapon slot in the Cube will be occupied by Reilena's Shadowhook, whose power scales your damage multiplicatively based on your maximum Essence. This places a strong emphasis on expanding your resource pool via Overwhelming Essence, maxing resource in Paragons and attaining a high max Essence in the secondary stats of your Scythe of the Cycle and chosen offhand.

Your armor Cube slot will be occupied by Stone Gauntlets — one of the most effective protective pieces in the game, bumping your armor in 50% increments as you get hit, but with a similarly stacking mobility penalty — and that downside you will be completely negating with the unique property of Ice Climbers, which make you immune to immobilization effects.

The general recommendation for your jewelry Cube slot is Krysbin's Sentence, both due to the overwhelming power it brings compared to its alternatives, as well as the relative difficulty of perfecting the item (high variance in its unique roll).

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during solo GR progression is the Enchantress, due to her cooldown reduction- and increased attack speed bonuses, both of which are helpful to the needs of an attack speed- and CDR-heavy build such as this one.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Tower, whose Armor-increasing properties complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Necromancers (due to Intelligence scaling resistances) for optimal survivability.