LoD Singularity Necromancer Key Farming Variation

The LoD Singularity Necromancer deals with Normal Rift farming excellently, making it one of the preferable builds for the purpose. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish Skeletal Mage Life Support 1 Blood Rush Metabolism 2 Devour Devouring Aura 3 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands 4 Simulacrum Reservoir
Passive Skills
Dark Reaping Extended Servitude Final Service Overwhelming Essence

A large part of your skill selection from the solo build will still make sense during GR XP farming. The basis of your damage still lies in the synergy between the (free) Skeletal Mage Singularity and the near-instantaneous Essence refills provided by Devour (aura-like for convenience, in this case) during Land of the Dead uptime, coupled with the extension of your overall Essence pool reserve via Overwhelming Essence and Simulacrum Reservoir. All the alterations made to skills will be made in service of speed and convenience, namely:

• For maximum convenience, you can swap the Devour rune to Devouring Aura, which automates the consumption effect and synergizes nicely with the worn Avarice Band. That being said, you can keep an active rune like Satiated, which provides a bigger overall benefit.
• With the revised powers of Haunted Visions, there is no reason not to keep Simulacrums on the bar, since you will get the permanent benefit of the Reservoir rune.
• Land of the Dead will stay on the hard CC effect of Frozen Lands, ideally overlapping with the strong cooldown reduction-oriented choices in your gearing.
• Bone Armor will be taken with the farming-oriented Harvest of Anguish due to the movement speed buff.
• For maximum mobility, Blood Rush will be taken with the doubled charges of Metabolism.

Most of your passive selection from the GR specs will be retained, with Final Service (cheat death), Overwhelming Essence (extra Essence for DPS) and Extended Servitude (longer lasting Mages) still providing tremendous value. We also recommend adding Dark Reaping for a steady source of Life and Essence with the lightning-quick kill speeds during farming.

From the Devour-related items, Requiem Cereplate retains its value for the snowballing effect in a speed run, and Razeth's Volition remains vital with the free Singularity and Gift of Death effects it provides.

From the "generic" legendaries, keep Leoric's Crown as your helm (CDR trumps the potential damage gain from Andariel's Visage here), as well as Reaper's Wraps — they remain a cornerstone item in the build for their resource regeneration.

The damage-increasing legendaries are highly desirable in speeds, so you will maintain Tasker and Theo for the pet attack speed, Haunted Visions for the damage buff from the Reservoir summons, and take Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan due to its combination of a damage increase plus resource generation enhancement.

Since speed is essential in XP runs, you will be wearing Steuart's Greaves over the progression-oriented Ice Climbers, and will be slotting Blood Rush Metabolism in your active skills accordingly (see above).

When it comes to jewelry, our basic recommendation is to keep Circle of Nailuj's Evol for the ease of Skeletal Mage Singularity army maintenance, and add the Act III bounty cache legendary Avarice Band for its tremendous speed farming utility. The combined power of the latter when socketed with a Boon of the Hoarder and paired with Goldwrap will both greatly speed you up and render you near-invulnerable in standard rift farming. The third suggested ring is Krysbin's Sentence for the damage amplification; pick your stronger two to wear and Cube the third. A notable alteration you can make is to drop Krysbin from the setup when you grow very confident of your damage, and take Rechel's Ring of Larceny for the movement speed proc (it has to be worn in order to proc itself with its guaranteed Fear on Hit secondary stat).

The weapon and offhand are, as always, Scythe of the Cycle, plus your best rolled phylactery with appropriate stats.

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.

You will maintain Enforcer and Legacy of Dreams as crucial legendary gems for the build, but should replace Bane of the Trapped for Boon of the Hoarder for the Avarice Band- Goldwrap synergy during farming runs.

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

For your weapon slot, you can run either Messerschmidt's Reaver (solo normal rift farming) or In-geom (group normal rift farming) as your cooldown reduction powerhouse; both will work exceptionally well with the build.

To further the speed of your clears, slot Nemesis Bracers in your armor Cube slot for the additional elite spawns.

In the jewelry slot, you should slot your weakest rolled ring between the ones outlined above: Krysbin's Sentence, Circle of Nailuj's Evol, or Avarice Band.

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 standard rift farming for keys is the Enchantress due to her numerous utility bonuses, allowing you to smooth out your speed runs even further.

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.