Rathma Army of the Dead Necromancer Physical Army of the Dead Rathma Variant Variation

This is no longer a variation, but has been changed to be the main build as of Patch 2.7.4. Please refer to the main page for the current iteration of this build.

Another option for solo Greater Rift pushing, which is safer and plays at a greater range, is to alter the build into Physical runes and drop the usual Nayr's Black Death Poison damage scaling in favor of other multipliers, i.e. Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang or Reilena's Shadowhook. This build variation guide will give you an outline for both approaches, which will achieve a similar result in terms of endgame viability.

Active Skills
Decrepify Borrowed Time Command Skeletons Frenzy 1 Bone Armor Dislocation 2 Army of the Dead Death Valley 3 Blood Rush Potency 4 Revive Personal Army
Passive Skills
Spreading Malediction Final Service Dark Reaping Grisly Tribute

Similarly to the base build, you should call upon your summons and maximize their numbers as soon as possible — all 7 Command Skeletons and the 10 Revives — so you get the most out of your Rathma set bonus and chunk the massive Army of the Dead cooldown. With proper Cooldown Reduction optimization, you should have two activations of Army of the Dead within a single Convention of Elements rotation. One of them needs to be during the Physical cycle in order to burst enemies down, while the other will be auxiliary damage, mopping up stragglers and setting up Oculus Ring spawns.

Unlike the base build, you will be at a considerable distance from the enemy — letting the minions tank and distract your enemies, and judiciously applying Decrepify (mind your Essence!) for the Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang damage bonus. As your Physical rotation of Convention of Elements approaches, you will need to move in closer to the fight, stun the pull with Bone Armor Dislocation to get the maximum Krysbin's Sentence damage bonus and then teleport away with Blood Rush to maximize your Zei's Stone of Vengeance bonus, which is based on distance. With both bonuses taken care of, you can unleash the Army of the Dead Death Valley nuke and enjoy the devastation.

Most of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, with minor adaptations to accommodate the purposes of a Physical damage-centric build.

• Army of the Dead is still the centerpiece of the build, but you should alter its rune to the pulling effect of Death Valley for some excellent battlefield manipulation.
• Command Skeletons stays in the build as one half of the summoned army necessary for the Rathma set bonuses. The preferred rune continues to be Frenzy, for the hastened resets of Army of the Dead.
• Revive is also a mandatory inclusion in a Rathma build, but you can drop the annoying fear of the Poison rune in favor of the much more pleasant damage reduction aspect of Personal Army. Note that this rune should be changed to Oblation if you opt to use Reilena's Shadowhook-based damage amplification, since this rune will help proc Blood is Power more reliably — in fact, you will need to use the skill quite often to assist the process yourself!
• Bone Armor Dislocation stays for both the additional defenses and the Krysbin's Sentence proc with the active stun effect.
• Blood Rush Potency remains in the build as a vital repositioning and movement tool throughout the Greater Rift.
• Instead of rushing into the fray to apply curses manually via Cursed Scythe, you can do it from the safety of your minion backline with sparing use of Decrepify Borrowed Time. If you opt to use Reilena's Shadowhook-based damage amplification, this slot should be swapped to Simulacrum Reservoir, and its use should be timed to the Physical rotation of CoE every 3 cycles.
• Taking cues from the main build, you will maintain Spreading Malediction for the damage bonus, as well as Grisly Tribute for the minion-based healing effect, in your passive lineup. In a Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang setup, adapt the remaining two passives to Dark Reaping for Essence sustain and Final Service for safety. In a Reilena's Shadowhook setup, change Spreading Malediction to Overwhelming Essence (for the Essence gain, scaling your damage) and swap Final Service to Blood is Power to mitigate the massive Simulacrum CD.

The build remains firmly rooted in the combination of the Bones of Rathma set (5 pieces) and the craftable Cpt. Crimson set (2 pieces), their full set bonuses attained via a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. You will also maintain the weapon and offhand combo from the main build — the Jesseth Arms set, Jesseth Skullscythe and Jesseth Skullshield. Generally, even the jewelry choices will remain the same — all out offensive powers with Squirt's Necklace, Krysbin's Sentence and Convention of Elements boosting your DPS. You can make a minor alteration in a Reilena's Shadowhook-reliant build by swapping the amulet to Haunted Visions, which will greatly reduce the strain on your cooldown management, but will lose you a damage multiplier — a convenience change with significant tradeoffs. In a Reilena's Shadowhook-leaning variation, you will also have to take Maximum Essence in your Paragons, as well as the secondary stats of your weapon and offhand.

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.

Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.

On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.

With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:

• Core: Movement Speed: 200 points.
• Offense: Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points so they are as close to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the two stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet. For weapon-and-offhand builds, this is usually achieved with the full 200 points spent into Critical Hit Damage.
• Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Necromancers, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and Armor (to complement the naturally high All Resistance stat of Intelligence-based characters).
• Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.

In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:

• Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the 3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season. If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its implementation. The available pieces are Guardian's Aversion (Wrists), Guardian's Case (Waist), and Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
• Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set ( Focus and Restraint) and Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
• Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e., Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%. Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.

Both Bane of the Trapped and Zei's Stone of Vengeance remain valuable, independent damage multiplication gems for the setup. Your third slot can be altered to Bane of the Powerful in a Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang setup, since it is safer and less CD-reliant than its sister build variations.

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

Both Fate's Vow and Ring of Royal Grandeur remain cornerstone pieces of the build and are firmly affixed to your Cube setup. Fate's Vow brings a massive additive damage increase (hence the incentive to exclude skill damage rolls on gear, as it falls in the same category) to Army of the Dead, plus granting you the highest base damage rune, Unconventional Warfare, for free. Ring of Royal Grandeur grants you the full bonuses of the Rathma and Cpt. Crimson sets mixture.

The weapon Cube slot is the reason for this variation's existence, and you can either go for a Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang setup (safer, more consistent, harder Essence management) or a Reilena's Shadowhook setup (higher burst during Simulacrum uptime and easier Essence management, but requires Max Essence rolls on gear and has less CC). Both sub-variants perform comparably, so it is up to your preferences how you build your Physical Army of the Dead Necro.

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 increased attack speed bonuses (helpful for the attack speed breakpoint-reliant methods of dealing damage in this build) via Focused Mind, as well as the cooldown reduction bonus from Prophetic Harmony and damage reduction from Powered Shield.

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 Unfettered, which renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it — valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside of straight up evasion via Blood Rush.