Rathma Skeletal Mages Necromancer Speed Farming Variation

The Rathma Skeletal Mage Necromancer can deal reasonably well with Normal Rift farming all the way through the highest Torment difficulties. The build variation suffers from minor inconveniences compared to top tier speed farming builds (lacking class-specific items for extra movement, limited skill and passive choices for the purpose).

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
Blood Rush Metabolism Skeletal Mage Skeleton Archer 1 Devour Devouring Aura 2 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands 3 Command Skeletons Freezing Grasp 4 Frailty Aura of Frailty
Passive Skills
Extended Servitude Spreading Malediction Dark Reaping Final Service

In the skill selection, you will accomplish that by:

• Most importantly, changing the slower, controlled pace of Singularity for the weaker, but Essence-efficient Skeleton Archers. The damage drop will not be noticeable in regular Rifts, but the ease of resource management definitely will. Note that this mandates the change to Cold damage on gear.
• Swapping the Cannibalize rune on Devour for the farming convenience of Devouring Aura. Note the extension of the aura radius through your gold pickup radius — an important factor that you will influence through gearing (see below).
• Swapping the defensive Decrepify curse for the automated, offense staple Frailty Aura of Frailty. Similarly to Devouring Aura, this rune scales with pickup radius (see below).
• Exchanging your Bone Spikes generator for the mobility of Blood Rush, augmented by the doubled charges of Metabolism.
• In the passives, replacing progression choices like Overwhelming Essence and Life from Death with powerful farming passives like Fueled by Death and Final Service.

Progress-oriented jewelry like Haunted Visions and Convention of Elements greatly diminish in usefulness during Normal Rift runs. When doing farming content, the recommended jewelry replacements are an Avarice Band and a Hellfire Amulet of Intelligence. Avarice Band is an Act III cache legendary that, in conjunction with a gemmed Boon of the Hoarder and a worn Goldwrap, will render you practically invulnerable during Normal Rift farming. Note that it also extends your pickup radius up to the whopping 30 yards as you pick up gold, enabling a near screen-wide effect to both Devouring Aura and Aura of Frailty, and Spreading Malediction as a result. While any well-rolled amulet will do, you will ideally finish off the farming jewelry with a Squirt's Necklace, which greatly augments the damage of long range, glass cannon builds like this one.

Since the extra DPS from The Witching Hour will be redundant in regular rifts, you can freely drop it in favor of Goldwrap for the convenience of near-infinite Toughness.

Finish off the farming staple items by dropping Reaper's Wraps' resource regeneration for the extra elites of Nemesis Bracers, feeding nicely into your cubed In-geom.

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.

In speed runs, proper ranged positioning can be left out in favor of faster advancement through the rift and looting enemies with reckless abandon; thus, the value of a gem like Zei's Stone of Vengeance diminishes and it is best replaced by Boon of the Hoarder, part of the gold utility triumvirate outlined above.

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

It is recommended that you swap out Reilena's Shadowhook from the Weapon slot in Kanai's Cube; its damage multiplication is welcome in the progression variant, but it ends up being a slower option to simply cubing In-geom for speed rifting. This farming staple cuts cooldowns by 10 seconds flat for a generous 15-second period after killing an elite, ensuring very high uptime on vital Corpse generation cooldowns and resulting in higher damage overall.

During Season 22, you are able to add Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang in the fourth slot of the Cube, and enjoy its damage multiplication benefits via the curses you spread.

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.