Support Necromancer BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

In a typical support build fashion, the Support Necromancer adopts a mixture of sets and utility legendaries to maximize Toughness and ability uptime. Your stat goals for items across the board are high Cooldown Reduction and Attack Speed, along with a healthy dose of Pickup Radius to assist your Frailty range. With high CDR rolls on every piece that can get it (shoulders, gloves, belt, weapon, offhand, all jewelry pieces), your Flawless Royal Diamond in the helm, Gogok of Swiftness, the Cain and Captain Crimson sets and Paragon points, it should not be much trouble to reach the 70-75% + CDR range, which trivializes all downtimes in the build. Increasing Attack Speed is a trickier subject, considering breakpoints of Corpse consumption for Corpse Lance. To put it in simpler terms, reaching the easily attainable 1.75 attacks per second breakpoint means you will shoot out 5 Corpse Lances per click, for a total of 25% crit chance on your target. Two clicks up that value to 50%, which should be the reasonable baseline for permanent crits by your DPS teammates.

In terms of actual pieces worn, it is recommended that you mix two pieces of the Pestilence Master's Shroud set ( Pestilence Gloves and Pestilence Defense) with two pieces of the craftable Captain Crimson's Trimmings set ( Captain Crimson's Thrust and Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle). This will ensure you get the valuable automatic Corpse Lance per consumption, as well as a slew of support-synergistic CDR and toughness bonuses from the craftable set.

Not responsible for damage dealing in any way, the Support Necromancer can focus on pure utility in the jewelry. Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac is a powerful tool for this cooldown-heavy build: benefiting greatly from the Death Nova spam, it allows for permanent uptime of the spec-defining Land of the Dead. In your remaining slot, you should take the revamped Oculus Ring — it now provides up to the impressive 85% multiplicative damage buff in a circular area for your DPS party members to stand in. While its wording is vague, it does trigger off assists, and will thus work on support characters.

To complete the jewelry, you have a number of options for the amulet slot. The default recommendation is the pickup radius-extending Rondal's Locket, though you have other interesting options — like Halcyon's Ascent, whose unique crowd control power triggers on enemies in your large perma-LotD radius and applies the Strongarm Bracers damage increase for your allies in return. Other notable options include a well rolled Hellfire Amulet of Intelligence (with good passives like Draw Life, Rathma's Shield, etc.), or any of the immunity amulets ( Xephirian Amulet, Countess Julia's Cameo, etc.)

With Cooldown Reduction as one of the deciding factors in the utility you bring to the group, Leoric's Crown and In-geom are unsurprising inclusions to the build. The unique property of Leoric's Crown ideally doubles the effectiveness of the slotted Flawless Royal Diamond, while In-geom cuts cooldowns by 10 seconds per slain elite pack, chaining very effectively in speed farming.

Steuart's Greaves will ensure this positioning and speed-dependent build stays ahead of the pack, while two final defensive pieces round out your gear: Aquila Cuirass will cut incoming damage in half while at high resources, while Stormshield will provide a massive bulwark and a stat stick that can be dedicated almost entirely on toughness stats, plus the necessary CDR. Its unique melee damage reduction property rolls with up to 30%, almost balancing out the DR deficiencies of the frail Necromancer class.

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, Necro Support builds do not have a great way of utilizing the three Sanctification powers. 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 is a jewelry piece like Oculus Ring.

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.

Iceblink serves a twofold purpose: first, it adds a potent, scaling slow effect to the cold rune Brittle Touch; and second, it offers a reliable source of 10% additional party-wide Crit Chance through its level 25 property.

Gogok of Swiftness synergizes well with the build, indirectly providing the entire party with more damage by increasing your essential Cooldown Reduction, as well as substantial personal Toughness from the Dodge bonuses.

The recommended gem for your third and final jewelry slot is Gem of Efficacious Toxin, for the party-wide damage increase against — and reduced damage from — enemies affected by its poisonous DoT.

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

Cubing the Messerschmidt's Reaver is arguably one of the strongest effects you can have in speedruns — reducing cooldowns by 1 second per slain enemy, and triggering off assists (and thus working with a support build). Note that once you grow confident in your cooldown management, you can cube the unusual Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander in this slot, which grants helpful Shrine effects to the group even in Greater Rifts; its utility will be greatly extended by the worn Gloves of Worship.

Stored in the Cube, Nemesis Bracers will provide the group with an extra elite spawn at every shrine — an indispensable time saving bonus during speed farming.

Briggs' Wrath will serve as an excellent monster pulling tool for the convenience of your DPS teammates.

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.