Lich Crit Harvest Endgame Build for Last Epoch
Welcome to our Last Epoch Lich Crit Harvest build guide for the Acolyte class. Here you will learn everything about the Lich play style, passives, skills, strengths, and weaknesses to conquer the world of Eterra.
Build Introduction
Transform into your Reaper, a scythe clutched in each hand, as you get ready to Harvest your enemies’ souls. Very little can slow you down as you jump from group to group feasting on souls. This build makes you the ultimate 'Undertaker', a melee fighter filled with Necrotic Damage who places a curse on all their enemies to take their souls.
Strengths
High critical strike damage
- Great mobility
- Built in Kill Threshold
Weaknesses
Low Life play is risky
- Requires Leech
Skill Selection
Our skill selection for this build focuses around keeping ourselves in our Reaper form as much as possible and
then stacking Health leeched from Damage to push back against the health cost on many of our skills. Next, we augment our damage
around Necrotic damage boosts and pump up our Critical Strike Chance and Multiplier. With built in auto-cursing and an
amazing traversal skill, we can easily zip through the battlefield with awesome survivability despite using 
Death Seal to
keep ourselves at low life for a huge boost in damage.
Class and Skill Passive Trees
Our base class is the Acolyte, which acts as a generic spell caster and summoner. Our character will be offered an opportunity to select a Mastery class once we have completed the first act of the campaign. Each base class has three possible masteries to choose from, for the Acolyte we have access to the Mastery Tree Passives for Necromancer, Lich and Warlock. Upon selecting a Mastery and placing 20 Passive Points into the Acolyte Tree, you'll then be able to place Passive Points into the Mastery Trees.
For this Lich Harvest build, we will be picking Lich as our mastery class. We will utilizing the majority of our Passive Points for the Lich Passive Tree. Our Passive Points will be targeting augments for our damage and boosting their survivability. Each of the Passive Trees and their points are broken down below.
Acolyte Passive Points
- 4 points into Blood Aura: Adds flat damage.
- 8 points into Forbidden Knowledge: Increases Necrotic Resistance and Intelligence.
- 8 points into Stolen Vitality: Increases Vitality.
Our base class is the Acolyte, which acts as a generic spell caster and summoner. Our character will be offered an opportunity to select a Mastery class once we have completed the first act of the campaign. Each base class has three possible masteries to choose from, for the Acolyte we have access to the Mastery Tree Passives for Necromancer, Lich and Warlock. Upon selecting a Mastery and placing 20 Passive Points into the Acolyte Tree, you'll then be able to place Passive Points into the Mastery Trees.
For this Lich Harvest build, we will be picking Lich as our mastery class. We will utilizing the majority of our Passive Points for the Lich Passive Tree. Our Passive Points will be targeting augments for our damage and boosting their survivability. Each of the Passive Trees and their points are broken down below.
Lich Passive Points
- 10 points into Apocrypha: This boosts our Intelligence and Mana Regen.
- 8 points into Dance with Death: This is your low life damage boost, which
Death Seal will keep you at 33% life. - 5 points into Grasp of Fate: Adds Necrotic Damage.
- 8 points into Crippling Insight: Increases Intelligence, but reduces our health regeneration, which is compensated for by using Leech.
- 8 points into Three Plagues: Grants penetration for Necrotic Damage.
- 5 points into Deathbringer: Increases Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed.
- 10 points into Necrotic Energy: Increases Necrotic Damage.
- 5 points into Clairvoyant Insight: Increases Critical Multiplier.
- 10 points into Elixir of Death: Increases damage reduction on potion use.
- 5 points into Ageless Ascetic: Increases Movement Speed and Damage Leech.
- 5 points into Soul Maw: Grants more Damage Leech.
- 10 points into Mind Over Body: Intelligence increase.
Our base class is the Acolyte, which acts as a generic spell caster and summoner. Our character will be offered an opportunity to select a Mastery class once we have completed the first act of the campaign. Each base class has three possible masteries to choose from, for the Acolyte we have access to the Mastery Tree Passives for Necromancer, Lich and Warlock. Upon selecting a Mastery and placing 20 Passive Points into the Acolyte Tree, you'll then be able to place Passive Points into the Mastery Trees.
For this Lich Harvest build, we will be picking Lich as our mastery class. We will utilizing the majority of our Passive Points for the Lich Passive Tree. Our Passive Points will be targeting augments for our damage and boosting their survivability. Each of the Passive Trees and their points are broken down below.
Necromancer Passive Points
- 4 points into Elixir of Hunger: Adds flat health and increases the duration of Hunger.
In this section, we will break down each skill and highlight the key passives we have selected to make the skill perform as best as possible in the build. While some of these skills do allow for some variation to exist depending on your own custom choices, we recommend utilizing the skill trees as presented until you have a strong understanding of the build itself.
Harvest
Harvest is our main DPS skill. We will be triggering several buffs
on our character as we stay in 
Reaper Form and 
Transplant leap
from pack to pack. This skill shreds Necrotic Resistances and has stacked
damage against Cursed targets. Its high base Critical Strike Chance and chosen
multipliers makes essentially every hit a critical strike.
Order of Skill Points
- 4 points into Harrowing Blade: This shreds Necrotic Resistance.
- 1 point into Life Eater: Gains Life from Intelligence.
- 4 points into Great Scythe: Increases strike area.
- 3 points into Spectral Whetstone: Raises our base Critical Strike Chance.
- 3 points into Finality: Adds a kill threshold to this skill.
- 5 points into Symbol of Loss: Increases damage against Cursed targets.
- 2 points into Putrid Reaper: Poisons enemies to trigger Death Inside.
- 1 point into Death Inside: 30% flat damage increase against poison enemies.
If you manage to acquire more points for this skill they can go into Putridity, Wretched Innards, Necromantic Fervor and Pull of the Grave.
In this section, we will break down each skill and highlight the key passives we have selected to make the skill perform as best as possible in the build. While some of these skills do allow for some variation to exist depending on your own custom choices, we recommend utilizing the skill trees as presented until you have a strong understanding of the build itself.
Reaper Form
In this build, we aim to stay in Reaper Form as much as possible. We
take advantage of several specific nodes in the skill tree to increase our
duration and stack our damage. Please note while in Reaper Form you are going
to slowly lose health as you kill enemies, which means we must prioritize
health leech to counteract this.
Order of Skill Points
- 4 points into Soul for a Soul: Increases damage, but lowers our Healing Effectiveness.
- 4 points into Reaper's Curse: Gain more damage increases, but we lose health.
- 2 points into Death Comes Quickly: 50% chance to gain Swiftness on kill. You can get 10 stacks of this at maximum. (This was removed, points will be redistributed when the build is updated.)
- 3 points into Rapid Destruction: Attack and Casting Speed increase.
- 3 points into Deathtouch Scythe: Increase base Necrotic Damage.
- 5 points into Executioner: Increases Critical Strike Multiplier.
- 1 point into Haunting: Gain a chance to apply Marked for Death to enemies.
- 1 point into Swift Harbinger: Cooldown reduction for
Reap. - 1 point into Unholy Dominion: Separates Reap and
Transplant cooldowns.
ReapAny additional skill points you gain from gear can go into maxing out Executioner, Swift Harbinger and Rapid Destruction.
In this section, we will break down each skill and highlight the key passives we have selected to make the skill perform as best as possible in the build. While some of these skills do allow for some variation to exist depending on your own custom choices, we recommend utilizing the skill trees as presented until you have a strong understanding of the build itself.
Bone Curse
This skill has perfect synergy with this build and is applied naturally through our movement skill Transplant. This buffs every aspect
of our build and amplifies all of our damage abilities.
Order of Skill Points
- 1 point into Crippling Anguish: Adds a slow to
Bone Curse. - 2 points into Cultist's Fervor: Increases Mana Efficiency.
- 3 points into Chilblains: Grants us a chill chance of 36%.
- 5 points into Cursed Limbs: Grants us Bone Curse on hit.
- 4 points into Conflation: Increases our area size.
- 1 point into Sigil of Mortality: Allows Bone Curse to apply Marked for Death.
- 3 points into Defile Defenses: Grants Armour Shred Chance of 60%.
- 1 point into Marrow Thief: Grants us a chance to gain
Bone Armor on kill.
Bone ArmorIn this section, we will break down each skill and highlight the key passives we have selected to make the skill perform as best as possible in the build. While some of these skills do allow for some variation to exist depending on your own custom choices, we recommend utilizing the skill trees as presented until you have a strong understanding of the build itself.
Transplant
This skill is used as our movement skill to bounce from pack to pack, but it is also a trigger for applying 
Bone Curse automatically
in the area where we land. For the skill tree, we focus on lowering the cooldown and health cost of the skill and buff our defenses
whenever we use the skill.
Order of Skill Points
- 3 points into Fleeting Form: Increases our cooldown recovery.
- 2 points into Anemia: Lowers the health cost of the skill.
- 3 points into Bone Armor: Grants us the Bone Armor buff when the skill is used.
- 2 points into Plated Bone: Bone Armor effects are increased by 20%. (This was removed, points will be redistributed when the build is updated.)
- 3 points into Apostasy: Increases Bone Armor duration.
- 3 points into Acolyte's Fervor: Adds Haste and Frenzy buffs upon skill use.
- 1 point into Reign of Blood: Adds an additional detonations upon arrival.
- 1 point into Doom Bringer: Curses all enemies with Bone Curse on arrival.
- 1 point into Sticky Blood: Adds pools of blood to slow enemies.
In this section, we will break down each skill and highlight the key passives we have selected to make the skill perform as best as possible in the build. While some of these skills do allow for some variation to exist depending on your own custom choices, we recommend utilizing the skill trees as presented until you have a strong understanding of the build itself.
Death Seal
This is the key to our low life aspect of this build. Death Seal locks our health at a certain value and holds it there giving
us a massive damage boost for the percentage of health we are missing. This skill amplifies our damage output, but does create some
risk to your character.
Order of Skill Points
- 5 points into Corrupted Consciousness: Increases our damage related to our missing life.
- 3 points into Desperate Shroud: Increases our armor related to our missing life.
- 1 point into Deadlock: Sets the threshold of our low life at 33%.
- 3 points into Moratorium: Increases duration of the skill.
- 1 point into Soul Stability: Removes any health drain.
- 1 point into The Quick and the Dead: Adds Haste to our character on release of the seal.
- 1 point into Mortal Pulse: Activates a death wave every second.
- 2 points into Pustulent Presence: Increases our chance to Poison in relationship to our health, the lower our health - the higher the chance.
- 2 points into Cycle of Decay: Increases death wave damage against poisoned enemies.
- 1 point into Curdled Flesh: Death wave does more damage.
Build Mechanics and Playstyle
This melee build has such a great pace and is quite relaxing to play despite the low life. We essentially only need to
focus on using our Transplant and positioning ourselves on a group of enemies, then wipe them out with one or two
clicks of Harvest, then repeat. Many of the elements in this build are automatic, which puts you at ease while playing.
Transplant is our opener, it triggers Bone Curse for 5 seconds on cast at the landing location, activates a Kill Threshold,
and increases our damage. The skill also gives us several buffs: Haste, Frenzy and Bone Armor. Lastly, it puts Marked for Death on enemies
to amplify our Harvest damage.
Harvest is our spammable skill and is designed to take advantage of the auto-cursing effects and one very important
skill: Death Seal. This skill is what puts us into low-life and unlocks our true potential for damage. While in low-life, we will be
boosted on both our offenses and defenses, as well as have our movement speed increased. Death Seal will also act as constant
damage drain on any enemies around us as it sends waves of necrotic damage out in a nova around us.
Overall, this is strong enough to brawl at endgame and the gameplay is fast and effective. As long as you keep your
buffs going and are playing smart with your position while using Transplant - you will be able to zip
through the battlefield unleashing your damage non-stop.
Equipment and Gear Affixes
For this build, we will be focusing on several main affixes for each piece of non-unique gear, as well as working towards acquiring the specific Uniques needed to make this build operate correctly. Our equipment will focus on these specific affixes for the Implicits and Modifier stats.
| Gear Slot | Implicits | Modifiers |
|---|---|---|
| Two-Handed Weapon |  Death's Embrace |
Legendary Potential Critical Strike Multiplier |
| Head | Cooldown Recovery Armor Minion Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed |
Prefixes Increased Necrotic Damage While Transformed Intelligence Suffixes Health % Increased Armor |
| Chest | Armor +% Endurance |
Prefixes Increased Necrotic Damage While Transformed Intelligence Suffixes Armor +% Health |
| Gloves | High Armor Needed Resistances |
Prefixes Cast Speed Intelligence Suffixes Hybrid Health +% Endurance |
| Feet | Movement Speed Resistances |
Prefixes Movement Speed Intelligence Suffixes Hybrid Health Critical Strike Avoidance Flat Health |
| Amulet | Less Damage Over Time Taken | Prefixes Critical Strike Multiplier Increased Necrotic Damage Suffixes Chance to Shred Armour on Hit Chance to apply Frailty on Hit |
| Belt | Armor Mana |
Prefixes Increased Necrotic Damage Suffixes Hybrid Health Health % Flat Health |
| Rings | Ward Retention Needed Resistances |
Prefixes Intelligence Increased Necrotic Damage Suffixes Flat Health Needed Resistances |
| Rings |  Siphon of Anguish |
Legendary Potential Increased Necrotic Damage |
| Relic | Necrotic Damage | Prefixes + level to Harvest Increased Melee Damage Melee Damage Critical Strike Multiplier Suffixes Endurance % Flat Health Needed Resistances |
A loot filter made specifically for the gear table above may be copied by pressing the button below. Once in the Loot Filter portion of the in-game menu, choose the "Paste Clipboard Contents" option to import the code.
Copy Loot Filter to Clipboard
Uniques
Now, let's look at the required Uniques for this build.
Death's Embrace
Death's Embrace: A two-handed scythe that fits our Harvest build with its stacking
buff called 'Harrowing Claim'. We gain a stack of this buff every time we hit an enemy with
Harvest; the buff lasts for 1.5 seconds and can have a maximum of 2 stacks. While it is
at two stacks, our Harvest skill is augmented with 200% more melee damage and 100% more AoE,
however, it consumes a significant chunk of our Health and Mana. While this is mitigated through
the build's life leech, do not over extend yourself by too much or get too low. This Unique can be
target farmed on the timeline "Reign of Dragons" under the "Unique or Set Axe, Mace or
Spear" echo reward. If you find this unique with legendary potential adding the affix Critical
Strike Multiplier is ideal.
Siphon of Anguish
Siphon of Anguish is a unique ring that helps us gain back Health as we do damage with both
Melee and Void damage types. This ring also has the added bonus of apply Doom on hit and granting us
Void Penetration while targets are Doomed. This ring can be target farmed from the boss "Shade of
Orobyss". Like other bosses in the Monolith, the Shade of Orobyss has a unique drop table with
this ring as one of the possible drops.
Idols
Idol slots are gained throughout the campaign, unlocking small bonuses and unique affixes for the player to discover and augment their builds with. The Idol screen consists of a grid system for the player to fill out with different sized idols, eventually filling in every part of the grid. As the Idol shape increases (1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, etc.) it will open up different affixes for you to use. This can be a great way to add some more customization to your build.
For this particular build, we will be focusing on increasing our health and resistances for our character - an attribute we neglected during our passive point allocation. We will also be trying to get idols with the affix Increased % Damage While Transformed. This unique attribute applies to our Reaper form.
These idols are 4x1s and class specific to Acolyte. They contain two main modificiers we want:
- +% Increased damage while transformed
- +% Increased Necrotic Damage
These can roll up to 70% and 45% respectively, so try to find the highest roll possible for both. The remaining idol slots can be filled with idols that provide flat health.
Blessing
Blessings are permanent buffs that are applied to your character. These come in two different powers, Standard and Grand. Grand blessings are significantly stronger than the Standard Blessings. In total, there are 10 Blessing Slots, one for each Monolith Timeline. When you complete a Monolith and defeat the final boss you will be awarded a choice of three blessing with a random value. For the purpose of this guide, we are highlighting 5 major slots that can be filled with our recommendations, leaving the addition 5 for some personal preference.
| Blessing Name | Affix | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
 Grand Emptiness of Ash |
+ Critical Strike Multiplier | The Black Sun |
 Grand Bastion of Divinity |
+ Lightning Resistance | Ending the Storm |
 Grand Resolve of Grael |
+ Physical Resistance | The Age of Winter |
 Grand Promise of Death |
+% Chance to Shred Necrotic Resistance on Hit | Spirits of Fire |
 Grand Despair of Flesh |
+ Necrotic Resistance | Reign of Dragons |
The Blessings listed above cover the most important slots for this build, with the remaining Blessing Slots being filled with whatever the player may be lacking for stats.
Changelog
- 04 Oct. 2023: Guide Added.
AaronActionRPG is a passionate gamer who loves to play and stream RTS, MMO, and ARPGs. He has his own Youtube channel, Twitch channel and gaming community on Discord. He loves to sit back, laugh and play games together with his community.
- Last Epoch - An Interview with EHG Lead Composer!
- Last Epoch - Best Endgame Build for the Imperial Uprising!
- Last Epoch - Patch 1.1.7: Imperial Uprising and Cycle Reset!
- Last Epoch - Details About the Imperial Uprising Event!
- Last Epoch - Patch 1.2, 1.1 Event, and Cycle Poll!
- Upcoming Last Epoch Cycle Restart With The Imperial Uprising!
- The Hardest Boss Fight in Last Epoch So Far!
- Last Epoch - Harbingers of Ruin Is Now Live!