Necromancer Mastery Leveling Build for Last Epoch (Patch 1.1)

This Necromancer mastery leveling guide is designed to get us started in the right direction with your new mastery, by offering a simple skill setup to assist us while we play through main story act of the game and begin the Monolith endgame. We have chosen a set of skills and passives that create an effective and yet simplistic play style that can rapidly push our character to level 70 and complete the main campaign.

What better way to level Necromancer than with an army of Skeletons? Composed of  Summon Skeletons,  Summon Skeletal Mages,  Summon Bone Golems,  Summon Volatile Zombies and  Summon Wraiths, your gang of ghouls will be virtually unstoppable during the leveling process. With all these Minions under our control, we have designed each of their skill trees to focus on keeping them alive while ensuring they deal enough damage to easily progress through maps. The idea is we don't want to spend the entire time re-summoning our minions, so we need to have some strong defenses to stop our minions from dying all the time. The only minion that will need casting during combat will be the Volatile Zombie; these minions are essentially used as walking bombs to provide a large burst of AoE damage.

As with most minion builds, your summons will be doing all the work for you. Your main job is just staying alive, letting your bone militia carry you into the endgame.

2.

Necromancer Leveling Passive Trees

Class Passives Skill Passives

Acolyte Necromancer

Summon Skeleton Summon Bone Golem Summon Skeleton Mage Summon Volatile Zombie Summon Wraith

2.1.

Acolyte Passive Tree

Acolyte is our base class to start this character off with. Our goal in this Passive Tree is to gain some critical stats for Minions as they will be our allies and major skills all the way to level 70. We start with Forbidden Knowledge to boost our Intelligence which directly helps to scale our Minions. Next we want to take points in Dark Rituals for the increased Attack and Cast Speed for our Minions. We take 7 points in Stolen Vitality for the boost to our Minions Health and to hit the 20 point threshold in the tree. Lastly, we included the single node for Soul Aegis for the Minion Armor per level.

Now that we've completed the Passive Tree for Acolyte, we will be moving on to our Mastery Passive Tree. For this build specifically, we will be focusing all of our points into the Necromancer Passive Tree, which is our chosen mastery as well. This tree will synergize well with our Summoning skills and provide our Minions with powerful boosts to help us with the leveling process.

2.2.

Necromancer Passive Tree

The Necromancer tree will be the rest of our points, focusing on buffing our Minions to carry us through the game. Our first major investment is the node Risen Army to increase our Minion's Damage, Attack Speed and Cast Speed. Follow this up by taking the two linked nodes; 3 points into Cursed Blood to allow us to place 4 points into Aegisfall, which is quite important to our Minion army for the Armor Shred. However, we don't need to max it out, as Armor Shred has a bit of diminishing returns, and most of our minions end up doing more Fire Damage later on.

Next, we will put the minimum points into Blood Armour and Mortal Tether to allow us access to Unbound Necromancy. After that, you are free to take the pictured passives in whichever order you prefer.

Please note, there is no need to put more than 1 point into Mark of Punishment as it is taken simply for boss damage, in which case your  Summon Volatile Zombie constantly dying will keep the debuff on the boss for an extra 25% damage.

2.3.

Summon Skeleton

As a summoner, this is the first summoning skill we get from the base Acolyte class starting at Level 2. This skill will stay with us the entire leveling process as the minions are a solid choice with decent stats.

The highest priority for nodes in this Passive tree will be the ones that add an additional Skeleton to our available summon pool. Immediately path towards Hollow Walkers, Grave Walkers, and Marrow Walkers in that order. From here, head towards Mightier than the Sword, which will remove Warriors from your Skeleton pool. This forces Archers only, raising their survival rate since they will now only attack from range, allowing your Bone Golems to tank for them. Once you have your Archers, take Dread Phalanx; this cuts your Skeletons in half, but buffs them substantially. Finish this Passive Tree off by capping the points in Unholy Rage and continuing onward to place the last two points into Multishot, which allows your Archers to shoot Fire Arrows.

2.4.

Summon Bone Golem

The next part of our Skeleton Army is going to be the  Summon Bone Golem. These huge beasts act as tanks to protect us from harm. Though they also do decent damage early on, we will be focusing all the points in this Passive Tree into allowing them to hold agro on enemies, increasing their Health and Armor stats, and providing a way for them to Leech Health through the damage they deal; this Leech also applies to us.

Prioritize pathing towards Tower of Bones, immediately making your Golem the tank in your party. Hunger should be prioritized next for the Health Leech. From here, path towards Twinned Golems, which lowers the Golems' stats, but you now have two of them. This equates to more overall damage, and much more Health between them. Finish the Passive Tree off by throwing the last four points into Amalgam of Primalists, adding a hefty amount of Armor to them.

2.5.

Summon Skeleton Mage

 Summon Skeletal Mage has two uses for us. The first, and more important aspect, being a full conversion to Pyromancers through Inferno. From here, focus Order of Death to add an additional Mage to your summon pool. This will provide a substantial amount of Minion Fire Damage to our output, quickly clearing pathways for us as we traverse maps. To further enhance the Mages you have, take all the points in Gravetide. This adds 15 flat Spell Damage to their attacks.

This skill doubles as a movement skill as well; by taking the node Grave Passage, we teleport to a target location when we summon a new Mage. This is perfect for moving through maps swiftly as your Minion army follows behind you, making quick work of mobs in your wake. Path towards this node last.

2.6.

Summon Volatile Zombie

 Summon Volatile Zombie is our main spam, and we are going to convert these Zombies into a Fire Skill to coincide with the Fire and Ignite Damage that most of our minions will be doing. This means immediate pathing towards Flammable Vitae, through the starting point of Forceful Commander. From here, focus on maxing out their effective damage through Fervor and Ravenous .

2.7.

Summon Wraith

The first step with this skill is to remove the decay on Wraiths, which also limits our summon count with them to two. This is done through the node Twin Spirits; we will need Mana to cast  Summon Volatile Zombie. Continue into the next node, Sequel of Avarice, in order to bolster Wraiths both offensively, with a more damage modifier, and defensively, by nearly doubling their Health.

From here, we want to a chance to summon a Flame Wraith with Flame Wraith on the left hand side of the skill tree. This node only gives us a 22% chance to get a Flame Wraith, which generally means you will have only one Flame Wraith at a time, so we will be increasing this chance with some of our targeted Idols later in the guide. Finish the Tree with Dawn of the Fall, which will provide a way for our Wraith's to sustain themselves through the Critical Damage they deal.

The playstyle for this Minion leveling build is as simple as summoning your minions to full capacity and then heading into battle. We have targeted our skill trees to amplify our Minion Army's damage and survivability as much as possible, however, you will need to resummon any units that die. This is the most difficult challenge as you level up, but it will become easier as you scale towards level 70. Be sure to use  Summon Skeletal Mage skill to jump out of danger.

There is no set rotation of skills, it's basically a 'one button' build. Just work on keeping your Minion Army refreshed if you lose any minions while moving throughout the map. This won't come up too much except during Boss fights, as some of them may take heavy damage from Boss skills. Overall, this play style is very relaxed, and when lined up with some of the recommended Uniques can make for a hugely rewarding playthrough.

As for gearing, we will be targeting Minion based stats and some Health/Resistance for our summoner. You should aim to upgrade your gear using a loot filter to highlight the gear you need with the right affixes. This game also carries a substantial crafting system where you will be able to augment pieces of gear you find with either strong affixes or craft new one you can add to an empty slot.

As you go through the game we will come across many uniques. While the majority of low-level uniques should be set aside for leveling alts, we will want to keep our eyes out for these specific items to assist with the build. While none of these have huge build changing affixes, the majority of them are good items you can scale easily with. One of themes you will see with these uniques is Movement Speed; this affix accelerates gameplay even just from being able to go around faster the battlefield.

If you happen to come across the unique wand  Reach of the Grave, this will likely be your best option for a weapon until you find Exalted items in the Monolith. On non-unique weapons, there aren't many good prefixes for our build, so it can be hard to get an upgrade during the campaign. Despite its level, this unique wand carries some great damage and Attack Speed buffs for our Minions.

Another great unique for Minion builds is the  Doublet of Onos Tull. This unique leather coat grants us Flat Health and decent bonus to our Minion's damage, in the form of a 40% chance to inflict Bleed on enemies. This chance to bleed is enhanced further with an increased duration modifier to keep them ticking away on our enemies. However, unlike the wand, this could be replaced by a decent crafted chest as early as level 30.

As for a great unique ring that can be used for any class to boost our journey through the campaign is the  Arboreal Circuit. This level 1 ring boasts two valuable stats for our build. The first is the increase in Armor to our Minions and the second is the Movement Speed for both us and our Minions. While this may not stand out as important, Movement Speed is one of the best time savers we can find and often makes your minions more effective at dealing damage.

Speaking of accelerating, we must talk about unique boots, particularly the  Advent of the Erased. These boots can grant us Haste, and while this chance is low, it is likely to happen frequently with mob groups dying constantly.

Despite the lower level of these uniques, they are quite valuable and can help push you that much faster to level 70. These can all be expanded into fantastic items if found with Legendary Potential for any future leveling needs. Good luck hunting and may your luck be high!

Idol slots are gained through 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.) the stronger an affix you might find for your build.

The target Affixes we want to look for in our Idols are:

• +% Health
• + Health
• Any Resistances needed

There is a class idol for Acolytes that we will want to look for. It works specifically with our  Summon Wraith skill by increasing our chance to summon a Flame Wraith instead of a standard Wraith. If you can find one with a decent roll, you may only need one to consistently get two Flame Wraiths summoned. The specific affix is Chance for Summon Wraith to summon a Flame Wraith Instead.

Once your Resistances are sorted and you have at least one of the 2x2 Idols mentioned above, your best bet will be to get a couple Large Immortal Idols with Increased Health and Shared Increased Critical Strike Chance.

This build will carry you all the way to the start of the Monolith, where you will want to decide on an Endgame build to follow. We have several options available for Necromancers.