Lich Mastery Leveling Build for Last Epoch
This is the perfect leveling guide for new players wanting to start with Lich! This page will cover everything and anything you could need to know about leveling the class, including which skills to use, what stats to prioritize, and what uniques are useful early in the game.
Introduction
This Lich 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.
This build uses 
Harvest as its main DPS skill, with a
built-in Necrotic resistance shred for a boost to our damage. To add even more
power to our Harvest skill, we will be incorporating 
Bone Curse as part
of our rotation. To apply Bone Curse, we use 
Transplant to
automatically apply it to enemies as we jump on top of them. This will add to
our Necrotic damage output, but also help us move around the battlefield
quickly. As you level this build past level 35 and unlock your
Reaper Form, you will be begin to see bigger gains in Damage until
finally you hit you last skill, 
Death Seal. This final skill will
activate a low-life option for us to lock our life at 30%, but boost our leech
and overall damage to new heights. Bear in mind, our Health leech is one of
main defensive mechanism and this build can be quite powerful, but squishy.
Lich Leveling Passive Trees
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 our character, ways to
augment our Harvest, and eventually gain Reaper Form. We start
with Forbidden Knowledge to boost our Intelligence which directly help to
scale our damage abilities. Next we want to take points in Blood Aura
for the flat increased Damage to all of our skills. Stolen Vitality is taken
for the boost to vitality to counter-act some of the Health drain our skills
will inflict on us.
Now that we've completed our the Passive Tree for Acolyte, we will be moving on to our Mastery Passive Trees. For this build specifically, we will be focusing all of our points into the Lich Passive Tree, as they synergize the most with our kit and we have a limited amount of points that can be used for leveling.
Lich Passive Tree
We are going to invest the remaining Passive Points into the Lich Passive
Tree. This being with the first 3 passive skills, we will be maxing out each of
them. Apocrypha is going to boost our Intelligence and Mana Regen.
Survival of the Cruel will grant us base Health and Health leech from
spells. Dance with Death is going to increase our Damage, tripling in
value when we are at low life which we will be triggering later through
Death Seal. The next three passive skills will be focusing on our
Necrotic Damage, Attack Speed and granting us more Health Leech. These passive
skill points are aimed at making us Leech enough Health to counteract
Reaper Form and Death Seal's health decay, and boost our damage as
much as possible. In this build, the greater our damage, the greater our
defenses.
Harvest
The Harvest skill tree has one main branch with two additional skill
nodes selected. The main branch, starting with Harrowing Blade, is where
we will invest our skill points first. We will follow the pathway on the left
hand side all the way over to Symbol of Loss, amplifying our damage when
a target is cursed. This will work with Bone Curse, giving
Harvest some added synergy. Next, we want to invest in
Finality adding a Kill Threshold to the ability.
Bone Curse
This skill tree has two main pathways: top and bottom. We want to take the
top branch first to get to Cursed Limbs. This will be very helpful with
applying Bone Curse. How this skill node works is when we cast Bone
Curse, which we will be doing through Transplant (more about that in
the Transplant section), we will gain the ability to apply Bone Curse on hit
for 5 seconds.
Take the bottom branch going left first to
Marrow Thief which grants us a 30% chance to gain 
Bone Armor when
we will a target with the Bone Curse on them. Finally, we go to the right
hand side of the branch and take Sigil of Mortality, this grants our Bone
Curse the ability to apply Marked For Death.
Transplant
Transplant is a movement skill that acts very similarly to a
teleport. We use several different utility nodes to take advantage of altering
how the skill works. We will begin with the right hand side branch, passing
through Acolyte's Fervor and going to Doom Bringer. Acolyte's
Fervor will grant us two buffs (Haste and Frenzy) when we use the skill and
Doom Bringer will cast Bone Curse on everyone around us when we arrive at our
new location. Finish the right hand side with the bottom skill node
Ethereal Body to convert the skill to Necrotic. Now we can head to the
opposite side of the skill tree and use the remaining points to take
Bone Armor to add another buff to use when we use this skill. We will
further augment our Bone Armor with the two skill nodes Plated Bone and
Apostasy.
Reaper Form
This is our brawling form, which we will try to stay in as much as possible.
The first skill node we need to target is Unholy Dominion at the bottom
right hand side of the skill tree. This separates our Transplant and
Reap into their own cooldowns - very important as we want to use them
independently of each other. Next, we augment our Reaper Form with
increased Damage, increased Critical Strike Chance, Swiftness on Kill and
Attack Speed. Our goal is to stay and fight in our Reaper Form as much
as possible.
Death Seal
Our final skill, Death Seal, pushes our build into low-life using the
skill node Deadlock for a very large boost in damage. While this does
mean you are more susceptible to dangerous game play and getting 1-shot, your
damage is so high you should just cut down most enemies before they get a
chance to hit you. We also pick up the skill node Mortal Pulse to add a
damage aura around yourself, which we will buff with Cycle of Decay and
Curdled Flesh. These two skill nodes amplify our Necrotic pulse as long
as enemies are poisoned, which will happen quite often with
Pustulent Presence.
Mechanics and Playstyle
This build is played very similarly to a damage aura build, using
Death Seal to constantly pulse damage at enemies while we run around with
Transplant. Bone Curse gets
automatically applied to enemies as we 'arrive' at locations with
Transplant. These two skills have such great synergy by not
only helping to maintain our curses, but each of them also grants us buffs
(Frenzy, Haste and Bone Armor) and offer us a chance to Shred Armor. Bear in
mind that our Death Seal will keep us at Low Health, while we brawl in
Reaper Form with Harvest.
Gearing and Affixes
We are going to target weapons for dual wielding, swords or axes. The rest of our gear will be straight forward filling in the slots with the recommended list of Affixes below. 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. There is a deeper look at the crafting system in the link below.
| Attributes | Offensive | Defensive |
|---|---|---|
| Vitality Strength |
Necrotic Damage Necrotic Damage while Transformed Melee Critical Strike Chance Critical Strike Multiplier Melee Attack Speed |
Armor Resistances Health on Kill Health on Melee Hit Health Regen |
Useful Uniques
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 the 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 two-handed axe 
Bone Harvester, this
will likely be your best options for a weapon until we find something we can
craft with higher values in our 40s or 50s. Despite its level, this unique weapon
can take you into the endgame if it has Legendary Potential, allowing us to boost
the Necrotic Damage on it.
Another great unique for this build is the 
Chimaera's Essence.
This amulet is fantastic, as our Reaper Form counts as a
transformation. It also has many other valuable
stats for our build besides the damage, so keep your eyes out for one.
Our next targeted unique are the gloves 
Fighting Chance.
Despite their level 15 requirement, these gloves can be a massive damage boost
and help accelerate you through the game. The only draw back is the increased
damage taken, but everything else about them is amazing.
Speaking of accelerating, we must talk about unique boots, particularly
the 
Advent of the Erased. These boots boots can grant us Haste,
and while this chance is small, it is likely to happen frequently with mob groups.
Lastly, we want to mention the unique relic called
Grimoire of Necrotic Elixirs. This relic offers a great set of bonuses on
potion use that our build can benefit it from, especially during a boss fight.
That boost of Necrotic damage can really help take down a high-health target a
lot easier.
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!
Idols
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
- Chance to Chill on Necrotic Hit
- Resistances
Progressing to Endgame
This build will carry you all the way to the start of the Monolith, where you will need to decide on an Endgame build to follow. We have several options available for Lich.
Changelog
- 30 Nov. 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.
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