Necromancer Mastery Leveling Build for Last Epoch (Patch 1.0)

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.

This build uses a Minion army on the battlefield, composed of  Summon Skeletons,  Summon Skeletal Mages,  Summon Bone Golems,  Summon Volatile Zombies and  Summon Wraiths. With all these Minions under our control, we have designed each of their skill trees to focus on keeping them alive while doing a good amount of damage going. 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 skill we will be manually casting is our  Summon Volatile Zombie, which we will be using like time-bombs to send out on to the battlefield to explode. Overall, this build pushes content quite easily with our Minion army doing the majority of the work.

Image courtesy of Last Epoch Tools

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.

Attributes	Offensive	Defensive
Intelligence Vitality	Increased Minion Damage Flat Damage for Minions Increased Minion Critical Strike Chance Critical Strike Chance for Skeletons Critical Strike Chance for Skeleton Mages	Armor Resistances Minion Damage Leeched as Health Reduced Damage of Critical Strikes (no more than 100%) Increased Minion Health

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 further built out 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 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.