Corpse Lance Necromancer Speed Farming Variation
Normal Rift Speed Farming Variation
The Corpse Lance Necromancer can deal quite well with farming Torment difficulty Rifts and low-to-mid Greater Rifts at a very high speed. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.
Within the limited scope of these lower difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.
Adapting Skills
Active Skills |
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Passive Skills |
The build is a variation of the standard Pestilence progression
setup that relies on the fast elite kill speed of low tier content to
constantly fuel Messerschmidt's Reaver and chain
Land of the Dead
casts.
The rotation of the build goes roughly like this:
- Activate
Land of the Dead as soon as it comes up, ideally with complete overlap. This can be accomplished with as low as two elite kills within a single
Land of the Dead window, given the focus on CDR on gear.
- Sic your
Command Skeletons on nearby monsters to buff up your damage from the Jesseth's Arms set,
Jesseth Skullscythe and
Jesseth Skullshield.
- Maintain your supreme speed with a combination of the passive buff from
Bone Armor
Harvest of Anguish and the active use of
Blood Rush
Metabolism.
- Note that since
Command Skeletons is a spender, you might have to spam it a bit to reset your
Land of the Dead, if the
Messerschmidt's Reaver resets do not line up properly. This will work due to the worn
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac.
- Spam
Devour
Voracious to sustain your health and get free
Corpse Lance
Ricochet shots from the Pestilence 2-piece.
Adapting Gear
You will need to replace the progression-oriented
Convention of Elements for the cooldown reduction of
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. With this ring, whenever a rift slows down
and the
Land of the Dead reset does not overlap as easily, you can spam
some
Command Skeletons to make up the CDR loss via Essence spending.
Complete the worn jewelry with the usual
Squirt's Necklace and
Krysbin's Sentence.
For your bracers, you can either stay on Strongarm Bracers from the
progression build, or add a little toughness to an otherwise squishy farming
build with
Ancient Parthan Defenders. They will be procced and kept up
by your high
Land of the Dead
Frozen Lands uptime.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
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Head |
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Shoulders |
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Torso |
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Wrists |
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Hands |
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Waist |
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Legs |
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Feet |
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Amulet |
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Ring #1 |
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Ring #2 |
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Weapon |
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Off-hand |
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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.
Season 29: Paragon Cap
Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.
On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.
With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:
- Core: Max Essence: 200 points.
- Offense: Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points so they are as close to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the two stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet. For weapon-and-offhand builds, this is usually achieved with the full 200 points spent into Critical Hit Damage.
- Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Necromancers, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and Armor (to complement the naturally high All Resistance stat of Intelligence-based characters).
- Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.
Season 29: Gearing Considerations
In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:
- Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe
for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a
decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the
3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from
equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season.
If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other
craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its
implementation. The available pieces are
Guardian's Aversion (Wrists),
Guardian's Case (Waist), and
Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a
Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
- Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of
The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and
The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set (
Focus and
Restraint) and
Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another
Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e.,
Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%.
Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.
Adapting Gemming
In speed runs, Elite and Rift Guardian fights are significantly faster and
enemies perish fast; thus, the value of Zei's Stone of Vengeance diminishes
and it is best replaced by
Boon of the Hoarder for the gold-related
synergy with an
Avarice Band worn by your Follower.
Slot | Gems |
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Jewelry | |
Helm |
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Torso and Pants |
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Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
For your weapon slot, you can run either Messerschmidt's Reaver (solo
normal rift farming) or
In-geom (group normal rift farming) as your
cooldown reduction powerhouse; both will work exceptionally well with the
build.
Corpsewhisper Pauldrons are still a cornerstone piece in the build,
necessary for their damage amplification for
Corpse Lance.
In order to attain the full bonuses of the Pestilence and Cpt. Crimson sets,
you will need to use Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube.
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.
Follower
The recommended follower for this build during standard T16 rifts farming
is the Enchantress due to her vast array of bonuses that complement
this build; most notably, Prophetic Harmony for the Cooldown
Reduction and
Amplification for the elemental damage
increase, both of which you can attain by using a
Hand of the Prophet.
For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.
Legendary Potion
Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered, which
renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it
— valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside
of straight up evasion via
Blood Rush.
Changelog
- 13 Sep. 2023: Added Season 29 Paragon Cap and Gearing recommendations.
- 22 Feb. 2023: Added Season 28 Altar of Rites recommendations.
- 26 Aug. 2022: Added Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
- 14 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 08 Dec. 2021: Added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 22 Jul. 2021: Added S24 Ethereal recommendation.
- 01 Apr. 2021: Added follower recommendation.
- 19 Nov. 2020: Added 4th Cube slot recommendation for Season 22.
- 02 Jul. 2020: Guide was revised with respect to the changes to the Jesseth set in Season 21.
- 12 Mar. 2020: No changes necessary for Season 20.
- 22 Nov. 2019: Reviewed for Season 19.
- 23 Aug. 2019: Reviewed and approved for Season 18.
- 12 May 2019: Guide was reviewed and approved for Season 17.
- 27 Oct. 2017: Reworked the variant to a Pestilence setup.
- 15 Jul. 2017: Updated the speed farming guide with optimized suggestions.
More Necromancer Guides
Builds from Other Classes
Farming Guides
This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.
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