LoD Corpse Explosion Necromancer Key Farming Variation
Regular Rift Key Farming
The LoD Corpse Explosion Necromancer deals with Normal Rift farming excellently, making it one of the preferable builds for the purpose. 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 regular 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 |
Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Ability to cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.
- Of course,
Corpse Explosion is still the main damage dealer of the build. You can experiment with the rune, since Nayr stack buildup is not something you particularly care for in standard rifts. Options like
Bloody Mess or
Final Embrace are completely viable here.
- If the cooldown reduction equipment you wear does not manage to get you to
Land of the Dead overlap, you have a failsafe in the face of
Decrepify
Borrowed Time, which you can simply spread around upcoming fights at your convenience.
- For maximum convenience, you will be using the
Frailty curse with the automated radius of
Aura of Frailty; its culling effect is a nice bonus, but the real benefit lies in its pulling synergy with the worn (or cubed)
Briggs' Wrath.
Land of the Dead will stay on the hard CC effect of
Frozen Lands, ideally overlapping with the strong cooldown reduction-oriented choices in your gearing.
Bone Armor will be taken with the farming-oriented
Harvest of Anguish due to the movement speed buff.
- For maximum mobility,
Blood Rush will be taken with the doubled charges of
Metabolism.
Some of your progression passives will still make sense during speed
farming, i.e. Spreading Malediction (extra damage based on cursed
enemies) and
Blood is Power (extra CDR) are still quite valuable. We
also recommend adding
Final Service for the cheat death, as it will
prevent the occasional mishap and death-related slowdown, as well as
Fueled by Death to further your mobility during standard rift farming.
Adapting Gear
You will no longer need the damage amplification of
Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang in standard rifts, and will make much better use
of the cooldown-resetting powers of
In-geom.
Since speed is essential in XP runs, you will be wearing
Steuart's Greaves over the progression-oriented
Ice Climbers, and
will be slotting
Blood Rush
Metabolism in your active skills accordingly
(see above).
When it comes to jewelry, our basic recommendation is to keep
Krysbin's Sentence for the invaluable damage multiplication bonuses, and
add the Act III bounty cache legendary
Avarice Band for its tremendous
speed farming utility. The combined power of the latter when socketed with a
Boon of the Hoarder and paired with
Goldwrap will both greatly
speed you up and render you near-invulnerable in standard rift farming. The
third suggested ring is
Briggs' Wrath for the pulling effect on enemies
as your curse aura affects them, bringing them right into the devastation of
your
Corpse Explosions. Distribute these three recommended rings
according to your best rolls, wearing your two best and cubing the third.
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: Movement Speed: 200 points.
- Offense: Cooldown Reduction: 200 points.
- 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 Gems
You will maintain Bane of the Trapped and
Legacy of Dreams as
crucial legendary gems for the build, but should replace
Bane of the Stricken for
Boon of the Hoarder for the
Avarice Band-
Goldwrap synergy during farming runs.
Slot | Gems |
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Jewelry | |
Helm |
|
Torso and Pants |
|
Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
For your weapon slot, you should run Messerschmidt's Reaver as your
second cooldown reduction powerhouse, paired with your equipped
In-geom; both will work exceptionally well with this LotD-dependent
build.
To further the speed of your clears, slot Warzechian Armguards in
your armor slot for the environment destruction-fueled speed ups — quite
easy to achieve with the
Corpse Explosion devastation.
In the jewelry slot, you should slot your weakest rolled ring between the
ones outlined above: Krysbin's Sentence,
Briggs' Wrath, or
Avarice Band.
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
The preferred potions for this build are Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid
(allowing you to break down Waller affixes that impede your positioning) and
Bottomless Potion of the Tower (whose Armor-increasing properties
complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Necromancers). Pick
whichever you feel helps you out the most.
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.
- 01 Feb. 2022: Altered the helm and off-hand recommendations to better fit the S25 meta.
- 08 Dec. 2021: Minor gear and skill revision; added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 22 Jul. 2021: Added S24 Ethereal recommendation.
- 01 Apr. 2021: Minor gear adjustments and added a follower recommendation.
- 19 Nov. 2020: Added S22 Cube recommendation.
- 02 Jul. 2020: Guide added.
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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