Masquerade Bone Spear Necromancer Key Farming Variation

The Masquerade Bone Spear Necromancer deals with Normal Rift quite well, making the build well suited for the purposes of key farming. 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.

Active Skills
Grim Scythe Frost Scythe Bone Spear Teeth 1 Devour Devouring Aura 2 Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish 3 Blood Rush Metabolism 4 Simulacrum Reservoir
Passive Skills
Stand Alone Bone Prison Final Service Fueled by Death

• Bone Spear will still be the main damage dealer, but you should swap the precise, progression-oriented Blighted Marrow rune for the AoE convenience of Teeth, and adjust elemental rolls on gear to Physical accordingly.
• Simulacrum is still an integral part of the build, and all of its runes will be provided by the Masquerade set bonus.
• For maximum convenience, you should add Devour to the build along with Devouring Aura, which automates the consumption effect and synergizes nicely with the worn Avarice Band.
• As a backup whenever you run out of Corpses to Devour, you should still keep Grim Scythe around — along with the IAS-oriented Frost Scythe rune to speed up the resource restoration process.
• 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 passive selection from the GR specs will be retained, with Stand Alone (massive armor bonus for non- and low-summoning builds) and Bone Prison (crowd control for Bone Spear) still providing tremendous value. Add to them Final Service (for the cheat death preventing the occasional mishap) and Fueled by Death (to further your mobility during standard rift farming.)

You will keep most of the items from the progression-oriented setup, with the majority of the Masquerade set remaining in place, but run a 5-piece setup with a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube to attain the 6-piece bonus. You should make the following gear alterations:

• Drop the Extravagant Shoes from the worn gear and replace them with Steuart's Greaves for the additional mobility after using Blood Rush.
• Replace the curse-dependent protection of Dayntee's Binding with Goldwrap, as the gold synergy outlined below will provide you with all the protection you might need in farming runs.
• Replace the progression-oriented Convention of Elements for the speed farming-appropriate Avarice Band. This Act III bounty cache legendary ring will greatly increase your pickup radius as you gain gold, forming a solid triumvirate of powers with the worn Goldwrap and socketed Boon of the Hoarder. Complete the worn jewelry with the usual Haunted Visions and Krysbin's Sentence.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Luxurious Bauta	Intelligence Socket Critical Hit Chance Bone Spear Damage % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Shoulders	Glamorous Gigot	Intelligence Area Damage Resource Cost Reduction Vitality Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Torso	Sophisticated Vest	Intelligence 3 Sockets Vitality Armor Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Wrists	Gelmindor's Marrow Guards	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Physical Damage % Vitality Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Hands	Lavishing Gloves	Intelligence (replaced by Attack Speed at High Paragons) Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Waist	Goldwrap	Intelligence Vitality Armor Life % Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Legs	Elegant Pants	Intelligence 2 Sockets Vitality Armor Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Feet	Steuart's Greaves	Intelligence Bone Spear Damage % Vitality Armor Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Amulet	Haunted Visions	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Physical Damage % Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Ring #1	Avarice Band	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage or Attack Speed Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Ring #2	Krysbin's Sentence	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage or Attack Speed Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Weapon	Scythe of the Cycle	High Weapon Damage Intelligence Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Attack Speed Damage %
Off-hand	Lost Time	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Bone Spear %

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 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: 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.

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.

You will maintain Zei's Stone of Vengeance as a universally useful damage multiplication gem in the build, but should replace Bane of the Trapped for Boon of the Hoarder for the Avarice Band- Goldwrap synergy during farming runs, and drop the Greater Rift Guardian-oriented Bane of the Stricken for the generic damage increase of Bane of the Powerful.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Boon of the Hoarder Bane of the Powerful Zei's Stone of Vengeance
Helm	Flawless Royal Topaz (Resource Cost Reduction)
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Topaz (Damage)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

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.

Tucked away in the Cube, Krelm's Buff Belt will provide you with a considerable and consistent speed boost throughout your runs.

In the base suggested setup above, you will have to slot the Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to maintain the 6-piece Masquerade bonus while enjoying extra utility legendary powers.

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.

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.

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.