Masquerade Bone Spear Necromancer Key Farming Variation
Regular Rift Key Farming
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.
Adapting Skills
Active Skills |
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Passive Skills |
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.)
Adapting Gear
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 |
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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: 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 Gems
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 | |
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 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.
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: Minor build revision and added follower recommendation.
- 25 Nov. 2020: Adjustment to the 4th Cube slot recommendation in Season 22.
- 19 Nov. 2020: Revision of item, skill, and passive recommendations, alongside advice for Season 22 changes.
- 01 Jul. 2020: Page added.
More Necromancer Guides
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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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