Cold Minions Back With a Vengeance Necromancer Build Guide

Great clear with very strong damage

Freezes everything in monos

Permanent minion build with big potential

Satisfying gameplay of 14 minions blasting everything in sight

No inherent defensiveness within skills - all comes from uniques/gear

Bosses like T4 Julra can kill off your minions if you don't properly use A to move them out of mechanics (Use Julra's Obsession while fighting Julra for extra void res on minions)

Melee playstyle

Screen clutter when trying to find your bone minion to sacrifice (Its okay to sacrifice one of your skeletons and just resummon them)

The way we are proccing Frozen Vengeance from Apogee of Frozen Light is with Harvest. Normally, this would be quite annoying, but there is a HUGE reason to want to use Harvest. Specifically the Legion of the Lich 5/5 node. God damn thats a lot of increased crit to multiply the base crit we are getting from idols and chest/helm. We get big flat cold damage from Dread Shade + Lingering Doom 4/4 which is obviously converted to Cold by Lich's Scorn.

Now to get Frozen Vengeance stacks is the bigger issue. We don't wanna kill any of our minions. I tried Eterra's Path to spawn vines that die. But that is far too inconsistent for my tastes. Sometimes they would just not die, and expire (doesn't count as dying). If you do want to go down that route, you could swap out Transplant for Infernal Shade with the Manic Pyre 3/3 node. However, I like the mobility of transplant instead. Infernal shade is obviously more damage, but good luck proccing Frozen Vengeance consistently.

So the answer to having minions die lies within Transplant. It has 2 nodes that work together to always have a reliable way to get a Frozen Vengeance stack on demand. It is Simulacrum 1/1 to spawn a melee minion that will run up to enemies (so its separate from all your ranged minions) + Transfusion 1/1 to kill that melee minion to get a stack of Frozen Vengeance. I continually spam Transplant, so I always have a little dude running around in melee with me that I can use Transplant on, and then harvest after to expend my stack of Frozen Vengeance.

Rotation:

1. Keep Dread Shade up at all times on your minions. I put it on a skeletal mage because they are tankier and can better handle the increased damage taken from Lone Watcher 1/1.
2. Use Transplant off cooldown to spawn Bone Minions and then use Transplant again to sacrifice one with Transfusion 1/1,
3. UseHarvest after sacrificing minion to use stack of Frozen Vengeance from Apogee of Frozen Light.
4. Watch everything die in a cold cold world.

You can level with Reach of the Grave and Lich's Scorn and replace Harvest with Summon Bone Golem converted to cold. Do not use harvest until you get Apogee of Frozen Light.

Priority is getting 2+ LP on your Exsanguinous andLast Steps of the Living. SuffixMinion Spell Damage on your Apogee of Frozen Light, and good helpful rolls on your Ambitions of an Erased Acolyte.

You could run Julra's Obsession with any of these: PrefixCast Speed, PrefixCritical Strike Chance, SuffixHybrid Health, SuffixChance to Shred Armour on Hit Those are all options, although I personally love PrefixExperimental Ward per Missing Health for the tankiness, which would be bad on a Julra's Obsession. because they would kill your minions.

Why not just use my Apogee of Frozen Light on my Beastmaster?

Because Necro players are cooler. Duh.

Why not Infernal Shade?

Okay so because of Lich's Scorn you can get great added flat damage from Infernal Shade. But I personally don't like the playstyle of it. Also this doesn't allow you to run Transplant, so you have to use Eterra's Path or some other way to have a minion die. Those options are far less reliable than the Transplant setup. Infernal Shade also kinda kills your skeleton archers if you place it on them, and all your minions are stacked together so its hard to avoid putting it on them. Theoretically you can just resummon them with Empty the Graves 2/2, but thats annoying to do. At high corruption, if you need the damage, try it out. I have tried it and did not enjoy it.

Is this a top tier build that can push 400+ corruption?

No idea. Doubt it is as good as Flame Wraiths. I just figured this build out and don't have the best gear for it. I do not know how far it can go, but damage wise, its feeling really strong at 250 corruption, so I can see the damage still doing well at 400+ corruption with higher quality gear.