Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.4 Necromancer Build Guide - Improvements For The Summoner In 2.4

Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.4 Necromancer Build Guide - Improvements For The Summoner In 2.4

1/18/2022 11:44:57 AM

Tag: Necromancer Build Necromancer Guide

As part of the journey into preparing for 2.4 D2R, people have been building characters around some of the major skills being modified, so we can look at how they perform prior to the patch's release and after. Today we are looking at a skill tied to an already popular but often misunderstood build - the Summon Necromancer. While we are looking at the upcoming changes to the skeleton mage as part of this, we're also going to talk about how the optimal setup for Summoner Necromancers is not exactly what you'll find on a lot of build guides.

D2R 2.4 Necromancer Build Guide

Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.4 Necromancer Build Guide - Improvements For The Summoner In 2.4

How the optimal setup for Summoner Necromancer

One nice thing about the current optimal setup is that it will be made even better with the planned changes. As usual for most builds, we just get the stats we need for our gear, in this case, the bare minimum strength for setup we want and everything else is going into vitality. Since what will be hitting you as a summoner is not going to be blockable, so we don't waste it on dexterity and you'll have no mana problems if you set up the rest of your gear properly and use an inside golem.

Skills:

In terms of skills, we should be focusing on skeletal mage due to the 2.4 patch, Blizzard does change it up a bit from a few of the more common builds, but the reality is ideal summoner builds generally have a lot of points to spare.

As far as what you do invest in the initial summoner setup for classic builds, it's 20 points in race skeletons for quantity and 20 points in skeleton mastery for quality, and a point in all of your one-point wonders. Then you spend a ton of remaining points on whatever variant you prefer. Since we're going magi, we do spend the additional 20 points on skeleton magi just to get them as far along as possible. This will be more valuable in 2.4 than it is here since the skeleton magi scaling is currently at best, but usually more in the realm of just sad even with lower resistance and conviction. Your one-point wonders are going to be your revives, your base golems, your summon resist and your choice of curses.

The dump skills for the remaining points are going to be a corpse explosion for a reasonable radius as long as it's large enough to hit a cluster of enemies. The other dump point is golem mastery, so we're not needing to spend more resources than necessary on our iron golems. Though since insights are cheap, it's not a big deal if they die every now and then, you just don't want them to die every game because that can get hard to find enough for socket pull arms. What you think most people would make their mistakes on summoners would be on their personal equipment, though not really, since mostly stacking plus skills is pretty hard to mess up, instead, the big mistake is optimizing for damage per hit in your mercenary equipment.

The optimal setup is usually infinity unless you have a large level gap above your opponents, this is because infinity causes a massive drop in defense which is important for your skeleton since they have a relatively low attack rating compared to player characters who do melee regularly. With the upcoming boost to skeleton magi, this gap for infinity becomes even stronger and it grows even more, the rest of your mercenary setup though is thankfully fairly straightforward and it stays the same. Mai Dora is the big boost for your melee dudes and you just slap on resists and life leech for the other stuff. Bramble is fun, it doesn't get to do much with the high-end versions of this build outside of speeding up act bosses a little, so fortitude is usually preferred.

Mercenary:

As a sort of mercenary part two though, we should probably mention the iron golem, we can make in any four-socket pull arms. Only saving a couple of leveling ones for low-level characters and then the end-game ones for mercenary use on end-game characters. And all the rest just go into the jangling automaton that would make Hannah the navigator proud.

Equipment for this 2.4 D2R Necromancer build:

- Beast axe: Which we use for the fanaticism aura for a bit of boosted damage and attack rating for our skeletons. Since while the increased attack speed does actually boost their attack animations, it doesn't do anything to reduce their ai based cooldowns between attacks. So it's not as drastic as you would think.

- Enigma: It’s an obvious choice for this build since it opens up access to a method of focusing fire called telestomping. Basically, teleporting onto a target which focuses the fire of all your summons on that single enemy usually decimating them. Without enigma, you'll usually either need a teleport amulet circlet or if you're really desperate a teleport staff on swap to let you focus this fire. It's not necessary to beat a game but it does help a ton if you're doing any type of farming with this build.

The rest of the gear for Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.4 Necromancer build:

Rings: Stones of Jordan

Belt: Arachnid's Mesh

Shako: Harlequin Crest

Amulet: Grim Heart

Skull: Boneflame

Boots: Marrowwalk

Bracers: Trang-Oul’s Claws

Graverobber’s Grand Charm

Call to Arms

Spirit Monarch

In 2.4, this Necromancer build could very easily get sped up by a stronger summon injection and the fact that most of this gear is just expensive fluff on top of the one raw necessity of plus skill gear means this is going to stay a fairly friendly farming build even if you go for a more affordable variant. Since while this still likely won't be the fastest build in the game, it has and likely always a very safe option for just clearing a wide array of areas in the game for everyone from prince to popper in softcore or hardcore.