When you take lethal damage, you are sustained preventing all damage for 4 seconds. In addition, all minions are consumed to heal you for 10% of your Life. This effect cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds.

Cost: 50 Essence Active: Command your skeletal minions to attack the target and increase their damage against it by 50%. Passive: Raise skeletons from the ground every 2 seconds to a max of 7 skeletons. Skeletal minions deal 50% weapon damage as Physical per attack.

When the target of your Command Skeletons dies, your skeletons are automatically commanded to attack a nearby target.While your skeletons are commanded to attack a target, all of your minions deal 400% increased damage.

When the target of your Command Skeletons dies, your skeletons are automatically commanded to attack a nearby target.While your skeletons are commanded to attack a target, all of your minions deal 400% increased damage.

All of the items are required for pushing. I personally did gr60 with only Jesseth's and krysbin and coe. So build is very good to start things off with, when u get rathma or jesseth, u can start playing it adding pieces as u get them. Even without any set or items, simulacrum skeleton mage is most likely the most powerfull thing necro has in his kit. I used it since I hit 70 and it was always blowing my mind how strong it was. White gem on helm, yellow on rest.

!!!MAX ESSENCE!!!

Build Guide

Note: I will keep on improving the guide and make the quality of it better!

Hello, this build is most likely going to dethrone current Inarius meta. Build is very hard to play compared to most builds, since its completely glass cannon. Note that you can swap dmg gems/rings as u please to tanky variations, they work very well too, but for maximized pushing results use PURE DPS. Your toughness check is that you dont oneshot by elite affixes that spawn top of ur char, so you have time to press potion. Use potion with teleport to save u from these attacks. Give up as much toughness as u can!

Gameplay in nutshell

Farm up essence and use skeletal mages with as much essence as possible. Spam quickly to 10 mages if u have rathma set, then proceed making stronger mages. Use ur curses. And most importantly use ur command skeleton bcs it procs ur wpn set and gives huge dmg boost. When you want to use simulacrum, farm full essence before using it, this will ensure 4 super mages. Proceed normally, spamming to 10 asap and then try make stronger ones. Note that the 4 super mages last only 10 seconds, so spam fast to 10 mages! With good amount of enemies u can make multiple sets of super mages because of good essence generating weapon in cube. *Update, with the new Rathma's shield passive and land of the dead, we can chain simulacrum to land of the dead when facing elites, getting sweet 8 sec immortality!

Tips

Use mages as shield vs ranged. Always identify quickly what monsters u are facing, this gets u killed if u ignore it. Use ur passive (1min cd guard from death) to give u cover from opening elite pylons. Consider farming full essence and using simulacrum before opening pylon. Be patient, this build requires alot skill and u will die alot until u get better. Note that even 1 death can ruin ur GR pushing rift attempt, you must hone ur skills to perfecton to be rank 1! Practice, practice, practice. Feel free to tinker build to ur liking, current version presented being still the most powerful ideal version for max push.

Alternative skills and item discussion will be added here

1. There are cube items that might seem to have more raw dmg, but the essence generation in cubed item is crucial.

2. If you want to maximize ur push potential, nemesis is not optional. Other bracers dont offer any real significant impact to this build, APD for example only procs when you have positioned badly, and we are not aiming for tankiness of any kinds. Lacuni is just overshadowed by the maximum bonus that nemesis can provide for a rift time.

3. Frailty curse is "optional" and in the same time it isnt, but if u will not be able to avoid being oneshotted with any other means, switch this to bone armor.

4. Decripfy rune is also "optional" but the highest dmg you will get with the stun one, cdr, 100% slow, movementspeed.. all worth testing to match ur personal needs

5. Bone Prison offers surprisingly high boost in dmg, as it can trap even some (all?) of the rift guardians = procs krysbins tirpledamage.

6. Bone Prison/Swift Harvesting vs Curse dmg/Longer mages, is not completely tested out (would need some serious gathering of metadata), personally I like the synergy with Swift Harvesting and essence and stun rune and bone prison, but this needs further testing to find out the BIS

Toughness in this build

I have decided that this needs its whole own section, since people seems to expect this build to work closer to current metagame aka facetank anything 24/7. In this build ur supposed to be oneshot to white mob psychical attacks. Its supposed to work like that. Now some ppl have said that this build cant survive 100+, bcs u get oneshot... It is the point of this build, to get oneshot, we trade toughness for maximum dmg. How we can complete grifts then? Our toughness check is magical elite affixes that are undodgeable and any white mob attack is possible to avoid with skill, except in some maps. These maps will be the sacrifice, u may call it gold digging of rifts, but actually its not that much to ask to get rift without indoor's with ghost and winged assasin. I assume that Inarius have some impossibilities too. So basicly all builds when pushing to maximum possibile, are gold digging in the end. When u really start getting in to the build u will learn which maps u just have to give up, but also u need to learn not to give up too easily. So back to the magical affixes. Im currently having something like 520k hp and my "only" defensive thing is passive that protects me from death. With this setup I can still take hit from undodgeable elite affix without passive proc at gr 97. With how much I have left I can prbly survive 98-99 too. But how to proceed when you can no longer do this? You will first give up for int gems and switch to all res, if u still need more you will switch cdr gem from helm to vit gem. If u still need more as u are going higher to the 100s, you will switch frailty to bone armor. Not to teleport, because its not usefull vs affixes if u die before u can teleport, and we got the potion for that! Then we will proceed dropping stats from gear accordingly while we are min maxing for the rift we are doing. If you need that extra 1000 vitality, we drop attack speed from gloves etc (note for high paragon: dropping attackspeed drops ur mage framerate, so giving up some int from paragon is prbly the better alternative). Now ofc at somepoint we will hit a wall where our min maxed dmg/survival just cant go higher, like any other build. But I believe that wall is quite far from 97.

Version 2.0

Hello, this version got inspired by faceroller necro! It was exiting to see another funky skeletal mage build, and it got me thinking since I have this 1 "extra" slot in my build (frailty/bone armor) that I would try to improve my build! So far it feels kinda good, havent completely decided if its better than the version 1, but atleast now Im trying things out with this new skeletal mage build! It is alot easier so it will atleast appeal more to diablo community, my old one being very difficult to handle. This build does alot better vs elites but loses some power vs whites, and so far I have been struggling against clearing whites not elites, so this might fall short in the end with more testing! However lets hope it will remain superior, for it is alot more fun to play!