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There are a lot of ways to approach builds in Diablo 2 and there are no exceptions to any class. In this D2R guide, we're going to look at one flavor of the poison necro - the lazy bones poison necromancer, it's one of the builds for just sitting back and chilling with that can easily travel to any area in the game, comfortably without any stress.
The goal of this Lazybones Poison Necromancer build is to make a character that you can farm with while listening to streams or reading articles without the need to worry about dying in most places, but also not sacrificing killing speed or magic find values when we want them. And needless to say, it is probably the best build for that function since you can wipe an area clear and then do clean up in short order with minimal skill juggling or effort, that combined with the ease of raising or lowering magic find values without impacting the build's functionality at all.
Now as far as how it's set up, it's fairly simple. Follow us to check out:
Strength: Enough For Gear
Dexterity: None
Vitality: Everything Else
Energy: None
Get enough strength for our gear and dump everything else into vitality, we don't need dexterity usually since we're almost never going to get hit by a blockable attack, nor do we need energy for the most part since we rarely if ever bothered to spam abilities outside of sometimes corpse explosion. This is because as was our goal, we want to play in a relaxed fashion going through dumping poison novas while our skeletons brawl and we snack on a bowl of chili while listening to critical role all without losing speed or taking unnecessary damage.
Summoning Skill Setting
Poison and Bone Skill Setting
Curses Skill Setting
There's a wide variety of poison necromancer builds out there, some more niche like the Daggerman's or others more popular like the skill juggling corpse explosion variant of the poison nova necromancer, but since we want to relax we're going to go with the summoner variant. Since the best way to not have to worry about dying, is to have a wall of aggressive bone chihuahuas barking at every enemy from normal to hell, this means that while we do the standard start of getting poison nova and maxing the synergies of poison explosion, poison dagger, and even get our requisite lower resist to punch through poison immunes. We want to spend the rest of our time looking at the summoning tree. There are a few options in this tree though:
The more Skeleton oriented one with max Raise Skeleton
One point in summon resist and the remainder in skeleton mastery to give us a solid and fairly sustainable skeleton army
Some alternatives include spreading the points out a bit more and even getting revives, which does give you more bodies
As far as the best gear for Lazybones Poison Necromancer, there is plenty of flexibility as well. But in the end, the most influential piece of gear is the armor. The rest of the gear is designed around augmenting our poison damage with plus skills and poison buffs for the most part at least.
Weapon: Death's Web
One-Hand Damage: 22 To 28 (25 Avg)With Death's Web being the most obvious piece, thanks to plus all skills on top of plus poison and bone skills, and stacking in fairly large reductions to enemy poison resist, which means after you've broken, an enemy's poison resist with lower resist - this will pull the remaining resistances down to a more tolerable level for dealing with them.
Armor: Bramble Archon Plate or Enigma Wire Fleece
If you're hunting item bases, you go bramble armor and minimize your magic find while maximizing your damage output, that way you can get more base just white and gray items. If you're going for uniques though, you want to go with enigma, with its teleport magic find in other buffs so you can telestomp bosses and increase your chance of finding uniques from them. You can swap between the two for different goals and, they both will work just fine.
Gloves: Trang-Oul's Claws
Defense: 67-74 (varies)(Base Defense: 37-44)Shield: Trang-Oul's Wing
Defense: 175-189 (varies)(Base Defense: 50-64)Belt: Trang-Oul's Girth
Defense: 134-166 (varies)(Base Defense: 59-66)Similarly, our three-part use of Trang-Oul's set gives us big bonuses in this regard too, with the gloves providing a percent boost to our poison damage as well as faster casts, and the Trang-Oul's Wing shield providing us with even more plus skills and a reduction in enemy poison resist. The latter being part of the bonus for using three parts, which means we finally actually have to go with Trang-Oul's Belt to give us that third item for the shield bonus, this also provides us with a nice cannot be frozen trait which while not necessary for casters is nice for running around. As far as parts of the set go is the easiest to work into our loadout compared to the armor and helmet. And if have an insanely good rare necromancer head and use Arachnid's Mesh, normally you don't need to use this.
Helmet: Harlequin Crest
Defense: 98-141 (varies)As far as our helmet, Harlequin Crest is the obvious choice and there really is not an amazing alternative for low magic find outside of maybe a good rare circulate or maybe out of stretch delirium for plus to all skills. But generally speaking anything outside the rare circlet, and harlequin crest would be really low on our list, even though some of them can be kind of fun.
Rings: Stone of Jordan
Required Level: 29Amulet: Grim Heart
Lastly, it's just rounding out the rest of our gear with two Stone of Jordan, a plus skills caster amulet to keep our teleport speed up.
Boots: War Traveler
Defense: 120-139 (varies)(Base Defense: 39-47)You can use whatever boots you're happiest with. If you want to do a bit of magic find with this on, War Traveler is the most likely use for it, though rare resist boosts can be an excellent alternative if you want to keep your magic find to a minimum.
Weapon: Obedience Great Poleaxe
Body Armor: Guardian Angel
Defense: 770-825 (varies)(Base Defense: 252-274)Helmet: Vampire Gaze
Defense: 252 (Base Defense: 60-125)As far as the mercenary, there are a number of options but the most popular is the Might mercenary packing whatever loadout you desire. You don't need insane gear with the Might build on the necromancer, so he goes with Obedience, Guardian Angel, and Vampire's Gaze, a realistic budget and reliable option in general.
Though on the optimal end, you would probably go with Pride and Fortitude with something like Vampire's Gaze or and Andariel's Visage on top, since this will increase the punchiness of your skeletons a great deal.
Though if you're going corpse explosion, an infinity mercenary will open up more enemy fire resists which are half the damage of corpse explosion; or if you're a teleport fiend, an insight mercenary can help you keep mobile by topping off your mana.
Overall, there's a reason why people frequently say that the necromancer is the best farming class, he's relaxing, can go anywhere, and can complete most areas with relative ease whether you're spamming short runs or doing full clears of various key target areas - there are almost no areas he can not beat with relative ease outside of maggot layer, and for that, you just use a teleport staff for that and then just get away from them.
