by Arvenyte — last updated a month ago
Death's new master. Featuring altered mod polarities allow for greater customization.
ITEM RANK
3060 / 60
APPLY CONDITIONALS
[Nekros Prime] represents the Necromancer, but one could also say he's a Lich.
The main focus of this build is to make use of [Nekros Prime]'s full arsenal, being able to collect as much loot as possible while also helping our shadows not die in high level content. To do so we follow these steps:
Cast Desecrate and keep it active, then wait for Molt Efficiency to max out before switching to your operator and doing chained slings for +40% ability strength. Then cast Gloom for a 73.5% slow.
Kill a few enemies fast, using Terrify if you need to get rid of armour or shield gate.
Cast Shadows of the Dead when you killed some enemies to get stagger, knockdown, and status immunity along with some damage reduction. If you kill at least 7 and do chained slings before casting you get 88.2% damage reduction from [Shield Of Shadows]. Your shields have 50% damage reduction and your armour gives your health 31% damage reduction, so that makes it 94.1% damage reduction on your shields and 91.86% damage reduction on your health. If you use your [Grimoire] you'll get to the max of 90% DR, which means 95% shield damage reduction and 93.1% health damage reduction. If you wanted to tank with [Adaptation] instead of using [Catalyzing Shields] at lower steel path missions you could go up to 99.5% shield DR and 99.31% health DR. Keep in mind. As long as there's at least 1 shadow alive when you cast Shadows of the Dead it'll use the ability strength of the original cast, so you can keep max DR without needing to trigger any conditionals again.
When you find a large enough group of enemies do your alt fire with your [Grimoire] for +60% ability strength, then do chained slings and cast Gloom to bring the slow up to 94.5%.
Keep killing enemies, re-casting Shadows of the Dead whenever needed, and casting Terrify whenever you need armour strip or de-aggroing.
We use Madurai for this build. The nodes we care most about are:
Crimson Archon Shard:
+15% Ability Strength x1. This is to get to 100% armour strip from the get go. While we can slowly build up ability strength with Molt Augmented to get 90% damage reduction with Shadows of the Dead and not rely on Sling Strength, we don't wanna compromise at all on Terrify. It also is necessary to get Gloom as close to its slow cap as possible. We could use 2 shards to get to the 95% cap, but I don't find it worth it to slow one extra shard just for a 0.5% increase.
Amber Archon Shard:
+37.5% Casting Speed x2. Both Terrify and Shadows of the Dead benefit greatly from this, so the more casting speed you can get, the better. We don't need more than two since we already get +50% cast speed from Power Transfer.
The last two shard slots are a free choice. Here's some options:
STRENGTH: We use Transient Fortitude, Vome Invocation on our secondary, and an archon shard. With this we'll get to 170% ability strength from the get-go. With Sling Strength we get a 73.5% slow from Gloom and a 94.1% damage reduction on your shields and 91.86% damage reduction on your health from Shadows of the Dead which we actually don't care much about since this build is more focused on shield gating than tanking. If we wanted to tank we can change some mods and arcanes we'll mention on the survivavility section.
If we find enough enemies a single alt fire from our [Grimoire] will give us +60% ability strength. That along with Sling Strength will bring our Gloom slow to 94.5%.
DURATION: We use [Primed Continuity] and Molt Efficiency. All our abilities besides Desecrate benefit from duration. At 163.5% ability duration Gloom's max drain per second is 4.59 energy, and Terrify would last 40.9 seconds, while Shadows of the Dead would have a 1.84% health drain.
RANGE: We use [Stretch] and [Augur Reach]. All of our abilities benefit from ability range.
Gloom's range is one of its most important features, since it'd be worthless if it can't affect as many enemies at possible. 28 meters is a comfy enough radius.
Terrify affects a large amount of enemies with our current ability strength, but it'd mean nothing if it doesn't have a big AoE. At 175% ability range you'll be just over the 25 meter mark, but we sadly can't add more range mods.
Desecrate lives and dies by its range, so increasing it is always optimall. 43.8 meters seems to be enough for most ocassions.
Shadows of the Dead doesn't benefit directly from range, but the links from [Shield Of Shadows] do. At 175% ability range the links have a radius of 87.5 meters, making it so you don't have to recast Shadows of the Dead to bring them close to you as often.
EFFICIENCY/ENERGY: We use [Preparation], [Primed Flow], and [Equilibrium]. With how much energy we get because of Gloom a bigger energy pool tends to be better than less energy per cast, which is why we chose [Primed Flow] over [Streamline] or [Fleeting Expertise]. Desecrate is up at all times, and it ends up creating a massive amount of energy and health orbs. Because of that we make the most out of it by putting [Equilibrium] on our [Nekros Prime], effectively filling up our energy at all times. Energy regeneration doesn't work whenever Gloom is active and slowing enemies, so our only other choice is to run things like [Netra Invocation] to make all of our other abilities consume way less energy.
As for Preparation... why use it when you can generate energy with energy orbs and health orbs non-stop? Well while it's true you won't need it when you got your run going, I've always found the hardest part of starting a high level run as [Nekros Prime] to be the very start when you can't cast lots of abilities. On top of that since we're not running [Despoil] both Gloom and Desecrate are running on the same pool. While it won't be noticeable most of the time, sometimes your energy can drain rather fast if you kill too many enemies at once. This gets rid of that issue, giving you more than enough energy to cast and use Desecrate, cast Gloom, and use Terrify a few times comfortably before casting Shadows of the Dead and getting your build going.
The calculation for starting energy is:
Base Starting Energy + (5 x Mod Capacity Left) + (Total Energy x [Preparation] Multiplier).
[Nekros Prime] starts with 75 energy and [Preparation] gives us an 82% multiplier and leaves us with three capacity left. That'd make our calculation be:
75 + (5 x 3) + (541 x 82%) = 533.62. which is more than enough.
PRIMARY: We use the Kuva Bramma. This is a great damage dealer in general, and mostly used for dealing with crowds from time to time. It's also great for hitting venomous eximus from a distance so that their toxin damage doesn't affect us. It's lich element is toxin to deal with corpus units while [Hunter Munitions] easily deals with armoured enemies if we don't bother to armour strip. That said, it's not our main weapon, and is mostly used to clear rooms when we don't want to focus on farming resources.
I chose this weapon thematically because you literally get it from a Lich, and it's one of the few Lich-exclusive weapons. It's also a bow instead of a gun, which fits a more fantasy themed being like a necromancer.
SECONDARY: We use the Grimoire. This is a great support weapon. While [Nekros Prime]' Terrify can definitely help you kill enemies with it, the most important thing about it is its support ability. depending on the invocation mod you put on you can easily get +60% ability strength, duration, or efficiency. You could also get +10 energy per second, but Gloom prevents energy regeneraton from working, so it won't be useful there. I chose the +60% ability strength tome to free up my arcane and get near max Gloom slow without having to kill 250 enemies.
I chose this weapon thematically because a necromancer is a dark magic caster that revives people as undead, so of course they'd have their own grimoire or necronomicon.
MELEE: We use the Hate. This is perfect for group 1-shotting with its heavy attack, dealing incredibly strong bleed procs. It now has an incarnon mode which, along with the tennokai, make this weapon fully viable for a light attack build. I use Arcane Strike on this build to slot in more damage mods on my melee. Because this weapon deals mostly slash damage and can kill pretty much anything easily this is our main damage dealer, using it to slice up enemies, one-shot heavy units like eximus and acolytes, and build arcane stacks for both our primary and secondary weapons if we ever want to use them.
I chose this weapon thematically because when you think about necromancy and undead the grim reaper tends to come to mind. When not casting spells you can only see them using either a scythe or a sickle.
COMPANION: We use the Panzer Vulvaphyla. A necromancer should have an immortal pet, shouldn't they? Besides spreading even more viral this companion makes sure you have even more crit damage and fire rate, while also providing health gating in the off chance you receive fatal damage. You could also use a Smeeta Kavat for the chance at double drops if you wish, but you lose on the fire rate and melee combo buffs along with the extra viral stacks and health gate, so I don't think it's worth it.
SHIELD GATING: We use [Brief Respite] and [Augur Reach]. Because of [Catalyzing Shields] your shields will get reduced to 20% of their total, which is 111 shields for [Nekros Prime]. the mods we use give us 150 + 40 = 190% of the energy we used as shields. The ability we'll use for this is Terrify, which is our most spammable ability. At 75 energy per cast it'd be 75 x 190% = 142.5, effectively filling up our shields entirely no matter what.
The reason why we want low max shields is because of how shield gating works with [Catalyzing Shields]. when your shields are depleted you gain 1.3 seconds of invulnerability. If your shield starts regenerating and goes down again before it can fill up fully, however, the invulnerability will only last 0.3 seconds. With these mods we make sure to always fill up our shields to get max invulnerability time.
AUGMENTS: We use [Shield Of Shadows]. [Shield Of Shadows] provides survivability by giving 90% damage reduction and drawing fire away from you, while also giving stagger, knockdown, and status immunity, saving us from having to use [Primed Sure Footed] and [Rolling Guard] respectively. the immunities are the most important parts, since at higher level damage reduction becomes less and less useful and things like slash, heat, and toxin status procs become even more dangerous.
We don't run [Despoil] because of how incredibly easy it is to keep your energy filled up, but if youe ver wanted to the only mod you could replace is Augur Reach.
SURVIVABILITY: We use [Shield Of Shadows] and [Martyr Symbiosis] on our companion. As stated above, Shield of Shadows will prevent stagger and knockdown effects, while also preventing you from suddenly dying of slash, heat, and toxin procs from enemies. that along with shield gating prevents us from dying completely with the only exception being pure toxin damage, which is rare in on itself. For those situations [Martyr Symbiosis] health gates us, saving us from a single hit and letting us kill the enemy that tried to down us.
Now, if we wanted to tank we can replace our first arcane slot with Arcane Blessing and change [Catalyzing Shields] to either [Adaptation], or [Health Conversion]. The former gives an overall better buff to damage reduction, but takes a few hits to fully trigger. The second is instant and stays up at all times since we get health orbs non-stop, but it doesn't affect shields.
So, if you want to test this build but are too worried that you won't like it and will waste forma on it, here's a 0 forma version of the build for you to test. 0 Forma builds always have to make some compromises, but I try to make them as close to the original to give an accurrate representation when testing.
And that's it! Besides downgrading two mods and removing the exilus all the mods are exactly the same, just in different spots since we can't change polarity positions with 0 forma. While it's a bit harder to start the run due to the lack of [Preparation] and smaller energy pool, it should still be more or less the same.
