Although I was sad that I never had the opportunity to get into the Beta for the Necromancer, I did not hesitate to purchase it as I still wanted to give the class a shot. Anyone who knows me realizes that I’m a class junkie. Just the two extra character slots and stash space made it worth my money. But for those who didn’t want to pay for the content, you still could receive other features like the new zones and challenge rifts.
The thing for me was to pretty much speed to 70 the moment I started up my first Necromancer. I had a few Gem of Ease items lying around and a fair amount of Death Breaths for crafting a couple of leveling weapons. Add to that a Hellfire Ring and Amulet with two nicely leveled up Legendary Gems, I felt that getting to 70 would be pretty fast.
I suppose the downfall for doing such progress so quickly is not really taking the time to figure out how the skills really operated. I never really bothered reading the forums nor spending too much time watching streamers to really understand the mechanics. In short, I wanted a completely fresh experience which is what I got.
But the thing was to farm up at least one full six piece set just to get a feel for one build. Turns out that I got the least popular set in the form of the Pestilence set. I fumbled around a bit trying to piece together other items for a short period getting a few here and there without any synergy. But that’s the fun of it where you can experiment on lower levels to figure out how things work.
Since I have quite a few cubed items like the Ring of Royale Grandeur, I could wring out hybrid combos just prior to acquiring my full six set bonus. Once I got Pestilence, I did some oddball stuff such as using a Golem, which really had no synergy for what I was trying to accomplish. But hey I’m a pet lover when it comes to builds.
I did have to run with this set for two days though. I would alternate between speed running greater rifts on my demon hunter or barbarian to get shards or normal rifts for death breaths just to craft up items. Gradually, I settled upon a doable build for T7 in using Bone Spear with Corpse Explosion. Not a great build by any stretch of the imagination but it was fun just watching lances erupt from dead bodies and slicing into your enemies.
However, the goal was to get something close to meta. Finally, I managed to get 5 pieces of the Inarius set which has become the current Necromancer meta. It’s a weird build that combines a whirlwind-like effect along with more lances. But I found it slightly awkward due to the gradual dwindling of Essence that would leave you helpless here and there.
I suppose I still need more work to do in trying to farm up the remaining few pieces. I am missing 3 key items to make this build shine. But so far I’m more interested in trying to make it work.
I would like to try the other sets. There’s a lot of options right now and tons of experimenting to do. So many items were released with the Necromancer DLC that it’s slightly overwhelming. Trying to pinpoint which items and skills work well together is rough and it’s very apparent that Blizzard will be buffing skills, passives and items down the line.
So far, the community has been quite mixed. Many people have pointed out that the DLC shipped with numerous bugs that were noticed in the PTR. The fact that Blizzard let those slide into production has the community being quite critical.
On the other hand, I think that in this age of internet time, we can’t completely fault Blizzard for wanting to release this content as soon as they could. I mean, other classes and skills for years have been tweaked as items would constantly change the meta. Thus, if Blizzard had delayed releasing the DLC, it would’ve been even worse.
The class is very playable and already people have managed to take one build in Inarius into the 100’s for Greater Rifts. It’ll probably take at least 2 more release cycles to nail down the mechanics for the various sets and skills but that should be expected. Instead, hopefully the real story is the ability for Blizzard to release more DLC’s for Diablo 3 in faster iterations. Druid anyone?