Malice Necromancer

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Lynderika
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Links
Basics : Overview - Gear - Normal & Nightmare tips
Ubers : Walkthrough
Bonus : D2stats - Mercanary





Introduction

Malice Necromancer has been in quite a bad spot for many patches, but recently, sneakily, during 2.2.2 and 2.2.6 patchs, he was granted two things : Passive physical resistance, 1% per 4 points put in the malice tree, which mean up to 20% in late, and Death Ripple, the main clearing skill, had it's hitbox corrected and heavily improved. It felt terrible to use before, but now will perfectly do it's job. With this, Malice is ready to go. I had lots of fun playing it, and hope you will too.

Strengths of the build

  • Good starter. TU gear alone is very strong and will easily carry to 120s ubers and farm duncraig very nicely. Sets pieces and mid game gear improvements are very easy to find as well.
  • Every bosses can be cleared (Not Deimoss, but we don't count her)
  • Dream Eater is a point & clic single target skill, nothing will get in it's way. Meaning, many usually pesky bosses will be easy. Is Astogha your worst nightmare? welcome. Here we clic on him and wait. Teleporting bosses in general are no problem, as Dream Eater will follow them immediately.
  • Another Dream Eater good point : This spell come with a pretty impressive slow, as well as life leech. Using Dream Eater against a small mob will regen your life instantly, and even against bosses the regen is noticable. It's one of the point that make me believe Malice is Hardcore viable. With lot of care, sure, but definitely possible.
  • Death Ripple really do it's job when farming. It's not top tier because the coverage isn't big enough, but still perfectly strong enough to be comfortable.
  • Only one respec needed -to get specilization mastery- and that's it ! All content can be done with one set up.

Cautions

  • 130 content is a big wall. Playing solo self found, Uldy, Scosglen and friends will be very tough. Early and mid game gear is easy to get, sure, but endgame gear is both rare and pricey. So getting the proper upgrades can be complicated.
  • Vanish is such a cool skill right? It will one shot enemies ! But oops, it doesn't work against champions, elites, or anything you'd want to kill with it. If you have dreams of one shotting goblins or scosglen trees with this, forget it, it doesn't work.





Overwiew

Basics

Image

Important :

  • Skill order : Death Ripple / Meditation → Nightwalker (up death ripple as much as your mana pool allow it, if not, meditation then Nightwalker) → Death Pact → Dream Eater → Mold The Flesh → Embaling → Death Ward. Take tenacity as soon as you can and others 1 pointers in the way. Not using Dream Eater early is fine, or just 1 point to regen. But Death Ripple will be enough to kill bosses. Jinn litarelly is there for the +1 max fire res and to have some funny visuals, you can ignore him if you want. Meditation is very useful for very early and late game, but I didn't feel the need at all for most of the game. Still not bad to keep, but you also can respec just before level 50 to remove it.
  • Killing baal unlock "specialization" passive, which can be used to increase Death ripple and Dream Eater to 30 pts, at the cost of Death Ward. Do the switch if you're confident in your tankyness. 25 pts will do just fine so I recommand doing the switch for 130 bosses and scsoglen. Here's a lvl 139 tree
  • "Enough for gear" details : 158 str & 85 dex will be enough to equip every T3 uniques, as well as your Tier 4 Wand. 272 str and 183 dex will be enough for every T4. Afterward it depend on your drops. In general, do not invest too much in thoses, if possible not at all, equipping better gear isn't always worth losing too much energy/vit points. Let Charms and -requirements jewels help the most possible.

How spell damage work

Both Death Ripple and Dream eater are Physical/Magic spell damage. Their scaling depend of a few things :
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Misc build comments

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Gear

Leveling (lvl 1-130)

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End

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Walkthrough

Normal & Nightmare



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Hell

Level 105


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Level 110


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Level 115


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Level 120


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Level 125


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Level 130


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Edited by Lynderika 1 year.
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Lynderika
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Level 135


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Mercenary

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Afterword

Special thanks to RollsRoyce for sharing his gear, as well as the many Malice discussions and advices. Also being the one that testplayed Malice before it was good, and behind 2.2.2 and 2.2.6 changes. Say your thanks !
Special mention and thanks to Crash, who started writing a malice guide, but I was faster hehe. Some parts of normal-nightmare walkthrough are his.
To Marco (I think?) for the class change. Malice is overall in a nice spot I believe. Not op, not bad, and real fun despite it's simplicity. Pestilence and Vanish could have a bit of tweaking to be useful, and having no usable reward skills can feel bad for some, so there's place for improvements, for sure. But still, I believe it to be an exemple of a well done class.

Malice biggest problem would be endgame itemization, every BiS are very specific, with no rooms for discussions. Worst, the 2 only useful endgame runewords,
Treachery
Treachery
Belts

'ArcPhul'
Runeword Level: 110
+1 to All Skills
+(5 to 10)% Bonus to Spell Focus
10% Hit Recovery
+(15 to 20)% to Physical/Magic Spell Damage
+(12 to 15) to Singularity
(15 to 20)% to Energy
+(150 to 250) to Mana
Physical Resist 5%
+(100 to 200) Life when Struck by an Enemy
and
Twisted Mind

Twisted Mind
Necromancer Shields

'ArcOlPhul'
Runeword Level: 110
+1 Projectile to Death Ripple
Occult Path: +10 Life per Death Ripple Skill Level
2% Chance to cast level 10 Timefield on Death Blow
+(3 to 5) to Necromancer Skill Levels
+(5 to 10)% Bonus to Spell Focus
+(50 to 75)% to Summoned Minion Life
+(171 to 200)% Enhanced Defense
+10 to all Attributes
10% to Energy
+(100 to 150) Life after each Kill
(30 to 40)% Magic Find
, require the exact same rune. Getting one Phul SSF is hard, forget about 2. And both are amazing and much needed items for 130+ content, how do you get 2 phul if it's what you need to start farming scosglen comfortably? If you ask me, I'd say Treachery is more important, and would be enough to clear content, but it's an hard call.
Edited by Lynderika 1 year.
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Crash
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Cool guide
nemmate
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Actually play with malice necro (actually lvl117 in SP) , and I often start with after every patch. Really nice guide, thank you for sharing.
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Pinball
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No ssf? shhhh unplayable
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Lynderika
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No ssf? shhhh unplayable


Actually, I was until Uldy ! So about level 136 I believe. Making fauzt leveling my last ssf video.

nemmate wrote:Actually play with malice necro (actually lvl117 in SP) , and I often start with after every patch. Really nice guide, thank you for sharing.


Have fun~

Cool guide


Truuue
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Can you post your Notifer setup OP?
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Lynderika
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snufkin wrote:Can you post your Notifer setup OP?


Sure, let me just keep the things relevent for Nec, remove some "#" and add some comments...
Here you go


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Vanngancabg
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You too output
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Finally some love to malice nec!