GhazzyTV's Dark Pact Necromancer Gear Progression (PoE Necropolis)

March 27th, 2024, 18:46

Introduction

While the PoB shows you what gear we believe belongs in which budget, it might still be a bit unclear in what order we think you should prioritise what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritise when, and why. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the gear progression.

Campaign

During the campaign with this build, you will for the most part pick up items that have the links and colours you desire and hit them with an Orb of Alchemy or an Essence with an appropriate function to make them rare. You will be hoping for a resistance when doing this, and should you end up having an open suffix on the item the crafting bench will let you add on a second resistance roll or an attribute roll, depending on your current needs.
Keeping your resistances as high as possible, ensuring you have the attribute rolls and getting some life modifiers is all you need to worry about at this stage. Do keep in mind that resistances are not very important in the first couple of acts but becomes extremely crucial for your survival around Act 5 and forward and reaching the cap (75%) is preferable for all 3 elements at this point. If you’re struggling with gear to reach this you can always replace any of your offensive aura(s) for a Purity of Elements to help solve this potential problem.

Low Budget

We are going to make the assumption that you have kept your resistances capped going into this budget, and will be working with that assumption. If you do not have capped resistances when hitting maps, you need to get that sorted as soon as possible. Any attributes you might need to keep leveling your gems and/or equip gear will also need to be sorted either via gear or by deviating slightly from the skill-tree by picking up any needed “+30 attribute” nodes on the tree. Gear wise, pieces such as a Heavy Belt and/or Jade Amulet are great pieces to solve attribute issues.

Early gear

The first order of operations is going to be acquiring a 6-Link. We recommend a 5 or 6L Corrupted rare of any ES variety or Hybrid ES variety. Using a mere Tabula Rasa is always an option but a corrupted 6-Link will provide other stats for you as well, just make sure you grab one with the correctly colored sockets!
Now that we have our chest piece sorted, we will be looking to pick up any Wand we find and hope it has an increased minion damage or Spell Damage roll. The only important part here is that the item has an open suffix slot to bench-craft “Trigger a Socketed Spell when you Use a Skill” which will automate the Desecrate & Bone Offering skills which will make the build MUCH smoother to play. Modifiers such as + level of either minion or all spell skills are highly preferable on your wand as well but do tend to cost a bit more. Later in the game you’ll want to add other modifiers to your weapon such as Increased Critical Strike Chance for Spells, Critical Strike Multiplier and/or more importantly: Increased Cast Speed.
At this juncture, you should already be paying close attention to the price of Vaal Caress as well as either; The Bones or Vaal Summon Skeletons as it will be placed inside the gloves.

Here we grab some boots, gloves, amulet and rings with resistance rolls and dexterity rolls on them. The exact stats on what does not matter all that much, you just want a little bit more than you need and then move on with your life as all of these items will be replaced in time. Do not spend a lot of currency on these. A hunter influenced amulet can have the modifier “0.5% of Chaos Damage Leeched as Life” which will help us sustain our life pool and is preferable at this stage.

It is finally time to prioritize our old friend Darkness Enthroned. Minion builds like Ghastly Eye Jewel and this build is no exception.
Getting a very well-rolled belt, especially early on, is extremely expensive and not advised. Get a roll of 50-75% or so, and look to upgrade the belt later. The values above that simply aren’t worth their price early on, we can spend our currency better elsewhere.

Clusters

Minion builds like cluster jewels, and while we are not going to need a large cluster this early, we are going to need a medium. You should acquire a Medium Cluster Jewel with the base “minions have #% increased life” and 4 or 5 passives. Avoid 6 passives as they will waste your points.
You need to have the modifier “Blessed Rebirth”. Nothing else on this jewel matters, but you have to have this for mechanical reasons. In more cases than not this is cheaper to craft yourself by making sure you purchase an item level 68 or higher Medium Cluster Jewel with minion life, this search link will help you find one like that: https://www.pathofexile.com/trade/search/Ancestor/gk7PYGOIQ and then simply use Orb of Alteration & Orb of Augmentation till you hit the Blessed Rebirth notable, finish it of with a simple Regal Orb.

Jewels

Our empty sockets in your skill-tree should preferably be filled with Cobalt Jewel and the priority of modifiers should first and most importantly be #% increased life for yourself and next you’ll want “Minions have #% increased maximum life” as this will vastly increase your damage output.

For the 2 sockets inside your Darkness Enthroned you’ll be looking for the exact same modifiers with the exception that the life modifier for yourself is no longer a #% increase but rather a # flat increase of life!

Shield

With our offences reasonably solidified at this point, it is time to take care of our defences.
The primary defensive layer in this build is block combined with highly effective sustain. This allows our defensive scaling from our shield to merely be the extra block chance it provides and we will focus on making sure the shield has a life modifier for yourself & increased chance to block. The remaining modifiers should be damage scaling ones such as Spell Damage (or Minion Damage), Increased Critical Strike Chance for Spells or even + level of minion skills!

Concluding low budget

If you have not already, it is high time that you sort your flasks. Get flasks with the modifiers that correspond with the guide as best you can, and be willing to spend a little extra to get better rolls on your Rumi's Concoction

Medium / High Budget

The main purpose of the higher budget is to eliminate a lot of the clunkiness that is the Dark Pact build. This is done by automating as much of our utility as possible. Order of importance for the following upgrades doesn’t really matter as they all bring equally valuable efficiency increasing features to the build. Unlike many of my other guides this guide only features low then directly up to high budget and that is simply because of how you can take more or less any upgrade from the higher budget PoB and put it on the low budget build and it will work flawlessly. Starting with the Major Items listed below would be the ideal step from low to medium budget and as you go down the list the cost will go up by each step and the efficiency of your character will increase at the same time.

Major Items

I personally prefer to start with upgrading my body armor to a double-influenced (Hunter & Crusader) to get both a high flat increase of Critical Strike Chance for our spells as well as Power Charges gained upon critting. You can either purchase this or craft it yourself which is done by first grabbing a high item level Vaal Regalia with either Hunted or Crusader influence (or you use the corresponding Influenced Exalted Orb to make it have that influence), then you’ll Alteration/Augmentation craft it till it has only that 1 specific influenced modifier. You’ll do the same with the second body armor, however, that does not need to be a Vaal Regalia as the Awakener's Orb will destroy it. Example below:

Hunter Influenced Vaal Regalia: +#% to Spell Critical Strike Chance
Crusader Influenced : #% chance to gain a Power Charge on Critical Strike

The important part here is to make sure that both items only has 1 existing influence modifier on them as the Awakener’s Orb will only keep 1 of any existing influenced modifiers in the combining process. By using the orb on the random body armor then on your Vaal Regalia will guarantee a double-influenced Vaal Regalia with both of those modifiers. Other modifiers on the item will now be completely random and if you have the possibility to bench-craft a life modifier you should and if that’s not possible but a suffix slot is open you’ll bench-craft a resistance modifier instead. For a more advanced approach you could bench-craft “suffix can’t be changed” then use Harvest to Reforge Caster which will guarantee “You can apply an additional curse” which you’ll want at a later stage.

Next up would be the Glorious Vanity Jewel. By buying a proper one you’ll be able to drop Wither from your skeletons and completely automate the application of Wither stacks on enemies making the build even smoother. This can be a bit tricky to learn how to search the trade properly for one so below you’ll find a video showcasing how to go about that process:

Aegis Aurora

Normally at this stage we’ll want to move our shield over to the Aegis Aurora, do keep in mind that this will demand proper flasks so follow the PoB listed in the guide to know what you’re looking for.

Minor Items

With the most important pieces out of the way we’ll look to upgrade the remaining gear pieces.

The recommendation is to aim for better gloves, amulet & rings to help cover resistances and/or attributes as we are looking for specific pieces including an open prefix allowing for the bench-craft of “#% Increased Damage while leeching”. At the same time it’s time to make sure the wand is a +1/+1 with spell damage (or minion damage), preferably with Cast Speed and then either Critical Strike Chance for Spells or Critical Strike Multiplier, don’t forget to still have an open suffix for the trigger craft!

Large Cluster

Next up you’ll want to look for the Large Cluster jewel which I would personally never bother crafting and just purchase instead.

Boots

This slot is a VERY good clear speed & damage output increasing piece but it’s not as important as the item slots mentioned above and becomes more of a luxury piece.

The rest

The remaining pieces can be upgraded in any order you see fit from here as they bring similar efficiency to the table for the build. Personally I prefer to grab a helmet with Dark Pact cast speed enchant before I upgrade my belt & jewels.

Final Notes

The Major Items listed in this page are both significant pieces for the build making it not just stronger & safer but most importantly; MUCH smoother to play.
Keep in mind that the more cast speed you get from your gear the more DPS you’ll do but more importantly, it’s an insanely effective QoL addition to the build.

This build excels at making you feel every single gear upgrade you put on the build, so every piece you decide to up in budget with will not just look good on paper but you’ll directly feel the efficiency of the upgrades done.