Ultimate Shadowblight Soulrift

Shadowblight is one of the strongest builds in the entire game for season 10 and is potentially necromancer's strongest build. It does insane damage, is very tanky, and is great for speed farming.

1. Cast Soul Rift until you get a corpse
2. Cast Corpse Tendrils on the corpse
3. Cast Corpse Explosion
4. Cast Soulrift until you need to cast a new Corpse Explosion

This build aims to proc Shadowblight as many times per second as possible. To proc Shadowblight, we need to deal 8 instances of shadow damage to a target. So the goal of this build is to deal as many instances of shadow damage as we can in the shortest period possible. To achieve this we are combining Alter the Balance with Soulrift to allow us to replace Soulrift's cooldown with an essence cost. This allows us to stack up to 10 instances of Soulrift at a time, dealing a ton of instances of damage per second.

The final piece of this puzzle is the Blighted Aspect which is going to be giving us a 70% damage multiplier on an enemy every time Shadowblight procs on that enemy. This is what allows the build to scale completely out of control, and its why attack speed is so important. The more you proc Shadowblight, the more damage it does, leading to an exponential damage scaling from anything that procs Shadowblight.

Leveling

Follow this build for leveling

Uniques

Blood Moon Breeches: Most of this item's stats are bad, but the 50% Crit Damage multiplier makes these amazing.
 
Ebonpiercer: We are using this to get additional instances of shadow damage to proc Shadowblight. It also gives a lot of damage through the Reaper's Pursuit ranks.
 
Heir of Perdition: This Mythic Unique gives a 60% damage multiplier as well as some good stats in the form of Crit Chance, Movement Speed, and Lucky Hit Chance.
 
Shroud of False Death: 1 to all passives as well as a high HP and all stat roll makes this item give way too much tankiness and damage to pass up.

Blighted Aspect and Aspect of Decay

When doing high level pits you really want the Blighted Aspect on a two-handed weapon to get access to incredible damage scaling. However when doing speed farming you don't have time to stack the Blighted Aspect, so it loses a lot of value. Because of this, we instead want to put the Aspect of Decay on our two-hander when speed farming.

Mythic Priority Order

Shroud of False Death > Heir of Perdition

Elixirs and Incenses

With the abundance of herbs now in the game it is now very easy to grab some consumables to either shore up big weakness with your character or to massively increase your strengths. I highly recommend you regularly keep Elixirs and Incenses running. Below I laid out the best consumables to use for every situation.
 

Elixirs

If you need more of any specific resistance or armor, use those elixirs first. Once your armor capped and resistance capped, look to use the Elixir of Advantage for the extra attack speed. If you're having trouble staying alive and your armor capped and resistance capped, you can use the Elixir of Fortitude to gain a 20% hp multiplier.
 

Incenses

For incense you have a couple of options, depending on what your character needs.

Core Stat

• Sage's Whisper: Generally the best option as it gives the most amount of damage.
• Spiral Morning: Not a bad alternative, as the all stat gives some armor and also helps hit breakpoints in paragon tree. Only use if there's specific paragon nodes you're trying to reach.
   

Resistance

• Soothing Spices: Best all around option as it gives +10% all resistances and +2% max resistance to everything. Only use another option if needed to hit resistance caps.
   

Defensive

• Song of the Mountain: Great early game option for the +300 Armor
• Reddamine Buzz: Gives +750hp, best option if you are already armor capped.

Chaos Perks

For our Chaos Perks we are running a pretty normal setup in the form of A Beast Cornered + Marred Guard for a large survivability and damage boost. We are also running Crazy Brew for the attack speed, and Accelerating Chaos for the extra cooldown reduction.

Mercenary

In general Subo gives the most damage via high uptime on Cover Fire. However if you are low on resistances you can pick up Raheir for a smaller amount of damage but lots of all res. For our support we are always using Aldkin with Flame Surge as this will proc loads of Lucky Hits.

Defensive Layers

Always make sure you have 1000 armor and 75% all resistances as your number one defensive priority!

Our defense is highly reliant on our skill tree and paragon board. Stand Alone from our passive tree is the single strongest defensive passive in the entire game. We also generate lots of barrier from Necrotic Fortitude due to dealing so many instances of damage, leading to high amounts of Lucky Hit procs. In this vein, we are also able to generate all of our Fortify from a combination of Necrotic Carapace and Hewed Flesh.

From the paragon board we get lots of maximum life percentage, making it very important to get Maximum Life rolls on gear as these two things scale well together. We are also getting lots of damage reduction from Scent of Death and the other damage reduction nodes on that board.

Masterworking and Greater Affixes Explained

Masterworking

Masterworking (MW) enhances an item's stats. Each MW rank boosts all affixes by 5%. Ranks 4,8,12 give a 25% bonus to a random affix (MW Crit).

In this planner, the color blue on an item denotes that the affix got one MW Crit, the color yellow denotes that the item got two MW crits and the color orange denotes that the item got three MW crits.

For future reference the amount of MW Crits on an affix will be denoted by 1MW, 2MW, 3MW.

Greater Affixes

Greater Affixes (GA) on an item force the affix to roll at the top of it's range of possible values and then applies a 50% increase to its value. GA increases are additive with Masterworking increases.

In this planner, the yellow star to the left of an affix denotes that is a GA.

Example

To put it all in to practice, let's calculate what stat increase a GA Affix on a 12/12 Masterworked item with 2 MW Crits gets:

Ranks 1-3, 5-7, 9-11 all give 5% -> 9 * 5% = 45%

Two MW Crits -> 2 * 25% = 50%

GA = 50%

Total = 45% + 50% + 50% = 145%

FAQ

It's a new build so feel free to ask any questions and I'll start adding them here!

9/19: Build Updated for Season 10
10/8: Updated for Patch 2.4.1