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Necromancer
Shadowblight is one of the strongest builds in the entire game for the Necromancer in Season 12. It does insane damage, is very tanky, and has access to two of the strongest aspects in the entire game in 
Blighted Aspect and Aspect of Decay which makes Shadowblight capable of ramping with Damage Over Time effects to hit incredible damage.
An optimized Shadowblight build for players who have just entered Torment 1. This is not intended to be a leveling guide, so check out This Build for the best ways to level your Necromancer.
Keep in mind that both Reap and Decompose are only on your bar for 
Reaper's Pursuit, so make sure you don't ever use those skills!
Sacrificing 
Skeletal Warriors Skirmishers can be a viable option in the Torment Tiers if you find you need help staying alive more than you need damage thanks to the massive amounts of resistances this sacrifice gives.
One of the key strengths to Shadowblight is its incredible scaling with Shadow Damage, so it is very important to temper for Shadow Damage Bonus on every piece of gear as early and as often as possible to do the most amount of damage.
Blighted Aspect and Aspect of Decay are vital to this builds damage, allowing Shadowblight to scale in power the faster we can proc it. And to do that the build utilizes Damage Over Time effects with 
Ebonpiercer thanks to its fast application of Damage Over Time from a distance.
Because we only care about applying Damage Over Time, it is not important to get an Ebonpiercer with ranks to Blight or that has a high roll of the passive as none of our damage scales with Damage Over Time or Blight.
Aspect of Grasping Veins is used over Aspect of the Damned in the torment tiers to help supplement your Critical Strike Chance.
Prioritize Armor and Resistances where you can, staying alive is the key to climbing Torment Tiers.
Your priority for Bloodied Affixes are as follows:
0 (0)This tree is designed to get as much damage as possible while still having enough survivability to easily do the hardest content in the game.
Shadowblight.Soulrift to apply Vulnerable as well as restore Essence.Blight to start stacking Damage Over time with Ebonpiercer and to spawn corpses from 
Hewed Flesh.Corpse Explosion three times to trigger 
Flesh-eater and 
Fueled by Death.Corpse Tendrils for grouping.Blight repeatedly to proc Shadowblight and to stack Blighted Aspect and Aspect of DecayCorpse Explosion as needed to maintain Flesh-eater.Soulrift to apply Vulnerable as well as restore Essence.Blight until a Corpse is spawned from Hewed FleshCorpse Tendrils on the corpse to group enemiesBlight again for the damage bonus on the grouped enemiesCorpse Explosion repeatedly to proc Shadowblight and to stack Blighted Aspect and Aspect of DecayThis 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 different Damage Over Time effects with Corpse Explosion and Ebonpiercer. This allows us to stack up our Blighted Aspect and Aspect of Decay very quickly by stacking multiple instances of damage per second.
The final piece of this puzzle is how Attack Speed scales with Blighted Aspect, which is what allows the build to scale completely out of control. The more you proc Shadowblight, the more damage gain through Blighted Aspect, leading to an exponential damage scaling.
Follow this build for leveling
Blood Moon Breeches: Most of this item's stats are bad, but the 50% Crit Damage multiplier makes these amazing.Ebonpiercer: We are using in speed farming to get extra each and to get additional instances of shadow damage to proc Shadowblight. It also gives a lot of damage through the Reaper's Pursuit ranks for a bunch of extra damage and movement speed. 
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.
Ring of Starless Skies: A strong Mythic Unique for speed farming, making us less reliant on Soulrift and Lucky Hit for Essence.
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.
Shroud of False Death > Heir of Perdition > Ring of Starless Skies
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.
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 as our best in slot Elixir. 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.
For incense you have a couple of options, depending on what your character needs.
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. 
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. 
Song of the Mountain: Great early game option for the +300 Armor
Reddamine Buzz Gives +750hp, best option if you are already armor capped. In general Subo gives the most damage via high uptime on Cover Fire as well as a vision passive that makes him important for pushing content. However those attributes aren't nearly as important as armor/resistances, so for Torment Tiers its best to pick Raheir for a smaller amount of damage but lots of Armor/Resistances. For our support we always use Aldkin with Haunt as it will help proc Shadowblight thanks to it being a Shadow Damage Over Time effect.
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.
Make sure to find the Elemental Finesse - Night temper to temper on Shadow Damage. Do not temper on Shadow Damage Over Time, it was be a massive damage loss. This temper is the key to your damage, so make sure you're tempering it on wherever you can until Shadowblight reaches its x450 cap.
Soulrift is the main way to maintain essence, with 
Abhorrent Decrepify being a very effective way to gain your Ultimate cooldown back thanks to how effective Damage Over Time effects are at hitting Lucky Hits.
Blight/ Corpse Explosion?Because we get all our damage from the Shadowblight Key Passive, it means we get very little damage from the actual Damage Over Time that we're applying. This means more points into Blight and Corpse Explosion actually does not increase our damage any, so only the minimal amount of points are invested.
As a general rule of thumb, it is more important to stack Resistances on your gear instead of Attack Speed when going up through the Torment Tiers as staying alive is the number 1 challenge when climbing the Torment Tiers. But as you get more Paragon Points and unlock more Resistances, you can start stacking Attack Speed.
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