With the official arrival of The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr just around the corner, there will be many people jumping on the new Necromancer class.
This guide will give an optional semi-hybrid Necromancer DPS build, as well as highlighting some specific skills of the class. We’ll go from the best race for Necromancer as well as skill use and rotation step by step.
The first thing to consider for this build is the race, and the most optimal is High Elf.
High Elf is the most useful when considering a specific passive in the racial tree called: Spell Recharge. This is the key factor to the entire build, as soon as you can take this passive do so.
The next point of interest is the different skill trees: Grave Lord, Bone Tyrant, and Living Death. Each of these has its own unique approach.
To give an example, Grave Lord skills and passives are more tuned to dealing damage whereas Living Death skills are more attuned to healing. Many of the later skills in the build I am presenting will come from Grave Lord, but there will be one specific skill from Bone Tyrant.
For level one, you will start out with Death Scythe. This is the other skill that is crucial to the build outside of the High Elf racial skill. When you evolve Death Scythe, you’ll want Ruinous Scythe. The reason for this is every 6 seconds you want to use your scythe attack to regenerate Magicka.
After you get Death Scythe, the next goal is to get Flame Skull and Blastbones. You can get Bone Armor for early leveling, but it’s not necessary.
Flame Skull and Blast Bones will both go the Magicka route when morphing. Flame Skull is your primary Magicka spender. Blastbones is just a pre-requisite for a skill that will be added later called Boneyard. Blastbones is the fastest way to generate a corpse for Boneyard’s damage increase, otherwise, Blastbones is a bit underwhelming.
The last primary skill should be Shocking Siphon. You won’t get this for a while, so you can fill the fifth slot with whatever.
I recommend tossing Render Flesh in the slot just to level up the Living Death tree. I only recommend this for the third passive in the tree which will make your ultimate recharge faster. This passive is called Corpse Consumption. Later you will want Undead Confederate as well for more Magicka and Stamina regeneration.
As far as the Bone Tyrant tree, the only thing you really need for this build other than Death Scythe is Death Gleaning for Magicka and Stamina regeneration.
The DPS Ultimate is Frozen Colossus. You can choose to run the Magicka morph of Bone Goliath for a melee version of this build, but it feels less impactful and scales off maximum health.
The weapon I recommend is Destruction Staff. This weapon is mostly for the passive Destruction Expert which you won’t get until way later, but you might as well level it up early. As far as your switch weapon at level 15, I’ve been carrying a Greatsword, but I don’t actually use it.
For armor, some combination of medium and light armor would be the most logical option for their second passives. I’ve been running heavy armor as a personal preference, but that does not offer anything to the build.
Rotation:
- Blast bones to open
- Boneyard
- Three Flame Skulls (This becomes more important after it is morphed)
- Ruinous Scythe (Prior to this morph, the rotation doesn’t matter)
- At this point, just repeat as long as your resources hold up and add in basic weapon attacks when you run low on resources
- Use your Ultimate as needed
That is all there is to it for this basic Necromancer guide, I may add more to it after I experience more difficult content, but this build will have no issues while leveling. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to leave them in the comments section below.
