Cold Destruction: How to Dominate with Necro Ice Critters in Last Epoch
If you’ve been looking for a way to dominate the battlefield with chilling precision and explosive cold damage, look no further. The Necro Ice Critters build in Last Epoch is one of the most satisfying and high-impact strategies for dealing cold damage with minions. What makes this build truly lethal is the perfect synergy of minions that are built to crit with every attack, stack cold penetration at an absurd 143%, and freeze enemies in their tracks with ease.
This guide will break down the crucial components of the build, showing you how to harness the power of minions while incorporating game-changing mechanics. Whether you're aiming for high corruption levels or simply seeking to outscale enemies in high-end content, this build has the potential to turn even the most challenging encounters into an icy graveyard.
Understanding the Core of the Build: The Power of Minions
At the heart of this Necro Ice Critters build is the use of cold-damage minions—two incredibly powerful, adult minions, each with their own deadly capabilities. By minimizing the number of minions, we can focus on maximizing their damage output rather than babysitting a whole army of lesser creatures. You’ll be nurturing a Golem and an Archmage—the dynamic duo of destruction. Let’s take a closer look at how these two powerhouse minions work together to obliterate enemies.
The Death Chill Golem and Archmage Combo
This build converts both the Golem’s and Archmage’s base damage to cold damage. The Priest’s Snow node in the Mage tree and the Death Chill Golem node in the Golem tree make it possible for these minions to scale incredibly well with cold damage, making every hit devastating. However, simply converting their damage to cold is just the beginning.
Critical Synergy: How Crits Power Your Minions
To take things to the next level, we need to discuss critical strikes—because every attack from both your Golem and Archmage will critically hit. This is a huge damage multiplier, and it’s thanks to the mechanics in the build that guarantee crits without needing to rely on high crit chance. Here’s where one of the build’s standout features comes into play: The Egoism node. This node ensures that your targeted minions are critting with every single attack.
Moreover, combining this with the Blind Fury node gives your minions a massive 40% increased attack and cast speed, which is essential for delivering consistent and devastating cold damage over time.
Key Item Mechanics: Amplifying Cold Damage and Crit Potential
While the minion selection is crucial to the build’s success, your gear is just as important in ensuring these minions reach their full potential. In particular, there’s one unique item that stands out in the build, and it plays a major role in converting your minions’ damage into something far deadlier.
The APG of Frozen Light: A Game-Changer
One of the game’s most powerful unique swords, the APG of Frozen Light, is absolutely essential for this build. It offers three significant boosts:
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Increased Skill Levels: Adding three more skill levels to both the Archmage and Golem gives them access to more damage and utility. This can completely change how your minions perform in battle.
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Chill Attackers on Hit: This feature adds utility by allowing your minions to chill attackers every time they’re hit. This isn’t just flavor—it’s a meaningful debuff that can slow enemies down and create opportunities for follow-up damage.
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Multiplicative Damage to Chilled Enemies: If that wasn’t enough, the sword offers a multiplicative damage bonus when attacking chilled enemies, ensuring that your minions deliver explosive cold damage to enemies that are already slowed by the chill effect.
Amplifying Damage with Infernal Shade and Haste Buffs
While APG of Frozen Light provides raw power, you’ll also want to consider the Infernal Shade node. This skill offers increased movement, attack speed, and cast speed over time, ramping up quickly to 72% as you build momentum. Infernal Shade, when cast on your Golem or Archmage, boosts their overall damage and speed, ensuring they hit harder and faster as the battle rages on.
Furthermore, you can max out movement speed with the Burn Trail node, allowing your Golem and Archmage to blitz through the battlefield at 102% movement speed, making them even more lethal.
The Secret Weapon: The Lich’s Scorn Offhand Catalyst
Now, let’s talk about the Lich’s Scorn Offhand Catalyst, a crucial item in your build that can truly amplify the damage and survivability of your minions. Here’s what it does:
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Cold Damage Conversion: This item takes the Necrotic damage buffs from Dreadshade and converts them into cold damage, enhancing the damage scaling of your minions.
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Frostbite on Hit: It gives your minions the chance to apply Frostbite on hit, adding an extra layer of damage to their attacks.
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Freeze Rate Multiplier: This is critical for ensuring that enemies don’t just suffer from cold damage but are also frozen or frozen more often.
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1% Cold Penetration per Intelligence: The catalyst provides cold penetration for every point of Intelligence you stack, so don’t skimp on this stat. More Intelligence means more cold damage, and more damage penetration.
When combined with Infernal Shade and the Archmage’s cold conversion, this offhand catalyst elevates your minions to god-like levels of power. And don’t forget, stacking Intelligence directly benefits your minions, giving them more multiplicative damage and increasing their damage overall.
Mastering Chaos Bolts for Buffs and Damage Amplification
The true genius behind this build lies in the clever use of Chaos Bolts. The unique mechanic here is that you won’t be casting Chaos Bolts at enemies—you’ll be casting them on your minions. This may sound odd, but here's why it's so powerful:
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Revolution Buff: Every time you hit a minion with Chaos Bolts, they receive the Revolution buff, which provides a 30% increase in attack speed and flat added spell damage based on your max mana. The more mana you stack, the higher the benefit to your minions, further increasing their damage output.
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Ailment Conversion: Chaos Bolts also convert ailments like Ignite into Frostbite chance, ensuring your minions freeze enemies constantly. It also has a chance to apply Damned, increasing overall damage output with a solid 60% chance to apply this effect.
This unique approach to Chaos Bolts offers a surprising amount of utility. Not only does it significantly increase your minions’ damage, but it also allows for consistent Frostbite application, slowing and freezing enemies to make them even more vulnerable to your cold-damage onslaught.
Strategic Amulet Choices for Enhanced Minion Crits
When selecting an Amulet, look for one that provides crit multiplier, Intelligence, and resistances. A unique amulet you’ll want to get your hands on is dropped by Woven Firstborn in the Cemeteries. This amulet provides the Revolutions Buff rotation, applying massive damage boosts to a random minion every 10 seconds.
This item makes your minions even more deadly, especially in conjunction with the crit multiplier and Intelligence. Remember, your minions are already critting with every hit, so buffing this stat through the amulet allows for devastatingly high damage output.
Building Your Character for Maximum Efficiency
Now that you understand the key components of the build, let’s talk about how to put it all together. Here’s the basic progression for your character:
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Summon Skeletons at level 4, focusing on maximizing DPS nodes.
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At level 10, specialize in Summon Bone Golem for tankiness and damage.
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By level 20, start investing into Infernal Shade and the Necromancer passive tree.
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At level 35, focus on Chaos Bolts for boosting minion damage.
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At level 50, focus on Dreadshade and its associated nodes.
Gear: Ensure you’re stacking Intelligence, Crit Multiplier, and Cold Penetration to maximize damage output.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. What is the primary focus of the Necro Ice Critters build?
This build focuses on empowering two minions—an Archmage and a Golem—to deal cold damage, crit with every hit, and apply devastating cold debuffs, making them highly effective in high-level content.
2. Why only two minions?
Limiting yourself to two minions lets you focus on maximizing their damage and scaling. The Golem and Archmage can take advantage of specific synergy effects without the complexity of managing an army of weak minions.
3. What is the best item for this build?
The APG of Frozen Light is a must-have for this build as it provides critical buffs to your minions’ damage, movement speed, and chilling effect.
4. Is this build effective for high-end content?
Absolutely. This build excels in high-end content such as Monoliths of Fate, Arena, and Endgame Bosses due to its ability to deliver high crit cold damage and control the battlefield with freeze effects.
Conclusion: Dominating with Ice and Crits
The Necro Ice Critters build is one of the most fun and powerful ways to enjoy Last Epoch. By mastering the cold-damage scaling, crit mechanics, and utilizing the synergy of key items, you can easily take control of any endgame scenario and obliterate enemies with a frosty vengeance. With 143% cold penetration, your minions won’t just deal cold damage—they’ll shatter everything in their path.
Give it a try, and watch your enemies succumb to the icy grip of death!
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