Nekros' Shadows of the Dead: Strength or Duration most essential?

[Mad-Crucifer]

So I got Nekros Prime recently and I've given him a potato and tomato and I think my current build on him is pretty satisfactory in my standards. (All mods described here have been maxed out).

Currently my build centres around his Desecrate ability, using Despoil (and Health conversion along with it), and using Stretch, Augur Reach and Cunning Drift for range.

My secondary focus for my Nekros build then is his Shadows of the Dead ability, which I often use for body shields, extra damage, and most importantly, to make use of any abilities said dead would have. (Thus I like aiming for and raising Ancients, Moas, Bombards, Hyekka Masters, etc.) 

So with only space for two mod slots left (my other two mods are Streamline and Vitality), I am wondering which ability buff is more important for Shadows of the Dead, Strength, or Duration? 

Currently I am leaning towards duration, using Continuity and Augur Message, so as to minimise the health drain to 1.95% or somewhere around there per second, but I want to know what's your opinion? 

When you have limited mod space yet you want to make the most out of Nekros' Shadows of the Dead, is ability duration or strength the biggest priority for the ability? 

 

 

[actuallyVile]

7 minutes ago, Mad-Crucifer said:

So with only space for two mod slots left (my other two mods are Streamline and Vitality), I am wondering which ability buff is more important for Shadows of the Dead, Strength, or Duration? 

Imo they're both rather important, so if you can mix em up, that'll probably give you the most satisfying results.

Though if you decide to also use Shield of Shadows, you may want to go for some more strength.

[Mad-Crucifer]

6 minutes ago, -AxHx-Vile said:

Imo they're both rather important, so if you can mix em up, that'll probably give you the most satisfying results.

Though if you decide to also use Shield of Shadows, you may want to go for some more strength.

I did take a look at a maxed Intensify and Continuity for my build, but the numbers don't really look satisfying. 

I only have two mod spaces left (unless I sacrifice a bit of range which would bother my otherwise Desecrate centred build), so this is a question of either adding more strength or more duration, or trying to work with both at their most basic increase.

[Streaky_Haddock]

Honestly, I'd keep them equal and slap on shield of shadows as well as despoil. Shield of Shadows allows you to get more value out of your minions besides their damage by giving you status immunity and damage reduction. If you can get it, get Equilibrium too so you can constantly regen from the health and energy orbs. Since Nekros is rarely at full health this means you'll be constantly healing/regenerating energy! You might not even need streamline.

[0_The_F00l]

Unpopular opinion:

Health conversion with good strength (170 ish) with shield of shadows is a better, more versatile build. 

This will still let you have decent duration (155), range (145) and efficiency (130) you can sacrifice something for vitality too. 

Arcane pulse helps as well. 

[Gilkan]

I'm reviving this topic because of the Archon update. I was wondering 50% strenght or 50% duration, and came to a conclusion I would like to share. And decided to revive it, because it was the first result for "nekros shadow of the dead strenght duration".

First thing to consider is that the Aura you're using, as well as the focus branch you're using, may change the conclusion I'm going to present, and this is not the definite master way of playing Nekros, so please feel free to share some thoughts as well. PLEASE. And maybe I'll present some new facts to some players, what is good as well.

Let's go:

My build:

Growing Power, Cunning Drift, Umbral Vitality, Health Conversion, Augur Reach, Equilibrium, Adaptation, Despoil, Stretch and Shield of Shadows.

Second thing to consider is that the 50% duration would bring the health drain from 3% to 2%, literally increasing the uptime of the skill from 33s to 50s (desconsidering it's propably taking damage... raw value). While the 50% strength increases the damage reduction from 6% to 9% by itself, with 150% strength. (You can check all that from within the fandom wiki, where there is a "View Maximization" tab in the Abilities page, with a nice calculator).

Considering (1) sometimes I'm kindly forced to activate s4 without activating Growing Power or the Zenurik Hardened Wellspring (What brings the 7 summons achieve 61% damage transference, when it's all set: 100% + 25% + 20% = 8.7% damage reduction. So 8.7% * 7 = 60.9 giving us this 61% I've just said. The hud shows this.). And (2) the amount of strength needed to achieve 90% damage transference would be 200% (what would give 12% damage transference times the 7 summons):

OBS: In case someone doesn't know, after you've activated Nekros s4 with a certain strenght, it will not update the strengthness of the skill while there is at least one summon still alive. So to update the strenght amount you need to leave all die and recast it. But to keep the bonus you already activate once you don't need to setup everything again, you just need to make sure you don't lose them all. Most skills will work similarly (like Vex Armor).

Conclusion: For sake of need of strength update and that we can achieve 195% strength with 50% strenght from archon shards and the two buffs before mentioned, I've decided that strenght is the better choice. I've thought about changing the u.vitality to u.intensify, and go for 50% duration with shards, or 10% strength and 40% duration, but you can't always count on all these damage reductions, you still can get one shot eventually if Adaptation is not up, no Health Conversions are active and you have no souls to use s4, it's not a good choice to remove u.vitality even with such damage reduction potential.

 

Strength > Duration

 

Any thoughts?

Edited September 16, 2022 by Gilkan
Added some info