Anime Gigachad Necromancer Ch. 4 Build (v1.10X)

Despite appearances, Loop Hero is a very complex game. You are trying to gamify a gameplay loop within a gameplay loop (gameplay loop INCEPTION).

The goal of this guide is to teach you how to maximize your necromancer gameplay to be extremely efficient, with the goal of obtaining hundreds of resources on a single ch.4 run.

Based on your skill level, here's what you should expect from this guide.

Beginner: How to play necromancer
Intermediate: Opinions on stats, traits, items, and buildings.
Advanced: How a complete dotard kamikazed his way to the top.
GIGACHAD: How to abuse god and destiny for resources.

As per the title, I do not expect you to emulate this absurd playing style. In fact, I discourage you from doing so. This guide serves to show you what limits could be achieved while maintaining a maximum level of stress. As such, I don't even expect you to read this guide. But if you do, I can only expect you to learn the core fundamentals of each section.

Slashing and stabbing are so overrated. Why risk your physical health when your undead friends can completely cover your back?

• When things get going, you don't need to worry about HP.
  
• Summoning 5 skeletons will guarantee a high chance of success in any fight.
  
• Scales well late game with the right skills.
  
• Not bounded by stamina.

• Slowest attacker.
  
• Exclusive reliance on RNG for optimal gameplay.
  
• Battles of attrition are expected, unpredictable, and absolutely boring.

To unlock Necromancer, you must construct the Cemetery and then the Alchemist's Tent.
You wield a Grimoire to summon skeleton to fight your enemies. Your amulet provides a magic shield whereas your two rings provide (in)consistent potential. Ignore the potions, we'll talk about that in another guide.

Even though these stats are pretty self-explanatory, the game doesn't do a good job in explaining these stats. This is because of the skeletons. They only scale off of Skeleton Level/Summon Quality/Max Skeletons

What about that last stat? It's completely omitted in the game! Well, wayward reader, you see... That's the secret sauce.

• Abuse rivers and thickets for a T H I C C 230% attack speed
  
• Prioritize skeleton substats (Skeleton level, Summon Quality, Max Skeletons)

• Skeleton Level: (Loop Lvl) - 2 is where you should be
  
• Summon Quality: Stay at around 50%
  
• Max Skeleton: Minimum 4 for comfy early-game, 5 for bosses/lategame

The rest of the stats are left to your discretion. Max Skeletons is integral to your success. Unfortunately, the stat is beyond rare, appearing once in a while and often times being an underwhelming piece. You'll want to hoard as much as you can, but only if the gods will it. It's a simple equation. More skeletons gives you more damage. More damage deletes the enemy before they can even lay a finger on you.

How you rip and tear through the abyss is simple. Attack Speed affects how fast you summon skeletons. You build that through Rivers + Thicket cards alone, but we'll talk more about that later.

Unfortunately, because your success is tied to a rare stat, it also becomes the class' biggest flaw. The flaw presents a giant dilemma whenever you upgrade your gear:

Do you trade one skeleton for more substats?

The answer should always be no, but because of how gear drops work, the question becomes substantially complicated.

The picture above demonstrates the worst case scenario for a Max Skeleton drop. It's a grey level 5 ring. Grey items only have one stat. And because Max Skeletons is ALWAYS +1, it's all or nothing. Yes, this means that you'll be relying on Orange drops for Max Skeletons. Yes, this is an L you have to take. Sorry kiddo.

You always have to weigh the pros and cons of both the present and future when making this decision. That sounds like a mouthful, sorry. Just be flexible with this. There will be times where you can't hit the minimum stats and that's okay. Failure is expected.

Here's a question: Do you want to replace your RIGHT ring for +2 Max Skeletons?

Well... The answer is no because you always want your Max Skeleton gear to have other skeleton stats.

The only time you WOULD replace the other ring would be when you're comfortable for the next couple of loops. But lady luck is a fickle beatch, and you can't trust her to give you what you want.

Now, I know what you're thinking. 15 cards?!??!?!

Yes. This is a run for resources. My highest run on ch.4 has been on loop 34, but I'm confident I can go higher with the right RNG.

• Cemetery is used for resources only. Gathering more Memory Fragments is always welcome for the girthy-ass encyclopedia achievement. Much like Ruins, it is best used in moderation.
  
• Village is the de-facto card for setting up your safe space. When a Vampire Mansion is placed beside it, it transforms into Ravaged Village for the next 3 loops. Then it transforms into Count's Land, offering better gear(?) and a stronger quest which heals you upon completion.
  
• Groves is used in conjunction with Blood Grove to help contain situations. It is particularly good for Ruins, since those slithery snakes have a 40% of leaving you in the dust unscathed.
  
• Ruins is good in moderation. On one hand, this is one of the prime ways to get loot. On the other hand, especially when misplaced, it can spell the end of your run because the snakes shooting you from a tile away can deal some SERIOUS damage.
  
• Vampire Mansion is the card that transforms Villages. They're great early game for generating loot and getting those upgraded quests.
  
• Battlefield is great when controlled properly and has minimal impact (using only 2 Battlefields for 3 Blood Path tiles).
  
• Bookery shuffles your cards. It's essential because you'll be burning a lot of cards with my setup.
  
• Road Lantern keeps the situation under control by reducing the max amount of enemies on any highlighted tile by one. It dictates how much and how well you can fight.
  
• Smithy's Forge significantly helps you with damage reduction. Generally, you should not expect a fight to last more than 30 hits, the maximum amount of armor you can carry. Its 20% damage reduction is invaluable late-game, as it eases damage requirements by simply tanking through it.
  
• Forest and River are used for the absolutely OP Thickets + River combo. I'll explain more in another guide.
  
• Suburbs are how you scale into late game by scaling your exp growth. It is absolutely required for late-game.
  
• Oblivion is used to keep progression straight. Deleting goblin and bandit camps maintains my inner peace.
  
• Temporal Beacon is only exclusively used for farming Astral Orbs (for fun). Used ONLY in late game, burned otherwise.

• Deserts? Because when you're engaging in combat, you will always want the enemy to target your skeletons. Because of how ridiculously squishy each one is, increasing the enemy's attack speed would do more harm than good. The increased atk spd would lead to more skeleton deaths instead of helping them live. Instead, you should tank the hit. Case and point, the skeletons.
  
• Zero Milestone? You are legit griefing yourself if you take this card. Sure, it helps decreases damage for one half of the map. But it increases the damage taken for other half. Either the kill-zone punishes you, or the bosses slap your ass cheeks into oblivion for taking such a stupid card.

One debate you'll come across is whether to use the Ancestral Crypt or the Arsenal gold card for Necromancer.

• Ancestral Crypt gives you +3 max hp for every enemy with a soul killed. It removes the hp bonus from armor and grants you one resurrection with full HP
  
• Arsenal grants you one extra item slot (the Shield for Necromancer) and lowers the stats of all dropped gear by 15%

The difference between the cards is quite substantial, but Ancestral Cryptbros will believe that their HP scaling will help them long term. And it's true, this would scale exceptionally well with my deck. But it doesn't necessarily solve the gear problem in the higher loops.

In my first attempt, when I beat god on loop 15, I lasted until loop 22 wherein a nasty combo of enemies managed to out damage my build. The problem was clear as day. Gearing in those loops got exceptionally tight since every upgrade needed to have all 3 skeleton stats. My 3k HP and ~1k Magic shield didn't matter and I died a slow death. Perhaps if I had dropped a skeleton for an atk speed drop, maybe I would have survived longer.

There was no further way of keeping up at that point. Because at that point, I had also snagged the achievement for filling out the entire map as a stupid humble flex. As the map was filled out, there was no further way of improving my attack speed and drops. Everything needed to be orange and have all 3 skeleton stats to retain loop comfort.

That means that your chonky HP doesn't matter if your drops can't keep up with Skeleton Level AND Max Skeletons at the same time. This makes Ancestral Crypt only good for the resurrection, which is still a pretty good deal mind you.

But if you don't need the resurrection or you're casually farming Hunter, Arsenal is the way to go. The shield alleviates Necromancer's biggest flaw - the inflexibility over Max Skeletons. Sure, the stat drop does add up and will affect you in all stages, but its benefits far outweigh the flaws. Your shield can also get Max Skeleton, increasing the maximum of skeletons to 7. A death force. If you get lucky and summon 3 Skeleton Mages, the fight's already decided.

I found that taking a shield with Max Skeletons always helps because it frees up the ring drops to be whatever garbage they want. Having 6 Max Skeletons is still comfy, but having 7 guarantees victory.

As this guide aims to prepare you for chapter 4, here is my recommendation:

• If you DO NOT have your cemetery upgraded, take Ancestral Crypt
  
• If you DO have an upgraded cemetery, you can get away with Arsenal.

Ugh. The most subjective part of the guide. But it must be done.

Note: This will ONLY cover class specific traits. Use others at your own discretion.

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This next set of traits would help increase survivability by a significant margin, but not as good as the above tier. Ideally, you would pick these traits as a Plan B, something to keep you on course.

If you only had these choices, prioritize the ones on the top.

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This section will outline what buildings you should consider upgrading. With how basic progression is in this game, you should be able to at least build the base building. Upgrading them is a major bonus/cost, so do as you see fit, hero.

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While each furniture has its own uses and applications, I will only mention the items I found essential.

In this section, you will learn how and what tiles you will place on the map. In addition, it will tell you all of the tile combos I use. This section is pretty straight-forward.

These tiles are place outside of the loop. Here are the only ones you will be using:

• River
  
• Thickets
  
• Suburbs

Do not use the Forest card. The only time it would be useful is if you were REALLY desperate to place a Bloody Groves, but we're gigachads. Not desperate housewives. Unfortunately, to play Necromancer optimally, you can't just take any map. You need to take a map that's most preferable to rivers because rivers replace the need to have attack speed on your gear. For optimal river gameplay you will need a 5-tile wide gap between the loop and the edge of the map. Here's an example. The highlighted area should be pretty obvious. (please let me know if it isn't)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2424861000
Rivers are 15-BILLION % IMPORTANT. Again, it replaces the need to have attack speed on your gear. As rivers aren't the most straightforward card, I thought it would be in everyone's best interest to remind you how it works.
On a basic level, here are how river cards work:

• Rivers will DOUBLE the effect of an ADJACENT map tile.
  
• Rivers are multiplicative, meaning that having multiple river tiles touch one map tile will multiply it by a lot. (2x -> 4x -> 8x -> 16x)
  
• Rivers can ONLY have a beginning point and an end point. You cannot fork the river into multiple paths.
  
• Place a river on ONE SIDE ONLY. Preferably touching the loop for Shipwreck synergy.
  
• If you need more information and pictures you should seriously check out the guide above.

If you bothered to check out the guide above, there are two viable types of rivers: 4-wide and 5-wide. There is a substantial difference of 56% in both types. Because this amount can make a substantial difference, I will only talk about the 5-wide river.

My color choice may not have been the best here, but that's not the point. This picture has been made even more noob-friendly, clearly indicating where you should start placing things.
Obviously, this is a very different looking map from the one depicted above, but you get the point. Rivers aren't the only thing that we place on the map. We place suburbs as well to get bonus xp from monsters. When you proliferate your suburbs, you can get to a maximum bonus xp of ~95-105. That's a substantial amount that you'll be thankful for late-game. Thankfully Suburbs are much easier to understand.
When you first place your suburb tile, you can no longer place them willy-nilly. From the first placement, you can only place tiles adjacent to suburbs.

When you place suburbs in a cross (+ shape), the middle suburb transforms into a town, granting you a bonus of 1 xp per monster. So when you surround a map's worth of towns, this is what it should look like.

• Brighter Green (on the left side, sorry colorblind people :X) = River/Thickets
  
• Yellow = Suburbs
  
• Red = Suburbs Transformed into a town

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And with that, I've just solved one piece of the puzzle for you. Optimized map placement! Here's a summary of the map placement rules:

1. Ensure the map has space for a 5-wide river. If not, restart.
   
2. Place the river on the side that's closest to the loop. Refer to the above image for reference.
   
3. Build suburbs with the largest surface area.

Thank you for attending Basic Map Theory 101! See you next lecture.

Combat in Loop Hero is something we're indirectly involved in. We don't control the state and flow of the battle, rather, we manipulate the outcome with gear and tiles. This means we should pay attention to the following metrics:

• Did the Necromancer take HP damage?
  
• Did the Necromancer use a potion in battle?

And obviously, here are the answers:

• Did the Necromancer take HP damage? No.
  
• Did the Necromancer use a potion in battle? No.

Obviously, this is the idealistic scenario for each combat encounter. But when you do take damage, these would be your alarm bells going off.

If the Necromancer does take HP damage, it's an indicator that things can be improved (until you know they can't be).

If the Necromancer takes enough damage to use a potion, it's a clear indication that you will have trouble revisiting that scenario. Far from ideal. You will need to further control the encounter.

The only tools available to keeping things in check boils down to two things:

• Blood Groves.
  
• Road Beacons.

Since we're gigachads, we purposefully run head-on into difficult encounters every single time. This is to keep the resources and the loot flow going. Keep the good times flowin, I'd say. How I use lanterns are very nuanced, so you should use them in your own way to stay comfy.

Blood Groves are the saviour to keeping things under control. They guarantee a kill at 15% HP, which is required for those DAMNED SNAKES IN THE RUIN. Otherwise, they have a 40% chance to escape and harass you in the next encounter.

Because Blood Groves can also affect bosses, some people would recommend you to turn it into a Hungry Grove for extra mileage. Instead of executing enemies at 15%, Hungry Groves execute at 20%. However, this comes at the additional cost of requiring an Oblivion card to properly set up. Generally, this isn't worth it since it requires an additional card that you might not be able to get before Lich King. With my deck, here are the synergies that you should be aware about:

While a lot less meatier than the previous section, this section is still harder than the previous section due to the fact that you will need to think and apply the theory shown here. While that might be very hard to visualize now, I will provide more theory on how to apply it in the next section.

Thank you for attending this lecture on Combat Theory. Until next time, wayward hero!

This section will describe to you how I place tiles on any given map. This is beyond subjective, debatable, and quite possibly incomprehensible. But I will try my best. As such, this section and the next will not be noob-friendly.

To describe the ebb and flow of how I place tiles, you need to understand that I divide the map into two halves.

This half of the map is with the campfire, where you will only exclusively place vampire mansions and villages. This area is pretty straight forward, though it is just as deadly if you can't handle the (initial) heat. The basic idea with this half is to populate it with many villages as possible so that you can heal before and after the campfire. This half of the map is filled out with ruins, cementaries, groves, you name it. The Kill-Zone exposes the biggest flaw with the Zero Milestone gold card, as you will be taking significantly more damage the further you are from camp. This means that if you do employ the gold card, you will take a drastic increase in damage and will eventually kill yourself because of it. It doesn't matter if you place the milestone at the campfire or in the Kill-Zone. You will take a drastic increase in damage either way, whether it'd be from the harsh Kill-Zone or the bosses themselves.

Unfortunately, I can't really guide you on how to build your own kill-zone. This sort of thing is completely subject to your preferences and how masochistic you are. The best advice I can give you is to make sure you have a Blood Groves in the notch before you develop it.

Here is the general tile priority: [everything else] > Bloody Groves > Road Lanterns

Even though Road Lanterns significantly increase survivability, I see it as a crutch as you reduce the amount of chances you get for loot. If you are serious about employing this silly play-style, I expect you to survive the harshest encounters within reason. That's not to say that you should completely avoid Road Lanterns, but to use it when you feel uncomfortable. Treat Road Lamps like a limiter, as you will feel more comfy with more of them on the map, but more stressed out when that one extra enemy can spell your doom.

You should be able to see the clear split. Should be simple enough. Notches decide how powerful your loop is. The more notches you have, the more efficient you can be with tiles.

Notches allow you to cram more villages per vampire mansion, more chances to swap cards and expedite the transformation, maintain armor, etc. etc.

Generally, to be a gigachad, you will want to place the higher-priority tiles in the INNER NOTCH. This means a Vampire Mansion in the Vampire Avenue, and Bloody Groves in the Kill-Zone.

The yellow notches are where I would place Vampire Mansions, whereas the red represents Bloody Groves.
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance ACTUALLY looks like. (minus the road lantern and wheat farms i'm sorry) As this section does not talk about how to specifically set up for chapter 4, I will provide some final tips before the next section.

• Try not to place Ruins back to back, those stupid fire snakes are SUPER DUPER DEADLY. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THEM.
  
• You can place whatever you want in-between villages. I prefer Ruins and Cemetery.
  
• I like placing Bookeries and Armories in the Vampire Avenue, as it spawns enemies adjacent to the tile. If I remember correctly, you do not fight on Count's Lands.

I have imparted as much knowledge as I possibly could before you seriously attempt this. Hopefully, you've seen how complex this game is. Now it's time to tie it all together. This chapter will slaughter all casuals who don't know any better. This is because of it's ridiculous pacing, forcing you to fight all 3 bosses consecutively AND as early as possible. Given my build, there are two major obstacles that end most runs.

• Fighting a Ravaged Village COMPLETELY raw dog before the Lich King.
  
• Lich King

If you are able to withstand these two obstacles, I guarantee that you have a strong chance of defeating the final boss. Because at that point, you've clearly displayed enough knowledge to properly brute-force through the game in a gigachad way. In case you forgot just how much of an ass the Lich King is, this guy will populate empty tiles around the campfire. Here's what it looks like.

As indicated in RED, if these marked tiles are empty, the Lich King will fill that tile and empower himself with the Lich's Palace. There are only two ways to counter this:

• Deleting a palace with Oblivion.
  
• Covering a marked spot with whatever tile you want.

Obviously, we don't have the luxury of getting Oblivion cards. You shouldn't take Omicron's blessing either, as your first ability choice will drastically affect your performance long-term. Thus, I shall only focus on the 2nd solution. Typically, what I will recommend is for you to simply wait until you get enough village cards to place beside the campfire. However, this will not work every time. Sometimes you will spawn the Lich King faster simply because you get more Rivers/Thickets. Here is my best advice:

• You simply cannot sloppily place tiles wherever and however you want. There needs to be thought put into it so your setup can survive late-game.
  
• You DO NOT want to place Cemetery/Ruins cards AFTER the campfire. This will cause enemies to spawn in your boss encounter. If you are forced to place a card that isn't a village card, try to wait for a Groves. That way you can place a Bloody Groves afterwards.
  
• If you are trying to conserve on card placements right before the Lich King, avoid placing thickets that do not touch rivers.
  
• Ensure that your Arsenal placement will NOT affect how you plan the rest of the map. Yes, this is one of the more latent advantages Arsenal has over Ancestral Crypt.
  
• Try not to place too many encounters near your campfire. When you're breasts deep into late-game, those guard-towers stop being useful. They end up being a giant liability and can lead you to your unfortunate demise.

It's perfectly fine to let the Lich have 1-2 palaces. If you have Bloody Groves connected, you need not worry about this loser. After all, if you were able to overcome the first obstacle (fighting a Ravaged Village raw dog), I am confident that you have set yourself up for success.
I clearly missed two spots, but I still managed to barely squeak out a kill without dying.

Well, I hope this guide was helpful for you! Sure, the later sections do not go farther in depth, but they only needed to guide you through the toughest obstacles in this chapter. The more you think about my guide, the more you see how these systems feed into each other.
This guide doesn't need to teach you how to farm at neck-level end-game. After all, a skeleton encounter is a guaranteed battle of attrition and RNG. While my set-up can exceed loop 30, I guarantee that you'll be absolutely bored out of your mind. If you take it any slower than I do, your chances of pushing loop lvl 30+ becomes that much higher. Sorry that I didn't take a formal picture of the loot, this particular run ended at 2am (at lvl28) and I was already tired of putting up with these absolutely stupid skeletons. SCREW EM. But nonetheless, the results speak for themselves. Good luck hero, and see you at the top.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free leave them down below! I'll try to answer as many questions if I can... if there are any.