HC zeal necro
This build is and experiment and a work in progress. It meant to be flexible, with the exception of one item, your main weapon. Passion runeword, which gives you the zeal skill. I do not get too specific with armour and weapon tiers as you will see. Feel free to build upon this and make substitutions.
Gear is a follows:
Head: Dream Helm
Body: Fort
Rings: 2x raven frost
Belt: string of ears
Boots: Gore Riders
Amulet: maras
Weapon: Passion runeword (for zeal)
Shield: Stormshield
Switch to CTA and Spirit shield for bo
Charms: Anni, Necro torch, all res small charms and some life small charms
Mercenary
Act 2 mercenary with might aura
Head: Vamp gaze
Body eth fort
weapon: pride runeword polearm (for concentration aura)
could use a1 merc and faith bow as alternate (for fanat aura)
Skill Choice
Since this build only relies on zeal there is a lot of opportunity to experiment. This is what I chose
Max out clay golem and golem mastery and summon resist. Get decrepify curse and lifetap. then dump everything else into corpse explosion. Do not waste stuff on bone armor or its synergies because the chilling armor from fort makes the bone armor disappear.
End result: This was an experiment I tried out on HC Ladder. It was super fun but the biggest problem was damage. Passion runeword just lack damage so I was always relying on merc and corpse explosion to do damage. Another issue is getting the max res. I was able to do this with torch and an anni and a few small charms. but that is expensive. The next problem was surviving. It was nice to be able to use the golem and decrep to slow enemies. Once something died in a mob you could easily clear it out. Bosses are very difficult and so are elite mobs. The necro was a horrible fighter and I nearly died so many times. Hes still alive as of now, but Im gonna respec and try to mess around with different gear. I had shadowplate fort on and all my gear was high defense but it was useless. Getting enough attack rating to successfully hit is another problem. I was at 30% chance to land a hit. As of now I strongly recommend nobody do this.