Turns out my build had a crippling flaw: Minion and mercenary damage do not contribute to the Shadowblight passive. I have no idea why I thought they did since the tooltip clearly omits them.
Changes to address that were:
- Skeletal Mages switched to Cold and sacrificed.
- Aldkin and Varyana swapped for Varyana (Attack Speed) and Raheir (Unstoppable on Impairment)
- Greaves of the Empty Tomb swapped for Ebonpiercer and Empowering Reaper swapped for Conceited.
- NaguVex runeword swapped for NeoGar.
- 6 points taken out of the Sever tree and added to Stand Alone and Memento Mori.
- 3 points out of Imperfectly Balanced and into Hewed Flesh, Necrotic Carapace, and Blight.
- 1 point removed from Enhanced Reap and added to Decompose.
- Control, Scent of Death/Darkness, and Bloodbath/Territorial swapped for Abyssal, Scent of Death/Control, and Bloodbath/Darkness.
- Chaos Unleashed & Decimating Desecration swapped to A Beast Cornered & Marred Guard.
My damage has now shot into the stratosphere while the playstyle has remained the same (just spamming Blight instead of Sever) and all challenges except the “Kill Lilith in T4 difficulty” have been cleared. Not sure if I’m going to stick with A Beast Cornered though since I don’t like having to keep using potions when there aren’t any trash mobs around to leech off of.