Necromancer survivability

[acheronx]

Early game, I don't really have a problem, between Blurred Mortality, at least one soul-based heal (and possibly an escort-based heal), and shielding runes I'm pretty good.

Late game (Orc prides, etc.) though, I just get destroyed, even with 5/5 Lichform and really great inscriptions (At level 35, a shielding rune for 700, a rune of reflection for 700, lighting bolt for 600...)
and gear. Even with 900 some odd health, I get some monster physical crit (Most recently from a Worm That Walks for over 1400 combined damage in one turn) that kills me about once per Pride (which isn't sustainable, obviously.)

What do you do to help your survivability late game?

[HousePet]

I found Vampiric Gift and Blood Splash useful for maintaining life while still dishing out the damage.

[ZyZ]

Early game, I don't really have a problem, between Blurred Mortality, at least one soul-based heal (and possibly an escort-based heal), and shielding runes I'm pretty good.

Late game (Orc prides, etc.) though, I just get destroyed, even with 5/5 Lichform and really great inscriptions (At level 35, a shielding rune for 700, a rune of reflection for 700, lighting bolt for 600...)
and gear. Even with 900 some odd health, I get some monster physical crit (Most recently from a Worm That Walks for over 1400 combined damage in one turn) that kills me about once per Pride (which isn't sustainable, obviously.)

What do you do to help your survivability late game?

In general there are only 2 ways to be insta killed
1) something hits you hard with weapon and you have almost no armor
2) something with high crit multiplier crits you

ALL classes except classes that simply can not use heavy armor (ie brawler) should wear massive armor or have other ways (artifacts, stone warden ego gloves etc) to boost armor hardiness to around 100%. Effective 30 armor early game is safe enough, mid game 70. If you want to simply ignore weapon attacks you will need a bit more than that but the difference is huge especially when most damage comes from damge multipliers and attack itself is not super strong. You can turn 500 dmg shadow hits to 30 dmg hits with relatively small amounts of armor but you should never "tank" beefy war hounds no matter what your armor is.

Crits are in general far more deadly than weapon attacks because usually they come out of nowhere. Ultimate stat to counter crit is crit reduction ("Reduces incoming crit damage: x%"). It will turn most deadly race + class combination attacks to something that you can survive. Every single spell in game (including mobs on madness) can be tanked with ~2K hp when you remove crit multiplier. One shoots are simply not possible when you have shield, hp + blurred mortality and full crit reduction. On the other hand almost all skills that do decent damage will be converted to insta kill spells if you allow mobs to land crit on you. There are quite a few damage multiplier passives that gets out of hand rather quickly (dark ritual, shalore racial, lethality, shadowstrike etc) so simply tanking them without having a way to mitigate 80%+ dmg simply won't work.

[Mordy]

From what I understand, you'd improve your survivability, first by not going Lich which cuts you out from the Heroism Infusions, and second you can use that sacrifice bone giant spell to get a strong shield.

[munch]

It looks like the general consensus on forums is that Sacrifice with some means to reliably maintain it semi-permanently is the main source of necromancer durability.

It requires either Higher race and/or Hidden Resource prodigy.
Not having lots of HP and acquiring some means of heal are also recommended, like Vampiric gift.