Blight Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
The Blight Necromancer Endgame Guide melds the overwhelming power of Darkness Damage Over Time (DoT), with crippling Crowd Control (CC)! Proving that Blight is the ultimate Darkness build for someone looking to absolutely bully the denizens of Hell!
Blight applies damage on hit and a powerful DoT Area of Effect (AoE) pool of oozing miasma. With the addition of the Void aspect, you can literally drag monsters anywhere you want to, giving you complete control over the battlefield.
This build is also great for early progressions since it doesn't require any Unique items to start, and many of its best Legendary Aspects are found in the Codex of Power. Finding stronger Aspects from random drops only pushes the build even further!
In the early game, your Skeletal Minions are a great bonus for utility and Essence management. Later on your sacrifice them for even more power. The Blight Necromancer begins as an undead commander but easily converts, allowing for a smooth progression curve and playstyle.
Build Requirements:
- Ebonpiercer damage drastically overperforms and quickly becomes your primary source of damage. The jump in power when you equip this item is palpable.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Necromancer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Belial's Eye Beams - Deals Corrupting type damage, which we scale naturally on this build with Wither.
Modifiers
- Wandering Death's Chest Beam - Executing non-Bosses vastly improves your clear speed, especially in the Pit.
- Sinerat's Flames - Adds a large multiplier for Shadow damage.
- Andariel's Flaming Skull - Scale DoT damage.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - When speedfarming the Pit, the additional Blisters help to clear Elites/Bosses faster. The additional targets they create also help in triggering Lucky Hit Chance procs.
- Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - When speedfarming, the additional cooldown procs for your Ultimate helps with Soulrift uptime.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Blight deals a small amount of initial damage then leaves behind a pool of defiled AoE damage that stacks on top of any enemies within range.
- Corpse Explosion does not directly contribute to your damage output, but activates multiple buffs for you. Cast this every 5 seconds for maximum benefits!
- Corpse Tendrils Slows, Stuns, makes Blood Orbs and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes more effective.
- Soulrift grants Barrier, generates Essence, applies Vulnerable and grants a Damage buff over its duration. Cast this whenever it's available.
- Decrepify Slows, reduces incoming damage, Stuns and reduces your Cooldowns via Lucky Hit mechanics. Cursed Aura automatically spreads this AND Iron Maiden onto monsters within range.
- Blood Mist is your source of Unstoppable, as well as an amazing survivability tool since it grants Immune for its duration.
- Sever is used as a mobility skill with the addition of the Aspect Inexorable Reaper's.
Skill Rotation
- Cast Sever with Inexorable Reaper's to quickly engage onto a pack of monsters, bringing them into the radius of your Cursed Aura, automatically applying Decrepify and Iron Maiden.
- If you don't have Cursed Aura yet, keep Decrepify on your Skillbar and engage packs of enemies by casting this first.
- Begin casting Blight into the pack where your extra projectiles from Ebonpiercer can shotgun and pierce through the maximum number of targets. While continuously casting this Skill, clicking any other Skill's button will "weave" it into your rotation. This is known of Skill Buffering and helps to reduce the total animation length of your attacks. This is a great way to cast Corpse Explosion every 5 seconds to maintain your buff uptime.
- Immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on the first Corpse generated to Crowd Control everything. This helps to reduce incoming damage and allows you to maximize your DPS windows.
- When still using Void, this effect will act in the same way. You can effectively bully packs of enemies by dragging them back and forth while moving towards the next pack. Once you're well experienced with the build, you know when the remaining DoT on the ground can clear off monsters. So you can start moving on before they've even died.
- Whenever it's off Cooldown AND you're engaging a monster pack, use Soulrift. It's only effective as long as enemies are within range, so don't be afraid to stay in close and personal!
- Stagger-stepping through the pack of enemies to pick up any Blood Orbs helps to maintain your bonuses from the Paragon Board. Maintaining the buff only requires you to pick one up before five seconds has elapsed.
- When in doubt Blood Mist out! Reposition and end the Mist early by clicking the Skill again, once you're ready to re-engage. A great tactic is to generate a Corpse during this time then immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on it for more safety.
- Sever through packs if you're standing on dangerous AoE or On-Death effects to efficiently maneuver through fights. Then use it to quickly move onto the next pack or objective.
Book of the Dead
While the Blight Necromancer benefits from having an active army of Skeletons at your disposal early on, in the endgame you Sacrifice them for even more power. Skeletal Warriors - Reapers adds Shadow Damage, Skeletal Mages - Cold adds Vulnerable Damage and Golems - Bone helps to reach the maximum Attack Speed Breakpoint
- If you're feeling squishy or playing on Hardcore, sacrificing Golems - Blood for Maximum Life and Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for Resistances are great ways to beef up your survivability.
- The Mythic Setup gets to use Golems - Blood because of the Attack Speed on Ring of Starless Skies.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Necromancer Class Overview.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Abyssal
- Scourge
- Eliminator
- Sacrificial
- Gravekeeper
To Level 46
- Gravekeeper
- Abyssal
- Scourge
- Eliminator
- Sacrificial
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Blight Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Ahu + Qax - Once enemies fall below 80% max life, the proc rate of Qax allows for overlapping periods of double damage.
- Igni + Ohm - The bonus damage from this alone is still great to use and allows you to time out your DPS burst windows by selectively triggering it after avoiding damage or boss mechanics.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cem OR Yax OR Moni + Lum - Helps to "passively" generate Essence during many scenarios where you cannot otherwise generate Resource and helps to reduce you time spent using Generators or alternative systems.
- Mot for damage reduction, Zec for better Soulrift uptime, and Qua for movement speed are all great options to fit your particular playstyle.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees. You can have one Hired Mercenary that accompanies you into battle, and one Reinforcement Mercenary that triggers a selected Skill from their Tree based on your Skill use or other conditional event:
Hired: Subo
When Subo applies his Molotov to an enemy, they take increased Damage Over Time for its duration.
Reinforcement: Varyana
Varyana quickly applies damage procs to trigger Abhorrent Decrepify and reduce your cooldowns, even against a single target.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Sever Necromancer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed etc. have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that progression step.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 100% Chance for Blight Projectiles to Cast Twice
- 93.7% Attack Speed from Gear, Golems - Bone Sacrifice and Paragon Nodes
- Maximum Damage on Ebonpiercer Unique Aspect
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 75%
- >10,000 Life
- >50% Movement Speed
- >50% Corpse Tendrils Size
- >30% Soulrift Duration
- 8+ Essence Per Second on Gear
- Lucky Hit: 15% Chance to Restore ~100% Primary Resource
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Blight Necromancer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Blight Necromancer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
Begin here if you just made it into Torment 1 or are coming from our Leveling Guide! Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats. Disobedience helps with this.
- If you find a Slow 2-Handed Weapon (Mace, Scythe) with great stats on it, don't be afraid to use it until you find a good 2-Handed Axe. The Slower attack speed makes Essence Management easier and you hit harder each time.
- Reaching a high value for Essence Per Second and high Attack Speed are your primary offensive concerns. The more Skill Ranks for Blight on Gloves and Passives on your Amulet also help.
- If you do not have Cursed Aura yet, make sure to keep Decrepify on your Skill bar and don't waste time with Inexorable Reaper's just yet. This also allows you to proc Affliction for free, as long as the enemy is Vulnerable. This is a great way to clear out trash monsters or minimize DPS loss while you're generating Resource.
- Cooldown Reduction on your Helmet helps with better uptime of Grasping Veins as well as Soulrift. Try to time your damage bursts during these timers and focus on resetting their cooldown with Decrepify whenever possible. Dont cast Soulrift until you have to, so it's up during dangerous combat scenarios.
- Depending on how much Essence Per Second you have on gear, tempering Resource Generation can outperform Resource Cost Reduction on your Jewelry. You want Resource Cost Reduction for the Ancestral setup coming next, but you can optimize this way if you're willing to re-temper later on with better gear.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestral Legendaries, Paragon points, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Ebonpiercer drastically improves your damage output, because everything that scales Blight's damage tends to scale the extra bolts' damage as well. These bolts shotgun, so they can all hit the same target, as well as pierce. Pulling everything together with Void or Corpse Tendrils allows you to stack every bolt's damage onto multiple targets.
- One of the weird side effects of using Ebonpiercer is that the base damage of Blight becomes a bit inconsequential. There's not much to be done about this, it's just a fact.
- At this point you may have Blood Begets Blood activated in your Paragon Boards. Try to pick up one of the Blood Orbs created by Corpse Tendrils within the 5 second window of the buff to maintain its full stacks.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Shroud of False Death offers a ridiculous amount of damage and utility. It's by far, the strongest Chest Armor in the game. As an alternative, Tyrael's Might makes it much easier to survive while hitting Resistance caps and movement speed cap.
- Heir of Perdition adds another damage multiplier that further scales Ebonpiercer's damage.
- While Mythics can often fully transform a build, they merely empower Blight Necromancer. Remember to recheck Movement Speed cap, and your Armor/Resistances so you're not wasting Greater Affixes of Masterwork Crits on your other gear pieces.
The Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- Make sure that you're at the Movement Speed cap even without activating Reaper's Pursuit. This is easy to accomplish with the two Mythics the build wants to use.
- Bac + Zec gives better uptime on Soulrift considering most monster die too quickly to trigger Decrepify often enough.
- Igni + Jah offer use of the skill Teleport every few seconds to blast even faster.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your DPS decreases significantly when you're dodging their attacks.
- This setup is HYPER optimized, meaning that every recommended Greater Affix and Masterwork Crit is tailored to hit the exact caps that are necessary. This allows you to swap more Masterwork Crits to + Ranks on Skills and other damage increases. While you may not see a difference at lower tier content, these changes make the differences between highest possible Pit Tier clears.
- Crown of Lucion offers an even larger increase in damage, while also granting Cooldown Reduction to make uptime on Soulrift easier to manage against a single target.
- Adding Sever back onto the bar in place of Blood Mist gets you the largest total damage bonus from Reaper's Pursuit that is possible. This does mean you have to get comfortable with surviving through Crowd Control OR you can add Metamorphosis to your boots to gain Unstoppable by dashing.
- Make sure to check your Attack Speed so that you don't miss out on a breakpoint, or overcap.
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Umbral
Each unique Crowd Control effect that you inflict upon enemies triggers this aspect and generates Essence. Corpse Tendrils, Decrepify and Crippling Darkness all apply CC when used or activated. You can layer these abilities as well.
- Corpse Tendrils initially Slows, then it Pulls and Stuns. This is 3 instances of CC on every target. BUT after the Pull, the Slow is removed from the target, so you're able to re-Slow with Decrepify for another free CC proc.
Essence per Second and Resource Cost Reduction
Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Resource Cost Reduction reduces the cost of every skill by a percentage equal to the total on your gear. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second. To completely replace the Essence loss of 1 cast per second you need 40% Resource Cost Reduction. This would allow you to go "infinite", meaning you would never run out of Essence. When casting your skills more than once per second, you need more of both stat to achieve this equilibrium.
Exposed Flesh/Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primary Resource
The Aspect gives Essence on Lucky Hit for any enemy you hit that is Vulnerable. The Lucky Hit Chance Temper works on a target regardless of Vulnerable Status. This makes the vast majority of your Essence gain automatic.
Grim Harvest
Whenever you consume a corpse via Corpse Explosion, Raise Skeleton or Aspect of Explosive Mist you generate Essence with this passive. You get to recoup resources while applying DPS. It's a great two for one!
Abhorrent Decrepify
With your multiple sources of overlapping Damage Over Time (DoT) effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of CC'ed enemies so your Skills hit as many targets as possible, with as many damage instances as possible.
Blight has two damage components. Its initial damage component is an Instance of damage, meaning it can Critically Strike and Overpower. Since this build doesn't scale those damage types, you can completely ignore them. It still counts as a Darkness Skill applying Shadow Damage for any system that requires those things. The second damage component is the DoT AoE pool that's left under the first target hit by your projectile. This is the meat and potatoes of your scalable damage. These pools can stack infinitely and the only limiting factor is your Attack Speed and resource generation.
Ebonpiercer works slightly differently, in that its bolts can pierce (apply damage to multiple targets in a line) and shotgun (all of the bolts that hit a target can apply their damage to them). They also apply a DoT to the target itself rather than an AoE DoT effect. The difference is that monsters walking on top of d4-skill id=481293]Blight's[/d4-skill] pool begin taking damage even if they weren't there initially.
Damage Over Time is applied to a target twice per second, over its duration. So the damage of Blight per tic (two tics to a second) is its DoT damage portion divided by twelve, because it deals its damage over six seconds.
Blight contributes 7% to your total damage output on this build, due to how strong Ebonpiercer;s effect is. Even with 24 Ranks in the skill, it only bumps up to 10% of your total damage output. Because of this, wasting Affixes, Greater Affixes and Masterwork Crits on those affixes does not benefit the build as much as alternatives would.
Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:
- Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
- Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
- Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life. Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for Resistances.
- Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
- Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
Mechanics
- While the mechanics are signifantly more nuanced than this, and many things in game slightly obfuscate the truth, understanding Lucky Hit Chance is fairly simple.
- With Advanced Tooltips activated in your Gameplay Settings, you can see a Skill's innate LHC.
- Not every Skill has a LHC even though things may cause those Skills to deal damage.
- A Skill must apply damage to a target to have a chance to trigger LHC.
- LHC effects do not have LHC and can't trigger other LHC effects.
- Skills check for LHC EVERY time they deal damage to ANY targets. There's no limit or "one per cast" mechanics.
- To calculate the chance of triggering something, you take your Skill's LHC, multiply that by (1 + (Total Bonus Lucky Hit Chance / 100)) and then multiply that by the Effect's LHC.
- Blight has an innate LHC of 40%.
- HUGE CAVEAT HERE: Damage over Time effects show an expected chance of applying Lucky Hit Chance over the total length of the Skill's duration, at least once, to a single target. So Blight is "lying" a little bit. Its chance of applying Lucky Hit with the initial damage is 22.54% and each damage tic has a 2.11% chance.
- The Mythic Variant gets 52.1% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
- So the equation is 22.54% * (1 + (52.1/100)) * 15% = 5.14% chance to trigger for the initial damage, and 2.11% * (1 + (52.1/100)) * 15% = .481%. But it hits the target a total of twelve times with its tic, so the total chance to trigger it once per cast is (100% - (100% - 5.14%)) + (100% - (100% - .481%)^12) = 6.13%.
- This seems low but you can stacks pools, which can all deal their damage simultaneously and drastically increase your chance of proccing something once per second.
- With the ability to bast Blight 2.6 times per second, by the end of the first six seconds you have stacked 14.6 effects, bringing your chance of triggering Decrepify once per second up to 89.5%.
- Blight has an innate LHC of 40%.
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
- While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Necromancers, these two caps include:
Cap 1
- Attack Speed on Gear
- Attack Speed from Paragon Nodes
- Elixirs
- Kalan's Edict for Minions
- Golems - Bone Sacrifice
- Moonrise
- Artillery Shrine
Cap 2
- Accelerating
- Rapid
- Rathma's Chosen
- Reap
- Blood Lance
- Hemorrhage
- Howl from Below for Corpse Skills
- Blood Attack Speed Temper
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.
Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:
- After 1st Stagger: 20%
- After 2nd Stagger: 40%
- After 3rd Stagger: 60%
- After 4th Stagger: 90%
Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.
Summary
The Blight Necromancer covers the world in a darkness that few demons can survive. It's a DoT build that loves Attack Speed, moving fast, and even has access to one of the few mobility skills the Necromancer has. Whether you play it super layed back, or tryhard, this build performs!
In Bocca al Lupo!
Credits
Written by MacroBioBoi