The Blood Lance Necromancer is primed to receive the biggest buff of any build, with the Patch 1.2 rework to Overpower! By harnessing the power it has available, this Necro is able to output TONS of damage! On top of being the Tankiest Necromancer build!
Blood Lance is an incredibly versatile skill. Its cheap Essence cost means you can spam cast at single targets and output great DPS while the "Lanced" mechanic helps to easily spread your damage across the battlefield. The passive benefit of stacking Maximum Life bonuses and Fortify means we get damage for free, while building an unstoppable tank!
The build always benefitted from some interesting interactions with Critical Strike Chance, but now Crit damage helps to scale our Overpower damage even further!
If you've been holding off from trying a Blood Necromancer build because of how unintuitive it was before, then the time is finally right for you to dive right in!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Blood Surge Necromancer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Necromancer play style, check out all of our Necromancer Guides.
Super Tanky ✔
Unique Play Style ✔
Fast Paced Gameplay ✔
Great For Nightmare Dungeons ✔
❌ High APM
❌ Complex Skill Rotation
❌ Incredibly Gear Dependent
❌ Unintuitive Mechanics And Stats
Season 2 - Season of Blood
Diablo 4 Season 2 introduces a new questline to hunt down the Shadow Vampire forces of Lord Zir across Sanctuary. With Lilith's blood still residing within our bodies, the infliction put upon us is harnessed throughout our leveling, granting access to new Vampiric Powers. Completing the seasonal questline, partaking in the seasonal Blood Harvest event and collecting Potent Blood are the main ways of obtaining and empowering these abilities. Check out the full Season 2 Guide from Chewingnom to learn more!
How it works
- There are 22 Vampiric Powers, separated into 2 different types:
- 15 Minor Vampiric Powers - Require 1 to 3 Pacts to be activated.
- 7 Major Vampiric Powers - Require 6 Pacts to be activated.
- There are 3 different types of Pacts:
- Ferocity Pact
have a Crown icon. - Divinity Pacts
have a Chalice icon. - Eternity Pacts
have a Skull icon.
- Ferocity Pact
- Pacts can roll only on Armor pieces (Helm, Chest Armor, Gloves, Pants, Boots).
- You can apply a total of 20 pacts across your gear pieces.
- You can use Cleansing Acid - All to remove all Pacts from a piece of Armor and place new Standalone Pacts to meet your Powers requirements to activate. Cleansing Acid can be altered at the Alchemists to target 1 of the 3 Pacts only.
- Once you have equipped the right Pact Armor pieces, you can activate Vampiric Powers in the Sanguine Circle through the character screen. Powers require varying amounts of different types of Pacts, pay attention.
- You can use Potent Blood acquired from Blood Seekers to upgrade your Vampiric Powers from Level 1 to Level 3.
With this in mind, let's look at the top 5 best Vampiric Powers and how they impact this build:
Best-in-Slot Vampiric Powers
- Ravenous (Minor) - Increases our attack speed significantly.
- Prey on the Weak (Minor) - Increases Vulnerable damage and applies that status when an enemy has a Vampiric Curse.
- Moonrise (Major) - Adds additional Attack Speed and Movement Speed to maximize your Late Game clear speed.
- Sanguine Brace (Minor) - More Fortify and large Critical Strike Chance bonus.
- Metamorphosis (Major) - Grants Unstoppable when you Evade, deals damage and applies Vampiric Curse to enermies in your path.
Alternative Vampiric Powers
- Hemomancy (Minor) - Applies AoE damage to the whole screen, and heals you considerably. Fantastic tool while progressing and Speedfarming.
- Undying (Minor) - Used with Temerity to create "infinite" Barrier.
- Feed the Coven (Minor) - Used on a Starter version of the build when still relying on Minions for Essence managment.
- Blood Boil (Major) - Add a guaranteed Overpower trigger, more important in the early game.
Skill Tree
Active Skills
- Hemorrhage has incredibly high Essence generation due to its bonus Attack Speed and allows you to spawn a ton of Blood Orbs to trigger various benefits.
- Blood Lance pierces through targets, applying its damage every time it hits a new enemy, to all Lanced enemies. This also applies to our Overpower Damage!
- Blood Mist is our get out of jail free card and a great mobility option later on with specific Aspects.
- Decrepify Slows, reduces incoming damage, Stuns and reduces our Cooldowns via Lucky Hit mechanics.
- Corpse Tendrils is the best total CC option in the game and also spawns a ton of Blood Orbs to trigger various benefits.
- Bone Storm gives you a reliable source of Barrier to make the most out of our Fortified status, as well as additional Damage Reduction.
Passives
- Rathma's Vigor gives you another source of Overpower procs every 12 seconds. Healing with Blood Orbs decreases the time between OP procs.
- Drain Vitality allows you to quickly stack Fortify to increase your Overpower Damage output as well as decrease incoming damage.
- Transfusion sadly does not perform well enough at any stage of the game to increase our effectiveness so you opt out of using it.
Book of the Dead
There are 3 different Minion types you can choose to summon or sacrifice, located in the Book of the Dead. The Blood Lance Necromancer chooses to sacrifice Skirmishers for the Critical Strike Chance bonus, Bone Mages for the MASSIVE increase to Overpower Damage and Iron Golem for Critical Strike Damage bonus.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specialization in our full Book of the Dead Guide.
Paragon Board
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Dominate
- NOTE: This Glyph needs to be leveled to 15 to be functional and is your priority while progressing in WT3 and 4. This Glyph starts on Blood Begets Blood and moves to Scent of Death after.
- Corporeal
- Territorial
- Control
- Blood-drinker
- NOTE: This Glyph is not used in the final "Min-Maxed" board since we eventually transition away from using Blood Orbs for Fortify.
- Essence
- NOTE: This Glyph is not used until you transition to the "Min-Maxed" board setup in the Late Endgame Variant. Make sure to reach Rank 15 before respeccing.
Level 21
- Dominate
- Corporeal
- Territorial
- Control
- Essence
Note: With the release of Abattoir of Zir and after acquiring the new Tears of Blood (TEMP) glyph we have to change our usual Paragon Board setup. To do this check out the Abattoir of Zir (AoZ) endgame variant below.
There are a total of 225 Paragon Points. Starting with level 50 you gain 4 Paragon Points per level, plus 20 from Renown, and 4 from Altars of Lilith.
Gameplay
Blood Lance Necromancer has a simple game plan: Fire as many lances into packs of enemies as fast as physically possible. This build uses a selection of Skills that help to minimize any threats to your survivability, so you can spend as much time spamming lances as humanly possible.
Skill Usage/Rotation
- Initiate with Decrepify to start, so you don't miss any CD reduction procs. This also greatly reduces incoming damage and makes kiting monsters easier.
- Rathma's Vigor ticks up every second that you are Healthy. You can use guaranteed OP proc on Blood Mist and Hemorrhage. Pay attention to your buffs and counters to not waste any procs on low value attacks.
- Once a Corpse is formed, cast Corpse Tendrils on it and use Evade to make space between you and any threats while the Tendrils pull mobs into range.
- The increase to Critical Strike Damage from Tendrils actually applies to your Overpower Damage when you successfully Crit. Make sure to wait for the Tendrils to actually Pull, since that's when you have the full benefits of the Aspect.
- Blood Lance until you run out of Essence, or every enemy is dead. When needed, recast Corpse Tendrils and Decrepify.
- Ideally you leave every fight with a few casts already counted towards your next OP, so you can guarantee an Overpower earlier into the next fight.
- Use Hemorrhage to regain Essence against Bosses and tankier Elite enemies. Make sure to pick up any Blood Orbs to give it an AoE effect, which generates Essence for each target hit. This is incredibly important for Bosses with adds, as well.
- Make sure to target a monster that is within the same range as high-value or high-threat targets. Focus any Damage Resistance Aura monsters, Elites or enemies that apply powerful Crowd Control effects. Neutralizing threats in scenarios where the pack isn't cleared out from the initial spam.
- When CC'ed or in a dangerous situation, use Blood Mist to get out of harms way and reposition yourself to gain an advantage. It's often safest to go into Blood Mist while waiting for Corpse Tendrils to finish pulling enemies together.
- Your lances are able to pierce already lanced targets. Whenever a lance deals damage, all lanced targets also take that damage. If you don't currently have enemis grouped up nicely, try to aim lances to maximize the number of pierce-able targets and aim for new targets whenever possible.
- Bone Storm is used in two key scenarios: 1. Engaging on dangerous monster types, to minimize incoming damage. 2. Initiating fights against bosses to maximize damage output and minimize the need to avoid fight mechanics, to maintain a continuous flow of damage and Essence management. In certain Speedfarming and gear setup swaps, Bone Storm is effectively active 100% of the time, or whenever it is needed for the two above scenarios.
Resource Management
One of the most important parts of your endgame journey is acquiring enough Essence to destroy your enemies. Having a grasp of the essentials of how your Essence works is key to your progression. There are many ways of generating resources, but below are some of the most important and relevant ones for the Necromancer.
Hemorrhage
Hemorrhage is a fantastic tool for quickly generating Essence, at range, against single or small groups of enemies. It naturally gains Attack Speed when you are Healthy, and picking up a Blood Orb causes it to damage enemies in an area. Every target hit generates more Essence.
Resource Aspect of Potent Blood
With the addition of Aspect of Gore Quills, our ability to quickly consume Blood Orbs has become infinitely easier. You're able to reliably "consume" all Orbs on the ground mid fight and this helps to keep you topped off for longer.
- Hemorrhage
- Blood Lance
- Blighted Corpse Tendrils
Resource Aspect of the Umbral
Each Crowd Control effect that you inflict upon enemies triggers this aspect. This means that you can stack multiple different Crowd Control Effects in order to get incredible Essence generation. You need to find a 4 Resource version of it from a drop. Try to gamble rings at the Purveyor of Curiosities to get this item. Important effects that can trigger the Resource Aspect of the Umbral include:
- Corpse Tendrils Slow, Stun, Pull
- Decrepify Slow
Endgame Gear & Skill Progression
When you start diving into the Endgame Blood Lance Necromancer build, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Aspect of Potent Blood Betrayer's Row - Dry Steppes
- Aspect of the Umbral Champion's Demise - Dry Steppes
- Blood Seeker's Aspect Mercy's Reach - Fractured Peaks
- Offensive Aspect of Grasping Veins Corrupted Grotto - Kehjistan
- Aspect of Disobedience Halls of the Damned - Kehjistan
- Ghostwalker Aspect Broken Bulwark - Scosglen
- Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
- Aspect of Gore Quills: The best option for automating the Blood Lance engine by auto-consuming Blood Orbs
- Aspect of Hungry Blood: Causes your Blood Lance to always cast a free Lance at a new target, if you hit a Lanced target. Worse than Gore Quills in most scenarios but still strong for speed farming.
- Aspect of Shielding Storm: Powerful source of Barrier for dangerous fights.
- Aspect of Rathma’s Chosen: Grants Attack Speed after we successfully Overpower.
- Find the following Unique items by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides and Endgame Bosses. Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!
- Temerity: Amazing survivability tool that can replace any Legendary pants you may have. Requires you to prioritize overhealing significantly to maintain the Barrier.
- Tibault's Will: Phenomenal Speedfarming and Bossing setup pants for added damage multipliers with Resource generation built in. Lacks survivability stats for pushing high NM Dungeons.
- Blood Moon Breeches: Powerful Boss Killing pants with the highest total damage multiplier as well as decent survivability stats.
- Banished Lord's Talisman: Rewards building into Critical Strike Chance and adds the highest total damage multipliers for an Amulet. Great for pushing high NM Dungeons. Not as valuable for speedfarming, as the damage tends to be overkill.
- Lidless Wall: Interesting option for Speedfarming as well as NM Dungeon pushing. Offers good damage and survivability while reducing the ease of play by sacrificing an Offensive Aspect.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the Blood Lance Necromancer's next progression point.
Gear
Coming from World Tier 2, you can already have a good array of Legendary Aspects imprinted on key gear pieces to help smooth out gameplay and set you up for success.
- Aspect of Gore Quills activates this build entirely. IF you have not found it on then you use Blood Seeker's Aspect as a weak alternative.
- IF you're not lucky enough to find Aspect of Gore Quills but do find Aspect of Hungry Blood, it is a suitable replacement.
- Offensive Aspect of Grasping Veins on your Weapon gives a massive amount of Critical Strike Chance and a decent damage multiplier.
- Ghostwalker Aspect is the only reliable movement speed boosting Aspect we can employ at this early stage. You can quickly spam Blood Mist on then off to gain 10% Movement Speed for 4 seconds.
- Aspect of Potent Blood helps to manage Essence and naturally synergizes with Blood Lance and Hemorrhage.
- Make sure to upgrade your Weapon, Boots and Amulet at least 3 times to help buff high-priority stats.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
The answer to many questions can be found in the following section.
Build Scaling
Learn all you need to know about how to scale the Blood Lance Necromancer in the endgame.
- Overpower: Reads your current Life and Fortify value to calculate its bonus damage. So stacking Maximum Life and Fortify Generation are keys to outputting your maximum damage, in addition to the additive Overpower Damage on gear and in the Paragon boards.
- Crowd Controls: CC'ing monsters and Pulling them becomes a direct damage scaler. Not only does it maximize our paragon board bonuses, but it also grants us more time to apply more attacks before Overpower procs.
- Attack Speed: Increased Attack Speed increases the rate we generate Essence, by reducing the animation length on our generators. It decreases the length of time before Tendrils is on the field and how quickly we can spam cast Blood Lance. It's arguably the highest value stat on our gear and Paragon after Maximum Life.
- Critical Strike/Vulnerable: Activating the base 1.5 and 1.2 multipliers from these sources is already powerful enough. The build also has a few multipliers that rely on meeting these requirements to activate.
Stat Priorities & Gear Options
There are many stats and status effects that generate on gear, but many are not important for your build. Some stats may block others from rolling or only appear on certain gear slots. See below for a general breakdown as well as a per slot priority list in the list.
Put in the following Gems into your gear:
- Helmet / Body Armor / Pants: Royal Ruby
- Weapon / Off-Hand: Royal Ruby
- Jewelry: Royal Diamond
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Crafted Elixirs: Heady Crushing Elixir for bonus Overpower damage.
- Type I Incense: Sage's Whisper
- Type II Incense: Soothing Spices to cap Resistances or Reddamine Buzz for Maximum Life.
- Type III Incense: Chorus of War
Refer to the table below to see the best rolls for every slot ranked in order of importance:
| SLOT | ASPECT | STAT PRIORITY |
| Weapon (1-Handed Sword) | Aspect of Gore Quills | 1. Overpower Damage 2. Core Skill Damage 3. Intelligence 4. All Stats 5. Damage to Close Enemies |
| Offhand (Focus) | Aspect of Hungry Blood | 1. Critical Strike Chance 2. Essence Cost Reduction 3. Cooldown Reduction 4. Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primary Resource |
| Weapon (2-Handed Sword) | Aspect of Gore Quills | 1. Overpower Damage 2. Core Skill Damage 3. Intelligence 4. All Stats 5. Damage to Close Enemies |
| Helm | Aspect of Disobedience | 1. Maximum Life 2. Total Armor 3. Cooldown Reduction 4. Basic Attack Speed 5. +xx Ranks to Decrepify |
| Chest | Aspect of Might | 1. Maximum Life 2. % Total Armor 3. Damage Reduction from Close Enemies 4. Damage Reduction 5. Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies |
| Gloves | Aspect of Grasping Veins | 1. +xx Ranks to Blood Lance 2. Overpower Damage 3. Attack Speed 4. Critical Strike Chance 5. Lucky Hit: Up to a 5% Chance to Restore xx% Primary Resource 6. Lucky Hit Chance |
| Pants | Aspect of Shielding Storm OR Temerity | Implicit: Potion Grants Barrier 1. Maximum Life 2. % Total Armor 3. Damage Reduction from Close Enemies 4. Damage Reduction 5. Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies |
| Boots | Ghostwalker Mobility Aspect | Implicit: Max Evade Charges 1. Movement Speed 2. Essence Cost Reduction 3. +xx Ranks to Corpse Tendrils 4. All Stats 5. Dodge Chance |
| Amulet | Aspect of Rathma’s Chosen | 1. Essence Cost Reduction 2. +xx Ranks to Tides of Blood Passive 3. Movement Speed 4. % Total Armor 5. Damage Reduction (Any Relevant Options) 6. Cooldown Reduction |
| Ring 1 | Aspect of Potent Blood | 1. Maximum Life 2. Overpower Damage 3. Critical Strike Chance 4. Damage (Physical, Damage to Close) 5. Lucky Hit Chance |
| Ring 2 | Sacrificial Aspect | 1. Maximum Life 2. Overpower Damage 3. Critical Strike Chance 4. Damage (Physical, Damage to Close) 5. Lucky Hit Chance |
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate the Blood Lance Necromancer through potentially dangerous situations:
- This build already prioritizes survivability above other stats on the majority of your gear. Make sure to ignore Damage affixes on your Amulet for more Damage Reduction options.
- Use of a Shield instead of an Focus with Maximum Life, Damage Reduction and All Resistance can greatly increase your survivability. Use any recommended Defensive Aspect not currently on your build or add Aspect of the Protector/Protecting Aspect.
- Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for All Resistances, until you are capped via other sources.
- In the Paragon Boards, select additional Armor Nodes in Rare clusters whenever possible.
- Only farm Nightmare Dungeon content that's 1-5 Levels above your Character until you're comfortable farming higher difficulty content.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Level 100 Endgame Variants
You can optimize your build further for certain endgame activities, such as Speedfarming, Nightmare Dungeon Pushing, etc. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to achieve the best results in them.
The Speedfarming Blood Lance Necromancer makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons. All Level 100 Endgame Variants use the "Late Endgame Min-Maxed Paragon Boards".
Setup
- Swapping to Blood-soaked Aspect grants us a much higher bonus Movement Speed while in Blood Mist and turns it into a legitimate mobility option.
- Tibault's Will not only increases our total damage output, but grants 50 Essence whenever you gain Unstoppable. This is activated from Blood Mist as well as Evading with Metamorphosis .
Swap your Golem Sacrifice to Golems - Bone for more Attack Speed.
Vampiric Powers
Using Undying effectively removes any concerns about your survivability and lets you focus on outputting damage and effiency.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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.
How Does Overpower Work?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Blood Lance
Video Guide
Hungry for more Guides?
Necromancer Guides
Summary
The Blood Lance Necromancer is incredibly nuanced and rewards the player for learning as much as you can about Overpower mechanics and how to maximize total enemies Lanced at any given time. Its natural tankiness makes it a great option for Nightmare Dungeon pushing and Hardcore play throughs.
- Blood Lance lingers in a target and deals its total damage to every target Lanced when a new Lance hits a target.
- Overpower has been drastically overhauled in Patch 1.2! It finally plays well with other damage scalers like Critical Strike and Vulnerable.
- Aspect of Gore Quills allows you to "consume" Blood Orbs while spamming Blood Lance, triggering every benefit you normally get from manually retrieving them. Along with Aspect of Hungry Blood, your ability to propagate Lances into every enemy on the screen drastically increases your clear speed.
- Practice makes perfect! Don't be afraid to run slightly easier content of Nightmare Dungeons to get the flow of the gameplay loop.
- In Bocca al Lupo!
Credits
Maintained by Chronikz
Originally Written by MacroBioBoi
Reviewed by Facefoot, Echohack
