Blood Lance Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
Last Updated:October 9, 2024|Change Log|FAQ
The Blood Lance Necromancer delivers powerful single-target damage, aiming to melt bosses while using Blood Orbs and the "Lanced" mechanic to create AoE attacks that wipe out entire screens. This build reaches its peak damage through guaranteed Overpower abilities from Blood skills, which also provide built-in tankiness with Fortify. The low Essence cost allows you to continuously cast at single targets, maintaining great DPS, while the "Lanced" mechanic spreads damage across multiple enemies.
The "Lanced" mechanic introduces a unique playstyle in Diablo 4. Each Blood Lance remains in an enemy for 3 seconds, and additional Blood Lance not only hit the original target but also deal damage to all enemies already Lanced.
The Blood Lance Necromancer focuses on stacking Critical Strike Chance and Damage to boost your Overpower hits. When your primary Lance lands a critical hit, all Lanced targets receive that bonus damage. With the ability to apply Vulnerable, the Blood Lance Necromancer can tap into every damage multiplier.
If you're transitioning from the Blood Surge or Blood Lance Necromancer Leveling Guide, this build is easy to respec into.
Key item to obtain in this build is the unique chest piece Mutilator Plate. Even though it is not mandatory to play this, build it is significantly recommended. It can be target farmed from Beast in the Ice boss. This unique chest piece significantly boosts damage and ability to generate Fortify much faster.
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.
Season Theme
Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Blood Lance is the main damage dealer. The "lanced" mechanic works both as a single target and as an AoE. Blood Lance lingers on enemies for 3 seconds, and makes the target “lanced”. Blood lance pierces already lanced targets. Whenever a Blood Lance deals damage, all lanced targets also take that damage. This is where the AoE component comes into play. Grouping enemies with Corpse Tendrils helps significantly when it comes to lancing multiple targets quickly. If enemies are not grouped together, try to aim your Blood Lance at all targets, launching as many targets as possible. This maximizes your damage output.
- Corpse Tendrils, one of the most critical skills you need to use efficiently, to group and pull targets. Additionally Corpse Tendrils is very important in order to generate enough Blood Orbs. Blood Orbs are the engine of Blood Lance Necromancer. They help you Overpower more frequently by activating Rathma's Vigor as well as giving you the essence you need.
- Soulrift, the new darkness ultimate. It provides Barrier, damage multiplier, Vulnerable, and Essence. This ultimate is so powerful. It makes your life so much easier in terms of survivability, utility and even more DPS.
- Decrepify applies powerful Crowd Control(CC) effects that also causes lucky hit processes to reduce cooldown of skills. You run Cursed Aura in most versions of the build. You do not have to cast this manually.
- Corpse Explosion is used as corpse consumption for Grim Harvest, Fueled by Death and Flesh-eater.
- You also use Blight as a core skill but don`t cast it as often. You only use this skill to activate a 20%x passive bonus. You cast this after grouping and pulling enemies using Corpse Tendrils. You also try to keep this on bosses as much as possible.
Skill Rotation
- Blood Lance targets from distance while approaching to agro them.
- Once you are in range you cast Soulrift to start applying vulnerability to targets as well as generating barrier.
- Then you start the damage rotation, casting Blood Lance to start lancing enemies. Lucky hits can also proc Vulnerable as well as Hewed Flesh to generate corpses.
- Once a corpse is available, you cast Corpse Tendrils. It is quite important to cast Corpse Tendrils on cooldown so you can activate Grasping Veins to boost critical strike chance as well as stunning enemies and generating Blood Orbs.
- Blood Orbs helps you gain Essence. The more Blood Orbs you collect by casting blood lance via Gore Quills, the more you activate Rathma's Vigor and Overpower. Overpower gives you another source of Overpower.
- Consuming Blood Orbs decreases the time between guaranteed Overpower procs.
- You continue to spam cast Blood Lance as much as possible and you cast Corpse Tendrils. Make sure to cast Corpse Explosion in between to also proc Flesh-eater, Grim Harvest andFueled by Death.
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 Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers for the Critical Strike Chance bonus, Skeletal Mages - Bone for the massive increase to the Overpower Damage and Golems - Iron for Critical Strike Damage bonus.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Specialization Guide.
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
- Eliminator
- Corporeal
- Essence
- Sacrificial
- Dominate
To Level 46
- Essence
- Dominate
- Eliminator
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
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. Blood Lance Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Ohm gives you access to War Cry - You cast Blood Lance 4.2 times per second once you reach targeted attack speed breakpoint. Based on this, Tam generates 100 offering per second, so it procs Ohm every 6 seconds to proc and it stays active for 6 seconds. It is a free 15% damage multiplier that has 100% uptime.
- Lith + Xal - On this build, you spend a lot of time standing still and casting Blood Lance. Lith generates about 75 offerings every second. The uptime of Xal is 100%. Xal increases maximum life by 20%. As an Overpower build, this increases not only survivability but also damage.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Poc is a decent generator since you spend Essence at all times casting Blood Lance.
- Gar - if you can't to reach 100% crit chance due to gear, this rune can help you get there in the meantime.
- Cir - Another good generator since you cast Blood Lance back to back.
- Zec - Can help you reduce cooldown of Soulrift, especially in the early game.
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 and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
- Hired: Raheir
Raheir offers a ton of survivability from Valiance, and Bastion, as well as CC`ing enemies nearly continuously. They also increase your damage through Inspiration.
- Reinforcement: Aldkin
Varyana adds another layer of CC on demand for the build with Earth Breaker on Blood Lance use.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Blood Lance Necromancer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 100% critical strike chance
- 100% attack speed cap for Cap 1 on gear with at least 56.1% attack speed is the target for Cap 2.
- 100% Chance for Blood Lance to deal Double Damage
- 50%+ Lucky Hit: Chance to Apply Vulnerable
- Armor Capped at 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- >20,000 Life
- >50% Movement Speed
- >50% Corpse Tendrils Size
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Blood Lance 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 Blood Lance 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.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. 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, master working 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.
- Once you cap resistance and armor, focus on Essence sustain and attack speed in the early game. As you gain more paragon levels and improve your gear, the damage will come.
- You might not have the shortest cooldowns early on, hence why you temper Soulrift duration on your gear and Fastblood to maintain Soulrift uptime as much as possible.
- Soulrift helps you keep Vulnerable up on targets as well as generating Essence and Barrier for you.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all 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 Ancestral 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.
- The most important unique item to acquire for you is Mutilator Plate. Once you acquire Mutilator Plate and replace it with your existing chest piece, you can remove skill ranks from Drain Vitality and move them into Death's Approach. Mutilator Plate will provide you the Fortify generation you need.
- Another thing to watch out for is attack speed breakpoints as you improve your gear. By tempering blood attack speed and using Accelerating, you reach 100% attack speed in cap 2 with your ancestral gear. Cap 1 and Cap 2 combined, you aim to reach at 176% attack speed in ancestral setup.
- The armor and res caps might eventually overcap as you progress your paragon, level up your glyphs, and gain access to more nodes. Gear can vary slightly from player to player. Make sure you adjust some masterworking options as you progress through the end game. As you reach the armor cap, you can remove points from Spiked Armor. In addition, you can adjust your affixes by changing your masterworking.
- Another example, as you gain more intelligence from paragon, it increases your resistance, you can change the masterwork on your boots from all resistance to movement speed or corpse tendrils size.
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
- Overall power is greatly enhanced by the Ring of Starless Skies, Helmet of Perdition, and Doombringer. Critical strike chance reaches 100% very easily, tankiness increases, and Essence sustain feels much better than before.
- Due to Rathma's Chosen and blood attack speed tempering being lost since mythic setup replaces those aspect slots with Doombringer and Ring of Starless Skies, it is important to concentrate on other blood attack speed temperings you have for cap 2. You need to make sure the added blood attack speed temperings get you over 56.1% attack speed for cap 2.
This 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
- Speed farming version of this build maintains mostly the same gear as mythic, with an emphasis on Unstoppable and quick movement. You should have no problem surviving in most speed farming content. So you can prioritize masterwork movement speed in general.
- In boots, you replace Cursed Aura withMetamorphosis.
- Also, swap out Lith for Cem rune since most enemies die fairly quickly, so you don`t spend as much time standing still. Through Metamorphosis, you evade quite often remaining unstoppable.
- You put all three skill points into Death's Approach to reach maximum movement speed.
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.
- Make sure to check Attack Speed and Critical Strike Chance caps so that you neither miss out on a breakpoint, or overcap either of these stats.
- Pit pushing setup aims to reach 176% attack speed breakpoint Cap 1 and Cap 2 combined.
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.
What can I do to improve survivability?
What can I do for better Essence recovery?
Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?
Mechanics
How Does Blood Lance Work?
Mutilator Plate
Attack Speed Caps
Stagger
Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)
Video Guide
Coming soon!
Summary
The Blood Lance Necromancer excels at single-target and AoE damage through the unique "Lanced" mechanic, which spreads damage to all lanced enemies. Having access to all damage buckets of critical strike, Vulnerable, Fortify and Overpower makes you dish out massive damage while being extremely tanky!
Utilize Corpse Tendrils for grouping enemies and generating Blood Orbs to fuel essence and activate Rathma's Vigor for Overpower procs. Soulrift adds damage and defense, making it a key skill for survival and DPS in any scenario.
Credits
Written by LordxSaura