Blood Lance Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
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.
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
Grigoire's Lightning Square - Easy activation as you spam Blood Lance to activate Boss modifiers to provide more damage and utility.
Modifiers
Wandering Death's Chest Beam - This power as a modifier provides a very valuable execute. It can boost clear speed significantly while pushing pits.
Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - This power as a modifier also provides more multipliers since you make monsters vulnerable at all times.
Lilith's Wind of Hate - As a modifier, this power creates blisters. More blisters mean more targets which leads to more cooldown reduction through Lucky Hit procs on Decrepify. But more importantly this is quite important to active "lanced" mechanic via always having multiple targets to benefit from Blood Seeker's even more. In early Pits, it can also help as a DPS support by dealing damage based on a percentage of monster life.
Alternate Boss Powers
Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Build has almost 100% uptime vulnerability on targets. This power gives flat damage multiplier at all times. To boost the multiplier of this boss power you need to temper crowd control duration on pieces of gear.
Lord Zir's Blood Pool - Created pools tested to be procing lucky hits very effectively.
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.
- Reap is helpful to gain attack speed at times and by being slotted on the skill bar, it increases your damage and movement speed via Reaper's Pursuit.
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.
- When you group enemies, cast Supernatural Blight to activate 20%x damage multiplier as much as possible get an additional damage boost.
- 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 - Defenders for maximum resistances, Skeletal Mages - Bone for the massive increase to the Overpower Damage and Golems - Iron for Critical Strike Damage bonus.
During the early game, you can sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers to reach 100% critical strike chance, especially if the survivability is not an issue through early torment difficulties.
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.
Blood Lance Necromancer Endgame Paragon
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
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. Blood Lance Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Ahu + Xan - This combination is extremely powerful. Blood Lance has a very high lucky hit chance, and once monsters are below 80% life, this rune generates a significant amount of offering with density. This will keep Xan rune active almost all the time making each hit guaranteed overpower, significantly boosting your damage.
- Igni + Xal - Igni is a great generator, it constantly stores offering and you gain that offering when you cast any ability. And it will activate the Xal. 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.
- Ohm - It gives you access to War Cry
- 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.
- Wat - Great at auto cursing targets as well as executing them when they are at low health.
- Bac - Great option for the speed farming variant as you focus more on mobility, moving fast activates this rune quite frequently.
- Jah - Great for speed farming to access teleport to boost your mobility.
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: Subo
Provides great visibility of the map, showing where the monsters are. This is also highly important when pushing pits. It also provides damage multipliers.
- Reinforcement: Raheir
You choose Bastion. It provides you damage mitigation and unstoppable.
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. 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, 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
- To cast blood lance at 13 frames you aim to reach 176% combined attack speed Cap 1 and Cap 2.
- You cast blood lance at 13 frames once you reach these attack speed caps.
- Check out this article to learn more about attack speed breakpoints.
- >90% Chance for Blood Lance to deal Double Damage
- Armor Capped at 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- >20,000 Life
- >180% Movement Speed
- >50% Corpse Tendrils Size
- 65%+ Lucky Hit: Chance to Apply Vulnerable
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.
- The combination of Fastblood and Soulrift Duration temper maintain great uptime on this Skill, especially in the early game
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.
- Even thought this build uses Soulrift, Indira's Memory is still the best option as pants due to valuable affixes it provides with tides of blood passive and maximum life.
- 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.
- As you gain more Strength and Intelligence from your gear and Paragon, you may overcap on Armor and Resistances. There's no benefit to doing this, so make sure to redirect Masterwork Crits and Paragon points to other beneficial stats, like Movement Speed on Boots.
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 with Mythic Uniques. Critical strike chance reaches 100% very easily, tankiness increases, and Essence sustain feels much better than before.
- Mythic setup should easily reach 100% critical strike chance via Ring of Starless Skies and Heir of Perdition. So you sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders to cap out your resistances.
- If you have issues with survivability Doombringer is a great option. If you choose you play the build with Doombringer, 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.
- This variant utilizes Metamorphosis. As you evade, you gain unstoppable.
- You put all three skill points into Death's Approach to reach maximum movement speed.
- Since this version of the build is all about moving fast, this setup utilizes Bac + Jah runeword combo. The faster you run, the faster you get access to teleport turning one of the slowest classes in the game to lightning fast!
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 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.
- Consumables become a must have when pushing higher tiers. This variant utilizes Song of the Mountain and Soothing Spices to reach an armor and resistance cap. Elixir of Fortitude II is our main choice of elixir to boost max life which then increases damage as well. All these consumables can be used simultaneously they are all stackable.
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.
The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:
- Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
- Use defensive consumables. Especially the Elixir of Fortitude II.
- You can swap Golems - Iron sacrifice with Golems - Blood sacrifice to maximize your tankiness if necessary.
- There are few ways you generate essence in this build during the end game. Each Blood Orb generates essence for you thanks to blood orb essence tempering. Soulrift also generates Essence.
- In the early game you may occasionally starve on resources before you get the full combo online. Casting Corpse Tendrils on cooldown is highly important to generate more Blood Orbs. Don`t forget, more Blood orbs = more Essence recovery!
- Cooldown management and Essence regen is sort of connected in this playstyle, so you want to make sure you reduce you big cooldowns by applying Decrepify. You have a very high lucky hit chance on this build and you reduce cooldowns a lot by procing Decrepify. The more cooldown reduction you have, the more you keep Soulrift up and you cast Corpse Tendrils more frequently which results in better resource management.
- Make sure you have necessary Blood orb restore Essence tempering as it is suggested in the build planner. You can also imprint Potent Blood to help with essence recovery further.
Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second. - Once you acquire Ring of Starless Skies and get enough cooldown reduction, Essence management is much easier.
Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:
- 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, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
- Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
- Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
- Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
- You can swap Golems - Iron sacrifice with Golems - Blood sacrifice to maximize your tankiness if necessary.
Mechanics
- Blood Lance lingers in a target it hits for 3 seconds. Whenever a new Lance hits another target, ALL lanced targets take the damage dealt by the new Lance.
- This procs for the multitude of different Lance generating Aspects and effects in your Skill Tree.
- When an attack successfully Overpowers, that Lance and all other lingering Lances, apply that Overpower damage. The same goes for Critical Strike damage and Vulnerable etc.
- Enhanced Blood Lance causes a Lance to pierce out of a lanced target and potentially hit a target behind them.
- Your character gets lanced however instead of receiving a damage from lanced mechanic, it gives you Fortify. It also increases damage significantly activating Blood Seeker's aspect.
- Against a single target, Blood Seeker's considers there to be two lanced targets for its damage calculation.
- You can target farm this chest piece by killing the Beast In The Ice boss.
- If you did not acquire this item yet, make sure to have skill points into Drain Vitality so you can maintain Fortify status.
- 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.
- 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.
- Blood Lance has an innate LHC of 50%. The Mythic Variant gets 85.4% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
- So the equation is 50% * (1 + (85.4/100) * 15% = 13.9% chance to trigger. But combination of Blood Lance and Gore Quills enables you to launch additional Blood Lances per each cast of Blood Lance assuming that you have enough Blood Orbs. Gore Quills is capped at 3 orbs per cast, but this means you can hit the targets potentially four times per cast. As a result our chance to trigger Decrepify once is (100% - ((100% - 13.9%)^4th)) = 45%.
Read up more on Lucky Hit Chance mechanics in our dedicated guide by Ava.
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