Blood Lance Necromancer Leveling Build Guide

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.

Leveling Boss Powers

Alternate Boss Powers

Kirma's Sparks - As a main power, it can provide additional damage as you evade. This can be an early option until you unlock a stronger main boss power.
Allek's Talons - As a main boss power, this can add additional damage source to your basic attacks. Additionally it is also a good option as a modifier especially if you have some cooldown reduction on your gear, this can improve your movement speed.

Raise Skeleton

‍Raise Skeleton must be on your Skill Bar to summon your Skeletal army. You can summon Skeletons by targeting and consuming a Corpse. This summons your Warriors and your Mages. Once all of your Skeletons are summoned, consuming a Corpse with this Skill raises a Skeletal Priest that heals all of your summons and giving them a damage buff for a small amount of time. In many scenarios, we can consume Corpses this way to gain the benefits of certain Passives in our Skill Tree.

Corpse Tendrils

Corpse Tendrils may be the best source of Crowd Control (CC) in Diablo 4. It Slows, Stuns, applies Vulnerable or generates Blood Orbs and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes infinitely more effective. With a few of your modifiers and Passives, these statuses become great sources of damage scaling as well. Hewed Flesh generates corpses to summon back minions or utilize Corpse Tendrils to stun and pull targets. NOTE: ‍Corpse Tendrils does not consume Corpses.

Key Passive and Ultimate

Soulrift makes your life so much easier, generates barrier, generates Essence making targets Vulnerable, as well as increasing your damage.

Kalan's Edict helps your minions to have more attack speed, and more damage overall which they do carry your damage quite a lot during the leveling journey.

Final Journey to Level 60

At this point, most of the key synergies are unlocked and the gameplay loop is almost complete. As you level up, you unlock a lot of extra points that go into various offensive and defensive passives or max out certain skills. Check out the skills progression above to see where to put your points as you go, but feel free to deviate from the order displayed as necessary.

Book of the Dead

Unlocking the Book of the Dead

You're able to summon Skeletons as early as level one, with the ability to customize your Skeletal Skirmishers starting at level 5, when the Book Menu unlocks. From there, you unlock more types of Skeletal Warriors, Skeletal Mages and eventually Golems as you gain levels. The Golem requires you to complete a Quest, which is detailed in this resource post. You must put the ‍Raise Skeleton and ‍Golem skills on your skill bar to summon them.

During the leveling always use your highest DPS weapon available for more damage. Ideally Ultimately, the best weapon for leveling is a Two-Handed Sword or Scythe for as much damage as possible. Otherwise, follow the priority list below. While you don't have all of the desired temper manuals available, simply try to get anything useful on your gear until you acquire the right ones. For example, % Damage, Damage to Close, Vulnerable Damage, etc. all work as long as you activate their conditions. Likewise, you can temper multiple defensive options such as Resistances, Life, Armor to fill gaps in your survivability. Tempering low level gear is relatively cheap and the results can be very impactful.

Tip: For the early game, Elemental Surge Weapon Tempers are very powerful due to their high base damage. If you find these, you may want to keep imprinting them on your weapons for an easier time.

The Codex of Power is a collection of Legendary Aspects you can imprint onto Rare or Legendary items at the Occultist. They unlock after completing specific Dungeons located around Sanctuary or salvaging items with these powers. Check out our Map Tool to locate these Dungeons.

For leveling, there are a few powers that can significantly help us if we have the funds to imprint them. In addition, keep an eye out for powerful Unique items you may find for this or other builds.

Must-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Blood Seeker's (Mercy`s Reach - Fractured Peaks)
2. Potent Blood (Betrayer`s Row - Dry Steppes)
3. Grasping Veins (Corrupted Grotto - Kehjistan)

Nice-to-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Disobedience (Halls of the Damned - Kehjistan)
2. Might (Dark Ravine - Dry Steppes)

Great Uniques for this build

1. Mutilator Plate
2. Blood Moon Breeches

Jackpot Drops

As you level up, you may get lucky and find some great random drops. Some of these can massively amplify your power and speed up the leveling by switching to another build. Keep in mind that there are many more Aspects and Uniques that can be useful to multiple builds; this just lists some of the most impactful ones. While we usually recommend starting with Endgame Builds at level 60, you often can make them work earlier with these drops:

Build-defining Aspects

• Tidal + Fastblood: Blood Wave Necromancer
• Shattered Spirit's + Requiem: Bone Spirit Necromancer

Build-defining Uniques

1. Ring of Mendeln: Minion Necromancer
2. Cruor's Embrace: Blood Surge Necromancer
3. Mutilator Plate: Blood Lance Necromancer
4. Kessime's Legacy: Blood Wave Necromancer

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 Blood Lance Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

In the end game with fully unlocked setup, you want to run the combinations below;

• Cir + Gar: This Rune combination allows you to trigger effects by spamming "free" skills like Raise Skeleton, even without hitting a target. It’s particularly useful for maintaining buffs from Runes between combats. The Critical Strike Chance boost from Gar is especially valuable when your gear falls short of reaching 100% crit chance.
• Cem + Lum: This pairing helps passively generate Essence in scenarios where resource generation would otherwise be limited. It reduces the time spent relying on Generators or alternative resource systems, improving overall efficiency.

Alternative choices

Especially during the leveling, as long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Mot- For extra defense.
• Zec - Good option early game when your Soulrift is not yet permanent.

In Diablo 4, you can level by completing the Campaign, collecting Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers, completing Helltide activities, grinding Dungeons, clearing Strongholds, fighting in the Undercity of Kurast or interacting with the Seasonal Mechanics. While there are many ways to level up in Diablo 4, not all of them are equal.

Paragon & Glyphs

Use the slider to see 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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

Coming soon.

The Blood Lance Necromancer is a powerful and beginner-friendly build that smoothly transitions into the endgame.

• Start by relying on your Skeletal Reapers and Mages for early damage, cooldown reduction, and Essence generation.
• Use Blood Lance to pierce enemies and spread damage efficiently.
• Unlock Corpse Tendrils to group enemies and generate Blood Orbs for additional Essence.
• Focus on acquiring generic damage modifiers to scale your power.
• Minions are key early, but the build adapts as you gear up with powerful Legendary Aspects and Codex of Power enhancements.

Unleash the power of Blood Lance and dominate your foes!

Written by LordxSaura