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Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 8 - Belial's ReturnEndgame

Last Updated:May 1, 2025|Changelog|FAQ

The Blood Surge Necromancer is an AoE-focused Overpower build that excels in both DPS and continuous healing. With stacking Maximum Life bonuses and Fortify, it builds an unstoppable tank while dealing consistent, high damage!

The Blood Surge Necromancer shines in its ability to apply Overpower damage across the entire screen with massive AoE potential. This makes the Blood Surge Necromancer incredibly effective in dense encounters, particularly in Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons, and certain Seasonal content.

While this build focuses on Overpowering as often as possible, learning how to incorporate Critical Strike Chance and Vulnerable status pushes your damage even further and rewards the player for understanding the finer details.

This build is the natural evolution of our Blood Surge Necromancer Leveling Guide. It uses many of the same Aspects, including powerful options from the Codex of Power.

Build Requirements:

  • Cruor's Embrace - While the build works without these, the addition of multiple drains transforms your gameplay to a whole new level.
Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Setup
Note

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 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

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 Surge to activate Boss modifiers to provide more damage and utility.

Modifiers

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. In early Pits, it can also help as a DPS support by dealing damage based on a percentage of monster life.

Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - This power as a modifier also provides more multipliers since you make monsters vulnerable at all times.

Wandering Death's Chest Beam - This power as a modifier provides a very valuable execute. It can boost clear speed significantly while pushing pits.

Blood Surge Necromancer Boss Powers

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.

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer
  • Reap is mainly used to get more attack speed, especially effective when it comes to clearing high tier Pits.
  • Blood Mist is your get out of jail free card. While you are Immune, reposition yourself to gain an advantage.
  • Decrepify applies a powerful CC effect that also causes Lucky Hit procs to reduce Cooldowns on your Skills. You do not manually cast it, Cursed Aura or the Wat rune does the job for you!
  • Corpse Tendrils, one of the most critical skills you need to use efficiently, to group and pull targets. It also generates blood orbs to activate Blood Begets Blood.
  • Soulrift solves Vulnerable, Resource and defense by providing Barrier, while also buffing your damage.
  • Blood Surge has two damage components. The first one hits the entire screen and "drains" the targets, which empowers the second smaller AoE damage "surge" and scales with targets hit by the first damage portion.
  • Cruor's Embrace is used as corpse consumption for Grim Harvest, Fueled by Death and Flesh-eater.
  • Sever is only on the skill bar to increase damage and movement speed via Reaper's Pursuit.
Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Skill Tree

Skill Rotation

  • Blood Surge is a very simple, yet powerful build to pilot. While constantly castingBlood Surge your Cruor's Embrace keeps Flesh-eater and Fueled by Death active.
  • Your Essence will constantly be filled by Soulrift and "Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Essence" affix from one of your weapons.
  • Reap should be used before monsters dying to gain attack speed. It can also generate a corpse to start the fight off with Corpse Tendrils.
  • Often times Blood Surge consumes all corpses, however you can generate a corpse using Reap or Soulrift often generates corpses procing Hewed Flesh. Before starting your damage rotation, make sure to use a corpse to cast Corpse Tendrils so you can generate blood orbs as well as pulling monsters together. Positioning your Blood Surge to overlap with as many targets as possible is very important to maximize your DPS output. This is especially important when pushing high tier Pits.
  • Move around the battlefield in between your Blood Surge casts to collect Blood Orbs and activate Blood Begets Blood. You can also cast while moving, this helps you maintain your Blood Begets Blood buff without losing any cast time.
  • In case you find yourself in a dangerous situation, Blood Mist not only makes you Immune but also Unstoppable.
  • Make sure to keep Soulrift active to not only help solve Resource, but also provide constant Vulnerable and Barrier.

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 Surge Necromancer chooses to sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers for the Critical Strike Chance bonus, Skeletal Mages - Bone for the massive increase to Overpower Damage and Golems - Iron for Critical Strike Damage bonus.

If you have reached 100% critical strike chance, you can sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders to increase your resistances especially while breaking into higher Torment tiers.

Book of the Dead

Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Necromancer Class Overview.

Paragon & Glyphs

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer
!
Important

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.

← Use the slider for progression steps →
Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Paragon
Tip

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

  1. Eliminator
  2. Essence
  3. Corporeal
  4. Sacrificial
  5. Dominate

To Level 46

  1. Essence
  2. Dominate
  3. Sacrificial
  4. Corporeal
  5. Eliminator

Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.

Runes

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge 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 Surge Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

  • Ahu + Xan - This combination is extremely powerful. 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:

  • Xal - increases maximum life by 20%. As an Overpower build, this increases not only survivability but also damage.
  • Lum - For additional Essence generation if you are not sustaining your Essence yet.
  • Ohm - It gives you access to War Cry
  • Zec - Good option early game when your Soulrift is not yet permanent.
  • 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 Surge back to back.
  • 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

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

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.

Blood Surge Necromancer Mercenaries

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

Stat Priorities & Item Progression

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

To enable the Blood Surge 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, with counting Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers, Inspiring Leader
  • 81.8%+ Attack Speed
  • 63.8% Blood Attack Speed
  • Cap 1 + Cap 2 aims to reach 145% attack speed to reach 16 frames per second. Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
  • 88% Chance for Blood Surge to Deal Double Damage.
  • Cooldown reduction 15%+
  • Ultimate Cooldown Reduction 28%+ to have more Soulrift uptime
  • Armor Capped 1,000
  • Resistance Capped 70%+
  • 10,000+ Life
  • >180% Movement Speed
Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Pit Push

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Blood Surge 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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Pit Push

Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.

Build Variants

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

This section is designed to guide your Blood Surge 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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Speedfarming
Pit Push

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

Starter Blood Surge Necromancer Gear
Starter Blood Surge Necromancer 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.
  • Keeping Soulrift up permanently helps solve your Essence issues.
  • Trigger your Iron Maiden by tagging enemies with your Cursed Aura to restore Essence.
  • Stutter step around the battlefield to consume Blood Orbs for even more Essence generation through your BloodOrbs Restore Essence Temper.

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

Ancestral Blood Surge Necromancer Gear
Ancestral Blood Surge Necromancer 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.
  • Once you acquire Cruor's Embrace you are BLASTING! This item constantly procs Grim Harvest and Flesh-eater as long as you generate corpses through Hewed Flesh or the natural way.
  • 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.

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

Mythic Blood Surge Necromancer Gear
Mythic Blood Surge Necromancer Skills
  • Shroud of False Death +1 to all passives significantly improves the build, boosting damage and utility.
  • Heir of Perdition - mythic unique helmet that boosts damage significantly. It also helps with reaching 100% critical strike chance.
  • Ring of Starless Skies - significantly increases your damage and helps with resource management. Combined with "Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primary Resource" on your 1h Mace solve your Essence sustain.

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

Speedfarm Blood Surge Necromancer Gear
Speedfarm Blood Surge Necromancer 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.
  • Speedfarming variant utilizes Jah rune to access teleport and another source of unstoppable.

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

Pit Push Blood Surge Necromancer Gear
Pit Push Blood Surge Necromancer 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.
  • The Boots for this variant do not include Movement Speed, because outside of town, Reaper's Pursuit grants you 24% extra movement speed. You won't see this bonus while you are in town hence why you may feel slower. We recommend riding your mount, if you need to spend any time traveling to vendors etc.
  • 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. You want to reach 145% attack speed from both cap 1 and cap 2.
  • Utilize Reap effectively to boost your attack speed further during combat.
  • 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

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how you are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

Mechanics

Video Guide

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

Video guide coming soon!

Summary

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

The Blood Surge Necromancer is incredibly nuanced and rewards the player for learning as much as you can about Overpower mechanics and how to maximize your Overpower procs. With your huge Maximum Life pool, Fortify and healing, you can survive damage that other builds could never conceive of!

  • Blood Surge can hit a target twice, as long as they're within range of the "drain" and the "surge". The "drain" hits the entire screen, while the "surge" only hits Close Enemies.
  • Blood-bathed Aspect allows you to cheat out an extra "surge" for free. This Overpowers when the base Skill does.
  • Enjoy screen wide explosions!

Credits

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Blood Surge Necromancer

Written by LordxSaura

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