Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
Build Requirements:
- Cruor's Embrace - While the build works without these, the addition of multiple drains transforms your gameplay to a whole new level.
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 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.
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
- 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.
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.
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 Surge 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
- Eliminator
- Essence
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
- Dominate
To Level 46
- Essence
- Dominate
- Sacrificial
- Corporeal
- Eliminator
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. 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
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 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
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.
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 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.
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, 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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.
- When Diablo 4 first released, Overpower was the most archaic system in the game. It basically didn't interact with the majority damage scaling systems.
- In Patch 1.2, OP was retooled to be a much more intuitive system, similar to Critical Strike and Vulnerable.
- Every attack has a natural 3% chance to Overpower.
- Overpowering checks the players current Life total and multiplies outgoing damage by up to 50%.
- Example: If the player is at 50% of their total Life, they would get a 25% damage multiplier.
- You gain +1% additive Overpower damage for every 1% of your Base Life you have in Fortify.
- If you have 150% of your Base Life in Fortify because you have more Maximum Life than your Base Life, you gain +300% Overpower Damage.
- You gain +1% additive Overpower damage for every 1% of your Base Life you have in Bonus Life.
- Level 100 Necromancers have 7959 Base Life. If you have 20,000 Maximum Life, you have 12,041 Bonus Life above your Base Life.
- These adds up to 150% Bonus Life in total, giving you +300% Overpower Damage.
- There are many sources in the game that say "You are guaranteed to Overpower on your next Skill use..." meaning that attack always Overpowers.
- First of all Blood Orbs are essential for your Essence sustain. Make sure to stutterstep around the battlefiel in between your Blood Surge casts to collect those and restore Essence through your Tempers on your Ring and Amulet.
- Soulrift grants an absurd amount of Essence while its active. Making Soulrift permanent through +xx% Soulrift Duration Tempers, Cooldown Reduction and Decrepify procs should be your first goal.
- Cruor's Embrace consumes Corpses which triggers Grim Harvest every time you consume a Corpse. To be able to keep the Corpse consumption going it is very important to create Corpses through Hewed Flesh or the natural way.
- Essence per Second on your Helm and Boots can be a very good alternative if you need a bit more Essence generation.
- If all else fails, replace Cadaverous with Voracious Rage.
- Ring of Starless Skies further helps solving Essence in the Mythic version of the build.
- Blood Surge has two damage instances (more with Aspects and Unique items). The first damage instance "drains" all monsters on the screen, then the "surge" damage instance occurs in a small ring around the Necromancer.
- If you "drain" from an enemy at all, you heal for 3% of your Maximum Life with Enhanced Blood Surge. If there are at least four targets, the heal is increased to 6%.
- After five successful "surges" have hit a target, the sixth time you cast Blood Surge the Skill's damage Overpowers due to Paranormal Blood Surge. The sixth cast increases your total cast total to one instead of zero. So it only takes five additional casts after to Overpower, and thereafter.
Abhorrent Decrepify
With your multiple sources of damage effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of crowd controlled enemies so your Skills hit as many targets as possible, with as many damage instances as possible.
Mechanics
- 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 Surge has an innate LHC of 20%.
- The Mythic Variant gets 0% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
- The equation is 12% * (1 + (0/100)) * 15% = 1.8%.
- Read up more on Lucky Hit Chance in our dedicated guide by Ava
- 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.
Video Guide
Video guide coming soon!
Summary
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
Written by LordxSaura