Blood Surge Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.

There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of four Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay, Psyche), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.

Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

Doom Orb - A cool looking orb that rotates around you damaging everything in its way! It can be a great source of passive damage.
Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Aura of Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed. Unfortunately, it's ineffective against Bosses.
Hex of Shattering - The Damage Reduction is great and it is the most consistent way to apply a Hex

Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.

Best-in-Slot Occult Gems

Dust Stone - Provides a significant damage multiplier when multiple Hexes and Auras are applied to the target.
Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats improve skill damage. Maximum Life improves defense and Overpower damage. Becoming Unhindered helps you move through groups of mobs.
Phantom String - A simple and straightforward damage multiplier for this build.

Alternate Occult Gems

Hungering Void - Improves density clearing and optimizes damage application by pulling monsters into your aura range.
Wicked Pact, Heart of Anima, Toadling's Wish - Each grants a bonus to the potency of the three Power types, providing a solid damage boost until higher-tier gems can be crafted. These gems are highly efficient during leveling, providing significant benefits.

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

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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

• Poc + Xal - This Runewords tremendously increases your Maximum Life which directly feeds into increasing your Overpower damage.
• Tam + Ohm - Provides a powerful 15% Damage Multiplier.
• Tam + Wat - This rune combination is very crucial for pit pushing. It auto curses and executes enemies, significantly increasing clear speed. Make sure to check out pit pushing variant down below.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Lum - For additional Essence generation if you are not sustaining your Essence yet.
• Moni - Solid Offering generator if you do not have any alternative available.
• Mot- For extra defense.
• 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.

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.

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. 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

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.

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.

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.

How Does Overpower Work?

• 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.

How do I Manage My Essence?

• 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

• 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.

How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?

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

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

• 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

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

Stagger

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 coming soon!

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.
• Overpower has been drastically overhauled in Patch 1.2! It finally plays well with other damage scalers like Critical Strike and Vulnerable.
• Blood-bathed Aspect allows you to cheat out an extra "surge" for free. This Overpowers when the base Skill does.
• Enjoy screen wide explosions!

Written by LordxSaura