Blood Wave Necromancer Endgame Guide
Introducing Blood Wave Necromancer, famously known as Shadow Surfer or Shadow Wave!
If you imagine a power fantasy, what would be better than casting waves of blood and darkness and sending your opponents into the shadow realm? Shadow Blood Wave does exactly that, using Blood Wave to lay waste to the battlefield with waves of damage. It is one of the most satisfying playstyles in the game due to its cool mechanic and impactful gameplay. Besides being a very cool looking build, this is one of the best Necromancer builds in season 8.
The following elements play a major role in making Blood Wave such a strong build:
- Ultimate Skill Ranks: Blood Wave can now gain skill ranks, with a Rank 5 bonus adding a substantial multiplier to its damage, scaling with both damage while fortified and damage while healthy buckets. This bonus now capped at 200%.
- Kessime's Legacy: This unique item dramatically changes how Blood Wave functions, elevating its power to incredible levels.
Shadow Blood wave is one of the more interesting theory crafts mainly due to the fact that you can build it in a way that utilizes both blood and darkness passives. Using Ultimate Shadow, a darkness skill tag is applied to Blood Wave, which makes it deal Shadow damage! Darkness and blood builds are both loved by many, so what could be better than having both at once? By attaching the darkness skill tag to blood wave, the build unlocks some significant multipliers that it isn't be able to access otherwise, such as Skeletal Warriors - Reapers sacrifice, Gloom and Terror passives. While keeping its the ability to Overpower and critically strike! As a result of these combinations, shadow wave is significantly stronger than the pure blood version. Even though the skill is called Blood Wave, you may have previously heard this build called Shadow Wave or Shadow Surfer!
Arguably the strongest build in season 8, Shadow Blood Wave gives you the best of both worlds, shadow and blood.
Requirements for this build:
- Kessime's Legacy
- Fastblood
- Tidal
- Ultimate Shadow
Once you have the above items, you can swap to this build and start blasting! You can get the lowest version of Fastblood from your codex.
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.
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
Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - This power when slotted as a main boss power provides additional ultimate cooldown reduction, in addition to extra damage source as you constantly cast your Blood Wave.
Modifiers
Belial's Eye Beams - As Blood Wave constantly deals overpower damage, this power adds additional damage multiplier to boost your damage further.
Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - This power as a modifier also provides more multipliers since you make monsters vulnerable at all times.
Sinerat's Flames - Since Ultimate Shadow converts Blood Wavee into Shadow damage, it benefits from this power as an additional source of multiplier.
Alternate Boss Powers
Wandering Death's Chest Beam - is used as a main boss power for the pit push variant. Once this boss power procs, it increases your damage by 50%x. This requires you to use Decompose effectively. Make sure to read pit push variant below in the variants section to learn more.
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.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Blood Wave is the main damage dealer. When cast, this skill does massive AoE Overpower damage while sweeping and pulling enemies towards you, reducing damage taken while generating Blood Orbs to provide healing and cooldown reduction. Combined with Ultimate Shadow, blood wave receives the darkness tag and do shadow damage, granting all shadow damage damage buffs. Blood Wave cooldown resets constantly through Blood Orbs and Fastblood.
- Decrepify applies powerful CC effects. It also causes lucky hits to reduce the cooldown of your skills. Currently all version of this build utilizes auto curse via Cursed Aura. You do not have to manually cast this ability. Hence why it is not on the skill bar.
- 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. You need to keep this on bosses as much as possible.
- Corpse Explosion is another important skill to include in the rotation. It is your main way of consuming corpses to activate Flesh-eater and Fueled by Death.
- The main purpose of Decompose in this build is to provide an additional damage bonus from Reaper's Pursuit. It’s also excellent for tagging monsters from a distance to aggro them, especially in the pits. Additionally, in the pit push variant, Decompose is utilized to activate Wandering Death's Chest Beam a main boss power. More info available regarding to this rotation under pit push variant below.
- Reap and Sever are only on the skill bar to increase damage and movement speed via Reaper's Pursuit.
Skill Rotation
- In the pits, Decompose is an effective tool for strategically tagging monsters to pull them. Additionally, Decompose is utilized to activate Wandering Death's Chest Beam a main boss power when pushing pits. More info available regarding to this rotation under Pit Push variant below.
- Once you are in range, you cast Blood Wave to start your damage rotation. The lucky hits of Blood Wave make targets Vulnerable and create corpses by procing Hewed Flesh.
- Tidal casts 2 additional Blood Waves, doing even more damage and giving you more orbs to collect. Tidal has an animation lock, meaning you cannot cast another Blood Wave even with a fully reset cooldown until the Tidal animation finishes.
- With Kessime's Legacy, Blood Waves now travel half the distance compared to before and move slightly faster. This shorter interval creates the perfect opportunity to pick up Blood Orbs and weave in Decompose, Corpse Explosion, activating Flesh-eater, Fueled by Death and Wandering Death's Chest Beam.
- Blood Orbs resets the timer for Rathma's Vigor causing Blood Wave to do Overpower damage. As long as you stay healthy for 15 seconds, Rathma's Vigor causes Blood Wave to Overpower. Consuming Blood Orbs decreases this 15 second timer to Overpower more frequently.
- Each Blood Orb reduces Rathma's Vigor timer by 2 seconds. So ideally picking up 8 orbs resets the Rathma's Vigor.
- You pick up Blood Orbs, reduce Blood Wave cooldown and do Overpower damage. Everything in this build synergizes very well with each other. The pit-pushing variant of the build does not use Fastblood, opting instead for another damage multiplier aspect. This results in slightly different gameplay. Be sure to check out the dedicated section below to learn more about the pit-push variant and its unique mechanics.
- Blight is used to activate Supernatural Blight. You do not need to use this often, but it should be kept up on bosses as much as possible, especially in the pits.
Book of the Dead
Blood Wave build sacrifice minions to gain more power.
- Skeletal Warriors - Reapers adds Shadow Damage.
- Skeletal Mages - Bone adds Overpower Damage.
- Golems - Iron adds another powerful Critical Strike multiplier.
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.
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
- Essence
- Sacrificial
- Abyssal
- Eliminator
- Dominate
To Level 46
- Dominate
- Abyssal
- Sacrificial
- Eliminator
- Essence
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 Wave Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cir + Vex - You’re constantly casting abilities, which keeps Cir generating offerings very reliably. It’s one of the best generators since it continues to generate even while "exhausted." It easily overflows Vex, giving your skills an additional +3 ranks.
- Ahu + Qax - This combination is extremely powerful. Blood Wave has a very high lucky hit chance, and once monsters are below 80% life, this rune generates a significant amount of offering with density, keeping the Qax rune active 100% of the time.
Alternative choices
You can also benefit from these options:
- Zan - One of the best generators since you cast your ultimate as your main damage dealer.
- Bac - In this playstyle, you run around all the time picking up blood orbs hence easily activating rune at all times.
- Xal - Great option for additional tankiness, and this also adds significant amount of damage since Overpower scales based on max life.
- Jah - Great for speed farming to access teleport to boost your mobility.
- Kry - Also great for speed farming as it works as an auto pull.
- Igni - One of the best offering generators.
- Wat - Great at auto cursing targets as well as executing them when they are at low health.
- Yax - During the early game, it can be an easy generator that gives significant amount of offering.
- Gar - if you can't to reach 100% crit chance due to gear, this rune can help you get there in the meantime.
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: Aldkin
You choose Flame Surge. This tech reduces your cooldowns significantly by procing lucky hits via Abhorrent Decrepify. This is an extremely important mechanic when you stop using Fastblood while pushing higher tier pits.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Blood Wave 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
- 70% Cooldown Reduction.
- 94% Chance for Blood Wave to do double damage.
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- >20,000 Life
- Movement Speed Capped 200%
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Blood Wave 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 Wave 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.
Begin here if you just made it into Torment 1 or are coming from our Leveling Guide! 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. Disobedience helps with this.
- If you can't find a good 2-Handed Mace, you can use any other 2-Handed Weapon (Axe, Scythe, or Sword) with good affixes for the time being. You can also use any 1-Handed weapon and Focus, but the damage output is significantly lower.
- Reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance is your number one priority before other stats. Always reliably critting means you can expect a certain damage output, and for monsters to consistently die in the same number of skill uses.
- Starter version, build utilizes Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers sacrifice to reach 100% Critical Strike Chance. This will later be swapped for Skeletal Warriors - Reapers sacrifice for extra shadow damage.
- Finding a high rolled Fastblood is very important to reduce the cooldown of Blood Wave.
- Cooldown Reduction on your Helmet helps with shorter cooldown of Blood Wave and better uptime of Grasping Veins. Tempering ultimate cooldown reduction on your jewelry also helps with this significantly.
- Once you get Kessime's Legacy, the true power of the build will be revealed!
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestral Legendaries, Paragon points, 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 make sure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Kessime's Legacy is an obvious power spike for the build totally changing the gameplay and significantly boosting build's playability with high cooldown reduction and chance to do double damage.
- Hopefully by this point, you acquired a good rolled Fastblood so that you can swap that out from your necklace with Sacrificial to ensure that you reach 100% critical strike chance. If your Fastblood is not over 2 seconds, do not swap it out of your amulet yet.
- Via masterworking your gear, you also now have a lot higher cooldown reduction which should significantly help with Blood Wave cooldown management.
- Skill Changes
- Corpse Tendrils is no longer used. At this stage Blood Wave itself is a great grouping resource when combined with Kessime's Legacy.
- Reap is slotted on skill bar to get more damage and more movement speed from Reaper's Pursuit. You do not have to actively use Reap, it is simply there to boost your Reaper's Pursuit passive.
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
- You want to craft Heir of Perdition as your first mythic item. Second mythic you will go after is Shroud of False Death.
- This build is significantly strengthened by Heir of Perdition. Heir of Perdition increases damage by 60%. Gets you to 100% critical chance without relying on Grasping Veins or Sacrifice.
- Heir of Perdition also removes the dependency on critical strike chance affixes on rings. In place of that, you can now use attack speed affixes on your rings. Attack speed helps you significantly when casting Blood Wave and Corpse Explosion to activate Flesh-eater. Blood Wave has a clunky animation and attack speed helps you have a smoother casting speed.
- Shroud of False Death is another mythic you utilize on this build. +1 to all passives significantly improves the build with boosts to Generic, Blood and Darkness passives (Tides of Blood,Coalesced Blood,Gloom,Terror).
- Runeword Changes
- You start utilizing Cir + Vex and Ahu + Qax runeword combinations, which give you the highest possible damage output out of any runeword setups.
- Because Qax consumes all your essence when it procs, one of the affixes in our 2-hander mace is "Lucky hit chance to restore essence", so that the build can sustain throughout the fight, generating enough essence at all times.
- Skill Changes
- Corpse Tendrils is no longer used. At this stage Blood Wave itself is a great grouping resource when combined with Kessime's Legacy.
- Reap is slotted on skill bar to get more damage and more movement speed from Reaper's Pursuit. You do not have to actively use Reap, it is simply there to boost your Reaper's Pursuit passive.
- By this point, the build should start feeling very tanky. Because of that, this variant drops Blood Mist and replaces it with Sever on the bar to squeeze out even more damage and movement speed through the Reaper's Pursuit passive. Similar to reap, its just on the skill bar to boost damage and movement speed.
- If you're still not feeling fully confident with your survivability, keeping Blood Mist is still a totally viable option as an emergency button. You would just be losing a small amount of damage and movement speed.
The 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
- To speedfarm effectively, reprioritize movement speed and attack speed.
- This setup utilizes Metamorphosis on boots to maintain unstoppable and pseudo teleport from pack to pack.
- Runeword changes:
- 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!
- Another key element of speed farming is the action economy. Zan + Kry - This rune combination makes makes it so that you can group monsters even more effectively.
- Skill Changes
- Corpse Tendrils is no longer used in this variant. At this stage Blood Wave itself is a great grouping resource when combined with Kessime's Legacy.
- Reap is slotted on skill bar in place of Corpse Tendrils to get more damage and more movement speed from Reaper's Pursuit. You do not use Reap in anyway, it is simply there to boost your Reaper's Pursuit passive.
- If you're still not feeling fully confident with your survivability, keeping Blood Mist is still a totally viable option as an emergency button. You would just be losing a small amount of damage and movement speed.
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
- Gear/Aspect changes
- Pit Variant utilizes Apogeic Furor instead of Fastblood to have access to another big damage multiplier.
- DISCLAIMER: If you’re not fully geared for endgame, do not drop Fastblood yet. The idea is to drop Fastblood once your Blood Wave cooldown is between 12 to 15 seconds. This change is intended for pushing really high Pit Tiers when your damage starts to fall flat. If your damage feels sufficient, stick with Fastblood for a more user-friendly gameplay experience until you need more damage.
- Not being able to reduce cooldown by picking up Blood Orbs can be a concern, however due Tidal's animation lock, you can no longer spam waves back-to-back, even if the cooldown is reset immediately by collecting Blood Orbs.
- With the new unique pants Kessime's Legacy, waves now travel half the distance compared to before and move slightly faster. As a result Tidal animation now takes approximately 2.4 seconds, compared to the previous duration of around 5.5 seconds.
- The goal is to align the cooldown of Blood Wave with this exact gap, rather than spamming or immediately resetting it.
- You achieve this by efficiently benefiting from Decrepify to synchronize the cooldown with the gap. Did you know your mercenaries can proc Decrepify, effectively reducing cooldowns? Pit pushing variant takes advantage of this important mercenary tech to fully benefit from this mechanic!
- If you have a GA Cooldown reduction on Kessime's Legacy in addition to chance to deal double damage, this should significantly help with Blood Wave rotation.
- Heir of Perdition also removes the dependency on critical strike chance affixes on rings. In place of that, you can now use attack speed affixes on your rings. Attack speed helps you significantly when casting Blood Wave and Corpse Explosion. Blood Wave has a clunky animation and attack speed helps you have a smoother casting speed.
- Skill Changes
- Corpse Tendrils is no longer used. At this stage Blood Wave itself is a great grouping resource when combined with Kessime's Legacy.
- Reap is slotted on skill bar to get more damage and more movement speed from Reaper's Pursuit. You do not have to actively use Reap, it is simply there to boost your Reaper's Pursuit passive.
- By this point, the build should start feeling very tanky. Because of that, this variant drops Blood Mist and replaces it with Sever on the bar to squeeze out even more damage and movement speed through the Reaper's Pursuit passive. Similar to reap, its just on the skill bar to boost damage and movement speed.
- If you're still not feeling fully confident with your survivability, keeping Blood Mist is still a totally viable option as an emergency button. You would just be losing a small amount of damage and movement speed.
- Boss Power Changes
- Pit push variant utilizes Wandering Death's Chest Beam a main boss power. Once this boss power procs, it increases your damage by 50%x. This requires you to use Decompose effectively. You do not constantly spam Decompose, you just need to tap the skill to activate this boss power within your rotation. Since Decompose and Tidal has an animation lock, and you can only cast Blood Wave every 2.4 seconds or so, in the time between you cast Decompose (again no channel it) to activate Wandering Death's Chest Beam and Corpse Explosion keep Flesh-eater active.
- Runeword Changes
- You start utilizing Cir + Vex and Ahu + Qax runeword combinations, which give you the highest possible damage output out of any runeword setups.
- Because Qax consumes all your essence when it procs, one of the affixes in our 2-hander mace is "Lucky hit chance to restore essence", so that the build can sustain throughout the fight, generating enough essence at all times.
- Mercenary
- As mentioned above, a crucial mercenary tech involves proccing Decrepify using Aldkin as a reinforcement along with the Flame Surge ability using Corpse Explosion. This combination is incredibly impactful, allowing you to reset Blood Wave’s cooldown efficiently, even without relying on Fastblood.
- Consumables
- This variant utilizes and Soothing Spices to reach an armor and resistance cap. Reddamine Buzz and Elixir of Fortitude II is the main choice of elixir to boost max life which then increases damage as well. Sage's Whisper to increase our main core stat intelligence. 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.
- The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have a high rolled Fastblood. Blood Wave Necromancer, the Fastblood significantly improves the flow of this gameplay.
- Kessime's Legacy with GA cooldown reduction provides significant help in optimizing Blood Wave’s cooldown.
- A Darkness skill tag is assigned to Blood Wave because of Ultimate Shadow. It transitions from Physical Damage type to Shadow Damage type, receiving all the benefits that also apply to Shadow Damage and direct damage. Therefore, it can still Overpower and critical strike.
- The Blood Wave Necromancer does not actively spend Essence to deal damage. Only spenders are Blight and Blight, and you do not cast them frequently. As long as you cast them when you need to, Essence is not an issues. Your main damage dealer Blood Wave costs no Essence.
- However, Qax uses all your Essence when it is activated. "Lucky hit chance to restore essence" affix on your weapon solves the resource issues.
Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:
- 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 and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
- Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life.
- Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
- Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
Mechanics
- Arguably the coolest ultimate in the game! It does massive AoE damage, gives you a damage reduction, and generates Blood Orbs.
- Combined with Tidal and Kessime's Legacy it generates 2 additional waves that also creates 12 additional blood orbs and pulls monsters towards you.
- In end game, no matter how much you increase your healing received or Blood Orb healing, each Blood Orb reduce the timer of Rathma's Vigor only 2 seconds.
- You need to consume 7 or 8 orbs to reset the timer of Rathma's Vigor fully.
- Because of this there might be times, Blood Wave might not Overpower. This is okay, as you get better at movement and as you accumulate orbs more effectively, orbs overlaps and you can consume multiple orbs all at once to ensure Blood Wave Overpowers frequently.
- 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 Wave has an innate LHC of 50%. Mythic variant has no lucky hit chance from gear so The Mythic Variant gets 0% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
- So the equation is (50% * (1 + (0100)) * 15% = 7.5% chance to trigger. But since Blood Wave can hit the 3 times in total, your chance to trigger Decrepify once is (100% - ((100% - 7.5%%)^3th)) = 20.85%.
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
Summary
The Blood Wave Necromancer, also known as Shadow Surfer or Shadow Wave, blends blood and shadow to devastate enemies. With the Blood Wave ultimate, it delivers massive AoE damage and generates Blood Orb to reset cooldowns. By utilizing both blood and shadow mechanics, the build gains access to strong multipliers for Overpower and shadow damage.
Credits
Written by LordxSaura