Bone Spear Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
The Bone Spear Necromancer is the natural endgame build evolution of our great leveling guide! Incredibly fast Attack Speed? Critical Strikes? Never ending Essence? Satisfying Lucky Hits on the whole screen? With this Bone Spear Necromancer build you will have all of this and more.
Of course you continue the brand of Bone Spear by making everything on the screen Vulnerable and guaranteeing Critical Strikes. A permanent Bone Storm provides Damage Reduction, Critical Strike Chance and a constant flow of Barrier which keeps you safe and healthy throughout every fight.
Corpse Tendrils pulls every Monster on the entire screen into a very small space for you to shoot down with your barrage of Bone Spears, triggering Decrepify often and reducing all of your cooldowns tremendously.
If you are looking for a ranged build, becoming the God of Death while keeping constant maximum distance, stutter stepping outside of the enemy's range and never having to worry about Essence ever again, you have come to the right place!
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.
Season Theme
Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Reap and Decompose are not part of the build but the Skill Tree requires you to invest 2 Skill Points in the Basic Skill section to further advance down the Skill Tree.
- Bone Spear is your main damage and hits enemies with both the main hit and reflected shards. The secondary damage component makes positioning important when fighting elites or bosses.
- Decrepify coupled with your high Lucky Hit Chance helps you reduce all of your cooldowns at a fast pace and provides additional safety through occasional Stuns.
- Blood Mist is your get out of jail free card. While you are Immune, reposition yourself to gain an advantage.
- Bone Storm provides Critical Strike Chance, Damage Reduction, and survivability with Shielding Storm.
- Corpse Tendrils slows, stuns and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes more effective. It also triggers Grasping Veins, which is handy from time to time for extra damage.
- Corpse Explosion serves you as a support skill by activating your Fueled by Death and Flesh-eater damage multipliers.
Skill Rotation
- Bone Spear to proc Hewed Flesh and create a corpse to be able to Corpse Tendrils all Monsters into one spot, activating your Grasping Veins multiplier, Decrepify to activate your Amplify Damage multiplier and reset your cooldowns through Lucky Hits and then Bone Spear away.
- You need to perfect your Bone Spear placement. Your Bone Spear has two portions of damage: the Bone Spear itself and the Bone Shards that return. Whenever your Bone Spear's initial portion of damage crits, the returning Bone Shards are 5 instead 3 which drastically increases your damage. This is only true if those returning Bone Shards do hit the target which is possible by ricocheting the Bone Spear off of a close wall to the target or by being max range to the target.
- In case you find yourself in a dangerous situation, Blood Mist not only makes you Immune but also Unstoppable.
- It is important to activate your Flesh-eater as often as possible by consuming five corpses which you can do by pressing Corpse Explosion five times to maximize your damage. Ideally you weave this in during your Bone Spear casts but it is only really necessary in absolute high-end Pit pushing or on Elites and Bosses.
- Bone Storm not only grants incredible defense through Damage Reduction and Barrier, but also grants Critical Strike Chance. Therefore it is incredibly important to have Bone Storm up as much as possible. Reset its cooldown by spending Essence for Rapid Ossification and proc Decrepify. Bone Storm Duration Tempers create more leeway in this calculation.
- (On Elites & Bossses) Use Corpse Tendrils before consuming your fifth corpse via Corpse Explosion to sync Grasping Veins and Flesh-eater uptime perfectly.
Book of the Dead
The Bone Spear Necromancer does not rely on its minions at all and powers up by making use of the sacrifice bonuses. You can choose between sacrificing Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers and Skeletal Warriors - Defenders depending on how your resistances look or how much Critical Strike Chance you already have from other sources. Don't forget that these bonuses are boosted by Memento Mori.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Book of the Dead guide.
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.
Bone Spear 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
To Level 15
- Corporeal
- Essence
- Eliminator
- Sacrificial
- Exploit
To Level 46
- Eliminator
- Essence
- Exploit
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
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 Bone Spear Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Moni + Mot - This Runeword drastically improves your tankiness. This effect does not help against Damage over Time effects.
- Xol + Ohm - By invoking another class' skill in your previous Runeword we can use the powerful Xol as vessel for this Runeword to sometimes get a 15% damage multiplier.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Poc - We continuously gain and spend Essence, so this is an easy activator.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Zec - Good option early game when your Bone Storm is not yet permanent.
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: Raheir
He provides amazing damage multipliers with a high uptime.
- Reinforcement: Varyana
You choose Earth Breaker for more crowd control whenever you engage Elites and Bosses since it is linked to Corpse Explosion.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Bone Spear 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
- 27.5% Critical Strike Chance
- 100% Chance for Bone Spear to Cast Twice (Deathless Visage + Weapon Temper)
- 150+ Maximum Essence
- 80%+ Attack Speed
- 2000+ Intelligence
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 80%+
- 5,000+ Life
- 160%+ Movement Speed
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Bone Spear 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 Bone Spear 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.
- It is extremely important to have your Bone Storm up and running when you are engaging dangerous enemies. The Damage Reduction and Barrier helps out tremendously.
- It is important to activate your Flesh-eater as often as possible by consuming five corpses which you can do by pressing Corpse Explosion five times to maximize your damage.
- Use Corpse Tendrils before consuming your fifth corpse via Corpse Explosion to sync Grasping Veins and Flesh-eater uptime perfectly.
- If you are struggling with Essence generation, remove Great Feast, put Serration on your 2h Sword. You can then choose to put Torment on your Amulet if you are really starving for Essence, or Grasping Veins and fill up your Rings with Edgemaster's accordingly.
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 Deathless Visage it is very important to stack as much Critical Strike Damage as possible to boost the Unique effect of Deathless Visage.
- Additionally you are now able to get a total of "100% Chance for Bone Spear Projectiles to Cast Twice" on your gear by Masterworking it once on your 2h Sword.
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
- Harlequin Crest and Tyrael's Might make it much easier to hit your Armor and Resistance caps, even in high Torment difficulties. This allows you to min/max the setup further for example by removing such Paragon nodes and putting them into more damage.
- At this point Ring of Starless Skies and Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primare Resource on your 2h Sword solve your Essence.
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.
Nothing changes in the Speedfarming variant.
Gear & Skills
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 may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your damage done goes way down and they can freely retaliate.
- In high tier boss fights, beware that many of your conditional damage and damage reduction modifiers cannot activate outside of stagger phases. This means they generally deal more damage against you than regular monsters and you have to prioritize dodging the attacks from shadow bosses while you can barely scratch them outside of stagger bursts.
- Nothing changes in the Pit Pushing variant.
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.
I'm dealing very low boss / single-target damage, what do I do?
Why not put Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon?
How can I hit 100% Critical Strike Chance?
How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?
Splintering
Mechanics
Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)
Attack Speed Caps
Stagger
Summary
The Bone Spear Necromancer is a fun to play, fast-paced tactical genius that performs well in almost any scenario. With a range of tricks and devices up your sleeve, and constant resets on all of your cooldowns, you can deal with anything.
- Bone Spear makes almost everything Vulnerable. You lean into this strength and trigger effects off it. Don't forget this while adjusting and swapping your build around!
- Reaching permanent Critical Strikes is extremely easy for the Bone Spear Necromancer and has to be abused at all times to make the most out of the build.
- Zoning enemies by using Corpse Tendrils and stutter-stepping far away from the monsters is mandatory.
- Happy blasting 🚀!
Credits
Written by Chronikz