Bone Spear Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Last Updated: August 17th 2023

Season 1 - Malignant

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The Bone Spear Necromancer is the natural endgame build from our best leveling build! Critical Strike Chance? Yes. But now we have so, so much more POWER.

Of course, we continue the brand of Bone Spear by making everything on the screen Vulnerable. Season 1 gives us unending Essence with Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh out of the Season Journey. With the right gear, you can get lucky and swim in seas of Essence.

Necromancer's fatal flaw is its movement speed. But we can add movement speed boots with Wind Striker Aspect into our arsenal of death, allowing our crits to speed us through the entire game.

However, your progression to a fully kitted out level 100 god of death won't be instantaneous. You will need to think on your feet to get there. This Endgame Guide will take you on your journey to achieve calcium perfection. Whether Soy Milk, Oat Milk, or regular Hell Bovine Milk is your choice, the strength of our Bone Spear is indomitable!

Endgame Bone Spear Build

Corpse Tendrils

Decrepify

Corpse Explosion

Blood Mist

Bone Splinters

Bone Spear

Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers

Sacrifice

Skeletal Mages - Cold

Sacrifice

Golems - Iron

Sacrifice

This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Bone Spear Necromancer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Necromancer play style, check out all of our Necromancer Guides

Level to Endgame
Effective AoE Damage

Powerful Offense and Defense ✔
Rewarding High-Level Gameplay

❌ High APM
Gear Dependent
All or Nothing Combat
Needs to Reach 100% Crit

Season 1 - The Malignant

Players on the Eternal Realm should ignore this section of the guide. Your build will differ slightly from this build guide.

Diablo 4 Season 1 introduces a new questline to hunt Malignant Monsters across Sanctuary. Defeating them drops Caged Hearts that are placed in Jewelry infested sockets to gain build-altering powers. Check out the full Season 1 The Malignant guide from Chewingnom to learn more!

  • There are 32 Caged Hearts divided into 4 different colors, 1 color for each type:
    • Vicious: Orange, Offensive Power
    • Brutal: Blue, Defensive Power
    • Devious: Pink, Utility Power
    • Wrathful: Black, Super
  • The first 3 must be socketed into their respective infested socket color, while the 4th can be placed into any infested socket.
  • Once socketed, they cannot be removed. Instead they can be broken down into Invokers to target farm the Caged Hearts you want inside Malignant Tunnels.
  • Higher powered Caged Hearts drop at higher levels.

With this in mind, let's look at the top 3 best Caged Hearts (and alternatives) for this build:

Best-in-Slot Caged Hearts

  1. Caged Heart of The Barber OR Caged Heart of the Malignant Pact - In general you may have better results with The Barber early on when you don't have the build finished, and better results with Pact when the build is closer to completion. The Barber may be the better choice for some encounters like Echo of Lilith and World Bosses as well due to its ability to Critically Strike and proc itself, leading to some reports in the community of 300M crits or more. But keep in mind that these encounters are a very small selection of the overall gameplay. Ultimately, you may want to stock two rings for different loadouts, if you're really min-maxing, or just pick Caged Heart of the Malignant Pact for a "best fit" scenario.
  2. Caged Heart of Tempting Fate - Our main goal is to get to near 100% Critical Strike Chance with the build, so that we can one-tap enemies. Adding more Crit Damage is extremely valuable for more instant damage.
  3. Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious - This heart gives us automatic Corpse Explosion and Corpse Tendrils. Corpse Explosion casts every second, and Corpse Tendrils casts automatically, and this doesn't even trigger your own cooldown! This heart is also used to trigger the amazing Flesh Eater Legendary Node on our paragon tree.

Alternative Caged Hearts

  • Caged Heart of Revenge - "Suppressed" means 20% less damage taken, and so this adds strong survivability! If you want to build more tanky, try this heart.
  • Caged Heart of the Decrepit Aura - Using this heart lets us remove Decrepify from our skill bar entirely, freeing up a critical skill slot. You may want to use this if you're using Bone Storm when you don't have 100% Crit Chance in the build yet.
  • Caged Heart of the Great Feast - While our testing shows that it acts as a new multiplier, the additional damage comes at an Essence cost that's counter productive to Bone Spear's primary gameplay loop. This bonus damage may prove useful in the Echo of Lilith fight, but is unnecessary in all other farming strategies.

Barber Setup

The Barber used to negatively interact with Lucky Hit effects, but this does not appear to be the case anymore as of patch 1.1.1. We'll keep this section here just in case additional items and notes about the Barber (and it's somewhat weird effect) are discovered again.

Skill Tree

Active Skills

  • Bone Spear is our main damage and hits enemies with both the main hit and reflected shards. The second damage component can make positioning important when fighting elites or bosses.
  • Bone Splinters for Essence generation. Our Best In Slot generation setup with Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh keeps us completely full.
  • Blood Mist is the only Skill the Necromancer has to provide Immune (which also provides Unstoppable). We also take Ghastly Blood Mist to generate a few extra corpses so we can Corpse Tendrils at will.
  • Decrepify is manually cast at range in the build because you rarely want to enter close range using Season 1's Caged Heart of the Decrepit Aura. The reason is because Bone Spear's main goal is to deal so much damage that it never needs to get in range of enemies, keeping it safe at a distance.
  • Corpse Tendrils Slows, Stuns, and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of our AoE damage becomes more effective. It also triggers Aspect of Grasping Veins, which is handy from time to time for extra damage. It's especially notable as one of the few pixel-pull skills in the game. Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious triggers this automatically in addition to our manual casts!
  • Corpse Explosion serves us as a support skill and automatically triggers with Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious. This triggers extra damage multipliers for us automatically!
Endgame Bone Spear

Passives

  • Ossified Essence and Serration scale our damage with maximum Essence.
  • Inspiring Leader offers attack speed.
  • Amplify Damage, Compound Fracture, Evulsion, Imperfectly Balanced, Fueled by Death, Death's Reach, Memento Mori offer big damage multipliers.
  • Stand Alone offers damage reduction.

Book of the Dead

The Necromancer has 3 different Minions it can choose to summon or sacrifice, located in the Book of the Dead. The Bone Spear Necromancer doesn't have space on its Skill Bar for more abilities, so we choose to sacrifice all three Minion options for their valuable buffs.

We prioritize Resistances from Skeletal Warriors when we reach 100% Critical Strike Chance from gear. Vulnerable Damage and Critical Strike Damage from Golem for give big damage and optimal calcium distribution.

Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers

Sacrifice

Skeletal Mages - Cold

Sacrifice

Golems - Iron

Sacrifice

Learn more details and how to unlock this class specialization in our full Book of the Dead Guide.

Paragon Board

← Scroll to Level →

Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.

Glyphs

We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

Level 15

  1. Gravekeeper
  2. Exploit
  3. Sacrificial
  4. Imbiber
  5. Essence

Level 21

  1. Essence
  2. Exploit
  3. Gravekeeper
  4. Imbiber
  5. Sacrificial

There are a total of 225 Paragon Points. Starting with level 50 you gain 4 Paragon Points per level, plus 20 from Renown, and 4 from Altars of Lilith.

Gameplay

The skill rotation here is critical to keeping the damage flowing.

Skill Rotation

  • Apply Decrepify on enemies before attacking. This allows all our hits to proc cooldown reduction on everything, and make the enemies deal less damage.
  • Start the fight using one Bone Spear in order to create one corpse. You can also use Blood Mist to get a Corpse.
  • Weave in Bone Splinters between casts of Bone Spear to kill everything. It's important to keep up your Essence and to occasionally cast Bone Splinters as this keeps up your optimal critical strike chance buffs.
  • Cast Corpse Tendrils on cooldown. This also activates the important Offensive Aspect of Grasping Veins. Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious automatically triggers this even more!
  • Blood Mist helps to remove CC from your Necromancer if staying stuck would lead to your untimely demise. Make sure to use this skill sparingly, so you have it available in truly dire scenarios. It also completely removes Poisons and other DoT debuffs, so it can be used mid-fight to reduce incoming DPS. While you can force your way through some enemy blockades, the slower movement speed of the skill can often lead to a wall of enemies waiting at the end to bop you.
  • When fighting regular mobs, we engage with a run-and-gun style that's fast and free. But when fighting a tough elite pack or boss, you will want to carefully engage from a distance. You can shoot offscreen, or stun using Corpse Tendrils on a far away corpse before spamming down the pack.
  • If you run into an elite pack or boss, it's best to engage them near a wall, column, or other environmental object that you can reflect your Bone Spear off. This enables all of the shards to hit the one mob you care the most about.
  • Standing still is preferable to constant movement to maximize the bonus from Aspect of Inner Calm. This is particularly useful in events and bosses. Don't randomly move around if you don't need to!

Resource & Cooldown Management

One of the most important parts of your endgame journey is acquiring enough Essence to destroy your enemies. Having a grasp of the essentials of how your Essence works is key to your progression. There are many ways of generating resources, but below are some of the most important and relevant ones for the Necromancer.

Generator: Bone Splinters

This endgame build starts with Bone Splinters as a primary generator, and also relies on Aspect of Exposed Flesh. Even though this skill stays on our bar, how we use it changes dramatically as we level up. It's definitely not as fast as the constant stream of endless Bone Spears that are punctuated by Corpse Tendrils, but you'll always have a skill to reach for to generate something, even on bosses.

BiS: Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh

This aspect is extremely rare compared to other aspects. However, if you can find it, it gives Essence for any enemy you hit that is Vulnerable. This makes the vast majority of your Essence gain automatic, but you will need other sources to top you off from time to time. Make sure you're properly grouping enemies with Corpse Tendrils in order to have more efficient fights.

Alternate: Resource Aspect of the Umbral

Each Crowd Control effect that you inflict upon enemies triggers this aspect. This means that you can stack multiple different Crowd Control Effects in order to get incredible Essence generation. However, using the Codex of Power version of this aspect isn't good enough at endgame. You need to find a 4 Resource version of it from a drop. Try to gamble rings at the Purveyor of Curiosities to get this item. Important effects that can trigger the Resource Aspect of the Umbral include:

  • Penitent Greaves chill
  • Corpse Tendrils slow, stun
  • Decrepify slow

Alternate: Resource Aspect of Torment

Oddly enough, Torment gives us a constant stream of Essence at endgame compared to early leveling. The constant Critical Strikes mean that the Essence generation is up always, so this is better than it might look at first glance! Don't overlook this one!

Alternate: Bone Prison

Bone Prison continues to be an excellent source of Essence at endgame because of the incredible capability of the wombo-combo. First cast Corpse Tendrils, then once you have many enemies in one spot, gain tremendous Essence with a Bone Prison, alongside Fortify.

Alternate: Grim Harvest

During leveling this was a small to medium source of our resource. Now however, it is a small, pitiful and slow way to generate essence, and only really useful to top up on Essence during or after a fight. Still, having an extra way to generate on bosses or in edge case scenarios is handy and will help you stay alive. More importantly, it's a side-benefit of eating corpses, so it is more or less automatic and still useful for our build.

Endgame Gear & Skill Progression

When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.

Progression Goals

Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee, that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!

  1. Minimum Requirements
  2. Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
  3. Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
    • Offensive Aspect of Serration
    • Aspect of Disobedience (High or Maximum roll)
    • Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh (High or Maximum roll)
    • Aspect of Explosive Mist (Tanky builds)
    • Splintering Offensive Aspect (High or Maximum roll)
    • Aspect of Grasping Veins (High or Maximum roll)

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

Progression Setups

Starter
Early Endgame
Late Endgame

Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.

Gear

  • Acquiring a Offensive Aspect of Serration will boost your damage early on.
  • Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh is critical for maintaining your resources. Make sure to complete chapter 2 of the season journey to acquire it as it is difficult to find from drops.
  • Don't underestimate Movement Speed. As Necromancer we don't have access to movement skills, so putting this on boot and amulet is critical to your success.
Endgame Starter Gear

Skills

  • In the very early endgame, we don't have 100% Critical Strike Chance yet, and Decrepify isn't a big impact on the build (yet). We're able to do a simple swap to acquire Bone Storm until we're ready to crit constantly.
Endgame Starter Skills

Build Scaling, FAQ & Mechanics

The answer to many questions can be found in the following section.

Build Scaling

Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.

Damage
Defense
  • Essence: This build relies heavily on fast Essence generation as well as Maximum Essence to scale. We should always be close to full Resource.
  • Critical Strike Chance: Bone Skills in general have high Chance to Critically Strike and the Skill Tree empowers this further with Serration. Stacking xx% Critical Strike Damage allows for massive damage dumps when successful. Prioritizing 100% Chance to Critically Strike is priority number one.
  • Offensive Aspect of Grasping Veins is important to trigger as much as possible allowing us to further push our Critical Strike Chance and Critical Strike Damage to the limits!
  • Vulnerable: We get Vulnerable procs via the Splintering Offensive Aspect. It's unnecessary to get it from other places since this makes the entire screen Vulnerable!
  • Crowd Controls: Since all of our damage occurs in an area, pixel pulls and grouping of monsters becomes a direct damage scaler. This also allows us to benefit from every "Damage to CC'ed Enemies" affix in the game when Corpse Tendrils.

Stat Priorities & Gear Options

There are many stats and status effects that generate on gear, but many are not important for your build. Some stats may block others from rolling or only appear on certain gear slots. See below for a general breakdown as well as a per slot priority list in the list.

Put in the following Gems into your gear:

  • Helmet / Body Armor / Pants: Royal Topaz (Better vs CC) OR Royal Ruby (Better one-shot protection)
  • Weapon / Off-Hand: Royal Emerald
  • Jewelry: Royal Skulls (Season 1 uses Malignants)

This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:

  • Elixirs: Elixir of Combatant Fortune, Elixir of Cruelty, Elixir of Fortitude, Elixir of Savagery, Heady Precision Elixir
  • Incense: Song of the Mountain or Reddamine Buzz

Refer to the table below to see the best rolls for every slot ranked in order of importance:

SLOTASPECTSTAT PRIORITY
WeaponOffensive Aspect of Serration on a One-Handed Sword*Weapon Damage
1. Vulnerable
2. Critical Strike Damage
3. Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills
4. Core Skill Damage
OffhandAspect of Inner Calm*Weapon Damage
1. Critical Strike Chance
2. Lucky Hit: Chance to Resource Primary Resource
3. Essence Cost Reduction
4. Intelligence
HelmAspect of Might OR
Deathless Visage
1. Cooldown Reduction
2. Total Armor
3. Maximum Life
4. Maximum Essence
Chest ArmorAspect of Disobedience1. Damage Reduction
2. % Total Armor
3. Maximum Life
4. Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies
(Note: Total Armor is a priority reroll, so if you get a drop without it, it's easy to get)
Gloves
Splintering Offensive Aspect
1. +Ranks to Bone Spear
2. Critical Strike Chance
3. Critical Strike Chance with Bone Skills
4. Lucky Hit: Up to 5% Chance to Restore Primary Resource
5. Attack Speed
PantsAspect of the ProtectorImplicit: Potion Restores Essence
1. Maximum Life
2. Total Armor
3. Damage Reduction
4. Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies
5. Intelligence
6. All Stats
Boots(BiS) Wind Striker Mobility Aspect OR
Penitent Greaves
Implicit: Movement Speed after Evade
1. Movement Speed
2. Essence Cost Reduction
3. +Ranks to Corpse Tendrils
4. Intelligence
AmuletOffensive Aspect of Grasping Veins1. Total Armor
2. Movement Speed
3. Essence Cost Reduction
4. +Ranks to Evulsion
*5. Damage Reduction (Hardcore)
Ring 1Sacrificial Aspect 1. Critical Strike Chance
2. Vulnerable Damage
3. Critical Strike Damage
4. Maximum Essence
*5. Maximum Life (Hardcore)
Ring 2Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh1. Critical Strike Chance
2. Vulnerable Damage
3. Critical Strike Damage
4. Maximum Essence
*5. Maximum Life (Hardcore)

Hardcore Adjustments

Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:

  • Use a Wand and a Shield. The Shield also lets us take Aspect of Explosive Mist for more Blood Mist. I've got a fever, and the only cure is more Blood Mist!
  • Alternatively, find a Lidless Wall so you can endlessly chain-spawn your Bone Storms, which keep uptime on Defensive Aspect of Shielding Storm.
  • Make sure every engagement starts with Decrepify, and that you have an eye on your Blood Mist cooldown. Ensure that Blood Mist is always off cooldown before heading into a big engagement.
  • Don't prioritize damage over survivability. I like to call this vanity damage. Bigger crits might look nice, but ain't so nice if you're dead.
  • Our Hardcore Variant below goes into more detail.

Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.

Level 100 Endgame Variants

You can optimize your build further for certain endgame activities, such as Speedfarming, Nightmare Dungeon Pushing, etc. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to achieve the best results in them.

Speedfarming
Nightmare Dungeon Push
Pinnacle Boss
Hardcore
Tanky

The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons below Tier 45.

Gear

  • Swap out survivability stats on boots and/or amulet for additional movement speed. Zoom!
  • Many players settle for a hybrid between this variant and their personal preferences so they don't have to build swap for different activities. Consider what is best for you and your playstyle at level 100.
  • Deathless Visage offers some increased damage for speed variants.
Bone Spear Speedfarming Level 100

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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.

Why not put Aspect of Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon?

How can I hit 100% Critical Strike Chance?

I'm having Essence issues, what do I do?

Why Not Use Bone Storm?

Why Manual Cast Decrepify? (Season 1)

Why Use Blood-drinker? (Hardcore)

Mechanics

Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.

Abhorrent Decrepify

Splintering Offensive Aspect

Video Guide

Endgame Necromancer Hardcore Thoughts - Full Guide For Season 1 Coming Soon!

Summary

  • Bone Spear makes almost everything Vulnerable. We lean into this strength and trigger effects off it. Don't forget this while adjusting and swapping your build around!
  • Don't forget movement speed on your boots! It's possibly one of Necromancer's most important stats on any piece of gear.
  • You need a mana battery to make more Bone Spears. Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh and Resource Aspect of Torment to have a well rounded approach to Essence generation.
  • Zoning enemies out is important because we don't have ANY movement skills. Corpse Tendrils keep enemies locked up and stunned.

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Credits

Written by Echohack
Reviewed by MacroBioBoi

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