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

• 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.

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

Skill Tree

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

Paragon Board

Glyphs

Glyph Leveling Priorities

Gameplay

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

Generator: Bone Splinters

BiS: Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh

Alternate: Resource Aspect of the Umbral

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

Alternate: Resource Aspect of Torment

Alternate: Bone Prison

Alternate: Grim Harvest

Endgame Gear & Skill Progression

Progression Goals

1. Minimum Requirements
   • Splintering Offensive Aspect in Guulrahn Slums (Dry Steppes)
2. Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
   • Aspect of Grasping Veins in Corrupted Grotto (Kehjistan)
   • Aspect of Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
   • Wind Striker Mobility Aspect in Shivta Ruins (Kehjistan)
   • Sacrificial Aspect in Ruins of Eridu (Hawezar)
   • Aspect of Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
   • Aspect of the Protector in Lost Archives (Fractured Peaks)
   • Aspect of Inner Calm in Raethwind Wilds (Scosglen)
   • Resource Aspect of Exposed Flesh (Season 1, Chapter 2 Completion)
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)

Progression Setups

Build Scaling, FAQ & Mechanics

Build Scaling

Stat Priorities & Gear Options

• 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)

• 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

Hardcore Adjustments

• 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.

Level 100 Endgame Variants

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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

• Aspect of Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon does in fact do higher damage numbers on screen, but overall lowers your DPS during general gameplay. Instead we prioritize a one-handed weapon, which allows us more attack speed and to fit in an additional multiplier.

How can I hit 100% Critical Strike Chance?

This build stacks a total of ~104% Critical Strike Chance. Let's look at the different sources these come from.

Gear: Gloves 12%, Rings x2 15%
Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors: 5% → Memento Mori 8% → Sacrificial Aspect 10%
500 or greater Dexterity: >10.0%
Base Chance: 5%
Paranormal Bone Spear: 5%
Serration: >5.4% (based on 180+ Essence)
Acolyte's Bone Splinters: 8%
Entomb Rare Paragon Node: 4%
Grasping Veins: 30%

The primary concerns here are the uptime on Serration (we're not always at 100% Essence), Acolyte's Bone Splinters (requires additional Actions from the player to keep up this buff), and Grasping Veins (Requires Corpse Tendrils to hit the enemy). For each of these concerns we can break this down as follows:
Serration: This concern is mitigated by prioritizing Essence Cost Reduction and Lucky Hit Resource on gear. Still, players will want to dump their resource down to 0 naturally, so the player needs to weave in Bone Splinters to ensure Essence is kept high.
Acolyte's Bone Splinters: This concern is mitigated by weaving in Bone Splinters with regular attacks, keeping the buff up.
Grasping Veins: Casting Corpse Tendrils on cooldown and also the extra Corpse Tendrils from Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious keeps this buff up consistently.

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

First, brush up on our Resource & Cooldown Management section in the guide. Also consider:

1. Weaving Bone Splinters into your attacks, instead of just emptying your essence orb. Also this keeps up your 8% Critical Strike Chance from Acolyte's Bone Splinters more often as well as Aspect of Might.
2. Caged Heart of the Malignant Pact can fully restore your resource. (Season 1)
3. Essence Cost Reduction on Boots/Amulet can help.
4. More economical usage of Bone Spear (reflect it off walls/columns for more damage saturation)
5. Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Primary Resource on Gloves and offhand.

Why Not Use Bone Storm?

Bone Storm is strong because it adds 20% Critical Strike Chance to the build, which can't be ignored at lower levels. But in the endgame build, we can achieve high crit chance without this skill. This allows us to equip both Decrepify and Corpse Explosion on our skill bar, which enable more damage multipliers to be used in the build.

In Season 1 in particular, many players want to use Caged Heart of The Barber for its extremely high damage, especially on Echo of Lilith and World Bosses.

The alternatives here are to swap out Corpse Explosion (Loss of 40%[x] Flesh Eater and 9%[x] Fueled by Death) or to swap out Decrepify (Loss of a Malignant Heart, likely Caged Heart of Tempting Fate, and loss of manual Decrepify at range). Other skills on the bar are unlikely to be removable as the trade-offs are too high. If you find that Bone Storm is too important to you because of how you've positioned your build, explore swapping the above alternatives.

Why Manual Cast Decrepify? (Season 1)

Decrepify in Season 1 can benefit from Caged Heart of the Decrepit Aura, which works well in many builds, but does not function too well in Bone Spear. 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.

This comes with a significant tradeoff: Additional Actions. This means the player has more APM (Actions Per Minute) to run a successful build. It can be more challenging for players to remember to cast Decrepify on packs before sending Bone Spears at them.

The good news? This build now also removes the need for Bone Storm, which needs significant help from Abhorrent Decrepify to reduce its cooldown. Since we don't have this concern anymore, the actual purpose of Decrepify changes slightly. We now care more about:

1. Reducing Blood Mist cooldown
2. Slowing enemies
3. Applying Decrepify's damage reduction
4. Stunning enemies (Infrequently with Lucky Hit)

Because the build has less overall reliance on Decrepify in this way, the impact of missing a Decrepify cast is lessened, which improves the overall build.

Why Use Blood-drinker? (Hardcore)

• Even though Bone Spear can be played as a glass canon style build, for hardcore, dying is uh, bad. If you prefer variants without Blood-drinker, check out our Endgame Variants section above for something more tailored to your playstyle.

Mechanics

Abhorrent Decrepify

• This skill procs off any hit and since we hit a whole ton with our build, you will see your cooldowns drastically reduce with each attack. Stacking Lucky Hit makes it even better.
• Cast this near the beginning of your rotation and recast it to keep those cooldowns down!

Splintering Offensive Aspect

• This aspect on its own makes everything on the screen Vulnerable. You really don't need additional sources of Vulnerable, so it's better to sneak in additional damage or mechanics in those parts of the build.
• Don't use Supernatural Bone Spear ever. It's a waste of an upgrade after you have Splintering.

Video Guide

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