Bone Spear Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
The Bone Spear Necromancer was brought back to life in Season 7 with the addition of the Bone Duster's. Unfortunately in Season 7 the build was riddled with bugs. In Season 8 we will now be able to fully recognize the power of this build and once again it will be one of the best build contenders.
Sporting a fast-paced, high action, machine gun style playstyle, this build fills your screen with a massive amount of Overpower damage and rapidly clears content. With the addition of Indira's Memory this build effectively becomes Blood Spear gaining a Blood tag and access to new multipliers.
No matter if you are facing a boss or a massive horde of enemies, Bone Spear is up to the task. With the high lucky hit chance, Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Essence tempers keep you topped off on Essence to continue your onslaught.
If you have missed the Bone Spear build from old, and looking to relive its glory, or new to the Necromancer class and want a ranged playstyle, then you are in the right place.
Build Defining Drops:
- Indira's Memory - This unique turns your Bone Spear into a Blood Skill and grants you access to one of the biggest multipliers of Tides of Blood turning them into a Blood Spear
- Bone Duster's - Utilizing this aspect with Bone Prison makes every Bone Spear overpower and deal massive damage.
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.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for 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
Lord Zir's Blood Pool - This power is able to Lucky Hit and drastically improves multiple skills and passives in this build from additional corpses from Lord Zir's Blood Pool to Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Essence. This is a massive quality of life feature this build while also having great synergy with Wandering Death's Chest Beam for the execute
Modifiers
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Tempering on crowd control duration on your amulet will provide a good multi for this boss power
- Outlaw Sharpshooter's Eye - This build performs the most efficiently when you are at max range to capitalize on the Echoes from Deathless Visage pairing nicely with the range requirement of this Power.
- Wandering Death's Chest Beam - While we still use Wat in this build, this has a higher execute threshold and will drastically speed up clear times.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Blackmailer's Sabotage - Added layer of survivability.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste - If you are short on Critical Strike Chance, this power will help get closer to cap.
- Lord Zir's Blood Pool - If you find yourself missing your spears frequently, you may not be maintaining your full HP, this Power will help with healing.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- To start your tree you must select two points into the basic skills. With the change to Reaper's Pursuit, we use Reap primarily for the multiplier however, it does grant more Damage Reduction and Attack Speed.
- 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. Now that it overpowers on every cast, the multipliers available have substantially increased the damage output of this skill.
- 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.
- Bone Prison is the enabler of guaranteed overpower hits paired with Bone Duster's. This also helps with projectiles as the walls can block them.
- Soulrift grants barrier, huge damage multiplier, and Essence generation while adding yet another Darkness skill.
- 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 vital for reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance.
- Blight grants a 20% multiplier as well as adding a third Darkness skill to the action bar.
- Until you obtain Shroud of False Death, you will need to remove two points from Soulrift and put one point into both Necrotic Carapace and Necrotic Fortitude.
Skill Rotation
- No matter if you are figthing bosses or mobs, you will begin your destructive rampage with Bone Prison. This not only helps group mobs and detain them, it enables Bone Duster's to guarantee overpower from Bone Spear
- Bone Spear activates multiple features of this build. From Hewed Flesh to activating Flesh-eater with the use of Indira's Memory. This will be your primary spam only stopping to activate your support skills as they fall off. Once you have a Bone Prison, you will attack with Bone Spear to create a corpse.
- While you are casting Bone Spear, you will actively be casting Decrepify utilizing your rune combo of Tam+Wat. If you do not have this combo yet, make sure you slot in Decrepify to ensure that you have the slow, damage reduction and, cooldown recovery from this skill.
- Once you get spawn a corpse, activate Corpse Tendrils to group mobs, reach Critical Strike Chance, and gain a massive multiplier.
- After the enemies have been pulled with Corpse Tendrils, begin your onslaught with Bone Spear only stopping to reapply your support skills. Bone Spear is very unique in its damaging effects. With Deathless Visage, you will spawn Echoes when you cast Bone Spear that explode for massive amounts of damage.
- To maximize your damage you will want to make sure that you are casting at Bone Spear maximum range or bouncing them off of a wall so that the broken Shards all hit the enemy. Bouncing them off of a wall immediately breaks Bone Spear and does not require the max range to activate.
- You need to keep Soulrift active at all times. This is an incredibly strong utility for this build as it offers barrier generation, huge damage multiplier, applies vulnerable, and Essence generation.
- Keeping your enemies in a pool of Blight will maintain a 20% damage multiplier on them. You need to utilize Blight every six seconds to maintain this buff.
- NOTE : Reap is on the toolbar to add another Darkness skill to the action bar to increase the multiplier from Bone Spear. You can however use this if enemies get too close for additional damage reduction.
Book of the Dead
The Bone Spear Necromancer sacrifices all three minions types. To maximize our damage output we sacrifice our Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers for additional Critical Strike Chance so we can bring more Critical Strike Damage affixes to the build. If you are having trouble reaching resistance cap you can sacrifice your Skeletal Warriors - Defenders.
Utilizing the Bone Duster's, every cast will overpower. Skeletal Mages - Bone grants a huge multiplier to all overpower damage.
Bone Spear critically strikes on every cast therefore Golems - Iron grants a massive 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.
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
- Dominate
To Level 46
- Eliminator
- Essence
- Dominate
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
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 Bone Spear Necromancer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Wat - This combo casts Decrepify and when specced into Decrepify, will cast both versions constantly. This allows to free up a skill slot to add another Darkness skill for more multiplier from Reaper's Pursuit
- Ahu + Qax - As you attack mobs below healthy, you will charge up this ritual to enable a frequent activation of Qax
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.
- Ohm - Grants a large uptime on a 15% multiplier
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
This mercenary grants you a map hack to see all enemies as well as an Overpower multiplier.
- Reinforcement: Raheir
You choose Bastion for additional defenses when you become injured
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. 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
- 55% Critical Strike Chance on Character Sheet
- 100% Chance for Bone Spear to Cast Twice (Deathless Visage grants 88% with a triple masterwork so you will still need a roll on your Weapon
- 92%+ Attack Speed for Cap One and as much as you can fit in Cap Two with Blood Attack Speed
- 2000+ Intelligence
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 75%
- 15,000+ Life
- 160%+ Movement Speed
- Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Essence - A non-GA affix on weapon will masterwork without hitting, over 100%.
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.
- If you are having trouble with your resistances then you can sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders to cap them until your Paragon and Gear grants you enough.
- It is extremely important to have your Soulrift up as much as possible for defense and Essence generation.
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.
- Indira's Memory turns your Bone Spear into a Blood Skill and grants access to new multipliers and making your spears into awesome looking Blood Spears.
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
- The biggest challenge to overcome with this build is the life drain. To solve this Doombringer provides not only a substantial increase to life but massive healing. With the incredible amount of Lucky Hit Chance and the amount of hits per spear, you will constantly remain topped off.
- Shroud of False Death not only increases your damage output but substantially increases your survivability as well as increasing the ranks of all your support passives.
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.
Gear & Skills
You will swap a Legendary pair of boots with Metamorphosis and utilize the Jah rune in place of Ohm. Utilizing Rapid Ossification tempers on your rings and amulet, you will have a substantially higher uptime on Bone Prison for your Speed Farming Setup.
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.
- Focus on perfecting the suggested Masterworking crits to achieve the highest damage output and survivability of this build to increase your chances of pushing higher pits.
- For pit pushing swapping in Cursed Aura allows for us to utilize the combo of Nagu+Xal in place of Tam+Wat for a massive HP boost. This gameplay is drastically different as you must maintain a continued focus on re-applying curse to the mobs. For clearing this is not a problem as your curse spreads however, for bosses, you will need to make sure that you re-apply every four seconds. This is easily maintained as you will already be moving to dodge both echo mechanics and pick up blood orbs.
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.
- Even though Blood Wave activates the unique effect of Indira's Memory, Soulrift has substantially more use in this build. Granting barrier, Essence generation, applying vulnerable, and a huge damage multiplier.
- With the change to Reaper's Pursuit, stacking additional Darkness skills on the toolbar grants more multiplier.
- Paragon Node Entomb grants +4% Critical Strike Chance, while the three Magic Nodes grant +1% Critical Strike Chance each, totalling +7% Critical Strike Chance coming from your Paragon Board.
- During the time it is active, Grasping Veins grants +25% Critical Strike Chance when it is not applied to a 2h-Weapon or Amulet.
- Inspiring Leader grants 16% Critical Strike Chance.
- The above already puts you at 48% Critical Strike Chance. This means you need to find an additional 52% Critical Strike Chance from other sources to achieve permanent Critical Strikes during Grasping Veins.
- Serration is rather tricky to factor into this calculation since ever player's Essence is different and based on your current gear however, for every 30 Essence you will gain .3 Critical Strike Chance per rank.
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
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.
- Bone Spear has an innate LHC of 50%.
- The Mythic Variant gets 18.1% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
- The equation is 50% * (1 + (18.1/100)) * 15% = 8.8857%.
- Read up more on Lucky Hit Chance in our dedicated guide by Ava.
- 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.
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.
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.
- Utilizing every tool in your toolkit, this build will effectively clear all content and provide a smooth gameplay experience.
- 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.
- Fill your screen with huge ORANGE NUMBERS.
- Relive the glory days with the new and improved Bone Spear.
Credits
Written by Serocifkre