Bone Spear Necromancer Leveling Build Guide

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.

Leveling Boss Powers

Alternate Boss Powers

• Wandering Death's Chest Beam - Great option for executing enemies for faster clear time.
• Torusk's Rage - Attack speed greatly increases overall damage.

Corpse Tendrils

Corpse Tendrils may be the best source of Crowd Control (CC) in Diablo 4. It Slows, Stuns, applies Vulnerable or generates Blood Orbs and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes infinitely more effective. With a few of your modifiers and Passives, these statuses become great sources of damage scaling as well. NOTE: Corpse Tendrils does not consume Corpses.

Soulrift

Soulrift Provides Barrier, Essence Generation, and a huge damage multiplier.

Blood Mist

Blood Mist makes you Immune in dangerous situations but is has a long 24 second cooldown. Only use it when absolutely necessary!

Key Passive

Unlocking the Affliction Key Passive increases your damage to Vulnerable and Crowd Controlled Enemies by 15%. Your Iron Maiden now also deals damage for free!

Book of the Dead

Unlocking the Book of the Dead

You're able to summon Skeletons as early as level one, with the ability to customize your Skeletal Skirmishers starting at level 5, when the Book Menu unlocks. From there, you unlock more types of Skeletal Warriors, Skeletal Mages and eventually Golems as you gain levels. The Golem requires you to complete a Quest, which is detailed in this resource post. You must put the Raise Skeleton and Golem skills on your skill bar to summon them.

To get started as an Bone Spear Necromancer, always use your highest DPS Weapon available for more damage. Otherwise, follow the priority list below. While you don't have all of the desired temper manuals available, simply try to get anything useful on your gear until you acquire the right ones. For example, % Damage and Vulnerable Damage, etc. all work as long as you activate their conditions. Likewise, you can temper multiple defensive options such as Resistances, Life, Armor to fill gaps in your survivability. Tempering low level gear is relatively cheap and the results can be very impactful.

Tip: For the early game, Elemental Surge Weapon Tempers are very powerful due to their high base damage, especially if you are twinking. If you find these, you may want to keep imprinting them on your weapons for an easy time.

The Codex of Power is a collection of Legendary Aspects you can imprint onto Rare or Legendary items at the Occultist. They unlock after completing specific Dungeons located around Sanctuary or salvaging items with these powers. Check out our Map Tool to locate these Dungeons.

For leveling, there are a few powers that can significantly help us if we have the funds to imprint them. In addition, keep an eye out for powerful Unique items you may find for this or other builds.

Must-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Splintering in Guulrahn Slums (Dry Steppes)
2. Torment in Black Asylum (Fractured Peaks)
3. Voracious Rage in Hallowed Ossuary (Fractured Peaks)

Nice-to-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Grasping Veins in Corrupted Grotto (Kehjistan)
2. Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)

Great Uniques for this build

1. Deathless Visage
2. Indira's Memory
3. Path of Trag'Oul

Jackpot Drops

As you level up, you may get lucky and find some great random drops. Some of these can massively amplify your power and speed up the leveling by switching to another build. Keep in mind that there are many more Aspects and Uniques that can be useful to multiple builds; this just lists some of the most impactful ones. While we usually recommend starting with Endgame Builds at level 60, you often can make them work earlier with these drops:

Build-defining Aspects

• Tidal + Fastblood: Blood Wave Necromancer
• Shattered Spirit's + Requiem: Bone Spirit Necromancer

Build-defining Uniques

1. Ring of Mendeln: Minion Necromancer
2. Mutilator Plate: Blood Lance Necromancer
3. Cruor's Embrace: Blood Surge Necromancer

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

Yax + Gar - Drinking a potion will grant you additional Critical Strike Chance to help with more Critical Strike hits.

Cem + Lum - You can use your Evade when you are low on essence to get a quick boost to essence and help top you off to continue your onslaught,

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Poc - You continuously gain and spend Essence, so this is an easy activator.
• Xal - For extra defense.
• Mot - For even more defense.
• Zec - Good option early game when your Soulrift is not yet permanent.

In Diablo 4, you can level by completing the Campaign, collecting Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers, completing Helltide activities, grinding Dungeons, clearing Strongholds, fighting in the Undercity of Kurast or interacting with the Seasonal Mechanics. While there are many ways to level up in Diablo 4, not all of them are equal.

Paragon & Glyphs

Use the slider to see 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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

• Utilizing minions early has multiple positives. You will have a frontline to help with your survivability, essence regen, and a great boost to your overall damage while you gear up to solely rely on Bone Spear.
• Grouping enemies with Corpse Tendrils allows you to maximize your damage output from spear and it's shards.
• Bone Spear is your bread and butter for this build. Not only is it your main damage dealer, but the Lucky Hit Chance that it provides activates multiple passives from Corpses to Fortify.
• Soulrift is one of the most powerful skills for this build granting defenses, damage multiplier, and granting Essence generation.
• NOTE : As you get better resource management you can drop your minions and switch to Decrepify for more utility.

Written by SerocIfkre