The most important change to Season 1 for Leveling with Bone Spear is that you can acquire Aspect of Exposed Flesh from Completing Chapter 2 of the Season Journey. Ensure you prioritize this aspect right away!

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!

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

Imperfectly Balanced is currently bugged in game. You're only able to place a single Skill Point in. Place the two points further along the track described below. Once you've reached 56 or 58 Skill Points used, consider what Skills would feel best for your current play style. Great Skills that benefit from more Skill Points are Blood Mist and Corpse Tendrils to reduce their cooldown!

It's time to invest in Bone Spear. Ensure you take Supernatural Bone Spear right away for the extra Vulnerable, and your damage will ascend even higher than the High Heavens themselves. Don't forget about the second upgrade, Paranormal Bone Spear, however. Once we complete Guulrhan Slums, we gain access to the Splintering Offensive Aspect, at which point we swap upgrades.

Note: Guulrhan Slums must be unlocked through the campaign first before you can access it for first completion.

First, open up your Book of the Dead and Sacrifice your Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers. When you unlock them, you can also go ahead and sacrifice your Skeletal Mages - Cold as well. Then, we take only 1 point into Blood Mist, and then we pick up Corpse Explosion. Finally, we top out our Bone Spear to 5/5 points for maximum damage.

Have too much Essence now? No? Well let's change that! Now we pump up the Essence generation by grabbing Grim Harvest and Hewed Flesh. Then we pick up Corpse Tendrils for Crowd Control. Traveling to Champion's Demise for Resource Aspect of the Umbral, turns this skill into an insane Essence battery too.

The Bone passives skyrocket our damage and nearly guarantee Critical Strikes 100% of the time. After that, Stand Alone and Memento Mori reward us for Sacrificing our minions even more. Make sure you use your Golem after unlocking it at level 25, and eventually Sacrifice Golems - Iron!

The Key Passive gives a powerful boost to our already high damage output. In fact, Ossified Essence may be the strongest Key Passive in the entire game, and it continues to scale even as you gain more gear and levels.

Finally, we take our Ultimate Bone Storm and we start pumping our Maximum Essence and Essence generation as high as possible. For long fights, it's better to prioritize regaining Essence to maximize our damage potential due to Ossified Essence and Serration, but also don't be afraid to nuke down an Elite or Boss if you have them tucked into a corner to benefit from the Bone Spear shard reflections.

After gathering all Renown in Diablo 4 you have 10 extra Skill Points to spend on every character. Your first priority is to spend them toward the leveling progression we've shown above. Your progression through these points can vary highly based on your found Legendary Aspects. Once you've reached the end, put them into these nodes to build toward the Bone Spear Endgame Necromancer Build Guide.

Hardcore: This variant of the leveling build is safer for Hardcore. Although Necromancer has a tough battle ahead compared to other classes, prioritizing skills that give you Fortity and stun enemies give you an edge against the forces of darkness.

Click and expand the Accordion below to see the skill point breakdown.

Every build will eventually need to generate enough Essence to use its skills. There are many ways of generating resources, but below are some of the most important and relevant ones for the Necromancer.

Season 1 Journey, Chapter 2

Every enemy that is Vulnerable can serve as a Essence generator for us with this incredible Aspect. This is only available for a limited time from Season 1's journey, so make sure you pick it up! Next season will be a much rougher start for Bone Spear build as it's likely we won't have access to this aspect right from the start.

Codex of Power Dungeon: Champion's Demise
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. You can acquire this from the Codex of Power, but it only gives you 1 Resource. If you're lucky you can find a 4 Resource version. If not, then make sure you diversify your Essence with other options. Try to gamble rings at the Purveyor of Curiosities to get this critical item. Important effects that can trigger the Resource Aspect of the Umbral include:

Codex of Power Dungeon: Betrayer's Row
During leveling this is your best bet for instantly regaining your Essence during a long fight. You can generate the blood orbs to power it when combined with Defensive Aspect of the Embalmer and Blighted Corpse Tendrils.

Codex of Power Dungeon: Black Asylum
This is easily available to us during leveling, but may be difficult to trigger until you can begin to stack Critical Strike Chance. If you have nothing else, pick this one up for a ring, but make sure you're correctly hitting your crits.

Our Bone Prison Variant of the leveling build includes this awesome skill 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.

This skill might look like a powerful source of Essence but it is wildly inconsistent and does not perform well against elites or bosses. Ultimately this makes you dependent on Corpses, which won't always be there for you to use. Use this to top up on Essence from time to time but it is more useful to trigger effects like Defensive Aspect of the Embalmer or your Corpse-oriented damage multipliers. Make sure you diversify your Essence or else you'll find yourself without important resources!

As a last resort, your basic skills Bone Splinters, Hemorrhage, Reap, and Decompose can add to your Essence pool. Hopefully you won't need to use these much. If you do, try to acquire some of the above Resource Aspects to help you on your leveling journey.

The Book of the Dead gives us access to Raise Skeleton and Golem skills, which let us summon our hordes of undead Minions to fight by our side. We can also elect to sacrifice these Minions, gaining a unique passive bonus for each type we choose to sacrifice. You can mix and match which ones to summon vs sacrifice, with any combination being viable for different builds.

You can 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 our Book of the Dead guide. You must put the Raise Skeleton and Golem skills on your skill bar to summon them.

Skeletons and our Golem are primarily useful for Sacrifice with this build, but we don't do this right away. Which Skeletons and Golem to choose and ultimately when to sacrifice them is detailed below:

Leveling up in Diablo 4 is similar to most other ARPGs and MMOs - we're at the mercy of what drops. For the most part this means replacing Rares with better Rares all the way up to 50. We also prioritize certain specific Codex of Power Legendary Aspects for imprinting. If you're lucky enough to find some Legendaries or Uniques they can provide a significant power boost (discussed in the next sections). Assuming you don't find any of those, let's look at some key stats to look for along the way:

The Bone Spear Necromancer specializes in constant Critical Strikes, and so ignores all other weapons for Two-Handed Sword since it gives implicit Critical Strike Damage.

Prioritize the stats below, in order:

Socket your Weapon with Emerald.

Don't Forget: Upgrade your weapon at the Blacksmith at least 1-2 times when you use a new weapon.

Do not upgrade Armor or Jewelry while leveling (except for Hardcore). Socket Armor with Rubies and Jewelry with Skulls.

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. For leveling, there are a few Aspects that can significantly help us if we have the funds to imprint them:

Warning: DO NOT imprint your Weapons as they are constantly replaced as you level and are expensive to imprint. Put Offensive Aspects on your Amulet and Gloves instead.

Written by Echohack.
Reviewed by Macrobioboi.