Bone Spirit Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.

There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of three Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay, and Psyche), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.

Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

• Doom Orb - a viable alternative which grants more damage with the rapid amount of hits this build applies.
• Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Aura of Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed. Unfortunately, it's ineffective against Bosses.
• Hex Specialization - This is a good alternative to grant additional Critical Strike Damage

Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.

Best-in-Slot Occult Gems

• Dust Stone - Utilizing one Hex and two Auras, this grants a nice damage multiplier
• Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats improve both skill damage and your Witch Powers potency. Maximum life both increases survivability and overall damage when overpowering.
• Phantom String - With this build overpowering on every single cast, this provides a huge multiplier to the damage.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Toadling's Wish - Increases potency for the three Growth and Decay powers
• Hungering Void - Another way to pull mobs together.

Skill Rotation

Hey Quick Note: This build is very intricate with a ton of moving parts and reading this section is INCREDIBLY important to understand what you're doing at any given time. It's worth the time now, so you can enjoy the build later!

• Before your build is fully online, and you've automated this through Tam+Wat begin combat by casting Decrepify at a distance to reduce the threat of enemies.
  • Due to a bug with Rapid Ossification, after casting Bone Spirit, using Decrepify further reduces the cooldown of all bone skills multiple times, depending on how much Essence has been spent on Spirit in recent skill uses. You don't need to do this in the end game, but it can be incredibly helpful before then to keep your gameplay loop running smoothly!
• Cast Bone Prison on top of the largest group of enemies.
  • Bone Prison enables Imprisoned Spirit's which in turn makes Phasing Poltergeist's trigger even more inside of Bone Prison
  • Path of Trag'Oul fires Bone Splinters at target in the prison, which grants two maximum Essence and restores two Essence everytime they hit a target.
  • Bone Prison's Cooldown is reduced by Rapid Ossification and the bug of it. So casting Bone Spirit AFTER Prison is crucial to minimize cooldowns. When in doubt, spam Decrepify.
• Once you have the enemies setup in your prison, cast Blight to give you a quick 20% damage multiplier.

• Now cast Bone Spirit into that group of Crowd Controlled (CC'ed) enemies. Watch the explosions POP!
  • With Banished Lord's Talisman, if you cast Bone Spirit with at least 275 maximum resource, you trigger the amulet to Overpower AND prime your next cast to Overpower again. You need to cast it at least once at the start of a new loaded zone to begin this domino effect. That's how you permanently Overpower. If you ever fail to cast at this minimum, don't worry, just know on your next cast, it procs.
• At this point you just rinse and repeat this process for each pack of enemies or while shotgunning directly into the face of a Boss.
  • When everything lines up you can continue casting Bone Spirit until your Prison runs out. Recast Bone Prison whenever this engine stalls out.
  • Be sure to keep Blight on Elites and Bosses at minimum.
• Soulrift should be cast whenever it's off cooldown AND you're engaging a pack of enemies of a boss. The Essence it generates helps to mitigate any suboptimal gameplay, while the Barrier protects your Life and Fortified status as well as granting a massive damage multiplier and applying Vulnerable to any targets that avoided your Prison's grasp. With the addition to Finality, you will at minimum want to cast this every eight seconds.
• Use Corpse Tendrils whenever it's off cooldown to proc Grasping Veins as well as keeping enemies grouped together for your next volley and provide you with Blood Orb
• When in doubt Blood Mist out! Reposition and end the Mist early by clicking the Skill again, once you're ready to re-engage. A great tactic is to generate a Corpse during this time then immediately cast Corpse Tendrils on it for more safety.

Book of the Dead

• If you feel squishy, sacrifice Golems - Blood for Maximum Life

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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 Spirit Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Poc + Qax = This will grant you an insanely huge hit every few casts as you spend substantially more than 5% of your maximum resource per cast.
• Tam + Wat = This casts both upgrades of Decrepify at once at the target location!

Alternative choices

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

• Yom can be used in place of Qax to help stagger bosses more quickly to activate damage vs Crowd Controlled targets, and
• Mot for damage reduction, Zec for better Soulrift uptime, and Qua for movement speed are all great options to fit your particular playstyle.

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. You can have one Hired Mercenary that accompanies you into battle, and one Reinforcement Mercenary that triggers a selected Skill from their Tree based on your Skill use or other conditional event:

Hired: Raheir

Raheir offers a ton of survivability from Valiance, and Bastion, as well as CC'ing enemies nearly continuously. They also increase your damage through Inspiration.

Reinforcement: Varyana

Varyana adds a boost to Attack Speed if you are slightly under. You can utilize Ancient Harpoons if you are good on attack speed.

To enable the Bone Spirit Necromancer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. 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

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Bone Spirit 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.

This section is designed to guide your Bone Spirit 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.

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.

I Keep Running out of Essence!

Essence per Second and Resource Cost Reduction

During your early progression you will need to manage this with the following until you can achieve 100% value on the Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Primary Resource affix. Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Resource Cost Reduction reduces the cost of every skill by a percentage equal to the total on your gear. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second. To completely replace the Essence loss of 1 cast per second you need 40% Resource Cost Reduction. This would allow you to go "infinite", meaning you would never run out of Essence. When casting your skills more than once per second, you need more of both stat to achieve this equilibrium.

Affix Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Primary Resource

This can be valued at over 100% of your resource. Making sure you have enough Lucky Hit Chance will ensure a high uptime on this affix.

How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?

Abhorrent Decrepify

Another layer of importance of Lucky Hit Chance with this build. Your Bone Spirit and Bone Prison will reset on their own with Bone Prison however, Soulrift and Corpse Tendrils will require Lucky Hit Chance to activate Decrepify

[Rapid Ossification

Every cast of Bone Spirit will trigger Rapid Ossification allowing for seamless resets on both Bone Spirit and Bone Prison. With three ranks into Bone Prison and one extra from Shroud of False Death, you will always reset your Shroud of False Death

How Does Bone Spirit Damage Work?

Bone Spirit is a Core, Bone Skill that deals Physical Damage. It can Critically Strike, Overpower and benefits form Vulnerable status. When you cast Bone Spirit, it consumes the remainder of your Essence. For each point of Essence it consumes, it gains a 4% multiplier of its damage. If you have 100 Essence, it gains 400% bonus damage, or a five times multiplier of its damage.

It applies its damage in a small radius around itself, on impact. This radius can be increased with tempers on gear.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life. Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors - Defenders for Resistances.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

Mechanics

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

• 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 Spirit has an innate LHC of 33%.
  • The Mythic Variant gets 38.3% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • The equation is 33% * (1 + (38.3/100)) * 15% = 6.845%.

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

Stagger

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.

The Bone Spirit Necromancer has the highest scaling damage in the game, in a single skill. It has often been the best Boss Killer and reaches Billions of Damage with ease! Once you see those massive orange damage numbers on the screen, it's hard to play anything else!

In Bocca al Lupo!

Written by Serocifkre