The Bone Spirit Necromancer has the strongest burst damage potential, in a single attack! We're talking Billions of damage! But it also rewards players that master the intricacies of the Necromancer's most complex skill rotation. When you prioritize reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance, the damage from a single Bone Spirit can one-shot pre-Tormented Bosses!
Since Bone Spirit deals its damage in a small radius around it on impact, the entire build is leveraged to pull everything together for one big KA-BOOM! Corpse Tendrils applying Vulnerable, Stunning and pulling everything to one location makes picking off entire groups of enemies, a breeze!
If you assemble Exodia in the form of Banished Lord's Talisman you can tap into Overpower to drastically increase your one shot potential. By respecing into powerful new multipliers, Maximum Life with Fortify and Uniques including Blood Moon Breeches, the automatic Overpower Critical Strike damage gets truly ridiculous!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Bone Spear Necromancer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Necromancer play style, check out all of our Necromancer Guides.
Season 5 - Infernal Hordes
In Season 5, the Season Theme brings your hero back into the bowels of Hell, in the Infernal Hordes endgame activity. You're first introduced to Hellbreach Dungeons, miniature Horde-like micro-dungeons that teach you the new mechanics and rewards systems. As you slay more powerful Demons and Bosses, you're rewarded with the new Reputation progression that comes with amazing rewards. These include Crafting Materials, unlocking Season's Journey tiers and even the coveted Resplendent Spark, needed to craft a mythic unique.
Follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the Reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 5 guide for more information.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Reap IS ONLY USED IN THE EARLY GAME TO: Allow you to generate Corpses on demand and increase your Damage reduction when needed, on the Starter setup. The Endgame setup does not use a Generator Skill.
- Decrepify applies a powerful CC effect that also causes Lucky Hit procs to reduce Cooldowns on your Skills.
- Blood Mist offers a quick and easy escape button, granting the Immune status over its duration.
- Corpse Tendrils is an amazing CC tool for pulling everything together and getting more BANG for your buck!
- Bone Prison is your primary on demand Vulnerable source. It physically stops monsters from closing the gap and endangering you. It counts as 6 Minions for the purposes of Requiem.
- Bone Storm: Damage, Survivability and Critical Strike Chance. Just an amazing skill on any build. You eventually need its survivability for enduring harder content in the end game.
- And when everything lines up: Bone Spirit to wipe every enemy off the screen!
- Ossified Essence is very straight forward. The more Essence you have when you cast Bone Spirit, the more damage it does!
- Serration should have 3 Skill Points if you need the additional Critical Strike Chance to reach 100% consistently. Once you no longer need them, you can remove points to put elsewhere.
- The single point in Spiked Armor helps your Minions to apply damage more quickly to trigger the bonus of Deadraiser Glyph.
Necromancer Specialization - Book of the Dead
The Bone Spirit Necromancer has many options for minions/sacrifices and what's best for your build depends on a few different circumstances:
- On early game gear, using Mages and Warriors helps to increase your Maximum Essence, you eventually only need the Warriors to accomplish this.
- In fact there's a reality where you don't need minions at all, with good enough gear and Elixir of Resourcefulness II.
- Using Skeletal Mages - If you still need Mages active to reach 275 Essence, and need better Essence Management use Upgrade 1 Skeletal Mages - Cold. Or use Upgrade 1 Skeletal Mages - Shadow for a 15% damage multiplier.
- Once Mages are sacrificed, if your Essence Management is still an issue sacrifice Skeletal Mages - Shadow at first, for more Maximum Essence and Resource Generation.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specialization in our full Book of the Dead Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
Managing your Resources and Cooldowns is crucial to the success of the Bone Spirit Necromancer.
Aspect of Torment
This Aspect helps to dramatically increase your passive Essence regen every time you cast Bone Spirit and Critically Strike. In addition to the skill's base Dreadful Bone Spirit modifier that adds another Essence regen rate, you quickly regain a large portion of the spent Essence. Both of these sources rely on the player reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance as soon as possible.
Essence per Second / Casting Macabre Skills Restores xx Primary Resource
These Affix and Temper options help to passively generate Essence so that the build continues to function without stopping or relying on manual Essence generation options. Using source of +xx% Resource Generation (e.g. Harlequin Crest) push these even further to effectively replace your entire Essence globe, everytime you cast Bone Spirit.
Essence on Kill
Simply put, if you kill an enemy, this affix regains you the total amount you have, per enemy. The interesting function on this build is that Bone Prison grants your Essence on Kill value per section of Bone that is destroyed when you proactively cancel the skill early. This does not trigger when the sections are killed by enemies or expire naturally.
Resource Aspect of the Umbral
Each Crowd Control effect that you inflict upon enemies triggers this aspect. This means that you can stack multiple Crowd Control Effects in order to get incredible Essence generation. You need to find a 4 Resource version of it from a drop. Try to gamble rings at the Purveyor of Curiosities to get this item. Important effects that can trigger the Resource Aspect of the Umbral include:
- Corpse Tendrils Slow, Stun, Pull
- Decrepify Slow
Reap
Reap is a fantastic tool for quickly generating Essence against large packs of enemies, since it triggers on every target inside its cleave. It performs much worse against single targets and should only be used as a last resort in those circumstances.
Abhorrent Decrepify
While you triggers this effect sub-optimally from your various damage dealing skills, Skeletal Minions are currently bugged and can trigger this for you with their various attacks. This helps to slightly decrease Cooldowns and makes for better uptime for key Cooldown Skills.
Skeletal Warriors - Reapers
Every 10 seconds your Reapers do a wind up attack which triggers a random Skill on Cooldown to have its timer reduced by 3 seconds. This can help with reducing the longer cooldowns on the build when you lack Cooldown Reduction affix on your gear.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15! Imbiber glyph is only used as a placeholder.
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Gravekeeper
- Corporeal
- Essence
- Deadraiser
- Amplify
- Not used in Overpower Setup.
- Control
- Not used in Overpower Setup.
- Dominate
- Specifically Used in Overpower Setup.
- Exploit
- Specifically Used in Overpower Setup.
Level 21
- Essence
- Dominate
- Exploit
- Gravekeeper
- Corporeal
- Deadraiser
For the Overpower Respec Boards, it's expected that you have equipped a Banished Lord's Talisman. To benefit from the new Overpower enabler the build has, you need to use Minions and level additional Glyphs in this order:
- Dominate
- Exploit
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Progression & Variants
When you start diving into the Endgame Bone Spirit Necromancer build, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. These are listed in priority order:
- Unlock the following Aspects from Dungeons:
- Swelling Curse - Hive (Scosglen)
- Grasping Veins - Corrupted Grotto (Kehjistan)
- Torment - Black Asylum (Fractured Peaks)
- Might - Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
- Disobedience - Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Edgemaster’s - Oldstones (Scosglen)
- Requiem - Vault of the Forsaken (Scosglen)
- Wind Striker - Shiva Ruins (Kehjistan)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Serration - Gamble Focus
- Hardened Bones - Gamble Helm
- Shielding Storm - Gamble Helm
- Occult Dominion - Gamble Helm
- Blood Getter's - Gamble Helm
- Shattered Spirit's - Gamble Ring
- Metamorphosis - Gamble Boots
- Imprisoned Spirit's - Gamble Focus
- Shattered Spirit's - Gamble Ring
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
- Banished Lord's Talisman allows you to Overpower on every cast once you reach the 275 Essence required to activate the amulet on every cast. This is easily the BIS option for the build but requires very specific gear to pull it off.
- Blood Moon Breeches offer a massive damage multiplier once you begin using Overpower.
- Path of Trag'Oul offer amazing power and bonus Essence through its interactions with Bone Splinters.
- Tibault's Will great for Speed Farming. Also helps with Resource management.
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Mythic Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest is easily the BIS helmet for Bone Spirit Necromancer.
- Doombringer offers in incredible source of Survivability that slightly increases Additive Damage through Overpower. Recommended for high tier Hordes and Pits.
- The Grandfather is an incredibly strong damage multiplier for the build that also adds on a good amount of survivability. Not used in the final version that wants to Overpower.
- Melted Heart of Selig offers an interesting alternative for survivability if you don't have a BIS Amulet currently. This is not typically recommended on the build since Amulet Tempers are so pivotal to the build's functionality, and the Overpower setup uses a Unique Amulet.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Follow the build's gearing progression from level 50 to 100, including the changes that need to be made as you obtain Legendary Aspects and Uniques.
to 100
The Pit
Hordes
Once you have completed the leveling process to 50, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup, the Bone Spirit Necromancer can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- The Codex of Power has many damage multipliers available to fill out your imprinted gear, while focusing on Essence Management and Crowd Control leads to the best success in the early game.
- Your primary concern is being able to generate Essence on demand to always be able to cast Bone Spirit on demand.
- This becomes significantly easier once you have Shattered Spirit's, but before that, Torment on an amulet grants a massive boost to your passive Essence generation.
- A Two-Handed weapon with Swelling Curse helps to bridge the gap to 100% Critical Strike Chance which is pivotal for the build to function properly.
Skills
- Acolyte's Reap allows you to initiate every fight with Corpse Tendrils to maximize the number of targets hit as well as trigger Grasping Veins.
- Iron Maiden works as a great tool to regain Essence between casts of Bone Spirit.
In this setup, your Bone Spirit Necromancer has access to all Legendary Aspects, allowing you to pilot a much stronger version of this build. Additional Legendary Aspects are used to fill slots that may be replaced with Unique items later on.
Gear
- Progressing to this Gear and Skill setup still relies on Essence management Aspects. If you hit a tipping point were the Corpse Generation and Essence Gen is handled, you can swap Aspects over to benefit from more Damage and Cooldown Reduction.
- DON'T SWAP EARLY! A smooth gameplay experience is better than a clunky endgame setup without the right tools.
Skills
- At this point you should no longer require Iron Maiden for Essence generation and can swap over to the strictly stronger tool of Decrepify. If you find your gameplay experience becoming too clunky, swap back until you gear gets better.
In this setup, the Bone Spirit Necromancer has access to all Unique items and Legendary Aspects. This allows you to pilot this build at its peak efficiency. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to implement them. This setup excels in all content including Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons and The Pit.
Gear
- SURVIVABILITY NOTE: If you feel like you're dying easily in the content you're doing, swap Blood Mist for Bone Storm and add Shielding Storm back onto the build. (This can replace Hardened Bones if you have Harlequin Crest).
- Now your build is fully online, with Essence management no longer being a concern. You can add on substantial damage as well as utility to bring your build to the next level.
- Banished Lord's Talisman requires you to cast Bone Spirit when you have at least 275 Essence to trigger the automatic Overpower. Doing this back to back means you always Overpower and get the biggest total damage bonus.
- Always recheck your total Critical Strike Chance with Grasping Veins active so you're never overcapping this stat and wasting potential Damage/Survivability slots.
- Adding a Harlequin Crest replaces Occult Dominion on a similar Legendary helm, stat-wise.
- In a perfect min-maxed world you can use Imprisoned Spirit's Bonebreaker as the last improvement to your damage output. This requires near perfect Masterwork Crits and Greater Affixes to maintain 100% Critical Strike Chance, Cooldown Reduction and affix rolls on the rest of your gear but this weapon nearly doubles your total damage output and helps with destroying Bosses and Tanky mobs even in Tier 8 Hordes and 140+ Pit Runs.
Skills
- Since you're using Minions and lacking DR from Stand Alone, you offset this by successfully Fortifying from Necrotic Carapace. This has the added benefit of increasing your Overpower Damage.
- Raise Skeleton counts as consuming a corpse for Fueled by Death and Flesh-eater.
- The single point in Spiked Armor helps to trigger Deadraiser faster.
The Speedfarming setup for the Bone Spirit Necromancer assumes you're able to swap survivability for higher damage output, to increase the rate of farming lower difficulty content. Low tier Pit Runs for materials, Helltide for Boss summoning materials and all openworld content to name a few.
Gear
- Metamorphosis on the boots add a ton of on-demand mobility. It also activates Unstoppable.
- Swap on Tibault's Will for more Maximum Essence and an Essence management tool.
- To make Essence Management even easier, use Skeletal Mages - Cold to generate Essence and gain more from Requiem. Skeletal Warriors - Reapers help to make Corpses or reduce cooldown so you can spam even faster.
Skills
- Move the points from Compound Fracture to Death's Approach for more movement speed.
The Bone Spirit Necromancer for the Infernal Hordes has access to all Unique items and Legendary Aspects. This content requires specific tuning to maximize survivability, density clearing and Boss kill speed to be efficient. The gear required may swap out key stats or optimize in specific ways that doesn't translate well to other areas, but offers valuable strengths to complete this conent.
Gear
- The perfect gear for pushing Infernal Hordes represents EXTREMELY endgame focused gear pieces and optimizations. You can confidently run Tier 8 and lower without Doombringer, but Harlequin Crest offers so much survivability that it quickly becomes a priority.
- Sacrificing potential damage for more Cooldown Reduction, Bone Spirit Size/Bone Storm Duration temper, and survivability is fine. You still do Billions of damage per cast on tanky mobs.
- While most builds prioritize damage output for Pit efficiency, Hordes requires much more movement speed and animation speed from Attack Speed, to gain an advantage.
- Note the change in desirable Masterwork Crits, and Tempers. The higher these values are, the smoother your gameplay experience is.
- In a perfect min-maxed world you can use Imprisoned Spirit's Bonebreaker as the last improvement to your damage output. This requires near perfect Masterwork Crits and Greater Affixes to maintain 100% Critical Strike Chance, Cooldown Reduction and affix rolls on the rest of your gear but this weapon doubles your total damage output and helps with destroying Bosses and Tanky mobs even in Tier 8 Hordes and 140+ Pit Runs.
Skills
- The largest change to the Skill Tree removes the use of Blood Mist to regain access to Bone Storm for its survivability. Paired with Shielding Storm, you are effectively unkillable with enough density around you since this setup on the top end gets above 75,000 Maximum Life.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successful in this game mode:
- Focus more on your Chest & Pants while gearing up. Make sure to have only defensive stats on these two slots as they provide a ton of survivability.
- Always reach Armor and Resistance cap and prioritzie Maximum Life instead of damage nodes on your Paragon Boards.
- Swap to a Shield with Shielding Storm and continue to use Bone Storm over Blood Mist. Replace Temper Affixes with Bone Storm Duration instead of Bone Splinters Trigger Twice.
- You can also just use Shielding Storm instead of Occult Dominion in the early game, or instead of Hardened Bones in the end game once you have Harlequin Crest.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
- Essence: This build relies heavily on fast Essence generation as well as Maximum Essence to scale Bone Spirit's damage. We should always be close to full Resource when it comes back off cooldown.
- Critical Strike Chance: Bone Skills in general have high Chance to Critically Strike and the Skill Tree empowers this further with Serration. Stacking xx% Critical Strike Damage allows for massive damage dumps when successful. Prioritizing 100% Chance to Critically Strike is priority number one.
- Vulnerable: You get Vulnerable procs from the Corpse Tendrils and Bone Prison. While you don't target Vulnerable Damage specifically, it is not a bad Affix to have on your gear.
- Overpower: Overpower grants a 50% damage multiplier (if at max Life) and additive damage based on your Maximum Life and current Fortify value. The more you have, the more you get!
- Crowd Controls: Since all of our damage occurs in an area, pixel pulls and grouping of monsters becomes a direct damage scaler. This also allows us to benefit from every "Damage to CC'ed Enemies" affix in the game when Corpse Tendrils procs.
- Attack Speed: Increased Attack Speed increases the rate we generate Essence, by reducing the animation length on our generators. It decreases the length of time before Tendrils is on the field and how quickly Bone Spirit spawns from our Necro. While less important on this build, its efficiency gain adds up over time. A single maxroll of Attack Speed reduces our animation length by 3 frames, which is an increase of 8.3% in efficiency.
- Don't Get Hit: Make use of your range advantage and CC enemies from afar before re-engaging. By stutter stepping on the edge of your range, you can avoid most projectiles that come your way.
- Maximum Life: Life has become more important than ever with the reduction in options for Damage Reduction. In the overall equation of "Effective Life", scaling Life itself is the easiest option to avoid one-shots.
- Armor: The armor cap of 9,230 reduces incoming Physical Damage. Always make sure to reach this cap even if it means sacrificng a bit of Damage or Maximum Life.
- Unstoppable/Immune: Blood Mist provides both of these effects. Cooldown Reduction helps to "scale" this defensive mechanic by making it available more often.
- Damage Reduction: In all of its forms, this stat is important to stack after Armor. Since we maintain the "Close" distance most of the time, Damage Reduction from Close Targets is a very strong survivability stat on top of all other forms of Damage Reduction.
- Resistances: Prioritize reaching the 70% cap in World Tier 4 at a minimum for most content. Use Max Resistance effects from Elixirs and gear to reach 85% when farming certain bosses and endgame content.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.
Damage Scaling
- 100% Critically Strike Chance
- On Gear Affixes, On Temper Affixes (Bone Critical Strike Chance), from Serration Passive (Need to do the math) and from Paragon Board.
- Minimum of 275 Maximum Essence
- On Gear Affixes, Unliving Energy, Bone Graft, Reinvigorate, Requiem, Elixir of Resourcefulness II, Skeletal Mages - Shadow (Early Game Only)
- > +4 to Macabre Skills, +4 to Core Skills, and 4 Ranks to Bone Spirit
- ~1000% Bone Spirit Damage
- >1,200 Intelligence
- >30% Cooldown Reduction
- >50% Bone Storm Duration While Leveling and Late Endgame (Bone Spirit Radius is less valuable)
- 100% Bone Splinters Projectiles Cast Twice (With Path of Trag'Oul for Maximum Damage in the Midgame)
- 51.8% Attack Speed (At least 40.2%)
Defense and Utility
- >35,000 Maximum Life
- Armor Capped: 9,230
- Resistance Capped: 70%
- >50% Corpse Tendrils Size (Infernal Hordes)
- 50% Curse Size (Quality of Life)
- >50 Casting Macabre Skills Restores +xx Primary Resource
- >20 Essence per Second (Without Uniques)
- >50% Bonus Movement Speed (Without Uniques)
- Helm: Harlequin Crest
- Temporary: Occult Dominion OR Shielding Storm
- Maximum Resource ↑
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Essence per Second ↑
- Maximum Life
- Intelligence
- ⚒️Maximum Life
- ⚒️Crowd Control Duration
- Chest: Hardened Bones
- Essence per Second ↑
- +x to Macabre Skills ↑ ↑
- Armor
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Total Armor
- ⚒️Curse/Corpse Tendrils Size
- Gloves: Serration
- +x Ranks to Core Skills ↑
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Intelligence ↑
- Attack Speed
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage
- ⚒️Curse/Corpse Tendrils Size
- Pants: Blood Moon Breeches
- Temporary: Shielding Storm
- Armor ↑
- Maximum Life ↑
- Intelligence ↑
- Dodge Chance
- ⚒️Maximum Life
- ⚒️Curse/Corpse Tendrils Size
- Boots: Path of Trag'Oul
- Temporary: Wind Striker
- Movement Speed ↑
- +x to Bone Spirit ↑
- Essence Per Second ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Movement Speed
- ⚒️Crowd Control Duration
- Amulet: Banished Lord's Talisman
- Temporary: Move Grasping Veins Here
- +x to Imperfectly Balanced ↑
- +x to Evulsion
- Maximum Resource ↑
- Cooldown Reduction
- Movement Speed
- ⚒️Casting Macabre Skills Restores +xx Primary Resource ↑
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage
- Ring 1: Requiem
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Intelligence
- Attack Speed
- Maximum Life
- Essence on Kill
- Critical Strike Damage
- ⚒️Casting Macabre Skills Restores +xx Primary Resource ↑↑
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage
- Ring 2: Torment
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Intelligence
- Attack Speed
- Maximum Life
- Essence on Kill
- Critical Strike Damage
- ⚒️Casting Macabre Skills Restores +xx Primary Resource ↑↑
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage
- Main Hand: Grasping Veins (1-Handed Mace)
- Intelligence ↑
- Maximum Life ↑
- Attack Speed
- Critical Strike / Overpower Damage
- Essence on Kill
- ⚒️Bone Splinters Projectiles Cast Twice
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage ↑
- Off Hand: Imprisoned Spirit's (Focus)
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Maximum Resource ↑
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Essence on Kill
- ⚒️Bone Splinters Projectiles Cast Twice
- ⚒️Bone Spirit Damage
Put in the following Gems into your gear:
- Helmet / Body Armor / Pants: Royal Ruby
- Weapon / Off-Hand: Royal Ruby
- Jewelry: Royal Diamond OR Royal Skull (Which ever is needed to hit either Cap)
This build benefits the most from the following consumables:
- Elixirs: Elixir of Resourcefulness II (Highly Recommend permanently drinking these during Pit and Infernal Horde runs)
- Incenses: Song of the Mountain, Reddamine Buzz & Chorus of War
FAQ & Mechanics
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.
Abhorrent Decrepify
Rapid Ossification Bug
Bone Prison Bug
Blood Artisan's Cuirass
Video Guide
Summary
The Bone Spirit Necromancer is the true height of damage potential from the class. The tons of Crowd Control, survivability and MASSIVE nuke damage make for explosive finale fights against enemies! You cast Bone Spirit and they go boom. It's wonderfully satisfying every time it happens!
- The playstyle is very "all-in". We know we need to Crit to win and when that doesn't happen, you may struggle. Prioritize the affixes you need to reach 100% Critical Strike Chance above all else.
- Practice makes perfect! Don't be afraid to run slightly easier content of Nightmare Dungeons to get the flow of the gameplay loop.
- In bocca al lupo!
Credits
Written by MacroBioBoi
Reviewed by Chronikz