The Bone Spirit Necromancer has the strongest burst damage potential, in a single attack! Able to output over 1 Billion damage without BIS (Best in Slot) gear! Bone Spirit has the largest Skill damage multiplier native to any Skill in Diablo 4. When you prioritize reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance, the damage from a single Bone Spirit can one-shot most enemies in the game!
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 Blood Artisan's Cuirass, you can even cast additional Bone Spirits completely for free. While the initial bonus damage isn't as high, it benefits from every buff and Rank we have for the skill itself. This is great for Speed Farming in the overworld and zomming through Nightmare Dungeons! Carrying a small swap of items for Bosses, allows for a hybrid approach to gameplay. Use the Speed Farming setup for most content, and swap to finish a Dungeon or general Boss encounter.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Blood Surge Necromancer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Necromancer play style, check out all of our Necromancer Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
Recommended Stones
- Tempest - Fast AoE Damage Tool.
- Resource Support
- Arcing Support
- Breaking Support
- Flash of Adrenaline - Damage Booster.
- Safeguard Support
- Tactical Support
- Duration Support
Alternative Stones
- Slash may be the fastest activation Stone and more easily proc effects than Gyrate.
- Gripping Support can help Tempest become an additional CC effect.
- If you don't need Essence anymore, then swap Resource Support to Swift Support.
If you are lucky enough to get either Evernight or Genesis from Uber Malphas, you want to swap them in on your Construct for their powerful effects.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Reap allows us to generate Corpses on demand and increase our Damage reduction when needed.
- Decrepify applies a powerful CC effect that also causes Lucky Hit procs to reduce Cooldowns on our Skills.
- Blood Mist is the cornerstone of the build. This gives us full Immunity, makes Corpses and increases our movement speed.
- Corpse Tendrils is an amazing CC tool and our Vulnerable applicator.
- Bone Storm: Damage, Survivability and Critical Strike Chance. Just an amazing skill on any build.
- 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!
- Memento Mori is important for increasing some of the biggest damage scalers you have available to you, which are your Skeletal Sacrifices.
- 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.
Necromancer Specialization - Book of the Dead
The Bone Spirit Necromancer chooses to sacrifice Skirmishers for the Critical Strike Chance bonus, Cold Mages for additional Essence and Iron Golem for the Critical Damage multiplier.
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 this build.
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.
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
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.
Abhorrent Decrepify
With your multiple sources of overlapping Damage Over Time (DoT) effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of CC'ed enemies so your Bone Storm has the most opportunities to trigger this proc.
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!
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. See the last two steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Control
- Territorial
- Essence
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
- Imbiber
Level 21
- Essence
- Territorial
- Imbiber
- Control
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
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, 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
- Umbral - Champion's Demise - Dry Steppes
- Might - Dark Ravine - Dry Steppes
- Disobedience - Halls of the Damned - Kehjistan
- Edgemaster’s - Oldstones - Scosglen
- Ghostwalker - Broken Bulwark - Scosglen
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Serration - Gamble Focus
- Shielding Storm - Gamble Pants
- Shattered Spirit's - Season's Journey/Gamble Focus
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!- Deathless Visage offers the highest damage helmet option before acquiring an Uber Unique. Only use this if your survivability is maxed out without a good defensive Helmet.
- Blood Artisan's Cuirass offers a very potent build alternative to spam Bone Spirit more consistently by sacrificing the damage required to normally one-shot Bosses. Required to Speed Farm on the Bone Spirit Necromancer.
- Lidless Wall allows for Speed Farming in high Nightmare Dungeons, as well as Open World content. The consistent uptime of Barrier, Critical Strike Chance and Damage Reduction helps for survivability and damage output.
- Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul brings back a powerful Malignant Heart power from Season 1. The auto-casting skills need to be equipped on your Skill Bar to function. This automates Resource management and maintaining relevant CC effects.
- Tibault's Will adds an additional damage multiplier for "free" since you are Unstoppable once you enter Blood Mist. Great for Speed Farming and Bossing. Also helps with Resource management.
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest is easily the BIS helmet for Bone Spirit Necromancer. Replaces Aspect of Might.
- The Grandfather is an incredibly strong damage multiplier for the build that also adds on a good amount of survivability. Requires your build to have very high Critical Strike Chance without Aspect of Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon.
- Melted Heart of Selig offers an interesting alternative if you don't have a BIS Amulet currently. This is not typically recommended on the build.
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.
Blood Artisan's Cuirass
Once you have completed the leveling process to 50, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup, you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
Coming from World Tier 2, you can already have a good array of Legendary Aspects imprinted on key gear pieces to help smooth out gameplay and set you up for success.
- Once you find Movement Speed on Boots and/or your Amulet make sure to upgrade there gear pieces 3-4 times to increase this bonus as much as possible.
- Similarly, keeping your weapon upgrade 3-4 helps to mitigate any damage plateauing while progressing.
- Normally you shouldn't imprint an important Aspect on your weapon since it's replaced often, but Swelling Curse is in the codex of power and the base bonus it gives is strong enough to keep imprinting. If you find yourself running out of materials, you can always move it to the Gloves instead.
Skill Tree
During early game progression, especially with lower strength Aspects and Affixes on your gear, this build relies heavily on the support of your Skeletal Minions. Not only do they help to generate corpses and Essence passively, but Raise Skeleton counts as "consuming a Corpse" for the purposes of Grim Harvest to generate Essence quickly. We move some of our points into supporting the Skeleton's base survivability and to capitalize on Corpse consumption.
Book of the Dead
Relying on your Skeletal Minions helps to alleviate the clunkiness in the early game that the Bone Spirit Necromancer can run into.
In this setup, you have 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
Now that we at least have low-rolled versions of the Aspects we need we can solidify our gameplay rotation and Essence generation tools.
- Sacrifice your Skeletons as soon as you're comfortably managing your Essence. This requires >= 3 roll on Aspect of the Umbral and a mid roll on Aspect of Torment.
- Regaining your Sacrifice bonuses could put you over 100% Critical Strike Chance depending on how good your gear affixes are. Make sure to never overcommit to Crit Chance, so you don't waste any stats.
In this setup, you have 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 easily excels at Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons without modification.
Gear
Transitioning to the Late Endgame version of the build entails replacing your gear with higher Item Power, finding perfect combinations of affixes and replacing Aspects with perfect versions of those same Aspects.
- As you're progressing to the Best in Slot gear, always prioritize Maximum Life rolls on your gear over other stats. A 3/4 piece of gear with a high Maximum Life roll can outperform a 4/4 piece of gear with a low roll.
- Equipping Harlequin Crest loses a % Total Armor affix on your gear that is made up on your Amulet.
- Before you get a Shako, consider using Deathless Visage for more damage or a Legendary Helm with Might on it for more survivability.
- To incorporate The Grandfather onto the build, replace the Umbral with Serration if you can manage your Essence without it.
The Nightmare Dungeon Push setup optimizes damage and survivability to allow you to dive much deeper into Nightmare Dungeons where the difficulty increases significantly.
AVOID THESE Nightmare Dungeon Affixes
Before we go into what you should change on your build, take a look at Nightmare Dungeon Affixes that you need to avoid for a successful push:
- Monster attacks from a distance reduce your Armor by 7% for 6 sec, stacking up to 35%.
- Monsters take 40% less Shadow damage.
- Monsters take 40% less damage from close targets.
- Monsters take 60% less damage from Critical Strike.
These Affixes are bad, but not unbeatable:
- Crowd Control durations vs monsters is reduced by 40%.
- The duration of Vulnerable Effects vs monsters is reduced by 60%.
- Monsters become Unstoppable when life drops below 30%.
Gear
For high Nightmare Dungeon content, the Bone Spirit Necromancer needs to add more Damage Reduction sources to withstand the onslaught of Close Enemies. The Shield is an easy place to stack more defensive stats and Aspects. Swap the Aspect on your Weapon and Amulet if you need the extra Critical Strike Chance to reach 100%. Dual Resistances on the Boots cap all of your Resistances.
Affix is a great alternative for more consistent uptime for Bone Storm now that Shattered Spirit's can spread damage far enough to proc it.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons.
Gear
The Blood Artisan's Cuirass allows us to proc Bone Spirit for free, whenever we collect a total of 5 Blood Orbs (with a perfect roll). So instead of manually casting the Skill, we focus on generating Blood Orbs to benefit from additional benefits. We also use Lidless Wall to for more survivability and buff duration uptime.
- Swap to Aspect of Potent Blood to quickly regain Essence whenever you manually cast Bone Spirit for more damage.
- Swap to Aspect of the Embalmer to help with Orb generation.
- Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul automates corpse consumption and helps to proc more Corpse Tendrils for Orb generation.
- Lidless Wall manages your survivability so you can focus on optimal Skill rotations and damage output.
Skills
You need ways of consuming Corpses to keep the Blood Orb engine running, so we add Corpse Explosion back onto the Skillbar by dropping Reap.
- Cast Corpse Explosion in between moving through packs of enemies, and CC'ing with Corpse Tendrils.
- Corpse Tendrils is swapped to the Blighted Modifier to make even more Blood Orbs.
Paragon Boards
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successful in this game mode:
- The Bone Spirit Necromancer already prioritizes survivability above other stats on the majority of your gear. Make sure to ignore Damage affixes on your Amulet and Essence management on your Shield for more Damage Reduction options.
- In the Paragon Boards, select additional Armor Nodes in Rare clusters whenever possible.
- Only farm Nightmare Dungeon content that's a few Levels above your Character until you're comfortable farming higher difficulty content.
- Use a Dagger or 1-Handed Sword and a Shield with multiple Damage Reduction affixes and Maximum Life. Prioritize the normal stats on a weapon, and Aspect placement.
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: We get Vulnerable procs from the Corpse Tendrils. While we don't target Vulnerable Damage specifically, it is not a bad Affix to have on your gear.
- 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.
- Don't Get Hit: Make use of your range advantage and hit enemies from afar. By stutter stepping on the edge of your range, you can avoid most projectiles that come your way.
- Armor: A great deal of defenses comes from your Armor. The Aspect of Disobedience can help to increase the effectiveness of it. Make sure to get as much Armor on your gear possible.
- 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.
- Unstoppable: We only have one way to gain Unstoppable and that's from Blood Mist. Cooldown Reduction helps to "scale" this defensive mechanic by making it available more often.
- Resistances: As an Intelligence main stat class, the Necromancer naturally accrues a lot of Elemental Resistances. Make sure to reach the 70% cap in World Tier 4, and use Maximum Resistance buffs against particularly deadly enemies and 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
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes) though and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
- Helm: Disobedience
- Maximum Essence
- Maximum Life
- Cooldown Reduction
- % Total Armor
- Intelligence
- Resistance
- Chest Armor: Shielding Storm
- Maximum Life
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction
- Gloves: Swelling Curse
- Critical Strike Chance
- Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills
- Attack Speed
- Intelligence
- Lucky Hit Restore Primary Resource
- Pants: Might
Implicit: Potion Grants Barrier- Maximum Life
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction
- +xx Ranks to Blood Mist
- Boots: Ghostwalker
Implicit: + to Max Evade Charges- Movement Speed
- +xx Ranks to Bone Spirit
- +xx Ranks to Corpse Tendrils
- Dodge Chance
- Resistance
- Intelligence
- Amulet: Grasping Veins
- Movement Speed
- Cooldown Reduction
- +xx Ranks to Macabre Skills
- +xx Ranks to Evulsion
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Ring 1: Shattered Spirit's OR Umbral
- Critical Strike Chance
- Maximum Essence
- Resource Generation
- Critical Strike Damage
- Damage to Close
- Maximum Life
- Ring 2: Torment
- Critical Strike Chance
- Maximum Essence
- Resource Generation
- Critical Strike Damage
- Damage to Close
- Maximum Life
- Main Hand: Serration (2-Handed Sword)
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Critical Strike Damage
- Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills
- Damage to Close Enemies
- Vulnerable Damage
Put the following Gems into your gear:
- Helmet / Body Armor / Pants: Royal Ruby
- Weapon / Off-Hand: Royal Emerald
- Jewelry: 1 of each Gem Royal Ruby, Royal Topaz, Royal Emerald.
This build benefits the most from the following consumables:
- Crafted Elixirs: Heady Precision Elixir
- Dropped Elixirs: Elixir of Resourcefulness
- Type I Incense: Sage's Whisper
- Type II Incense: Soothing Spices to cap Resistances
- Type III Incense: 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.
Mechanics
Learn about the mechanical details which makes the build tick.
Blood Artisan's Cuirass
Corpse Explosion
FAQ
Why no Aspect of Exposed Flesh?
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!
- Blood Artisan's Cuirass is a great option for Speed-farming and can help to increase your clear speed. A common mistake new players make is assuming that it's good enough for the +xx Ranks to Bone Spirit. You need to retool your approach to farming and skill rotation to get the most out of this Unique.
- 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.
I wish you the best on your journey through Sanctuary in Diablo 4. In bocca al lupo!
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Credits
Written by MacroBioBoi
Reviewed by Echohack