Bone Spirit Necromancer Endgame Build Guide
The Bone Spirit Necromancer has the strongest burst damage potential, in a single attack! We're talking big damage with LOT of zeros at the end! 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 spawning Blood Orb to fuel Blood Orb, 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 the automatic Overpower Critical Strike damage gets truly ridiculous!
Requirements for this Build:
- Banished Lord's Talisman - Enables the build to overpower for insane amounts of damage.
- Path of Trag'Oul - This is required to meet your maximum resource of 275 to enable Banished Lord's Talisman on every cast as well as increases the radius of Banished Lord's Talisman for even more damage with Imprisoned Spirit's
- Blood Moon Breeches - Adds to Critical Strike Chance as well as a good multiplier to Critical Strikes.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Necromancer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
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.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Grigoire's Lightning Square - With Bone Spirit being a Core Skill now, this will activate frequently to empower the Modifier Boss Powers to increase your damage output and provide a higher execute than Decrepify
Modifiers
- Belial's Eye Beams - An easy slot in for any overpower build for a nice multiplier.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - The incredible AOE of this build allows for huge damage increase when these blisters die.
- Wandering Death's Chest Beam - This provides a larger threshold for execute than Decrepify and will drastically speed up clear time.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Grants additional Vulnerable multiplier.
- Blackmailer's Sabotage - Provides an additional layer of defense.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Blight - This serves two purposes. The primary purpose is to gain a 20% multiplier to Elites and Bosses. This lasts for 6 and anything within the pool takes 20% more damage. With the change to the size of the pool you have more coverage for this damage. The second is to add a second Darkness skill to the action bar for Reaper's Pursuit.
- Blood Mist is your source of Unstoppable, as well as an amazing survivability tool since it grants Immune for its duration.
- Bone Prison is your primary on demand Vulnerable source. It physically stops monsters from closing the gap and endangering you. With Imprisoned Spirit's you gain a massive damage boost especially paired with Phasing Poltergeist's
- Corpse Tendrils Slows, Stuns, makes Blood Orb to fuel Phasing Poltergeist's and pulls every monster (except Bosses) into a single space so that all of your AoE damage becomes more effective.
- Soulrift grants Barrier, generates Essence, applies Vulnerable and grants a Damage buff over its duration. Cast this whenever it's available.
- Decrepify Slows, reduces incoming damage, Stuns and reduces your Cooldowns via Lucky Hit mechanics. Utilizing the Tam+Wat combo you will benefit from both your slotted upgrade as well as Decrepify to add an Execute to all non Bosses at 10%
- And when everything lines up: Bone Spirit to wipe every enemy off the screen! This also has the Core Skill Tag!
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
The Bone Spirit Necromancer initially uses their Skeletal Minions to further boost its efficiency, but gets to fully sacrifice them for its final form.
- While using minions select Skeletal Warriors - Reapers for Corpse consumption, and Skeletal Mages - Cold for Essence generation.
- When you Sacrifice them select Skeletal Warriors - Defenders to reach Maximum Resistances, Skeletal Mages - Bone for Overpower Damage and Golems - Iron for Critical Strike Damage.
- If you feel squishy, sacrifice Golems - Blood for Maximum Life
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Necromancer Class Overview
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
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.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Corporeal
- Essence
- Eliminator
- Amplify
- Dominate
To Level 46
- Corporeal
- Essence
- Eliminator
- Amplify
- Dominate
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
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.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
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.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
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. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. 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
- 88% Chance for Bone Spirit to Deal Double Damage
- 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)
- >51.8% Attack Speed (At least 40.2%)
- >15 Total Bone Skill Ranks, Macabre Skill Ranks, Core Skill Ranks
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- >10,000 Life
- >60% Soulrift Duration
- 30% Cooldown Reduction (In Stat Sheet)
- +3 Ranks to Rapid Ossification
- Lucky Hit: 15% Chance to Restore 100% Primary Resource
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.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
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.
Begin here if you just made it into Torment 1 or are coming from our Leveling Guide! Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats. Disobedience helps with this.
- If you find a Slower 2-Handed Weapon (Sword, Mace, Axe) with great stats on it, don't be afraid to use it until you find a good 2-Handed Scythe. The Slower attack speed is less impactful on this build since the early game is a lot slower with more setup.
- If you do not have Cursed Aura yet, make sure to keep Decrepify applied to all enemies, whenever you engage a new pack or more monsters aggroe onto you.
- Cooldown Reduction on your Helmet helps with better uptime of Grasping Veins as well as Soulrift. Try to time your damage bursts during these timers and focus on resetting their cooldown with Decrepify whenever possible. Dont cast Soulrift until you have to, so it's up during dangerous combat scenarios.
- Cast Raise Skeleton often to stay at maximum minions, while also keeping them topped off. Their damage is not relevant, but their utility is.
- Make sure to calculate your Critical Strike Chance and that you're reaching 100% consistently whenever you cast Bone Spirit. If you don't Crit, you're cooldown is seven seconds longer until you can cast it again.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestral Legendaries, Paragon points, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Make sure to Respec your Paragon Board to the Overpower setup to benefit from your new found power.
- At this point in your gear quality, you should be able to spam Bone Spirit after casting Bone Prison. If you're often "stalling out" where you cooldowns are resetting, add Decrepify back to your Skillbar and spam it between casts to trigger Rapid Ossification.
- The Unique Aspects of Path of Trag'Oul, Blood Moon Breeches and Banished Lord's Talisman are by far the most important stats on them. A perfect rolled Aspect is worth more than all four affixes rolling perfect.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Heir of Perdition is a substantial enabler for this build. Granting Core Ranks, Critical Strike Chance, and Lucky Hit chance all are highly desired for this build. The extra Movement Speed is great too.
- Ring of Starless Skies Has everything you could ever ask for in this build. With the increased stats it helps you meet all of your minimum requirements.
- Shroud of False Death makes this build absolutely seamless granting the extra rank to Rapid Ossification paired with the Bone Spirit Cooldown temper. The bonus to all other passives increase your damage substantially.
The Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- Replace Ohm with Jah for more movement speed.
- For the wealthy out there, a Greater Affix and triple Masterworked Path of Trag'Oul for Movement Speed is ideal on this setup.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your DPS decreases significantly when you're dodging their attacks.
- This setup is HYPER optimized, meaning that every recommended Greater Affix and Masterwork Crit is tailored to hit the exact caps that are necessary. This allows you to swap more Masterwork Crits to + Ranks on Skills and other damage increases. While you may not see a difference at lower tier content, these changes make the differences between highest possible Pit Tier clears.
- Fists of Fate add a wild amount of Lucky Hit Chance when you triple Masterwork Crit on a Greater Affix. The Damage bonus of the Aspect can leads to significantly higher DPS output as long as the build high rolls on average. The additional procs of Restore Resource allows for continuous Bone Spirit spam without ever stalling.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Video Guide
Summary
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!
Credits
Written by Serocifkre