Spirit Wave Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Skill Rotation

• Cast Decrepify at range to drastically reduce your target's movement speed and damage output. This also maximizes the procs of Cooldown Reduction per monster pack, to manage your longer Cooldowns. With a 10 second duration, be mindful of when this falls off so that you can re-apply the Curse.1
• Start your onslaught with Blood Wave. This will not only begin to spawn Blood Orb, it will begin to spawn Corpses, and apply Vulnerable.
• Once the first corpse has spawned, cast Corpse Tendrils to gather the mobs together and spawn more Blood Orb. This also slows and stuns the mobs.
• When the mobs are gathered up or you are fighting a Boss, cast Blight to apply the pool which activates your x20% multiplier. You will want to cast this somewhat frequently as it has a six second duration.
• At this point, you are ready to fill your screen with blood and bones! Casting Blood Lance will begin to consume all of the Blood Orb on your screen unleashing unholy amounts of Bone Spirit while weaving in Blood Wave on every cooldown.
• Primarily used for defensive purposes, Blood Mist, grants Unstoppable and you are Immune during its duration. This helps with in sticky situations or to quickly reposition yourself to a more effective combat position. Please note, you do not take any skill ranks in the Mythic version as Harlequin Crest grants the skill ranks to utilize this skill

Book of the Dead

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 Spirit Wave Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Zan + Ohm - With the ridiculous amount of casts of Blood Wave we manage with this build, we have a permanent uptime on War Cry for a 15% damage multiplier.
• Lith + Xal - This build requires a massive amount of spamming to efficiently maintain a high damage output. There are substantial periods of time in which you are stationary so this combo provides a 20% increase in Maximum Life with a very high uptime allowing for both more survivability and more damage from the damage scaling of Blood Artisan's Cuirass.

Alternative choices

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

• Mot is a good defensive alternative to gain extra damage reduction.
• Kry will help with crowd control by pulling mobs into closer range as your Blood Wave continues to knock back the mobs.
• Yom has a huge benefit for staggering Bosses.

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 and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

Hired: Raheir

While Raheir is our Mercenary, you benefit from know that he will always "have your back." Not only does he come to your aid when you take more than 15% damage, he heals you frequently with his Ground Slam. He also puts his life on the line for you with Bastion redirecting 90% of the damage you would take to himself while also granting you a 25% damage multiplier from Inspiration during the effect.

Reinforcement: Varyana

We choose Ancient Harpoons for extra crowd controls which preferably happens exactly when we cast Blood Wave to mitigate the Knock Back from the skill.

To enable the Spirit Wave 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 Spirit Wave 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 Spirit Wave 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.

Why does my Blood Wave take so long to reset?

The primary reason is that your Cooldown Reduction is not high enough. You need a minimum of 60% Cooldown Reduction paired with a high roll of Fastblood to have your Blood Wave reset efficiently.

Why do we not scale Maximum Essence?

While Bone Spirit does benefit from Maximum Essence, the Pros do not outweigh the Cons for speccing into more Maximum Essence. The affix slots that are typically used for Maximum Essence in Bone Spirit builds, have priority to more important stats for both damage and survivability such as Maximum Life on your Focus.

Why not use Doombringer?

With the new temper of Bone Spirit has a chance to deal Double Damage, the increase in Maximum Life does not double your damage. This is however suggested in the Pit Pushing version as it does provide a substantial increase in survivability.

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.
• 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 significantly 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.
  • Blood Wave and Blood Lance both have an innate LHC of 50%. The Mythic Variant gets 28.1% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • So the equation is 50% * (1 + (28.1/100) * 15% = 9.61% chance to trigger Decrepify

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 Spirit Wave Necromancer fills your entire screen with blood and bones. Dealing incredible amounts of AOE and Single Target damage. This build will take you to the highest levels of content and perform exceptionally well in both single and group play.

Huge shoutout to Scriblet from Sanctuary Discord for the work he put into this build in Season 5

Written by Seroc

Reviewed by Macrobioboi