Corpse Lance Necromancer Speed Farming Variation

The Corpse Lance Necromancer can deal quite well with farming Torment difficulty Rifts and low-to-mid Greater Rifts at a very high speed. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

Within the limited scope of these lower difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Corpse Lance Ricochet Blood Rush Metabolism 1 Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish 2 Devour Voracious 3 Command Skeletons Dark Mending 4 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands
Passive Skills
Rathma's Shield Final Service Blood is Power Fueled by Death

The build is a variation of the standard Pestilence progression setup that relies on the fast elite kill speed of low tier content to constantly fuel Messerschmidt's Reaver and chain Land of the Dead casts.

The rotation of the build goes roughly like this:

• Activate Land of the Dead as soon as it comes up, ideally with complete overlap. This can be accomplished with as low as two elite kills within a single Land of the Dead window, given the focus on CDR on gear.
• Sic your Command Skeletons on nearby monsters to buff up your damage from the Jesseth's Arms set, Jesseth Skullscythe and Jesseth Skullshield.
• Maintain your supreme speed with a combination of the passive buff from Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish and the active use of Blood Rush Metabolism.
• Note that since Command Skeletons is a spender, you might have to spam it a bit to reset your Land of the Dead, if the Messerschmidt's Reaver resets do not line up properly. This will work due to the worn Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac.
• Spam Devour Voracious to sustain your health and get free Corpse Lance Ricochet shots from the Pestilence 2-piece.

You will need to replace the progression-oriented Convention of Elements for the cooldown reduction of Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. With this ring, whenever a rift slows down and the Land of the Dead reset does not overlap as easily, you can spam some Command Skeletons to make up the CDR loss via Essence spending. Complete the worn jewelry with the usual Squirt's Necklace and Krysbin's Sentence.

For your bracers, you can either stay on Strongarm Bracers from the progression build, or add a little toughness to an otherwise squishy farming build with Ancient Parthan Defenders. They will be procced and kept up by your high Land of the Dead Frozen Lands uptime.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Pestilence Mask	Intelligence Socket Critical Hit Chance Vitality
Shoulders	Pestilence Defense	Intelligence Corpse Lance % Cooldown Reduction Vitality
Torso	Pestilence Robe	Intelligence 3 Sockets Vitality Corpse Lance % Armor
Wrists	Ancient Parthan Defenders	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Poison Damage Vitality
Hands	Pestilence Gloves	Intelligence Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction Vitality
Waist	Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle	Intelligence Vitality Armor Life %
Legs	Captain Crimson's Thrust	Intelligence 2 Sockets Vitality Armor
Feet	Pestilence Battle Boots	Intelligence Vitality Armor All Resistance Movement Speed
Amulet	Squirt's Necklace	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Poison Damage Intelligence
Ring #1	Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction
Ring #2	Krysbin's Sentence	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction
Weapon	Jesseth Skullscythe	High Damage Range Intelligence Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Cooldown Reduction % Weapon Damage
Off-hand	Jesseth Skullshield	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.

On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.

With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:

• Core: Max Essence: 200 points.
• Offense: Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points so they are as close to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the two stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet. For weapon-and-offhand builds, this is usually achieved with the full 200 points spent into Critical Hit Damage.
• Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Necromancers, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and Armor (to complement the naturally high All Resistance stat of Intelligence-based characters).
• Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.

In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:

• Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the 3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season. If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its implementation. The available pieces are Guardian's Aversion (Wrists), Guardian's Case (Waist), and Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
• Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set ( Focus and Restraint) and Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
• Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e., Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%. Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.

In speed runs, Elite and Rift Guardian fights are significantly faster and enemies perish fast; thus, the value of Zei's Stone of Vengeance diminishes and it is best replaced by Boon of the Hoarder for the gold-related synergy with an Avarice Band worn by your Follower.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Bane of the Trapped Gogok of Swiftness Boon of the Hoarder
Helm	Flawless Royal Diamond (Cooldown Reduction)
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Topaz (Damage and All Resistance)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

For your weapon slot, you can run either Messerschmidt's Reaver (solo normal rift farming) or In-geom (group normal rift farming) as your cooldown reduction powerhouse; both will work exceptionally well with the build.

Corpsewhisper Pauldrons are still a cornerstone piece in the build, necessary for their damage amplification for Corpse Lance.

In order to attain the full bonuses of the Pestilence and Cpt. Crimson sets, you will need to use Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during standard T16 rifts farming is the Enchantress due to her vast array of bonuses that complement this build; most notably, Prophetic Harmony for the Cooldown Reduction and Amplification for the elemental damage increase, both of which you can attain by using a Hand of the Prophet.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered, which renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it — valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside of straight up evasion via Blood Rush.