Corpse Lance Necromancer Trag'Oul Variation
Trag'Oul Blood Lance Variation
The Trag'Oul Blood Lance remains a very viable and capable GR progression
build, which focuses on sniping elites rather than relying on the Pestilence full screen,
auto-targeting mayhem. This variant's core dynamic comes from the delicate
balance of spending life and depleting Corpses to fuel your damage dealer,
Corpse Lance
Blood Lance, or replenishing life and consuming Corpses
through
Blood Rush
Transfusion and
Devour
Cannibalize .
Adapting Skills
Active Skills |
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Passive Skills |
To play into the 6-piece bonus of the Trag'Oul set, you will have to use
the strongest, Life-spending rune of Corpse Lance —
Blood Lance.
With Blood Lances consuming a considerable amount of health,
especially during
Land of the Dead, you will have to counterbalance them
with an even stronger effect — the
Cannibalize rune on
Devour.
When it comes to Trag'Oul set builds, Blood Rush deserves a special
mention. Selection of a particular rune is not necessary; due to the 2-piece
bonus, you receive the benefits of the
Potency toughness buff,
Transfusion healing,
Molting Corpse generation, and
Metabolism double charge — all the while losing the drawbacks of
the skill from the
Hemostasis rune. Playing around the
Transfusion healing is especially important, since in any decently
populated fight it can replenish a decent chunk of what you lost from
Blood Lances.
Grisly Tribute should be added to this variation over
Fueled by Death from its Pestilence sister spec. This passive is needed
for some helpful health sustain in an otherwise healing-starved build.
Adapting Gear
Naturally, this variant replaces the Pestilence set with the 6-piece Trag'Oul set in all the same slots. All stat recommendations and other legendary and set items are completely identical to the Pestilence spec.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
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Head |
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Shoulders |
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Torso |
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Wrists |
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Hands |
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Waist |
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Legs |
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Feet |
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Amulet |
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Ring #1 |
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Ring #2 |
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Weapon |
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Off-hand |
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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: Paragon Cap
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.
Season 29: Gearing Considerations
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.
Adapting Gemming
You will maintain the selection from the main Pestilence version of the
build: Bane of the Trapped and
Zei's Stone of Vengeance for the
damage amplification, and
Gogok of Swiftness for the CDR and Increased
Attack Speed value.
Slot | Gems |
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Jewelry | |
Helm |
|
Torso and Pants |
|
Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
You will keep the setup from the solo progression spec, using
Reilena's Shadowhook for Essence-based damage amplification,
Corpsewhisper Pauldrons as a
Corpse Lance-dedicated legendary,
and
Ring of Royal Grandeur to tie the bonuses of Trag'Oul and Cpt.
Crimson sets together.
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.
Follower
The recommended follower for this build during solo GR progression is the
Enchantress, due to her increased attack speed bonuses (helpful
for the attack speed breakpoint-reliant methods of dealing damage in this
build) via Focused Mind, as well as the cooldown reduction
bonus from
Prophetic Harmony and damage reduction from
Powered Shield.
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.
Legendary Potion
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.
Changelog
- 13 Sep. 2023: Added Season 29 Paragon Cap and Gearing recommendations.
- 22 Feb. 2023: Added Season 28 Altar of Rites recommendations.
- 26 Aug. 2022: Added Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
- 14 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 08 Dec. 2021: Added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 22 Jul. 2021: Added S24 Ethereal recommendation.
- 20 Apr. 2021: Minor fix to the skill and passive selection.
- 01 Apr. 2021: Added follower recommendation.
- 19 Nov. 2020: Revision of item, skill, and passive recommendations, alongside advice for Season 22 changes.
- 02 Jul. 2020: Guide was revised with respect to the changes to the Jesseth set in Season 21.
- 12 Mar. 2020: No changes necessary for Season 20.
- 22 Nov. 2019: Reviewed for Season 19.
- 23 Aug. 2019: Reviewed and approved for Season 18.
- 12 May 2019: Guide was reviewed and approved for Season 17.
- 27 Oct. 2017: Moved Trag'Oul as a progression variant.
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This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.
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