Corpse Lance Necromancer Trag'Oul 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 .

Active Skills
Corpse Lance Blood Lance Blood Rush No rune chosen 1 Devour Cannibalize 2 Command Skeletons Dark Mending 3 Simulacrum Reservoir 4 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands
Passive Skills
Grisly Tribute Overwhelming Essence Blood is Power Final Service

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.

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
Head	Trag'Oul's Guise	Intelligence Socket Critical Hit Chance Vitality
Shoulders	Trag'Oul's Heart	Intelligence Corpse Lance % Cooldown Reduction Vitality
Torso	Trag'Oul's Scales	Intelligence 3 Sockets Vitality Corpse Lance % Armor
Wrists	Lacuni Prowlers	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Physical Damage Vitality
Hands	Trag'Oul's Claws	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	Trag'Oul's Stalwart Greaves	Intelligence Vitality Armor All Resistance Movement Speed
Amulet	Squirt's Necklace	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Physical Damage Intelligence
Ring #1	Krysbin's Sentence	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction
Ring #2	Convention of Elements (Best in Slot) Unity (Alternative)	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction
Weapon	Jesseth Skullscythe	High Damage Range Intelligence Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Cooldown Reduction Max Essence (Secondary Stat) % Weapon Damage
Off-hand	Jesseth Skullshield	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction Max Essence (Secondary Stat)

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.

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
Jewelry	Gogok of Swiftness Bane of the Trapped Zei's Stone of Vengeance
Helm	Flawless Royal Diamond (Cooldown Reduction)
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Topaz (Damage) Flawless Royal Ruby (Toughness)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

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

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.

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.

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.