Necromancer Corpse Lance Build with Pestilence or Trag'Oul's set

The Corpse Lance Necromancer is a powerful elite hunting build, capable of the whole spectrum of content difficulty with minor adjustments. This daredevil, burst damage spec is meant for Greater Rift solo progression. The present build is using the Pestilence set. We also have variations of this build: a Trag'Oul variation, a group progression variation, and speed farming variation; all accessible by using the links below.

The basic skill setup of the Corpse Lance Necromancer is displayed below. Read the dedicated Skills page for detailed information on choices, alternatives and build customization.

Active Skills
Corpse Lance Brittle Touch Blood Rush Molting 1 Devour Voracious 2 Command Skeletons Dark Mending 3 Simulacrum Reservoir 4 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands
Passive Skills
Fueled by Death Overwhelming Essence Blood is Power Final Service

The required gear setup for the Corpse Lance Necromancer is listed below. Check the Gear page for detailed information on choices, alternatives, gemming, Kanai's Cube and Paragon distribution.

• Helm: Pestilence Mask
• Shoulders: Pestilence Defense
• Gloves: Pestilence Gloves
• Chest: Pestilence Robe
• Belt: Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle
• Pants: Captain Crimson's Thrust
• Boots: Pestilence Battle Boots
• Bracers: Strongarm Bracers
• Amulet: Squirt's Necklace
• Ring 1: Krysbin's Sentence
• Ring 2: Convention of Elements
• Weapon: Jesseth Skullscythe
• Offhand: Jesseth Skullshield

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.

• Legendary Gem 1: Gogok of Swiftness
• Legendary Gem 2: Bane of the Trapped
• Legendary Gem 3: Zei's Stone of Vengeance

• Weapon Slot: Reilena's Shadowhook
• Armor Slot: Corpsewhisper Pauldrons
• Jewelry Slot: Ring of Royal Grandeur

In this section, we will briefly go over how to kickstart this build into reality; which items you should aim for with priority when farming and gambling, and what is their relative priority for the functioning of this spec. Note that these suggestions are exclusively aimed at getting you up and running into endgame farming, and might not reflect the gear you need to wear for high-end Greater Rift solo or group pushing. This section also assumes a fresh Season's start, which usually is the point where most players work on assembling their first build with a particular set.

If the Pestilence set is part of the Haedrig's Gift for the Season, your simplest and most straightforward path to assembling the build is to complete the Seasonal Journey chapters up to Chapter IV. The Seasonal Journey chapters will gradually give you a complete class-specific set, giving 2-3 pieces for Chapters II, III and IV.

From the pre-game menu, choose and do this week's Challenge Rift. When successfully completed, this weekly event will grant you 5,1 million Gold, 475 Blood Shards, 370 Reusable Parts, 350 Arcane Dust, 125 Veiled Crystals, 35 Death's Breaths, and 15 of each Bounty cache material: Khanduran Rune, Caldeum Nightshade, Arreat War Tapestry, Corrupted Angel Flesh, and Westmarch Holy Water. This will allow you some early Seasonal leeway to extract and reforge items in Kanai's Cube, speeding up the assembly of this build with the items recommended below.

Having some materials at your disposal, either from farming or the Challenge Rift, is particularly important when you get duplicate pieces of your desired set. When you do, you can use Kanai's Cube Skill of Nilfur recipe (10x Forgotten Souls, 10x Death's Breaths, 1x Set item) to convert into another item from the same set. You should never salvage duplicate pieces of a desired set before you have it assembled.

In order to assemble an Pestilence Corpse Lance Necromancer, you should do the following.

• Gather the full 6-piece Pestilence set using the advice above, or by spending Blood Shards at Kadala. In order of gamble chance, you should spend for: Shoulders, Boots, Pants, Gloves, Helm, and Chest. A trick you can also use is to gamble for duplicate pieces with an easier gamble chance (i.e., Shoulders) and convert them into another piece from the same set using the Skill of Nilfur recipe in Kanai's Cube.
• Gamble or upgrade rare (Hope of Cain recipe in Kanai's Cube) Shoulders for Corpsewhisper Pauldrons. They are a build-defining piece for Corpse Lance Necromancers, and tie directly into the Corpse consumption mechanic of the Pestilence set.
• Upgrade rare One-handed Swords to get In-geom; doing this on a level 1 Demon Hunter alt will improve your chances due to their lowest loot pool of legendary swords. Then, upgrade rare Two-handed Axes for Messerschmidt's Reaver. Both these items are a massive boost to your farming due to the massive Land of the Dead cooldown.
• Upgrade rare One-handed Scythes for Trag'Oul's Corroded Fang and rare Two-handed Scythes for Reilena's Shadowhook and/or Nayr's Black Death. These are damage-scaling items that will take the build into GRs and allow you to progress the build on the leaderboards.
• Gamble Belts to get Dayntee's Binding and Goldwrap; both are cornerstone protective pieces that will keep you safe in GRs (the former) and standard rifts (the latter).
• Gamble Boots to get Steuart's Greaves for a massive speed boost during farming.
• Do Act I bounties to attain the act-specific Ring of Royal Grandeur from Bounty caches. This will be helpful either in completing the basic set bonus, or mixing other helpful sets in (Cpt. Crimson) as described in the Pestilence Corpse Lance Gear page. Bounties will net you the craftable set recipes to begin with, so you will be killing two birds with one stone. Bounties will also net you Avarice Band (Act III), another farming-oriented staple for most builds and classes, this one included.
• While largely undesirable due to high costs, gambling or upgrading rare Jewelry is also possible; Krysbin's Sentence, Convention of Elements, Squirt's Necklace and The Johnstone will all bring massive damage bumps to the build, with other standout pieces that can also substitute or be temporarily helpful in the face of Briggs' Wrath, Unity, or Oculus Ring and The Flavor of Time for your Follower.