Blood Lance – Necromancer Build for Diablo 4

Build Introduction

The Blood Lance Necromancer build, also known as a “Bloodmancer”, is a collaboration guide made between content creators GhazzyTV and the blood God Garm. It provides an extremely sturdy, resilient, and high damage dealing character for you to start your adventures in Diablo 4 with. Thanks to the massive amount of Life and Fortify we have on this build, the damage dealt by Overpower on our skills skyrockets, as Overpower provides bonus damage based on the sum of your current Life and Fortify.

This build is entirely designed around Blood Lance, for both clearing packs of enemies and single-target. It’s crucial to point out that this build performs extremely well at killing bosses, while the Blood Surge version of a Bloodmancer is better at clearing. Our defensive layers come in the form of Fortifying our massive Life pool and having access to Blood Orbs, which will heal us when picked up. Enemies should be cursed with Decrepify to lower their damage dealt.

It is important to point out that for this build to feel the best you will want to get a Aspect of Gore Quills equipped as soon as you find one. It’s a drop-only aspect, so keep your eyes open!

You are able to level with this build, however, we would strongly recommend checking out the Necromancer Leveling guide for the smoothest experience going through the campaign before switching to this build.

Build Variants

A build variant is a modified version of an existing build that changes some aspects of it, such as the damage type, specific skills or passives, and even certain items like different Uniques or Legendary Aspects.

Below you will find any variant that relates to the Blood Lance Endgame Necromancer.

Strengths and Weaknesses

To see how this build compares to the other builds on our site, you can check out our build tier lists.

Build Requirements

Required Uniques

Blood Moon Breeches

Mutilator Plate

The build functions without these unique items but it is strongly recommended to equip them as soon as you gain access to them!

Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points

Recommended

Suggested Skill Bar

BlightBlood WaveBlood MistBlood LanceCorpse TendrilsDecrepify

Follow the points allocated in the Skill Tree above for the complete 71-point build. The additional 10 skill points are completed using the Renown system.

Book of the Dead

The Blood Lance Necromancer is designed to be able to take hits from enemies consistently. Using minions with this playstyle is a waste and can cause problems when you want to use Blood Lance if enemies are scattered across your screen, hitting your minions rather than moving towards you. Therefore, we will be sacrificing all of them.

• Melee Skeletons: Skirmishers – Provides us with increased critical strike chance.
• Mage Skeletons: Bone Mages – sacrificed in the name of Lilith to provide a huge increase to Overpower Damage.
• Golem: Iron – Provides a massive Critical Strike Damage benefit.

Mercenary

Aldkin is a great choice with crowd-controlling features, but the comfortability of using Subo, who brings the ability of revealing enemies and materials in the area, makes him a natural preferential decision. The mercenaries are a nice addition to the game and whichever you chose to run is up to you. The recommendation for this build will be to run Subo.

Skill-tree wise we’ll grab the left-hand side first for Wire Trap to provide stuns with the following node is up to you. Trip Mines is the next big notable to grab, taken for safety reasons. We finish that tree with Mastermind.

For the reinforcement, stick with Raheir, utilizing his Bastion skill being cast when the player becomes injured.

Paragon

The Paragon Board for this build will be updated before the launch of Season 6 Vessel of Hatred on October 8th.

Gear, Gems, Elixirs, and Stats

The following sections cover the important systems that are essential to improving the power of your character in the endgame of Diablo 4.

Legendary Aspects

Each aspect is listed with its matching gear slot. Do your best to keep each aspect in the assigned slot. Additionally, if you are trying to farm a specific item, we recommend using your Obols to target farm them!

Gear Slot	Gems	Aspect / Unique	Legendary Aspect / Unique Power
Helm	Royal Ruby	Aspect of Hardened Bones	You and your Minions gain 10-30% increased damage reduction.
Chest	Royal Ruby	Mutilator Plate	You are Blood Lanced, and when Blood Lance would deal damage to you, it instead Fortifies you for 1-2% of your Maximum Life and has a 5% chance to form a Blood Orb.
Gloves	N/A	Aspect of Gore Quills	Casting Blood Lance will consume Blood Orbs to also conjure lances from them. Each additional Blood Lance deals 20-50% of normal damage and prioritizes targeting un-lanced enemies.
Pants	Royal Ruby	Blood Moon Breeches	Enemies affected by at least 1 of your curses take x70% increased Overpower damage from you.
Boots	N/A	Aspect of the Cursed Aura	A dark aura surrounds you, inflicint Decrepify and Iron Maiden on enemies who touch it. Curses inflicted this way spread to surrounding targets every 0.3-2.5 seconds and last 4 seconds outside of the aura.
Weapon 1H	Royal Emerald	Aspect of Rathma’s Chosen	Whenever your Blood Skills Overpower you gain 35-50% Attack Speed for 4 seconds.
Off-hand (Focus)	Royal Ruby	Sacrificial Aspect	Your Sacrifice bonuses are increased by X%.
Amulet (50% Scaling)	Any Resistance Jewel	Aspect of the Great Feast	Your Minions deal 45-68% increased damage, but each one one drains 2 Essence from you per second. If you have no active Minions, the damage increase applies to you instead, and you lose 7 Essence per second.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Blood Seeker’s Aspect	Blood Lance deals X% increased damage to its primary target per lanced enemy.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Tidal Aspect	Blood Wave fires two additional waves, each dealing X% less damage than the previous.

Gems and Runewords

See below for a more detailed explanation of the best Gems to socket into your gear for each category.

Weapon Gems	Armor Gems	Jewelry Gems
Royal Emerald For Crit Damage.	Royal Ruby For increased Maximum Life.	Royal Amethyst Royal Sapphire Royal Ruby Royal Skull Royal Diamond

Below you’ll find the recommended Runewords for this build.

Which Elixirs Should You Use?

Visit the Alchemist and craft an Elixir providing any Resistance you need most, or the Elixir of Advantage to increase Attack Speed. Some Elixirs cannot be crafted and only drop from things like Helltides or Nightmare Dungeons. Additionally, make sure to keep your health potion upgraded!

Stat Priority and Tempering Affixes

Below are the affixes to prioritize on gear. Each line of affixes is listed in order of importance. Tempering Manuals and their recommended affixes are provided in the second column, and the bolded affixes are the most important targets for Masterworking upgrades. Be sure to check our Tempering and Masterworking guides for more details about these topics.

Slot	Targeted Gear Affixes	Tempering Affixes
Helm	1. Essence per Second 2. Maximum Life 3. Armor	Worldly Endurance #% Total Armor Profane Finesse #% Lucky Hit Immobilize
Gloves	1. Ranks to Core Skills 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Lucky Hit: Chance to make enemies vulnerable on hit	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Profane Innovation #% Corpse Tendril Size
Boots	1. Maximum Life 2. Movement Speed 3. Essence per Second	Necromancer Motion #% Movement Speed Profane Innovation #% Curse Size
Amulet	1. Ranks to Coalesced Blood 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Attack Speed	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Sped Necromancer Invigoration Casting Ultimate Skills Restores X Primary Resource
Ring	1. Maximum Life 2. Attack Speed 3. Critical Strike Chance	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Sped Worldly Stability #% Resource Generation
Ring	1. Maximum Life 2. Attack Speed 3. Critical Strike Chance	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Sped Worldly Stability #% Resource Generation
1H-Weapon	1. Intelligence 2. Maximum Life 3. Resource Cost Reduction	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Blood Augments #% Chance for Blood Lance to Hit Twice
Off-hand (Focus)	1. Maximum Life 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Intelligence	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Blood Augments #% Chance for Blood Lance to Hit Twice

Keep in mind that the maximum Resistance is 70% by default for each element and can be increased to 85% by various sources. Furthermore, Unique items cannot be tempered, only masterworked!

Rotation and Playstyle

The highest priority for this build to excel is to make sure all enemies are cursed by Decrepify. We follow this up by casting Blood Lance till there is a corpse on the ground; this allows us to use Corpse Tendrils. Do make sure that you try to stay somewhat close to the enemies to avoid having your Blood Lances miss their targets! Blood Wave is a great offensive tool as well.

To sustain the Essence pool we will weave in casts of Hemorrhage to generate both Essence and Blood Orbs which will hit enemies in an AoE due to having consumed Blood Orbs recently.

In case of dangerous situations we have a panic button which helps when you’re crowd controlled: You’ll simply use Blood Mist to get out of harms way and this will generate a corpse on the ground so you can follow it up with a Corpse Tendrils to regain control over the situation!

Uniques and Mythic Uniques

Below you will find information on Uniques and Mythic Uniques that are useful for this build. Moreover, if you are interested in target farming Mythic Uniques, check out our How to Farm Mythic Uniques guide.

Uniques

The build has two specific unique items and to include more would cause too much harm on the loss of legendary aspect powers. Thus, we will simply stick to Blood Moon Breeches and Mutilator Plate!

Before you have access to the pants you can run Juggernaut’s Aspect to alleviate the pressure in reaching 9200 armor (the armor cap).

Mythic Uniques

There are some Mythic unique items you can fit in the build, though all of them will require a lot of changes in the build ranging from shifting slots for your aspect powers to solving attribute issues in other cases. Do as you will with that information and below you’ll find a list of potential Mythic unique items you can use for this build:

• Harlequin Crest
• Heir of Perdition

Season 6: Vessel of Hatred

The following list details the changes in the Season 6 Update that may pertain to the Summoner Necromancer build. Check the Changelog for all the other guide updates.

• No direct changes, but affected by generic changes such as the Paragon board and general itemization adjustments in the core game.

Advanced Information

Below, you will find every additional piece of information you need to know for a more in-depth look at this build.

Build Mechanics

We will utilize a hybrid Essence gain approach where we can attack super fast with the basic Hemorrhage which generates Essence and Blood Orbs. This combined with our passive Essence generation covers that end of the build very effectively.

Since Overpower damage is based of our own Life pool, the focus of ramping that up to hilariously high values is another mechanic we are actively pursuing. The Blood Orbs themselves acts as turrets with our Legendary Aspects, making our Blood Lance shoot out from them as we are delivering our damage output. The Rathma’s Vigor is triggered consistently from the consumption of these Blood Orbs much thanks to the efficiency increase provided by the Paragon Board!

Defenses

Big life pool with very high EHP maximizes efficiency of healing from consumed Blood Orbs and other means (such as max hp% healing sources or % part of potions). High level of Decrepify scaling significantly boosts overall damage resistance due to the reductions applying to raw damage before damage reduction calculation for your character. Increased slow from scaled Decrepify provides excellent means of active damage mitigation – significantly slowing enemies, allowing kiting even at close range and noticeably staggering bosses.

Offenses

This build relies on mostly Overpower procs of Blood Lance, but additive damage is normalized as much as possible without losing any power whatsoever. The additive Overpower % from projected life pool of 60k reaches approximately 1500% Overpower mitigating additive loss from losing gear affixes!

Thanks to the Legendary Aspect powers our massively generated Blood Orbs will also be shooting Blood Lance on enemies consistently for even higher damage output!

Paragon board

Not long after Season 6 launch we will have a proper Paragon Board tool available for you to easier navigate through the boards. For now you can follow the images below, do keep in mind that you will have to rotate the boards before locking them in so they fit the images shown below!

1. Starter Board – Eliminator

The top priority for the Paragon Board is to pick up as much Life as possible as it scales both our offensive and defensive approach for the build. On this board we’ll be using the Eliminator Glyph and only take the surrounding attributes within range of the Glyph depending on its level. Don’t forget the Magic and Rare nodes giving Life on the left side before we head out north for the second board.

2. Bloodbath – Essence

No rotations needed for this board. We continue the trend with having a high priority of picking up life nodes as we travel to the Legendary node Bloodbath. After this we grab the Socket and use Essence and now we’ll head out on the left side. We will come back to this board when we are done with the third one and head out on the right!

3. Flesh-eater – Control

Three Rotations will be needed to make the board fit the image above. Start with the Socket node and use Control. After that we pick up the Legendary node Flesh-eater and the remaining the Rare and Magic nodes. Once done, we’ll head back to the previous board and leave that one on the right side!

4. Frailty – Dominate

No rotations needed for this board. Pick up the Rare and Magic nodes as you travel to the Socket node to use Dominate. After this we’ll head south for the Legendary node Frailty. As we leave at the bottom we skip the Rare and Magic nodes on the side and come back to those after the last board is finished.

5. Blood Begets Blood – Corporeal

One rotation will be needed to fit the image above. Begin by traveling to the Socket node and use Corporeal. Once that is done we’ll take that right turn and take the Magic and Rare nodes as we travel to the Legendary node Blood Begets Blood. Once this board is completed you’ll return to any nodes you’ve skipped in the previous boards. This includes taking nodes that are within range of your Glyphs depending on the level of them!

Board images courtesy of d4builds.

Obol Gambling

Obol gambling is a great way to potentially find item upgrades or items missing from your build. Check out the new tool from Icy Veins for gambling Obols in the link below:

Changelog

• October 7th, 2024: Paragon board added.
• October 2nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 6.
• August 6, 2024: Guide updated for Season 5, Infernal Hordes.
• May 12th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 4 Loot Reborn.
• January 22nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 3 Season of the Construct.
• November 3rd, 2023: Optimized Paragon Board and added end-game version.
• October 15th, 2023: Guide updated for Season 2 Season of Blood, Patch 1.2.
• August 7th, 2023: Guide added.