Blood Lance Endgame Necromancer Build for Diablo 4 (Season 1)

Build Introduction

The Blood Lance Necromancer build, also known as a “Bloodmancer”, is a collaboration guide made between content creators Ghazzy and Garm. It provides a 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. 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. Through Hemorrhage we can recover Essence very smoothly while clearing Nightmare Dungeons.

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.

Video Guide

Video guide is not updated yet, we will add a new video once it’s updated and ready.

Strengths and Weaknesses

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

Season of the Malignant

Season 1 Patch Updates

The following list details the changes in the Season 1 Patch Update that are specific to this build. Check the Changelog for all the other guide updates.

Patch 1.1

• Aspect of Disobedience maximum stacks reduced from 100 to 60, reducing maximum Bonus Armor % from 25%-50% to 15%-30%.
• Abhorrent Iron Maiden healing increased from 5% to 7% of Maximum Life.
• Drain Vitality Lucky Hit Chance increased from 25% to 30%.
• Amplify Damage increased from 3/6/9% to 4/8/12%.
• New Aspect: Gore Quills (Offensive Aspect): 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.

Patch 1.1.1

• Fixed an issue where guaranteed Overpower attacks from the Rathma’s Vigor key passive were not benefiting from the Paragon Legendary Node Bloodbath.
• Fixed an issue where the Necromancer’s Imperfectly Balanced passive could only have 1 point allocated to it.

Besides a generic armor nerf from the Aspect of Disobedience, we have received a lot of damage increase from this patch! This makes the build more reliable than ever.

The 1.1.1 patch fixed the Imperfectly Balanced bug, which prevented us from placing 3 points into it. It also fixed the Overpower damage scaling from our guaranteed Overpower coming from Rathma’s Vigor.

Malignant Hearts

The Season 1 theme introduces Malignant Hearts that provide build-altering bonuses. The Hearts are divided into 4 categories, each with a color that needs to be socketed in the corresponding colored Malignant Socket on equipped jewelry. Wrathful Hearts are a special case due to their rarity, and can be placed in any Socket. 

Listed below are the Malignant Hearts that are useful for this build, ranked by importance. Stats displayed reflect what a Level 20 character would receive as a drop.

• Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious (Vicious, Offensive): Walking near a Corpse automatically activates an equipped Corpse Skill every second, dealing 40-30% reduced damage.
• Caged Heart of The Barber (Wrathful, Super-World Tier III): Critical Strikes and all subsequent damage within 2.0-4.0 seconds is absorbed by your target. Then, the absorbed damage erupts onto surrounding enemies. Stored damage is increased by 10% per second.
• Caged Heart of Revenge (Brutal, Defensive-World Tier III): 10-20% of incoming damage is instead suppressed. When you use a Defensive, Subterfuge or a Macabre skill, all suppressed damage is amplified by 250% and explodes, dealing up to 1360-2040 Fire damage to Nearby enemies.

Skill Tree Points

Recommended

Blood Lance Necromancer Recommended Skill Bar (order does not matter)

Blood Lance Hemorrhage Blood Mist Decrepify Corpse Tendrils Bone Storm

The following tables show the full allocation of Skill Points for the Blood Lance Necromancer build. The first table has the most important 48 points to start the build. The second table has the remaining 10 points that are allocated once you obtain all Skill Points from Renown.

Priority Skills	Cluster
Hemorrhage Level 5, Enhanced Hemorrhage, Acolyte’s Hemorrhage	Basic Skill
Blood Lance Level 5, Enhanced Blood Lance, Supernatural Blood Lance, Hewed Flesh Level 3	Core Skill
Blood Mist, Enhanced Blood Mist, Ghastly Blood Mist	Curse Skill
Decrepify, Enhanced Decrepify, Abhorrent Decrepify, Amplify Damage Level 3, Death’s Embrace Level 3	Summoning Skill
Corpse Tendrils, Enhanced Corpse Tendrils, Blighted Corpse Tendrils, Gruesome Mending, Coalesced Blood Level 3, Tides of Blood Level 3, Drain Vitality Level 3	Corpse & Macabre Skill
Inspiring Leader, Stand Alone, Memento Mori Level 3	Ultimate Skill
Rathma’s Vigor	Key Passives

Remaining Renown Points	Cluster
Unliving Energy, Imperfectly Balanced Level 3	Core Skill
Bone Storm, Prime Bone Storm, Supreme Bone Storm, Stand Alone Level 3, Inspiring Leader Level 2	Ultimate Skill

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: sacrifice the Skirmisher, as this provides us with increased critical strike chance.
• Mage Skeletons: Bone Mages will be sacrificed in the name of Lilith to provide a huge increase to Overpower Damage.
• Golem: Blood Golem will also be sacrificed, as this buff provides a massive increase of Life.

Paragon Board

The Paragon progression system unlocks at Level 50 and provides a vast amount of character power. On the Paragon Board, bonuses range from minor stats on Magic Nodes to more powerful Rare Glyphs and Legendary Nodes.

As you path towards Glyph Sockets and Legendary Nodes, you should prioritize Damage, Intelligence, Resistance, and Life for Normal and Magic Nodes. Glyph radius increases as you level them up. Therefore, if you cannot fulfill Additional Bonus requirements early on, skip allocating extra nodes for now. It’s also important to point out that you might not have the Glyph you want when you reach your first socket; if that’s the case, simply slot in any Glyph providing any beneficial stats for you until you get the correct one.

Listed below are images of the pathing you should take along with the locations of the Glyphs and order you should choose your Paragon Boards past the initial Starting board.

Starting Board

Since most Nodes from our Paragon Tree do not actually scale our Overpower damage output, we will be focusing on picking up a lot of Rare and Magic Nodes that provide Life. We rush the socket on this initial board, in which we’ll place the Blood-drinker Glyph. Only take the extra attributes within range of the Glyph which will increase when you level the Glyph up via Nightmare Dungeons. Once done, we’ll grab the Rare and Magic Nodes, then move out north to our second board, Blood Begets Blood.

Blood Begets Blood (2nd Board)

Blood Begets Blood will act as a crossroads, as we will be coming back to this one to head out on all sides in the end. We’ll start by rushing up on the left-hand side of the board and grab the socket, in which we use the Amplify Glyph. Similar to our starting board, we only take the attributes within radius if the Glyph level allows us to enable the bonus modifier from it. We want the Overpower damage increasing Magic Nodes just to the right of the socket, but no further. Head out on the left-hand side for our third board, Bloodbath.

Bloodbath (3rd Board)

Start by rushing the socket in which we’ll use the Control Glyph. Again, only grab the extra Nodes for attributes if the Glyph radius/level allows to enable the bonus modifier. Otherwise, we are picking up every single Rare and Magic as shown in the image above, don’t forget the Bloodbath Legendary Node! Once this is done, we’ll circle back to Blood Begets Blood (2nd board) and rush up on the north side.

Scent of Death (4th Board)

This is a straight forward board. Rush the socket node and use the Dominate Glyph. Yet again, we will only take the extra Nodes within radius if the level of the Glyph allows. We also want to grab the Scent of Death Legendary Node and it’s surrounding Rare and Magic Nodes before we leave this one. Once done we will, yet again, go back to Blood Begets Blood (2nd board) and this time head out on the right-hand side, picking any missed Rare and Magic Nodes according to the image for that board as seen further up in this guide.

Bone Graft (5th Board)

We are closing in on the highest levels the game has to offer as we enter this board. Therefore, we will rush the Glyph Socket and use Territorial Glyph here. Again, only take extra attributes to help enable the bonus modifier if the level of the Glyph has increased the radius enough to allow for it. We also want to grab the Rare and Magic Nodes north of the Glpyh Socket before we finalize the build.

Wither (6th Board)

We access this board via Bloodbath (3rd board) by heading north. The Wither board is only here to throw us some extra Life Nodes, as the Paragon system has a very limited set of scaling powers for Overpower.

Paragon board images courtesy of d4builds.gg.

Mechanics and Playstyle

The order of which you’ll want to use your skills is very simple with this build. Anytime you ever run out of Essence, you will resort to using Hemorrhage. Outside of that, Blood Lance will be our main source of damage and should be spammed. Make sure enemies are cursed by using Decrepify before attacking. For bigger targets and/or bosses, you’ll use Bone Storm for added Critical Strike Chance and added Damage Reduction.

Corpse Tendrils should be manually used when needed to group enemies up and generate Blood Orbs, which helps our Blood Lance via the Gore Quills Aspect. This is automatically triggered via our Malignant Heart, Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious.

Should you find yourself in harms way and need a panic button, good old Blood Mist is there to save your day!

Gear Choice and Stat Priority

Prioritize a higher total damage output when it comes to your weapon, as the higher it is, the better. It should be kept in mind that if you find a higher Item Power 1-Handed weapon, it could very well be better than a 2-Handed weapon if coupled with an Off-hand or even a shield, as Shields scale your main-hand weapon by 80%!

Listed below are the Affixes to prioritize on gear for Blood Lance Necromancers. Affixes for each gear slot are listed in order of importance. Bolded stats are the most important and sometimes vital for the build to function properly.

Aspects, Powers and Uniques

We are focusing on making Blood Lance more effective for clearing, then focusing on ramping up our defensive layers so we can reliably tank endgame bosses. Listed below are the best-in-slot Aspects found on Legendary Items that are important for the Bloodmancer build.

Aspects from the Codex of Power can be used if you cannot find the proper Legendary drops, but they have weaker effects. Extract Aspects from the lower level Legendary Items and imprint them onto better Rare Items with Preferred stats. This does not require any changes to your skill-tree.

Gear Slot	Aspect Name	Aspect Power
Helm	Aspect of Disobedience	You gain 0.25-0.5% increased armor for 4 seconds when you deal any form of damage, stacking up to 25-50%.
Chest	Aspect of Might	Basic Skills grant 20% Damage Reduction for 2-6 seconds.
Pants	Aspect of the Embalmer	Consuming a Corpse has a 20-30% chance to spawn a Blood Orb.
Boots	Wind Striker Aspect	Critical Strikes grant 8-16% Movement Speed for 1 second, up to 6 seconds.
1H Weapon	Aspect of Grasping Veins	Gain 10-20% increased Critical Strike Chance for 6 seconds when you cast Corpse Tendrils. You deal 20-40% bonus Critical Strike Damage to enemies damaged by Corpse Tendrils.
Glove	Aspect of Hungry Blood	Each cast of Blood Lance will launch an additional Blood Lance at a Nearby enemy when it first hits an enemy that is already lanced, dealing 38-48% of normal damage.
Amulet (50% scaling)	Sacrificial Aspect	Your sacrifice bonuses are increased by 15-25%.
Ring	Aspect of Rathma’s Chosen	Whenever your Blood Skills Overpower you gain 20-50% Attack Speed for 4 seconds.
Ring	Gore Quills Aspect	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.
Off-hand (shield)	Protecting Aspect	When hit while not Healthy, a magical bubble is summoned around you for 3-5 seconds. While standing in the bubble players are Immune. Can only occur once every 90 seconds.

Unique Items

The Windstriker Aspect on our boots can easily be replaced by a common Unique Item such as Penitent Greaves, but using a Legendary pair of boots would still be recommended.

Gems

Listed below are the best Gems to socket into gear for each slot type.

• Weapon: Royal Ruby for +#% Increased overpower damage.
• Armor: Royal Ruby for +#% Maximum Life.
• Jewelry: Royal Skull for increased armor to help mitigate damage taken.

Elixirs and Health Potions

To gain an edge in your adventures, head to the Alchemist and craft Elixirs that enhance your stats and experience gain for 30 minutes. Remember to gather the necessary crafting materials by foraging plants. Select an Elixir that provides the resistance you need most, or try the Assault Elixir to boost your Attack Speed.

Return to the Alchemist again when you reach Level 20, 30, 45, 60, 70, 80 and 90, to upgrade your potion. The extra healing is essential to survival.

Changelog

• August 7th, 2023: Guide added.