Summoner – Necromancer Leveling Build for Diablo 4 (Season 13)

Build Introduction

The Summoner Necromancer is a staple leveling build controlling a small army of Skeleton Warriors, Skeleton Mages and even up to 3 Golems. Minions inherit all the Summoner’s stats – be it Armor or Resistances, Attack Speed or Critical Strike Chance. It allows you to invest only just enough into the Summoner’s defenses without compromising the minions and focus solely on the offensive potential of both.

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Gear, Stats, Gems and Runes	Skill Tree
Rotation and Playstyle	Season Updates

Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points

Use the Skill Tree above to complete the 83-point build. 69 skill points are gained by leveling, and 14 skill points are locked behind the Season Rank System or Renown for Seasonal or Eternal characters, respectively. Use “Leveling Path” toggle to see the exact order of skill allocation.

The new Lord of Hatred expansion Skill Tree unlocks in stages, permanently unlocking new skill clusters. For example, Necromancer Curses unlock at level 13, so from level 13 it is possible to refund all previously allocated skill points and start leveling skills starting from the Curses cluster right away (or anywhere above it).

Skill points from the Season Rank System or Renown do not affect Skill Tree progress and can be allocated to skill ranks you already unlocked.

The Build Mechanics section helps to explain how these Skills play and interact.

Following Necromancer’s Class Mechanic will explain how it will be adjusted at certain levels to synergize with your Skills progression.

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Necromancer Class Mechanic – Book of the Dead

Necromancer’s class-specific ability is the Book of the Dead, which provides three different types of minions at different levels. This build is designed around using all types of your minions, even sacrificed ones.

Key Minion type changes during progression:

Level 5: Skeleton Warrior – Skirmishers [Upgrade #1] (extra 2 Skeleton Warrior for free)
Level 5: Skeleton Mage – Shadow [Upgrade #2] (more survivability scaling with Maximum Life)
Level 8: Golem – Bone [Upgrade #1] (enables Corpse generation on demand for Corpse Explosion)
Level 12: Skeleton Warrior – Reapers [Upgrade #1] (significantly more Corpses and Cooldown Management)
Level 50: Golem – Bone [Sacrifice] (trade non-scalable aurabot Golem damage for another 10% Attack Speed)
Level 50: Skeleton Warrior – Reapers [Upgrade #2] (50%[x] increased damage)

Final setup:

Skeletal Warriors: Reapers [Upgrade #2] – 50%[x] increased damage and 15% chance to Stun for 1 second
Skeletal Mages: Shadow [Upgrade #2] – Bolts grant you and the Shadow Mage a Barrier for 3% of your Maximum Life for 4 seconds, up to 30%.
Golem: Bone [Sacrifice] – 10%[+] Attack Speed and Golem does 50%[x] less damage

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Gear, Stats, Gems and Runes

Check the sections below for important gearing considerations to improve your character’s power while leveling.

Legendary Aspects

In the new Lord of Hatred expansion, Legendary Aspects became significantly more powerful, so it is a good idea to keep an eye on everything you can research from early on. We have a dedicated in-depth Aspect and Codex of Power guide that you can check out for more information on gear enchanting.

Always salvage gear you don’t use, even if you already have a better Legendary Aspect roll in the Codex of Power. Stockpiling crafting materials from early levels will pay off during Torment World Tier push.

Always check the merchant’s stock when visiting town – not only do they sell affordable Magic and Rare gear relevant for your level, but they also sometimes sell Legendaries.

Building up Mercenary Rapport from early levels and bartering for Aspect Caches or specific Legendaries is a great way to hunt for specific slot Legendary Aspects.

The Purveyor of Curiosities is another excellent way to obtain specific slot Legendary Aspects, and even Uniques – by gambling with Murmuring Obols you farmed in your journey.

Imprinting Aspects costs 10 Baleful Fragments, which can be acquired early mostly by salvaging Legendary or Unique gear, or opening Baleful Chests in PvP zones. The scarcity of useful Aspects to imprint and the high cost of imprinting – multiplied by the extremely high rate of gear turnover – makes it impractical to imprint your gear until you are about to progress past the Penitent World Tier.

The most efficient way is to maintain only a few of the most powerful Legendary Aspects on your gear. These should be strategically placed on gear pieces that you can avoid replacing for the longest possible time, if ever. Weapon slots are eliminated due to the highest gear turnover rate. The ideal spot is the Amulet, due to the 150% effect of the imprinted Aspect and the rarity of useful, high-value affixes on that slot during the early game.

These are the most impactful Legendary Aspects that can speed up the leveling process:

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Stats Priority and Tempering Affixes

Keep in mind that Tempering Affixes are unlocked by Tempering Manuals you find as you progress. Be sure to check our Tempering guide for more details about this topic.

Try to obtain the highest Worldly Endurance tempering recipe available, as early as possible, because of extreme Maximum Life rolls, especially at higher rarities.

One of the regular affixes on a gear piece can be re-rolled repeatedly until the desired outcome. This is covered in our Occultist guide for more details.

Both Tempering and Enchanting are very affordable in the early game, costing only 5 Veiled Crystals. Single Magic Worldly Endurance – Maximum Life temper can almost double your and your Minion’s Maximum Life early, so don’t miss out.

Generally, you will be trying to go for a few recommended affixes per piece, in descending priority:

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Gems and Runewords

It is not recommended to socket items until level 50+ due to material cost and the fact that you’ll be replacing your gear too frequently, especially weapons.

If a socket already exists in your gear, use the following gems:

Weapon: Amethyst for Shadow Damage increase.
Jewelry: Ruby for Fire Resistance, Topaz for Lighthing Resistance.

When it comes to Runewords, there are only a couple that this build can utilize well. The most attractive ones available early are:

Nagu + Ceh / Cir + Ceh – Summons a pack of Spirit Wolves, applying Vulnerable and triggering your Lucky Hit procs. Nagu maintains a pack of 10, Cir – up to 6.
Igni + Wat – Applies Decrepify automatically along your skills once every 1.2 seconds. It allows you to invest into Decrepify upgrades and use them without having the skill on your Skill Bar. Check the playstyle and rotation section of the guide to see how it affects the build.
Nagu + Que / Igni + Que / Cir + Que – Maintains a Druid’s Earthen Bulwark barrier for extreme survivability in descending efficiency and uptime

Make sure you slot these in your Helmet, Pants or Chest, since Weapon allows you to use damage multiplier gems instead. You get runes back for free when salvaging the item.

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Season 13 Mechanics

Season 13 does not offer specific seasonal mechanics due to the release of the Lord of Hatred expansion. Many new features are available to explore, including War Plans, Talismans, Horadric Cube, and Echoing Hatred. Additionally, several buildcrafting systems were overhauled, such as Skill Trees, Tempering, Aspects and Uniques.

For a complete overview of the current Season, its mechanics and theme, new leveling activities, and other changes, please take a look at our comprehensive season hub here.

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Talismans

The Lord of Hatred expansion introduces Talismans as a new character progression and itemization layer. Find, equip, and fill a suitable Horadric Seal with a variety of Charms. These grant everything from plain stats similar to any gear piece to powerful set effects, doubling down on and elevating Necromancer archetypes to new heights.

This build Talisman goalposts would be:

Horadric Seal with the most Charm Slots possible
Charms and Seals with valuable affixes, like:
- + 1 Charm Slot
- +% Movement Speed
- Practiced Technique Charm full set
- + to Minions Skill
- + to Darkness Skills
- +%[x] Shadow Damage
- +% Minion Attack Speed

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Mercenaries

The mercenaries are useful, but not a crucial addition to the game, so whichever one you choose to run is up to you. Aldkin helps to reach meaningful Critical Strike Chance thresholds with Raging Violence. Varyana improves skill rotation speed with Bloodthirst. Subo reveals enemies and resources on the minimap for optimal routes. Raheir protects you in times of need with Valiance and Bastion.

Default recommendation for this build will be to run Subo:

Take note that during campaign leveling – primary mercenaries often will be dismissed in favour of quest-related NPCs.

We also recommend using the Reinforcement slot to level up all your mercenaries evenly to get extra loot caches and Pale Marks.

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Build Mechanics

This is a straightforward minion swarm build buffed by Unholy Frenzy and Gargantua auras. The build is optimized to easily transition to one of the meta Shadowblight Minion builds, making easy use of any Minion or Darkness-related Uniques if obtained, and activating the full potential of the Cult Leader Paragon Board multiplier right after Node is unlocked. Gear requirements are close to none for the recommended difficulty level, as long as the gear is of any relevant item level and has a fraction of the recommended affixes.

Rotation and Playstyle

Before Level 50 Golem switches to Gargantua:

Send Golem into enemies using active ability.
Send Skeleton Warriors to attack enemies using the active ability.
Use Corpse Explosion until corpses created by Golem and Decompose are exhausted.
Channel Decompose to create more corpses, apply crowd control and deal some extra damage
Use Sever for mobility and emergency corpse creation, if needed.
Repeat.

After Level 50 Golem, switch to Gargantua:

Use Sever for emergency corpse creation, if needed to revive Skeleton Warrior.
Use Golem active ability to become Unstoppable, if you are about to be Crowd Controlled.
Send Skeleton Warriors to attack enemies using the active ability.
Debuff enemy packs using Iron Maiden.
Buff your minions using Unholy Frenzy Decrepify, if it is not triggered by Wat runeword
Use Sever for mobility and emergency corpse creation, if needed.
Use Hemorrhage to Freeze enemies for various synergies and active damage mitigation from modded Elites, if it was leveled after Wat runeword removed Decrepify from the Skill Bar.
Repeat.

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Season Updates

Due to the release of the Lord of Hatred expansion and the resulting overhaul of class buildcrafting, the build concept was created from scratch.

For a complete overview of the current Season, its mechanics and theme, new leveling activities, and other changes, please take a look at our comprehensive season hub here.

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Difficulty and Endgame

This guide is designed to get you to level 70 in a smooth and enjoyable way. Once there, you’ll want to look at a proper endgame-designed build guide and start making required preparations. Make sure you pick one of our recommended ones!

Recommended World Tier to start: Hard

Quantity over quality is a road to success in leveling. Staying at a difficulty level where Elites and Seasonal content pose low threat and do not take any significant time to kill nets the most experience. Moving upwards through World Tiers should happen when the requirements to unlock the next level become trivial.

Preparations for an endgame build usually take some time to acquire the required gear and will result in character unlocking the paragon board after reaching level 70. To continue the progression and farm gear more efficiently, the selected endgame build paragon board can be followed.

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Changelog

April 29th, 2026: Added Skill Tree, optimizations (delaying full support transition)
April 27th, 2026: Minor optimizations and cleanup.
April 26th, 2026: Guide updated for the Lord of Hatred expansion.
March 7th, 2026: Guide updated for Season 12.
December 11th, 2025: Reworked leveling build for Season 11, Divine Intervention
October 5th, 2025: General visual improvements on the guide.
September 27th, 2025: Reworked leveling build in to current Season 10 meta leveling using Chaos perks.
September 23rd, 2025: Adjust seasonal powers and Book of the Dead for optimal speed.
September 18th, 2025: Guide updated for Season 10.
July 3rd, 2025: Optimized minor tweaks in the guide.

Slot	Affixes	Tempering Affixes
2H Weapon	1. Weapon Damage 2. x% Shadow Damage Multiplier 3. x% All Damage Multiplier 4. Maximum Life	Weapons – Worldly Destruction – Attack Speed
Helm	1. Maximum Life 2. Armor 3. Resistance to All Elements 4. Essence per second	Defensive – Worldly Endurance – Maximum Life
Chest	1. Maximum Life 2. Armor 3. Resistance to All Elements 4. Essence per second	Defensive – Worldly Endurance – Maximum Life
Gloves	1. x% Vulnerable Damage Multiplier 2. x% Shadow Damage Multiplier 3. x% All Damage Multiplier 4. Attack Speed 5. Maximum Life	Offensive – Elemental Finesse — Night – Shadow Damage
Pants	1. Maximum Life 2. Armor 3. Resistance to All Elements 4. Essence per second	Defensive – Worldly Endurance – Maximum Life
Boots	1. Movement Speed 2. + Evade Charges 3. Maximum Life 4. Armor 5. Resistance to All Elements	Mobility – Natural Motion – Movement Speed
Amulet	1. Movement Speed 2. x% Vulnerable Damage Multiplier 3. x% Shadow Damage Multiplier 4. x% All Damage Multiplier 5. Attack Speed 6. Maximum Life	Offensive – Elemental Finesse — Night – Shadow Damage
Rings	1. x% Vulnerable Damage Multiplier 2. x% Shadow Damage Multiplier 3. x% All Damage Multiplier 4. Attack Speed 5. Maximum Life	Offensive – Elemental Finesse — Night – Shadow Damage