Bone Spear – Necromancer Build for Diablo 4

Build Introduction

Bone Spear Necromancer is one of the smoothest builds to level a Necromancer with. It performs just as well in the endgame content, providing high critical hits with Bone Spear in combination with an insane amount of corpses being generated. We can easily regain our Essence at the same time as we are dealing respectable damage using Corpse Explosion, making the Bone Spear Necromancer a very consistent and reliable build. A very important note here is that the Blighted Corpse Explosion deals damage twice per second and generates an insane amount of corpses via Hewed Flesh. This build mechanic is how we sustain the build.

In the endgame we will gain access to more legendary powers that takes this build to a whole new level. Since our biggest source of damage comes from Bone Spear, we can provide legendary powers to help sustain resources, eventually resulting in only casting the Bone Spears!

Besides being reliable and consistent, this build guarantees the Vulnerable effect on enemies, making it a great option for group play.

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.

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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 Bone Spear 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

Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points

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

Book of the Dead

We will be sacrificing all our minions. Below you’ll find the details covering all aspects of how we utilize the Book of the Dead for the Bone Spear Necromancer.

• Melee Skeletons: Skirmishers – will be the choice here for the added critical strike chance.
• Mage Skeletons: Cold Mages – sacrificing the Cold Mages grants us increased damage to Vulnerable enemies. The build reliably making enemies Vulnerable makes this the best choice.
• Golem: Iron – is sacrificed for extra critical strike damage.

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 and 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 board

Below you’ll find the entire end-game paragon board set-up for this build in detail!

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	Grand Topaz	Juggernaut’s Aspect	You gain x Armor, but your Evade has 100% increased cooldown.
Chest	Poc + Ohm	Aspect of Shielding Storm	Each time that Bone Storm damages an enemy, gain a Barrier equal to 2-5% of your Base Life for 10 seconds.
Gloves	N/A	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.
Pants	Grand Topaz	Aspect of Hardened Bones	You and your Minions gain 15-20% increased Damage Reduction.
Boots	n/a	Aspect of Slaughter	You gain 20% Movement Speed. Lose this bonus for 2.5-5 seconds after taking damage.
Weapon 1H (Dagger)	Royal Emerald	Accelerating Aspect	Critical Strikes with Core Skills increase your Attack Speed by 15-25% for 5 seconds.
Off-hand	Royal Emerald	Lidless Wall	Lucky Hit: While you have an active Bone Storm, hitting an enemy outside of a Bone Storm has up to a 5-25% chance to spawn an additional Bone Storm at their location. Each of your active Sacrifice bonuses increase the chance by 25% and the total additional Bone Storms you can have by +1.
Amulet (50% Scaling)	Any Resistance Jewel	Aspect of Serration	The Ossified Essence Key Passive also increase the Critical Strike Damage of your Bone Skills by 1%x per Essence above 50, up to 38-60%x.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Conceited Aspect	Deal 10-25% increased damage while you have a Barrier active.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Splintering Aspect	Bone Spear’s primary attack makes enemies hit beyond the first Vulnerable for 3 seconds. Bone Shards from Bone Spear deal 30-60% bonus damage to Vulnerable enemies and pierce them.

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
Grand Emerald For Critical Strike Damage.	Grand Topaz For increased Intelligence.	Royal Amethyst Royal Sapphire Royal Ruby Grand Skull

The following Runewords are recommended to be used for this build.

Runeword Combination	Effect
Poc + Ohm	Gain 2 Offering by spending 5% of your Maximum Resource 600 Offering will trigger the Barbarian’s War Cry

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 Resource 3. Intelligence	Worldly Endurance # Maximum Life Profane Innovation #% Corpse Tendril Size
Chest	1. Essence per Second 2. Maximum Life 3. Intelligence	Worldly Endurance # Maximum Life Profane Innovation #% Corpse Tendril Size
Gloves	1. Ranks to Bone Spear 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Attack Speed	Bone Finesse #% Bone Critical Strike Damage Worldly Fortune Lucky Hit: #% Chance to Freeze on hit
Pants	1. Maximum Life 2. Armor 3. Intelligence	Worldly Endurance # Maximum Life Worldly Fortune Lucky Hit: #% Chance to stun on hit
Boots	1. Essence per Second 2. Movement Speed 3. Intelligence	Natural Motion #% Movement Speed Worldly Fortune Lucky Hit: #% Chance to immobilize on hit
Amulet	1. Ranks to Evulsion 2. Ranks to Compound Fracture 3. Maximum Resource	Bone Finesse #% Bone Critical Strike Damage Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
Ring	1. Resource Cost Reduction 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Maximum Life	Bone Finesse #% Bone Critical Strike Damage Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
Ring	1. Resource Cost Reduction 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Lucky Hit: Chance to make enemies Vulnerable on hit	Bone Finesse #% Bone Critical Strike Damage Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
1H-Weapon (Sword)	1. Critical Strike Damage 2. Intelligence 3. Maximum Life	Bone Augments #% Chance for Bone Spear Projectiles to Cast Twice Bone Finesse #% Bone Critical Strike Damage

Keep in mind that the maximum Resistance is 70% by default for each element and can be increased to 85% by various sources.

Rotation and Playstyle

The build features a very straight forward play-style with a focus on casting Bone Spear as your main source of damage. To help boost your damage and efficiency, keep up the Decrepify curse as it will lower the cooldown of Bone Storm. Blood Mist will be used as a panic button and Corpse Tendrils is utilized to group enemies together for easier bursting of enemy packs. The Corpse Explosion is used when you run out of Essence, but does come with the added effect where the Shadow damage pools it leaves on the ground increase your movement speed when it hits an enemy!

Uniques and Uber Uniques

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

Uniques

Listed below are the recommended and optional Unique Items for this build. This build thrives of the legendary aspect powers so we would prefer not to involve any uniques to have the build function the best. This doesn’t mean you can’t play around with some changes and test it out yourself though!

• Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul is a great tool to automate your corpse skills, but comes at the cost of the Conceited aspect making you deal less damage to gain a bit of quality of life.

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, obviously affected by the general itemization changes and Paragon rework 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

The build functions with the combination of regaining essence via corpse consumption and heavily reducing the cost of our abilities. Thanks to our skill-tree, we gain big bonuses when having a large Essence pool when we use our Bone Spear making it vital to sustain it which our gear modifiers will help achieve. Besides this we are consistently going to re-apply Bone Storm via Lidless Wall when we move from pack to pack clearing enemies. These Bone Storms also generate a barrier for personal defenses.

Before you reach super optimized gearing the corpse skills will help maintain the play-style and efficiency.

Defenses

Through the consistent application of Bone Storms via our unique shield, this build will have very high up-time with Barrier for protection. Outside of that, the build dishes out a crazy amount of damage with lucky hit modifiers allowing you to crowd control enemy packs.

Offenses

With a heavy focus on critical hits, the Bone Spears cover large areas with instant damage application. This is combined with Corpse Tendrils to group up enemies to demolish them in a swift move by throwing your Bone Spears right after!

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 12th, 2024: New Paragon tool added.
• October 7th, 2024: Paragon board added.
• October 2nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 6.
• August 5th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 5, Infernal Hordes.
• May 23rd, 2024: Finalized tempering modifiers.
• May 16th, 2024: Gem updates.
• May 10th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 4 Loot Reborn.
• January 22nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 3 Season of the Construct.
• October 15th, 2023: Updated guide for the 1.2 patch.
• August 7th, 2023: Minor updates for the 1.1.1 patch.
• August 5th, 2023: Guide updated for patch 1.1.1 (launches on August 8th).
• July 26th, 2023: Optimized gear affix list.
• July 19th, 2023: Guide updated for Season 1 including Malignant Hearts.