Corpse Lance Necromancer Speed Farming Variation

The Corpse Lance Necromancer can deal quite well with farming Torment difficulty Rifts and low-to-mid Greater Rifts at a very high speed. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

Within the limited scope of these lower difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Corpse Lance Ricochet Blood Rush Metabolism 1 Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish 2 Devour Voracious 3 Command Skeletons Dark Mending 4 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands
Passive Skills
Rathma's Shield Final Service Blood is Power Fueled by Death

The build is a variation of the standard Pestilence progression setup that relies on the fast elite kill speed of low tier content to constantly fuel Messerschmidt's Reaver and chain Land of the Dead casts.

The rotation of the build goes roughly like this:

• Activate Land of the Dead as soon as it comes up, ideally with complete overlap. This can be accomplished with as low as two elite kills within a single Land of the Dead window, given the focus on CDR on gear.
• Sic your Command Skeletons on nearby monsters to buff up your damage from the Jesseth's Arms set, Jesseth Skullscythe and Jesseth Skullshield.
• Maintain your supreme speed with a combination of the passive buff from Bone Armor Harvest of Anguish and the active use of Blood Rush Metabolism.
• Note that since Command Skeletons is a spender, you might have to spam it a bit to reset your Land of the Dead, if the Messerschmidt's Reaver resets do not line up properly. This will work due to the worn Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac.
• Spam Devour Voracious to sustain your health and get free Corpse Lance Ricochet shots from the Pestilence 2-piece.

You will need to replace the progression-oriented Convention of Elements for the cooldown reduction of Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. With this ring, whenever a rift slows down and the Land of the Dead reset does not overlap as easily, you can spam some Command Skeletons to make up the CDR loss via Essence spending. Complete the worn jewelry with the usual Squirt's Necklace and Krysbin's Sentence.

For your bracers, you can either stay on Strongarm Bracers from the progression build, or add a little toughness to an otherwise squishy farming build with Ancient Parthan Defenders. They will be procced and kept up by your high Land of the Dead Frozen Lands uptime.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random.

Unlike their LoD counterpart, set-based Corpse Lance builds do not have a great way of utilizing the three Sanctification powers during Greater Rift solo pushing — owing to an imperative skill selection that pretty much locks down your entire skill line-up. Thus, you should simply use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). The Sanctification power outcome does not matter. In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification are your weapon, Jesseth Skullscythe, or a jewelry piece like Krysbin's Sentence.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

In speed runs, Elite and Rift Guardian fights are significantly faster and enemies perish fast; thus, the value of Zei's Stone of Vengeance diminishes and it is best replaced by Boon of the Hoarder for the gold-related synergy with an Avarice Band worn by your Follower.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

For your weapon slot, you can run either Messerschmidt's Reaver (solo normal rift farming) or In-geom (group normal rift farming) as your cooldown reduction powerhouse; both will work exceptionally well with the build.

Corpsewhisper Pauldrons are still a cornerstone piece in the build, necessary for their damage amplification for Corpse Lance.

In order to attain the full bonuses of the Pestilence and Cpt. Crimson sets, you will need to use Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during standard T16 rifts farming is the Enchantress due to her vast array of bonuses that complement this build; most notably, Prophetic Harmony for the Cooldown Reduction and Amplification for the elemental damage increase, both of which you can attain by using a Hand of the Prophet.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered, which renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it — valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside of straight up evasion via Blood Rush.