Corpse Lance Necromancer Trag'Oul Variation

The Trag'Oul Blood Lance remains a very viable and capable GR progression build, which focuses on sniping elites rather than relying on the Pestilence full screen, auto-targeting mayhem. This variant's core dynamic comes from the delicate balance of spending life and depleting Corpses to fuel your damage dealer, Corpse Lance Blood Lance, or replenishing life and consuming Corpses through Blood Rush Transfusion and Devour Cannibalize .

Active Skills
Corpse Lance Blood Lance Blood Rush No rune chosen 1 Devour Cannibalize 2 Command Skeletons Dark Mending 3 Simulacrum Reservoir 4 Land of the Dead Frozen Lands
Passive Skills
Grisly Tribute Overwhelming Essence Blood is Power Final Service

To play into the 6-piece bonus of the Trag'Oul set, you will have to use the strongest, Life-spending rune of Corpse Lance — Blood Lance.

With Blood Lances consuming a considerable amount of health, especially during Land of the Dead, you will have to counterbalance them with an even stronger effect — the Cannibalize rune on Devour.

When it comes to Trag'Oul set builds, Blood Rush deserves a special mention. Selection of a particular rune is not necessary; due to the 2-piece bonus, you receive the benefits of the Potency toughness buff, Transfusion healing, Molting Corpse generation, and Metabolism double charge — all the while losing the drawbacks of the skill from the Hemostasis rune. Playing around the Transfusion healing is especially important, since in any decently populated fight it can replenish a decent chunk of what you lost from Blood Lances.

Grisly Tribute should be added to this variation over Fueled by Death from its Pestilence sister spec. This passive is needed for some helpful health sustain in an otherwise healing-starved build.

Naturally, this variant replaces the Pestilence set with the 6-piece Trag'Oul set in all the same slots. All stat recommendations and other legendary and set items are completely identical to the Pestilence spec.

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.

You will maintain the selection from the main Pestilence version of the build: Bane of the Trapped and Zei's Stone of Vengeance for the damage amplification, and Gogok of Swiftness for the CDR and Increased Attack Speed value.

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

You will keep the setup from the solo progression spec, using Reilena's Shadowhook for Essence-based damage amplification, Corpsewhisper Pauldrons as a Corpse Lance-dedicated legendary, and Ring of Royal Grandeur to tie the bonuses of Trag'Oul and Cpt. Crimson sets together.

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 solo GR progression is the Enchantress, due to her increased attack speed bonuses (helpful for the attack speed breakpoint-reliant methods of dealing damage in this build) via Focused Mind, as well as the cooldown reduction bonus from Prophetic Harmony and damage reduction from Powered Shield.

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.