Blood Surge – Necromancer Build for Diablo 4

Build Introduction

The Blood Surge Necromancer build, also known as the “Bloodmancer”, provides a sturdy, resilient and high damage dealing character for you to start your adventures in Diablo 4. Thanks to the massive amount of Life and Fortify we have on this build, the damage dealt by Overpower on our skills skyrockets.

This build is entirely designed around Blood Surge, both for clearing packs of enemies and single-target. Our defensive layers come in the form of Fortifying our massive Life pool, stealing health from enemies, and having access to Blood Orbs which will heal us. Enemies should be cursed by Decrepify to lower their damage dealt, and through the use of Hemorrhage we can recover Essence very smoothly during generic clearing of 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.

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 Blood Surge 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 list.

Build Requirements

Required Uniques

Blood Moon Breeches

Cruor’s Embrace

Skill Tree Points

Recommended

Suggested Skill Bar

BlightSoulriftBlood MistBlood SurgeCorpse TendrilsHemorrhage

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

The Blood Surge 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 Surge 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: Skirmishers – Sacrificed to provide increased critical strike chance.
• Mage Skeletons: Bone Mages – Sacrificed in the name of Lilith to provide a huge increase to Overpower Damage.
• Golem: Iron – Sacrificed, scaling 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 with 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	Aspect of the Embalmer	Consuming a Corpse has a 15-35% to spawn a Blood Orb.
Chest	Grand Topaz	Aspect of Hardened Bones	You and your Minions gain 15-20% increased Damage Reduction.
Gloves	N/A	Cruor’s Embrace	Pushes the whole focus of the build to the Blood Surge efficiency.
Pants	Tam + Ohm	Blood Moon Breeches	Enemies affected by at least 1 of your curses take x70% increased Overpower damage from you.
Boots	N/A	Aspect of the Cursed Aura	You automatically Curse enemies around you with Decrepify and Iron Maiden. Curses inflicted this way spread to surrounding targets every x seconds and last 4 seconds outside of the aura.
Weapon 1H	Grand Emerald	Cadaverous Aspect	Consuming a Corpse increases the damage of your Core skills by 4-7% for 5 seconds, up to 18-35%
Off-hand (Focus)	Grand Emerald	Sacrificial Aspect	Your Sacrifice bonuses are increased by 10-25%
Amulet (50% Scaling)	Any Resistance Jewel	Aspect of the Great Feast	Each minion drains 1 Essence per second but deals x% bonus damage. With no minions, this bonus applies to you and drains 5 Essence per second.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Blood-bathed Aspect	Blood Surge’s nova echoes again after a short delay, dealing x% less damage.
Ring	Any Resistance Jewel	Aspect of Rathma’s Chosen	Whenever your Blood Skills Overpower you gain 35-50% Attack Speed for 4 seconds.

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

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

Runeword Combination	Effect
Tam + Ohm	Gain 25 Offering by casting a non-channeled core skill. 500 Offering will trigger Barbarian’s War Cry buff.

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 guide, and our Masterworking guide, for more details about these topics.

Slot	Targeted Gear Affixes	Tempering Affixes
Helm	1. Maximum Life 2. Essence per Second 3. Ranks to Decrepify	Blood Innovation #% Blood Surge Nova Size Worldly Endurance #% Total Armor
Chest	1. Essence per Second 2. Maximum Life 3. Armor	Blood Innovation #% Blood Surge Nova Size Worldly Endurance #% Total Armor
Boots	1. Maximum Life 2. Movement Speed 3. Essence per Second	Necromancer Motion #% Movement Speed Blood Innovation #% Blood Surge Nova Size
Amulet	1. Ranks to Coalesced Blood 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Attack Speed	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Manual: Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
Ring	1. Maximum Life 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Intelligence	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Manual: Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
Ring	1. Maximum Life 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Intelligence	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Manual: Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction
1H-Weapon	1. Maximum Life 2. Intelligence 3. Overpower damage	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Blood Augments #% Blood Surge Double Damage
Off-hand (Focus)	1. Maximum Life 2. Intelligence 3. Critical Strike Chance	Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Blood Augments #% Blood Surge Double Damage

Keep in mind that the maximum Resistance is 70% by default for each element and can be increased to 85% by various sources. Furthermore, Unique items cannot be tempered, only masterworked!

Rotation and Playstyle

Start by casting Blight then Blood Surge till there is a corpse on the ground which allows us to use Corpse Tendrils. Do make sure that you try to stay close to the enemies to avoid having your Blood Surges miss their targets!

To sustain the Essence pool we will weave in casts of Hemorrhage to generate both Essence and Blood Orbs which will hit enemies in an AoE due to having consumed Blood Orbs recently.

If you are crowd controlled, you’ll simply use Blood Mist to get out of harms way. This will generate a corpse on the ground so you can follow it up with a Corpse Tendrils to regain control over the situation!

Uniques and Mythic Uniques

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

Uniques

Build has 2 very important unique items needed to perform: Blood Moon Breeches and Cruor’s Embrace.

Mythic Uniques

There are some Mythic unique items you can fit in the build, though all of them will require a lot of changes in the build ranging from shifting slots for your aspect powers to solving attribute issues in other cases. Do as you will with that information and below you’ll find a list of potential Mythic unique items you can use for this build but they do come with the trade that you have to sacrifice a legendary power to equip one!

• Harlequin Crest
• Ring of Starless Skies
• Heir of Perdition

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.

• Wolves from our Runeword got both damage and AI performance buffs!

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

This build relies on stacking maximum Life to extreme values. This mitigates insufficient damage scaling multipliers with additive damage to Overpower and allows indefinite sustain to tank any threat. High attack speed Hemorrhage used as primary means for Fortify management, Might Aspect trigger, and partial Essence gain is how this build functions.

Defenses

In order to survive, this build boasts a huge life pool (up to 200k buffed with perfectly min maxed build wielding a Doombringer!), resulting in massive EHP. The build maximizes efficiency of any max life % based healing (Blood Surge, Undying, % portion of potions, Blood orbs, Crowded sage) allowing to recover hundreds of thousands EHP within seconds.

On top of that, the build utilizes a high level of Decrepify that significantly boosts overall damage resistance due to the reductions applying to raw damage before damage reduction calculation for your character. Increased Slow from scaled Decrepify provides an excellent means of active damage mitigation, significantly slowing enemies, allowing kiting even at close range, and noticeably staggering bosses.

Offenses

We rely on Overpower procs of Blood Surge, but damage is normalized as much as possible. Additive Overpower% from projected life pool reaches approximately 1500% Overpower! The Legendary power Blood-bathed Aspect is utilized, allowing the Nova to echo and hit more than once.

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 6th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 5, Infernal Hordes.
• May 12th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 4 Loot Reborn.
• January 22nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 3 Season of the Construct.
• November 3rd, 2023: Optimized Paragon Board and added end-game version.
• October 15th, 2023: Guide updated for Season 2 Season of Blood, Patch 1.2.
• August 7th, 2023: Minor updates for Patch 1.1.1.
• August 5th, 2023: Guide updated for Patch 1.1.1 (launches August 8th, 2023)
• July 26th, 2023: Optimized Paragon board pathing and Glyph choices.
• July 19th, 2023: Guide updated for Season 1 including Malignant Hearts.