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 thanks to our Cursed Aura Aspect.
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
- Very tanky
- Super high Overpower damage numbers
- Consistent performance
- Not as strong as Blood Wave
- Struggling with super high end-game Pit tiers due to lack of damage
To see how this build compares to the other builds on our site, you can check out our build tier list.
Build Requirements
Do note that Indira’s Memory effect does nothing for the build and the reason we’re using it is due to the huge life and added passive skill which will boost the efficiency of the build!
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
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: Defenders – We get 25% Resistance to All Elements this way.
- 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. Skills chosen for Subo is listed below.
For the reinforcement, stick with Varyana, utilizing her Bloodthirst skill being cast when the player casts Blight.
Witchpowers
In Season 7 we will have access to Witchpowers granting some absolutely crazy abilities that we’ll utilize to enhance our builds power. Below, you’ll find a list of the recommended powers we use for this build.
Red Power (Unique):
Purple Powers:
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 | Poc + Gar | Aspect of the Embalmer | Consuming a Corpse has a 15-35% to spawn a Blood Orb. |
| Chest | Royal Sapphire | Aspect of Hardened Bones | You gain 15-20% increased Damage Reduction. |
| Gloves | N/A | Cruor’s Embrace | Pushes the whole focus of the build to the Blood Surge efficiency. Priority would be the Drain Count on these gloves. |
| Pants | Tam + Xal | Indira’s Memory | Blood Wave is additionally a Bone Skill that spawns a Bone Prison at its end point and increases your Blood Skill damage by x#% for 8 seconds when cast. |
| 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 (Mace) | Royal Ruby | Blood-bathed Aspect | Blood Surge’s nova echoes again after a short delay, dealing x% less damage. |
| Off-hand (Focus) | Royal Ruby | Cadaverous Aspect | Consuming a Corpse increases the damage of your Core and Ultimate Skills by #% for 5 seconds, up to x35%. |
| 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 | Sacrificial Aspect | Your Sacrifice bonuses are increased by 10-25% |
| Ring | Any Resistance Jewel | Vehement Brawler’s Aspect | Casting an Ultimate Skill increases your damage by x#% for 8 seconds. Gain 4 additional Ultimate Skill Ranks. |
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 Ruby For increased Health. | Royal Sapphire For increased Willpower. | Royal Skull |
The following Runewords are recommended to be used for this build.
| Runeword Combination | Effect |
| Tam + Xal | Gain 25 Offering by casting a non-channeled core skill. For 300 Offering you gain more maximum life. |
| Poc + Gar | Gain 5 Offering by spending 5% of your maximum resource. For 25 Offering you get increased Critical Strike chance up to 25%. |
In Season 7 we’ll have access to Occult Gems, below you’ll find the list of these gems we want to use for this build.
Which Elixirs Should You Use?
Visit the Alchemist and craft an Elixir providing any Resistance you need most, or the Elixir of Fortitude or Elixir of Resourcefulness. 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. Essence per second 2. Maximum Life 3. Cooldown Reduction | 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. Essence per Second 2. Maximum Life 3. Armor | Necromancer Motion #% Movement Speed Blood Innovation #% Blood Surge Nova Size |
| Amulet | 1. Ranks to Tides of Blood 2. % Intelligence 3. Maximum Life | Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Manual: Worldly Stability #% Resource Cost Reduction |
| Ring | 1. Lucky Hit: #% Chance to make enemies vulnerable 2. Maximum Life 3. Attack Speed | Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Necromancer Efficiency #% Ultimate Cooldown Reduction |
| Ring | 1. Maximum Life 2. Attack Speed 3. Intelligence | Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Necromancer Efficiency #% Ultimate Cooldown Reduction |
| 1H-Weapon | 1. Maximum Life 2. Intelligence 3. Lucky Hit: #% Chance to Restore Primary Resource | Blood Finesse #% Blood Attack Speed Blood Augments #% Blood Surge Double Damage |
| Off-hand (Focus) | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. Maximum Life 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!
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: Indira’s Memory 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!
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. Besides this we’ll run Soulrift assisting in keeping a high Barrier active on top of the high life and it being fully Fortified.
We utilize crowd-controlling skills such as Corpse Tendrils to help group enemies together as we obliterate them with our Blood Surge
Defenses
In order to survive, this build boasts a huge life pool as well as it being fully Fortified, 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 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 crazy high 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 guide from Icy Veins for gambling Obols in the link below:
Obol Gambling Optimization ToolChangelog
- January 24, 2025: Clarified why Indira’s Memory unique is used in the build.
- January 19th, 2025: Guide updated for Season 7.
- 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.
