Blood Lance Necromancer Endgame Build Guide

The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:

• Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
• Use defensive consumables. Especially the Elixir of Fortitude II.
• You can swap Golems - Iron sacrifice with Golems - Blood sacrifice to maximize your tankiness if necessary.

• There are few ways you generate essence in this build during the end game. Each Blood Orb generates essence for you thanks to blood orb essence tempering. Soulrift also generates Essence.
• In the early game you may occasionally starve on resources before you get the full combo online. Casting Corpse Tendrils on cooldown is highly important to generate more Blood Orbs. Don`t forget, more Blood orbs = more Essence recovery!
• Cooldown management and Essence regen is sort of connected in this playstyle, so you want to make sure you reduce you big cooldowns by applying Decrepify. You have a very high lucky hit chance on this build and you reduce cooldowns a lot by procing Decrepify. The more cooldown reduction you have, the more you keep Soulrift up and you cast Corpse Tendrils more frequently which results in better resource management.
• Make sure you have necessary Blood orb restore Essence tempering as it is suggested in the build planner. You can also imprint Potent Blood to help with essence recovery further.
  Essence per Second (EPS) affix on the Helm, Chest and Boots helps to passively replace Essence as you cast your damage skills. Since the base rolls of EPS add up to 12 and the Necromancer regains 3 EPS, you generate a total of 15 per second.
• Once you acquire Ring of Starless Skies and get enough cooldown reduction, Essence management is much easier.

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
• You can swap Golems - Iron sacrifice with Golems - Blood sacrifice to maximize your tankiness if necessary.

• Blood Lance lingers in a target it hits for 3 seconds. Whenever a new Lance hits another target, ALL lanced targets take the damage dealt by the new Lance.
• This procs for the multitude of different Lance generating Aspects and effects in your Skill Tree.
• When an attack successfully Overpowers, that Lance and all other lingering Lances, apply that Overpower damage. The same goes for Critical Strike damage and Vulnerable etc.
• ‍Enhanced Blood Lance causes a Lance to pierce out of a lanced target and potentially hit a target behind them.

• Your character gets lanced however instead of receiving a damage from lanced mechanic, it gives you Fortify. It also increases damage significantly activating Blood Seeker's aspect.
  • Against a single target, Blood Seeker's considers there to be two lanced targets for its damage calculation.
• You can target farm this chest piece by killing the Beast In The Ice boss.
• If you did not acquire this item yet, make sure to have skill points into Drain Vitality so you can maintain Fortify status.

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Necromancers, these two caps include:

Cap 1

• Attack Speed on Gear
• Attack Speed from Paragon Nodes
• Elixirs
• Kalan's Edict for Minions
• Golems - Bone Sacrifice
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine

Cap 2

• Accelerating
• Rapid
• Rathma's Chosen
• Reap
• Blood Lance
• Hemorrhage
• Howl from Below for Corpse Skills
• Blood Attack Speed Temper

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

• While the mechanics are signifantly more nuanced than this, and many things in game slightly obfuscate the truth, understanding Lucky Hit Chance is fairly simple.
  • With Advanced Tooltips activated in your Gameplay Settings, you can see a Skill's innate LHC.
  • Not every Skill has a LHC even though things may cause those Skills to deal damage.
  • A Skill must apply damage to a target to have a chance to trigger LHC.
  • LHC effects do not have LHC and can't trigger other LHC effects.
  • Skills check for LHC EVERY time they deal damage to ANY targets. There's no limit or "one per cast" mechanics.
• To calculate the chance of triggering something, you take your Skill's LHC, multiply that by (1 + (Total Bonus Lucky Hit Chance / 100)) and then multiply that by the Effect's LHC.
  • Blood Lance has an innate LHC of 50%. The Mythic Variant gets 85.4% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • So the equation is 50% * (1 + (85.4/100) * 15% = 13.9% chance to trigger. But combination of Blood Lance and Gore Quills enables you to launch additional Blood Lances per each cast of Blood Lance assuming that you have enough Blood Orbs. Gore Quills is capped at 3 orbs per cast, but this means you can hit the targets potentially four times per cast. As a result our chance to trigger Decrepify once is (100% - ((100% - 13.9%)^4th)) = 45%.

Read up more on Lucky Hit Chance mechanics in our dedicated guide by Ava.