Blood Wave Necromancer Endgame Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Skill Rotation

• Decrepify targets from a distance while approaching. This slows the target down while reducing their damage output. It also helps reduce cooldowns. 
• Once you are in range, you cast Blood Wave to start your damage rotation. The lucky hits of Blood Wave make targets Vulnerable and create corpses by procing Hewed Flesh.
• Once you have a corpse, you cast Corpse Tendrils to pull and group targets. 
• Do not forget to surf your own waves. As you collect Blood Orbs, Blood Wave cooldown goes down due toFastblood. You want to cast Blood Wave immediately off cooldown so you can keep accumulating Blood Orbs while continuously damaging targets.
• Tidal casts 2 additional Blood Waves, doing even more damage and giving you more orbs to collect. Once the build is fully tuned in, you can overlap multiple waves covering entire screens in blood and shadow! 
• Blood Orbs resets the timer for Rathma's Vigor causing Blood Wave to do Overpower damage. As long as you stay healthy for 12 seconds, Rathma's Vigor causes Blood Wave to Overpower. Consuming Blood Orbs decreases this 12 second timer to Overpower more frequently.
• Each Blood Orb reduces Rathma's Vigor timer by 2 seconds. So ideally picking up 6 orbs resets the Rathma's Vigor. 6 x 2 = 12 seconds.
• You pick up Blood Orbs, reduce Blood Wave cooldown and do Overpower damage. Everything in this build synergizes very well with each other.

Book of the Dead

Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Blood Wave Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Zan + Ohm gives you access to War Cry - Every cast of Blood Wave gives you 150 offering. Blood Wave procs Ohm every fourth cast. With full setup, you can cast Blood Wave almost every 1.5 seconds, trigger Ohm every 6 seconds, and it stays active for 6 seconds. It is a free 15% damage multiplier with 100% uptime.
• Bac + Xal - In this playstyle, you run around all the time picking up blood orbs hence activating Bac rune very frequently. The uptime of Xal is 100%. Xal increases your maximum life by 20%. As an Overpower build, this increases not only your survivability but also your damage.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Yul - Good generator since you cast blood wave and tendrils very often.
• Cem - You evade quite often to maintain unstoppable via meta at the same time activating this rune.
• Yax - Early game can be an easy generator that gives back significant amount of offering.
• Gar - if you can't to reach 100% crit chance due to gear, this rune can help you get there in the meantime.
• Cir - Another good generator since you cast Blood Wave back to back.

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

• Hired: Raheir

Raheir offers a ton of survivability from Valiance, and Bastion, as well as CC`ing enemies nearly continuously. They also increase your damage through Inspiration.

• Reinforcement: Varyana

Varyana adds another layer of CC on demand for the build with Earth Breaker on Blood Wave use.

To enable the Blood Wave Necromancer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.

UPDATE: Originally this build runs Shroud of False Death however it is currently disabled in Season 6. In the meantime, you run Tyrael's Might.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Blood Wave Necromancer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

This section is designed to guide your Blood Wave Necromancer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

What can I do to improve my survivability?

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.

Why can't I reset my blood wave cooldown?

• The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have a max rolled Fastblood. Blood Wave Necromancer, the Fastblood significantly improves the flow of this gameplay.

• Secondly, avoid casting your Blood Wave into places where your blood orbs would disappear if they were consumed by walls or obstacles.

How does Blood Wave do Shadow Damage and benefit from Darkness Passives?

• A Darkness skill tag is assigned to Blood Wave because of Ultimate Shadow. It transitions from Physical Damage type to Shadow Damage type, receiving all the benefits that also apply to Shadow Damage and direct damage. Therefore, it can still Overpower and critical strike.

How to Manage Essence Generation and Cooldowns?

• The Blood Wave Necromancer does not actively spend Essence to deal damage. Only spenders are Blight and Blight, and you do not cast them frequently. As long as you cast them when you need to, Essence is not an issues. Your main damage dealer Blood Wave costs no Essence.
• Nevertheless, cooldown management is one of the most important factors. Blood wave's cooldown resets immediately with an end game setup of mythics and max Fastblood. Once you reach the cooldown cap in late game, cooldown of Blood Wave goes down to as low as 9 seconds, which means grabbing 3 Blood Orbs resets the cooldown fully. However you still need to pick up 6 orbs to reset Rathma's Vigor timer. So ideally 12 seconds of Blood Wave cooldown is enough to constantly Overpower.
• If you cast Blood Wave as soon as they become available, you'll accumulate orbs all the way through the fight. Blood Orbs stack together as you cast more waves, where you can pick multiple orbs all at once allowing you to cast Blood Wave more frequently increasing your overall Damage Per Second (DPS).  
• Avoid casting waves into walls or obstacles, this causes your Blood Orbs to disappear or not spawn, preventing you from consuming them and resetting cooldowns. 

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Other than going slower and paying more attention to threats around you, there are some imporant things to consider:

• 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 and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Sacrifice Golems - Blood for more Maximum Life.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than the build normally would until you've adjusted to the increase in danger, or got better gear.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

Mechanics

Blood Wave

• Arguably the coolest ultimate in the game! It does massive AoE damage, gives you a damage reduction, and generates Blood Orbs. 
• Combined with Tidal it generates 2 additional waves that also creates 12 additional blood orbs. 
• And also combined with Fastblood, these blood orbs resets the cooldown of blood wave so you can keep casting!

Blood Orbs and Rathma's Vigor

• In end game, no matter how much you increase your healing received or Blood Orb healing, each Blood Orb reduce the timer of Rathma's Vigor only 2 seconds.
• You need to consume 6 orbs to reset timer of Rathma's Vigor fully. 6 Blood Orb x 2 seconds = 12 seconds.
• Because of this there might be times, Blood Wave might not Overpower. This is okay, as you get better at movement and as you accumulate orbs more effectively, orbs overlaps and you can consume multiple orbs all at once to ensure Blood Wave Overpowers frequently.

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

• 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 Wave has an innate LHC of 50%. Mythic variant has no lucky hit chance from gear so The Mythic Variant gets 0% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
  • So the equation is (50% * (1 + (0100)) * 15% = 7.5% chance to trigger. But since Blood Wave can hit the 3 times in total, your chance to trigger Decrepify once is (100% - ((100% - 7.5%%)^3th)) = 20.85%.

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

Stagger

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.

The Blood Wave Necromancer, also known as Shadow Surfer or Shadow Wave, blends blood and shadow to devastate enemies. With the Blood Wave ultimate, it delivers massive AoE damage and generates Blood Orb to reset cooldowns. By utilizing both blood and shadow mechanics, the build gains access to strong multipliers for Overpower and shadow damage.

Corpse Tendrils efficiently groups enemies and boosts Blood Orb generation, while Decrepify enhances control and cooldown reduction. This allows for continuous casting of Blood Wave, overwhelming foes with waves of blood and shadow.

Written by LordxSaura