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Blood Wave Necromancer Endgame Guide

Season 6 - Season of HatredEndgame

Last Updated:October 13, 2024|Change Log|FAQ

Introducing Blood Wave Necromancer, famously known as Shadow Surfer or Shadow Wave!

If you imagine a power fantasy, what would be better than casting waves of blood and darkness and sending your opponents into the shadow realm? Shadow Blood Wave does exactly that, using Blood Wave to lay waste to the battlefield with waves of damage. It is one of the most satisfying playstyles in the game due to its cool mechanic and impactful gameplay. Besides being a very cool looking build, this is also be one of Necromancer's S Tier builds in season 6.

While Blood Wave has always been a cool concept, it never made a strong build in the end game. Season 6 presents some significant changes for the blood wave, and now that ultimate skills can get skill ranks, it's looking significantly more powerful. It is also one of the more interesting theory crafts mainly due to the fact that you can build it in a way that utilizes both blood and darkness passives.

Using Ultimate Shadow, a darkness skill tag is applied to Blood Wave, which makes it deal Shadow damage! Darkness and blood builds are both loved by many, so what could be better than having both at once? By attaching the darkness skill tag to blood wave, the build unlocks some significant multipliers that it isn't be able to access otherwise, such as Skeletal Warriors - Reapers sacrifice, Gloom and Terror passives. While keeping its the ability to Overpower and critically strike! As a result of these combinations, shadow wave is significantly stronger than the pure blood version. As a result, even though the skill is called Blood Wave, you may have heard this build called Shadow Wave or Shadow Surfer!  

Among the strongest builds in season 6, Shadow Blood Wave gives you the best of both worlds, shadow and blood. It’s also a budget-friendly build that comes online very early, without having to find uniques or mythics.

Blood Wave Necromancer Endgame Setup
Note

This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Necromancer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.

Season Theme

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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:

  • Seething Opal of Equipment
  • Seething Opal of Gold
  • Seething Opal of Materials
  • Seething Opal of Torment
  • Seething Opal of Socketables

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

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer
  • Blood Wave is the main damage dealer. When cast, this skill does massive AoE Overpower damage while knocking down enemies, reducing damage taken while generating Blood Orbs to provide healing and cooldown reduction. Combined with Ultimate Shadow, blood wave receives the darkness tag and do shadow damage, granting all shadow damage damage buffs. Blood Wave cooldown resets constantly through Blood Orbs and Fastblood, you get to cast it constantly.
  • Corpse Tendrils, one of the most effective skills to group, pull and stun enemies. It also helps generate Blood Orbs. Blood orbs help Blood Wave Overpower more regularly by activating Rathma's Vigor. Blood orbs also reduces blood wave cooldown. Grouping enemies into your blood wave is a very key and fun aspect of this gameplay.
  • Decrepify applies powerful CC effects. It also causes lucky hits to reduce the cooldown of your skills. This serves as an effective way to agro targets, and curse them from a distance. You need to make sure targets are cursed at all times.
  • You also use Blight as a core skill but don`t cast it as often. You only use this skill to activate a 20%x passive bonus. You cast this after grouping and pulling enemies using Corpse Tendrils. You need to keep this on bosses as much as possible.
Blood Wave Necromancer Endgame Skill Tree

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

Blood Wave build sacrifice minions to gain more power.

  • Skeletal Warriors - Reapers adds Shadow Damage.
  • Skeletal Mages - Bone adds Overpower Damage.
  • Golems - Iron adds another powerful Critical Strike multiplier.
Book of the Dead

Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Book of the Dead Guide.

Paragon & Glyphs

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer
!
Important

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.

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.

Blood Wave Necromancer
Tip

Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

To Level 15

  1. Abyssal
  2. Sacrificial
  3. Essence
  4. Dominate
  5. Eliminator

To Level 46

  1. Essence
  2. Dominate
  3. Eliminator
  4. Abyssal
  5. Sacrificial

There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.

Runes

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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.

Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.

Mercenaries

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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.

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

Stat Priorities & Item Progression

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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

  • 100% Critical Strike Chance
  • >50% Cooldown Reduction
  • 100% Chance for Blood Wave to do double damage.
  • Armor Capped 1,000
  • Resistance Capped 70%
  • >12,000 Life
  • >50% Movement Speed
  • >50% Corpse Tendrils Size
Blood Wave Necromancer

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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Starter Blood Wave Necromancer Checklist
Ancestral Blood Wave Necromancer Checklist
Mythic Blood Wave Necromancer Checklist

Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.

Build Variants

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Speed farming
Pit Pushing

Begin here if you just made it into Torment 1 or are coming from our Leveling Guide! Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.

Gear & Skills

Starter Blood Wave Necromancer Gear
Starter Blood Wave Necromancer Skills
  • Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats. Disobedience helps with this.
  • If you can't find a good 2-Handed Mace, you can use any other 2-Handed Weapon (Axe, Scythe, or Sword) with good affixes for the time being. You can also use any 1-Handed weapon and Focus, but the damage output is significantly lower.
  • Reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance is your number one priority before other stats. Always reliably critting means you can expect a certain damage output, and for monsters to consistently die in the same number of skill uses.
  • Starter version, build utilizes Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers sacrifice to reach 100% Critical Strike Chance. This will later be swapped for Skeletal Warriors - Reapers sacrifice for extra shadow damage.
  • Finding a max rolled Fastblood is very important to reduce the cooldown of Fastblood.
  • Cooldown Reduction on your Helmet helps with shorter cooldown of Blood Wave and better uptime of Grasping Veins. Tempering ultimate cooldown reduction on your jewelry also helps with this significantly.

The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestral Legendaries, Paragon points, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.

Gear & Skills

Ancestral Blood Wave Necromancer Gear
Ancestral Blood Wave Necromancer Skills
  • As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but make sure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
  • Blood Moon Breeches is an obvious power spike for the build skyrocketing the damage with a huge multiplier.
  • Hopefully by this point, you acquired a good rolled Fastblood so that you can swap that out from your necklace and replace it with Grasping Veins to ensure that you reach 100% critical strike chance.
  • Via masterworking your gear, you also now have a lot higher cooldown reduction which should significantly help with Blood Wave cooldown management.

This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.

Gear & Skills

Mythic Blood Wave Necromancer Gear
Mythic Blood Wave Necromancer Skills
  • This build is significantly strengthened by Harlequin Crest, adding skill ranks to Blood Wave increasing its damage and reducing its cooldown. Triple masterworked GA cooldown Harlequin Crest with ultimate cooldown reduction tempers on jewelry should reduce Blood Wave cooldown as low as 9 seconds. Which means you can reset its cooldown fully by picking up only 3 Blood Orbs.
  • Shroud of False Death is another mythic you utilize on this build. +1 to all passives significantly improves the build with boosts to Generic, Blood and Darkness passives (Tides of Blood,Coalesced Blood,Gloom,Terror).
  • UPDATE: Currently Shroud of False Death drops are disabled in Season 6. In the meantime, you can run Tyrael's Might.

The Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.

Gear & Skills

Speedfarming Blood Wave Necromancer Gear
Speedfarming Blood Wave Necromancer Skills
  • To Speedfarm effectively, reprioritize movement speed and attack speed. Since most speedfarm content does not require maximum damage output, your 2-Hander is swapped for one-hander mace and focus to help speed up the animation of Blood Wave.
  • Prioritize movement speed when you masterwork.
  • Shroud of False Death is replaced with Tyrael's Might to have more movement speed, and added tankiness does also help when farming content like infernal hordes.

This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.

Gear & Skills

Pit Push Blood Wave Necromancer Gear
Pit Push Blood Wave Necromancer Skills
  • When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your DPS decreases significantly when you're dodging their attacks.
  • This setup is HYPER optimized, meaning that every recommended Greater Affix and Masterwork Crit is tailored to hit the exact caps that are necessary. This allows you to swap more Masterwork Crits to + Ranks on Skills and other damage increases. While you may not see a difference at lower tier content, these changes make the differences between highest possible Pit Tier clears.
  • UPDATE: Currently Shroud of False Death drops are disabled in Season 6. In the meantime, you can run Tyrael's Might.

FAQ & Mechanics

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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?

Why can't I reset my blood wave cooldown?

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

How to Manage Essence Generation and Cooldowns?

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Mechanics

Blood Wave

Blood Orbs and Rathma's Vigor

Lucky Hit Chance (LHC)

Stagger

Video Guide

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

Summary

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

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.

Credits

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Blood Wave Necromancer

Written by LordxSaura

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