Bone Spear Necromancer Endgame Build 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

• Bone Spear to proc Hewed Flesh and create a corpse to be able to Corpse Tendrils all Monsters into one spot, activating your Grasping Veins multiplier, Decrepify to activate your Amplify Damage multiplier and reset your cooldowns through Lucky Hits and then Bone Spear away.
  • You need to perfect your Bone Spear placement. Your Bone Spear has two portions of damage: the Bone Spear itself and the Bone Shards that return. Whenever your Bone Spear's initial portion of damage crits, the returning Bone Shards are 5 instead 3 which drastically increases your damage. This is only true if those returning Bone Shards do hit the target which is possible by ricocheting the Bone Spear off of a close wall to the target or by being max range to the target.
• In case you find yourself in a dangerous situation, Blood Mist not only makes you Immune but also Unstoppable.
• It is important to activate your Flesh-eater as often as possible by consuming five corpses which you can do by pressing Corpse Explosion five times to maximize your damage. Ideally you weave this in during your Bone Spear casts but it is only really necessary in absolute high-end Pit pushing or on Elites and Bosses.
• Bone Storm not only grants incredible defense through Damage Reduction and Barrier, but also grants Critical Strike Chance. Therefore it is incredibly important to have Bone Storm up as much as possible. Reset its cooldown by spending Essence for Rapid Ossification and proc Decrepify. Bone Storm Duration Tempers create more leeway in this calculation.
• (On Elites & Bossses) Use Corpse Tendrils before consuming your fifth corpse via Corpse Explosion to sync Grasping Veins and Flesh-eater uptime perfectly.

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 Bone Spear Necromancer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Moni + Mot - This Runeword drastically improves your tankiness. This effect does not help against Damage over Time effects.
• Xol + Ohm - By invoking another class' skill in your previous Runeword we can use the powerful Xol as vessel for this Runeword to sometimes get a 15% damage multiplier.

Alternative choices

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

• Poc - We continuously gain and spend Essence, so this is an easy activator.
• Xal - For extra defense.
• Zec - Good option early game when your Bone Storm is not yet permanent.

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

He provides amazing damage multipliers with a high uptime.

• Reinforcement: Varyana

You choose Earth Breaker for more crowd control whenever you engage Elites and Bosses since it is linked to Corpse Explosion.

To enable the Bone Spear 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.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Bone Spear 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 Bone Spear 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 you are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

I'm dealing very low boss / single-target damage, what do I do?

• This is the trickiest thing for a Bone Spear Necromancer to get right because a lot of different factors need to play together correctly for your single-target damage to skyrocket:
  • You need to make sure your Essence generation is very high and you stay at high Essence all of the time, because you want to keep spamming Bone Spears continuously while also benefitting from the absolute maximum bonus of Ossified Essence.
  • Also you need to ensure all of your modifiers are up or as high as possible during your burst window:
    • Grasping Veins
    • Flesh-eater
    • Serration
    • Ossified Essence
  • Last but not least you need to perfect your Bone Spear placement. Your Bone Spear has two portions of damage: the Bone Spear itself and the Bone Shards that return. Whenever your Bone Spear's initial portion of damage crits, the returning Bone Shards are 5 instead 3 which drastically increases your damage. This is only true if those returning Bone Shards do hit the target which is possible by ricocheting the Bone Spear off of a close wall to the target or by being max range to the target.
• I explain the above in great detail with a lot more visual examples in this video.

Why not put Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon?

• Grasping Veins on a Two-Handed Weapon does in fact do higher damage numbers on screen, but overall lowers your DPS during general gameplay.
• This should only be done when you really need the additional Critical Strike Chance.

How can I hit 100% Critical Strike Chance?

• Paragon Node Entomb grants +4% Critical Strike Chance, while the three Magic Nodes grant +1% Critical Strike Chance each, totalling +7% Critical Strike Chance coming from your Paragon Board.
• Paranormal Bone Spear grants +5% Critical Stike Chance to Bone Spear permanently.
• During the time it is active, Bone Storm grants +20% Critical Strike Chance.
• During the time it is active, Grasping Veins grants +25% Critical Strike Chance when it is not applied to a 2h-Weapon or Amulet.
• Skeletal Warriors - Skirmishers boosted by Memento Mori grants +16% Critical Strike Chance. Already calculated in your character stat sheet in game.
• Serration grants +4.5% Critical Strike Chance when you have atleast 150 Essence.
• The above already puts you at 77.5% Critical Strike Chance. This means you need to find an additional 22.5% Critical Strike Chance from other sources to achieve permanent Critical Strikes during Grasping Veins.
• Serration is rather tricky to factor into this calculation since ever player's character will have a different amount of maximum Essence and Essence generation. Keep this passive node from your Skill Tree in mind when you calculate your real Critical Strike Chance!
• Every other source of Critical Strike Chance will be factored in your Critical Strike Chance visible in your Character Sheet, so take a look there to see how close you are to the remaining 51% Critical Strike Chance that you need. NOTE: Do not forget to factor in Serration!
• I've created a Crit Cap Calculator that calculates all of the above for you. You just need to create a copy, enter 2 values and you can instantly see if you are Crit capped or not.

How do I Reset my Cooldowns Faster?

Abhorrent Decrepify

With your multiple sources of damage effects, Decrepify quickly lowers all active Cooldowns by one second and rewards aggressive gameplay. Get close to a group of crowd controlled enemies so your Skills hit as many targets as possible, with as many damage instances as possible.

Splintering

• This aspect on its own makes everything on the screen Vulnerable except the first target your Bone Spear hits. In situations where you only have one target available to you the "Chance to cast Bone Spear Twice" / Lucky Hit: Vulnerable will take over.

Mechanics

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.
Bone Spear has an innate LHC of 50%.
The Mythic Variant gets 18.1% LHC Bonus, and Decrepify has a 15% chance to trigger Cooldown Reduction on your skills.
The equation is 50% * (1 + (18.1/100)) * 15% = 8.8857%.

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

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

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 Bone Spear Necromancer is a fun to play, fast-paced tactical genius that performs well in almost any scenario. With a range of tricks and devices up your sleeve, and constant resets on all of your cooldowns, you can deal with anything.

• Bone Spear makes almost everything Vulnerable. You lean into this strength and trigger effects off it. Don't forget this while adjusting and swapping your build around!
• Reaching permanent Critical Strikes is extremely easy for the Bone Spear Necromancer and has to be abused at all times to make the most out of the build.
• Zoning enemies by using Corpse Tendrils and stutter-stepping far away from the monsters is mandatory.
• Happy blasting 🚀!

Written by Chronikz