Blood Lance Necro build?

Necromancer
1

Heyo,

Hope you are all doing well. I’ve been trying to level my Necro past lvl 65 and compared to others I feel like my character is pretty weak which I think is a combination of skill issue and my lack of ability to build the character properly, which recently just got me frustrated.

Do you happen to know a build or guide or whatever that’s focused on the blood lance? I’ve been trying to make a blood lance build work but seem to be missing a few things here and there. I was searching for guides but most of them seem quite different even though they rely on empowering the same spell(s).

I’m aware that this build might be a bit unconventional however for some unknown reason I would really like it to work (to a degree), I do not mind if it’s not an S-tier build. Just would like to at least have some fun in World Tier 4. I’m currently using Hemo, Corpse Tendrils, Blood Lance, Blood Mist and Blood Surge alongside with Blood Wave. If you don’t mind I also got questions in regards to these spells:

  • At the current state of the game, am I supposed to be using Blood Wave at all? I saw none of the “meta builds” use it which made me think. I feel like it can do damage under certain conditions, maybe I’m missing an opportunity here with replacing it with something else
  • Should I be summoning anything at all? For some reasoning summing skeletons and golems is something I chose not to do. Is it an error on my part - if I would like to make a blood lance build work?
  • I feel like my ability to generate essence is extremely limited and kind of makes my gameplay experience a bit unfun, should I be building more attack speed so that Hemo generates essence faster?
  • Moreover, I feel like my character does not really have a lot of mobility, everyone else who play a different class just sprints or teleports by which kind of makes me feel inferior. Is there anything which supposed to fix this?

I have a decent amount of legendaries and extracted affixes, also got pretty lucky to get a few sacred uniques but those have terrible stats unfortunately.

Anyway, thanks for reading past the wall of text. Any tips you could give me maybe would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

2

Problem is necro has no mobility, but for blood skills you want overpower % on your kit.

Second problem is that while i love my blood build, you’ve got to move slow or mix in bone skills unfortunately. If you kit it right it can get to and go through wt4 content but slowly.

You dont have to summon anything if you dont want to.

For essence you need either corpse explosion or have the lego that gives it to blood mist. Necro has poor essence regen right now in game.

I dont use blood lance myself, but hope that helps a little bit.

2 Likes
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Thank you, for sure it helps! Any ounce of information is something I can use towards being able to build better.

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In the current state of the meta you need to crit to do damage. Blood lance has no crit support. It automatically overwhelms every 8 casts, which is roughly equivalent to 12% crit chance, but that doesn’t cut it. Bone gets a lot of crit for free and automatically inflicts vulnerable, so its usually considered superior.

It has the best cost-to-damage ratio of all core necro spells, but you need to absolutely have the option to inflict Vulnerable from another skill to be even remotely competitive. If you are not doing that your build has trash DPS.

You can actually support essence somewhat using cold skelly mages - they can generate 2 essence/hit for you. Others options are essence spirit - if cast on low mana it will give you back 40 over 3 sec and also bone prison. Experiment around those. There is a legendary that can automatically detonate corpses when you use the blood mist spell. Id strongly consider it for the same purpose.

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Thank you kindly! I do appreciate this.

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I tried out a blood lance build with level 80 and did a nightmare dungeon tier 40 with it. It was a miserable experience, but it worked. The build should work fine for all open world activities though. If you really want to use blood lance, I can give you some build key aspects. Be warned though that it is in no way an S tier build, and it does not compete with other necro builds, especially bone spear and spirit.

So here are the key aspects:

  • This is an overpower build. Focus on overpower all the way. Get overpower damage on all items and paragon nodes.
  • In case you don’t know, overpower only takes your hp and fortify into account, no skill oder weapon damage. Therefore get hp on ALL items you can (helm, chest, legs, rings, shield, gems).
  • Get the “every 8th hit is an overpower hit” passive for blood lance. It is absolutely key for the build.
  • Get as much attack speed as you can. You want to proc the overpower effect as often as possible on blood lance. Get the fastest 1H you can find, and a shield. This will lead to increased attack speed, and the shield can roll hp on it, you want both. The lost attack power through shield usage does not matter for overpower.
  • No minions. Get attack speed for golem sacrifice, and very important: overpower damage for mages sacrifice, the 40% are a multiplier, not additive!

Your character numbers should be:

  • At least 10.000 hp
  • At least 1000 overpower % bonus

Skills:
Hemo, blood lance, tendrils, blood mist, other skills are up to you (I preferred iron maiden with essence back on cast, and bone prison for fortify and also extra essence on cast)

Key legendary aspects:

  • Blood lance spread to other targets
  • Overpower hits grant more attack speed (VERY KEY)
  • Stronger overpower hits on overheal
  • Blood lance initial hit more damage (not sure if that works with overpower)

Playstyle:

  • Shoot blood lance at all targets around you
  • Once overpower procs with the 8th guaranteed hit, all mobs should explode and die
  • Gain essence back via the extremely fast hemo casting, or iron maiden or bone prison
  • Collect blood orbs that spawn, either via guaranteed drops from blood lance or via tendrils. Blood orbs will fortify you, which is very important since that’s where half your overpower damage will come from. Always be 100% fortified. Blood orbs will also overheal you for the stronger overpower hits on heal legendary aspect.

And that’s pretty much about it. Overpower is a pretty weird mechanic, and this build revolves entirely around it. You can just try it out if you really want blood lance to work :).

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7

I’ve been having the same experience and hoping they buff blood lance. My current build focuses around a lot of essence generation from corpse explosion with the unique gloves that make them run and also the aspect that makes blood orbs generate essence. I also found it very useful to find boots that increases max evades cuz necro is not mobile. I’m still trying to figure out the best route to go for this build but would recommend to try out using the blood golem with the build as it never dies as long as your emptying your blood lances on targets.

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when i hit 100 ill work on a blood build. I know its not a helpful response but just looking at the skills it looks extremely possible. I used Blood lance in my minion build yesterday and it seemed extremely strong. As for blood wave I think it comes around making sure you have the perk that collecting blood orbs reduces CD. Again I am not sure I have not done it but IT looks very possible.

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Thank you kindly for the explanation ggsnake :slight_smile:

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Can you elaborate on this more, please?
Do you mean the 20% chance or whatever from that once aspect that has a chance to shoot a 2nd lance at random target?

Right now I have to take Blood Surge for any kind of decent AOE but that eats up so much essence. CE doesn’t seem to do nearly as much dmg as Surge but haven’t tried Tendrils yet.

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It’s just the base way how blood lance works - each time you hit an enemy with a lance, that damage gets transferred to all enemies that are already lanced, this includes overpower hits as far as I can tell. So you just hit each single enemy with a lance as fast as you can, and then you’ll deal damage to all of them.

The aspect with the target spread certainly helps spreading the lance effect to all targets and I would recommend taking it, but it’s not the initial cause for the aoe.

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Edit: TL DR, I made a build here’s the link. this is just my guess at a build that would work, with the unique ring, blizzard boots aspect, and minion damage reduction helm aspect being replaceable. You should also test whether the splitting blood lance aspect or the damage increase per lanced target is a better option. I couldn’t quite decide between the two and I honestly think you dont need both but do what you wanna do. finally the weapon gem is a toss up between emerald and ruby. try em out.

https://
d4builds. gg
/builds/c2ddb12f-7ca9-47cf-9215-5517f9be6e48/

you will have to put the above together because blizzard is to lazy and afraid to moderate the forums normally.

from what I can tell you need all the attack speed you can muster, crit chance, over power damage, and I would get you corpse tendrils with the leggo aspect that gives you crit chance and crit damage after casting it.

outside of this, you can bring cold mage skeletons for essence generation, tanky skeles or reapers, sacrifice the golem for over power damage, and use hemorrhage as filler.

sorry here, your skillset would be this: Hemorrhage, Blood Lance, corpse tendrils, decrepify, summon skeleton, army of the dead.

Take the Kalan’s edict keystone for much faster minion attack speed for further essence generation.

The name of the game here is attack speed for you first, but minion attack speed is a very close second. There is an aspect that helps with their attack speed from normal attacks and theirs the one for army of the dead. If you can spare the aspect slots getting the blizzard for your mages helps with CCing generally but great for boss stagger too. Then, just having more mages is good too.

With decrepify and your minions attack speed you should be able to effectively spam corpse tendrils when needed, army of the dead very often, and have tons of essence to spend to spam cast blood lance.

Sorry if this is a bit confusing, im working this out as I think it over, I have not played this specifically with bloodlance but this is very similar to the build im currently using and I am on a lvl 76 hardcore necromancer if that means anything to you.

Another thing thats important to note here is that you still should invest in the skill nodes that increase the damage/health of the mages and warriors as well as the damage reduction talents because as everyone knows these dudes are very squishy. you can start to take away from these nodes as you get to higher levels and find gear that helps keep them alive without having to invest so much.

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I might drop CE from my blood build once I get the board for +15% DR with at least two corpse around me and x12% damage for six around me. I will loose the 6 essence per explosion passive though.

Thinking of putting the points into lance if I am having problems with bosses.

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You get extra casts with aspects. I think it fires 2 or 3 more after the initial cast so really it over powers every 3 uses.

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in this video, as you can see, blood lance can be really powerfull but really laggy !!

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Overpower definitely; also stack as much +life possible

oh, and damage reduction is your friend

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Yeah, Blood defensive revolves around damage reduction as it synergizes with Fortify. Fortify offers 10% on it’s own. Fortify is a part of the Overpower bonus damage calculation. It’s not something you want to ignore building. It’s pretty simple to do and it’s easier to stack to 100% in later skill tree progression than early.

The other thing I want to mention is that attack speed is not really super important to the build. Attack speed is something you want early game because of hemorrhage but late game you want to switch over to a recovery or a regen setup exclusively allowing you to focus solely on building OPs. As such, you can use either 1H or 2H.

In my latest video, I used Bone Splinters Plus Aspect of Torment which offers really good regen, better than hemo IMO but it’s actually not the primo regen method believe it or not. I feel like most Necro players are just starting to get their feet wet with essence setups so I won’t spoil that too much.

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Most of the issues with lances lagging the server don’t seem to be a thing anymore. Below is a link for a season 1 blood lance build that I am quite fond of made by the same fellow who made your server crashing vid. I don’t follow it 100% as I like to test various things and decide if it’s a good fit for me but I’m PRETTY close to it.

To get ideas, I’ve watched most of the blood surge/lance stuff out there and by far, I like this Struth fellow’s approach the most.

You’ll find a lot of people have different ideas about building a lance build. They all mostly overlap though.

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Since they introduced the cap on blood orbs I haven’t been “able” to lag the server. At the start of S1 it still happened if you cast 3-4 tendrils before triggering Gore Quills.

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Thanks for all that info that literally everyone already knows… Except you know, all the things in there that are flat wrong… Attack speed isn’t important? It’s literally the number one stat to cycle through your weak lances faster. Just stop posting you have no clue what you are talking about.

I have 27k HP and over 2200% overpower damage, attack speed is the number one stat to kill things faster.

1 Like