Is it possible to get Blood Lance close to the damage output of Bone Spear? If so, how would you go about it? Would it be crit and vulnerability just like Bone Spear or something to go with Overpower?
It will be difficult without a very strong reliable source of vulnerability.
What makes bone spear so strong is twofold –
- it can trigger its own vulnerable (first target hit)
- it has its own built in multiplier (when shards split)
The way damage works, as far as we can determine, is as follows –
- “Conditional damage / damage to X” – this includes things like increased shadow damage to slowed, bonus damage to abilities, etc.
- Vulnerable damage
- Critical damage
- Overpower damage
So let’s take an example –
You do 100% bonus damage to slowed, 100% bonus damage to vulnerable, and you have 100% bonus damage on critical. To keep the numbers nice and round let’s say our base damage is 10.
10 (Base) x 2 (to slowed) x 2 (vulnerable) x 2 (critical) = 80 damage
So in order to achieve the same damage you’d need 800% bonus damage to any one of the multipliers which gets really difficult.
One area you can explore is scaling off overpower. One thing we have in our toolkit are multiple ways to guarantee an overpower. For other classes overpower is not very reliable as the base chance is only 3%.
So if you’re going to try and work with blood lance I’d suggest scaling damage to x (it doesn’t matter what you choose - slow, blood spells, etc.), overpower, vulnerable (iron golem/corpse tendrils), and then crit.
It won’t do as well as bone spear because that one ability can do all of those things in one but you can get numbers up there. Blood spear does have some scaling with blood orbs if you can find a way to reliably generate them.
For fun youtube search “blood lance uber lilith” there’s some cheese out there.
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Thank you ShadowSpirit. I really appreciate you taking the time to write that all up and explain it to me.
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I’d expand this a bit further:
- Bone skills also have access to “Critical Damage with Bone Skills” which adds more critical damage.
- Bone skills have access to meaningful x% damage multipliers which dramatically increase the damage of the skills (e.g., the Splinter’s Aspect with its large multiplier when used on a 2h weapon).
- The Ossified Essence Legendary Aspect is actually working multiplicatively vs additively (like it says in the tooltip). This is multiplying the multiple in critical effects.
- The Aspect of Grasping Veins is also an expansion of critical damage multiplication which just compounds with the other elements available.
So, while all other necro builds have access to the very last topic (Corpse Tendrils), Bone makes the best use out of it since it is already piling on additional sources to critical damage. That then combines on top of Vulnerability with essentially 100% uptime, and you get Bone Spear running away with its overall damage in respect to almost every other build in the entire class.
Blood doesn’t have anything like that to compound multiply on Lance. Lance tops out earlier than Bone’s potential due to the lack of x% multiplicative Legendaries that have any meaningful impact on direct damage.
Blood’s entire kit seems designed around actions per minute vs one big hit (i.e., Bone). The two in their current state couldn’t be any more different. They are functionally entirely opposite playstyles, but an issue in implementation is exacerbated by how certain mechanics work. The latter favors bone spells by a huge margin.
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Happy to help. I enjoy theory crafting. I’m running a blood surge build now using the deathspeaker amulet and ring of mendeln artifacts. It’s by no means optimal but my owerpower damage bonus is 1600% which makes up (somewhat) for the lack of vulnerable.
I’m experimenting with maxing out lucky hit to actually sustain (health+essense) the ability and trigger mendeln.
It works “OK” … I’m starting to hit a wall at nightmare 80. Too much random in the build but it’s a fun experiment.
The cool thing about the build is that the “more crap that is on the screen” the more lucky hits that get triggered. I’m trying to determine if the amulet (which allows my pets to blood surge when I do) actually triggers lucky hit. The amulet might actually be a waste!
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With the way overpower works? Not in the current state of the game.
Overpower as a number is essentially two different numbers. Number A) is ((health + fortify) * overpower%). Number B) is “normal damage”. By normal damage I mean everything you would typically expect like white damage (standard hits) and yellow damage (critical hits).
So, the teal overpower number is (Health component + normal damage) = new number. The orange number is (Health component + critical damage you normally see) = new number.
Right now, the largest contributor to Overpower’s overall damage is your health (and your fortify when you stack it up fast) and the overpower percentage value. There are a few other non-specific modifiers that can scale the end number, but it is a limited list.
That said, Blood Lance can work with some set-up. One way to go is stacking a lot of attack speed in order to fire out as many lances as possible to spear enemies and trigger its Legendary Aspect which spreads its effect. Each enemy lanced will keep a lance for 3 seconds and all enemies lanced take repeat damage.
In other words, you hit target A first, and you hit target B next. Target B gets hurt, but so does target A. If you can shoot again at target C quick enough, then targets A + B also take damage too.
This is why you see some videos out there firing off lances very quickly in order to hit as many targets possible, and then those spread into other targets, and the next shot makes them all explode with damage. If your Overpower is available, then all targets get it. This element of the build takes a ton of gearing to pull off because you can drain essence incredibly fast, you need specific legendary aspects with good rolls, and generally need to be accessing Ancestral gear. It couldn’t be more different from Bone spear if it tried.
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You guys are great. Thank you again, all of you. It appears I have a lot of thinking to do. I almost want to ask about Blight, but sadly, I really don’t enjoy corpse explosion, so, I figure not using that would gimp a blight build too much.
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My main is Blight + Blighted Corpse Explosion… BUT… I worry a lot less about general damage over time. Instead, I use a lot of general shadow damage in my build, including Paragon, to ramp up Shadowblight (the Key Passive). In support of this, I also run the skeletons. It is by far my favorite character I play. It is in no way a meta build on the scale of Bone Spear/Spirit. However, it works well enough for my tastes. I’ve completed every capstone dungeon several levels earlier, can do NM dungeons 10+ levels higher (though I usually stick to +3 over my level for speed), and its OK. I solo a lot though and it doesn’t have the speed of other builds.
Anyway, an alterative approach to look at is Sever. Sever is one of the coolest looking skills in the entire necromancer kit. It is a pretty decent direct damage attack and you’d want to build around it for critical damage/crit chance.
You’d still go for Shadowblight key passive, but now the Shadow Mages can actually contribute to that. So, if you want to skip Blighted CE you probably can.
There is a legendary pair of the boots (I have a pair myself that I don’t use at the moment) that applies a damage over time effect on the ground as the Specter from Sever travels. That can also be used to stack and trigger Shadowblight (so can the legendary that gives bloodmist a shadow after effect, and so can the legendary that gives blood wave a shadow effect).
So, you could have an off the beaten trail non-meta build that could work. It would be gear intensive, especially if you use the shadow version of blood wave (it would require two legendaries to make it useful).
Paragon wise do take note that Darkness as a glyph is SHADOW Damage. Scourge is Shadow Damage Overtime. They are separate damage effects that look similar. You’d want Darkness in your build if you want to maximize the direct damage potential of both Sever and Shadowblight. Also, I highly recommend a 2h weapon using the Decay Aspect (X% damage x5 for Shadowblight specifically; this can go as high as 400%x damage to just Shadowblight), and the Blighted Aspect (upto 120%x damage to all after Shadowblight triggers 10 times) on necklace.
You can see Shadowblight go from its default 22% of your weapon damage (it cannot be increased beyond legendaries) to hit for several hundreds of thousands and eventually a few million damage per explosion. Sever can also hit for a few million with investment in the right stats.
It is no Bone Spear, but it is fun and effective.
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No, not possible. Blood Lance do damage at 6 stacks. I can do 4m tops for every 6 stacks while Bone spear do 4-6m+ dmg per second.
Unless they change BL OP to be guarantee every 2 hit or something and change how they calculate overpower critical
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