Hey all,
Just need to vent somewhere about the state of Blood Surge. I love it so much and I’ve mained BS since release. I’ve tried out pretty much every build I could find online and made my own build based on the best of each while also distilling the build down to something that focuses almost solely on BS and single-target damage.
Here are my stats: 46k health, 9,400 armor, res capped, 44% crit chance, 700% crit dmg, 3000+ OP dmg (I likely have closer to 3,500-4,000, but the new “blood OP damage” affix doesn’t add into the OP dmg pool yet.)
Playstyle: Hemorrhage for essence gen, lay down decrep and iron maiden, spam BS till everything dies. Use bonestorm on elites and bosses for the extra crit. It’s awesome and works incredibly well, to a point. I don’t use minions. I played D3 Witch Doctor with minions for years and I’m minioned out haha.
When I get OP crits I’ll see numbers up to 15-16mil, but those are very rare. Most crits are between 3-6mil. Most of the time I’m just waiting for a guaranteed proc or that lucky 3% chance. Killing trash is easy, and single target damage is the problem. But in my max level pit even trash is beginning to be troublesome sitting around waiting for OP procs. The 3% proc rate causes a roller-coaster effect with dmg output that can be really hard to overcome.
All right, with all that out of the way, the reason I’m frustrated is because even with my build dialed and most items masterworked to 8/12, and I can’t clear pit 59 to start getting Neathiron to finish upgrading. I’ve seen other classes and other necro specs run pit 60 with no problem and mediocre gear. I just feel like with my stats I should be at least clearing 65-70.
To add insult to injury, my build uses Banished Lord’s and Blood Moon Breeches. Both of which have been nerfed so I’m stuck using legacy items that are better. On top of that, I need 60 willpower from my legacy boots to get the bonuses to life and essence from my paragon board. My board layout is perfect imo and locked in, so the only way now to get new boots that i can upgrade is to gem for willpower. I use armor gems to get just over armor cap, so it’s this stupid trickle-down effect that wrecks everything. I wish I could just roll willpower as a stat again.
Anywho, if you’re out there Blizz and reading this, I think BS necro needs some love to it’s damage output as well as it’s paragon board requirements. And if you’re not with Blizz reading this I would love to hear your feedback. Am I way off base with this?
TLDR: I’ve loved Blood Surge since release and have no real desire to play anything else. I feel like its seriously underperforming compared to most other necro specs and especially other classes when it comes to the pit. Blizz has nerfed OP damage for us as well as the 2 uniques that my build uses (thanks barbs), so I’m still using legacy items that are better. I’ve masterworked as far as I can and I can’t clear pit 60 to continue upgrading. I can’t roll willpower on my gear that is needed for my paragon board bonuses, so instead I have to gem for it which throws off my armor or continue to use my legacy boots that have willpower on them.
Edit* Just wanted to give an honest thanks to Blizz for the latest patch. It helped fix the willpower and pit clearing issues. Blood Surge still needs a very large buff to get on par with other high tier builds, but I think this is the case for a lot of other classes and builds as well. I’m guessing/hoping a large rebalance happens when the expansion drops.
7 Likes
You’re not off base. The overpower nerfs between the PTR and live absolutely obliterated blood necromancers. Blood lance was already just a build for enthusiasts, but at least previously blood surge was a competitive build.
Blood necros got caught up in the attempt to reign in overpower barbarians.
They’re still good builds for general clear and speed leveling if you really enjoy surge playstyle, but they’re both going to cap out early in the pit. This is coming from a blood lance fan. I eagerly await the day that blood builds get the love they deserve.
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I don’t get why they need to blanket nerf overpower just because Barbarian. How about nerfin owerpover for THE BARBARIANS ONLY?
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I really want 3 changes for next season…
Change Blood Begets Blood paragon board to get 40% damage for blood skills only instead of 15%.
AND
Change Flash-Eater to no longer gave benefits for blood skills.
AND
Duplicate OP bonus dmg [ x ] from blood passives.
Maybe it doesn’t fix the whole bloods build, but at least it makes it more enjoyable.
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And unironically they’ve made Barbs even more grossly overpowered than before, just without overpower. HoTA seems tame compared to some of the stuff they are doing now with 500k hp.
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Thank you for the replies! It’s nice to know I’m not alone. And yes, I’m also in disbelief from the Barb nerf and their continued ability to top the charts in basically everything… Super frustrating.
can u show us ur build planner? maybe we can give feedback on it?
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Would love to! I haven’t updated it in a long time so I’ll work on that and get back with it.
I am blood surge necro, too. I have almost the exact same build as the poster.
Using banished lord and bloodmoon breeches.
I have maxed out almost everything, but can not go past Level 60 pit.
They nerved overpower to much. The passive skills, banished lord, bloodbath paragon and dominate glyph and overpower in general.
Barely playable anymore. I hope blizzard will do something. They should have nerved overpower for barbarians only and not for necromancer, too.
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Blood surge has a very low lucky hit chance. I barely ever create any blood orbs. They would need to increase the lucky hit chance for blood surge for the blood begets blood paragon to work.
Increasing lucky hit chance for blood surge would be great. Not only for blood orbs, but also for generating corpses. When dealing with bosses, i rarely create corpses to use corpse tendrils or that passive which generates essence by consuming corpses
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I feel you guys. I’m running Minions because I feel like I’m forced to. Blood is in just such bad shape right now it’s ridiculous. And you can’t even do something like Blood Golem + Blood Surge/Lance because splitting your skills and tempers like that would spell disaster.
Like, why doesn’t Blood Golem get the Blood tag?
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I already posted how bad i felt about them forcing me to stop playing my Blood Surge Necro that i uninstalled after 1 year (even having a shadow necro minion too with her long awaited boost) , i refuse the massive nerfs in just competent for high-end specs/classes of any game that pretends to be a RPG .
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similar experience here, sweated and optimized my blood surge as hard as I could and still hit the wall at around pit60. the fact that blood surge nova makes boss attacks harder to see don’t help either.
the funny part I was using bone spirit to gain resources with new resource on macabre temper, and realized that with all % damage increases bone spirit can get, it just makes sense to go full bone spirit and drop nova altogether.
so… after basically rebuilding character from scratch, and dropping bone spirit CD to 0, now my character can overpower+crit every 2nd or 3rd cast, and it’s doing 50-200m damage versus blood surge 5-15m doing overpower every 6th cast and requiring generators on top. muahaha. 10x of the blood surge damage. that summarizes the balance between builds in S4, it’s just pure chaos and RNG.
PS and another nail on blood surge coffin is that it can only gain overpower charges when being HEALTHY. how frequently you can be healthy standing face to face to Pit boss, hitting with basic attacks for like 50% HP depending on pit level? so tanking anything tough on blood surge destroys your DPS. the heal from surge do not prevent damage drop from health moving. it’s just makes whole build unworkable.
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I main BS as well, but I did manage to clear pit 68, going for 70 soon.
You do need to min-max for the build to work, you need heavy essence regen gear, and minimum 40% cost reduction. Then focus on attack speed. Don’t worry too much on OP stats.
Ideally for pit you should focus on Max life - with potions I have around 55k and with barrier and fortify I get over 100k easily.
Its a tough build but it does work to scale higher!
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they really need to buff it because right now bone spirit blows blood surge out of the water. my current bone spirit crits for around 200m, and overpower + crit is possible every 2nd or 3rd cast. compare that to blood surge 10-20m every 6th cast IF you are above healthy? it’s not balanced well. after switching to bone spirit I was able to clear +20 pits levels almost immediately as bosses are so easier when you can crit 200m+ non stop.
on mobbing bone spirit is little awkward though as if you miss with the cast (mobs already dead) you get 5 seconds cooldown to wait. that’s the only drawback of bone spirit right now versus blood surge as you need to be careful with spamming.
I would say for blood surge to feel really good they need to increase it self heal dramatically… and give more damage multipliers as bone spirit have like 10x more.
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Thanks for the reply!
Yes, I’m slowly figuring it out. I’m finally farming pit 65 and maxing out at pit 72 so far. Not stellar but it’s getting better. You’re right about the stat priority. I never realized that BS costs more essence than any other core skill! It’s crazy how expensive it is.
I just hit pit 74 with BS, got lucky and got my amulet with blood of tides +4. At this rate I should be able to get close to 80
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That’s awesome! Congrats!
One more update since the patch, I was able to beat pit 100 with Blood surge, so the build is very viable now!
I have my screenshot posted in the official d4 discord under the blood General Discussion
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