There are no top tier Shadow builds that make use of either of the spenders. There’s a reason why.
Sever is diametrically opposed to what shadow builds want to do, which is to create a massive number of shadow damage sources to proc Shadowblight damage. Sever cleaves hard if built properly, but doesn’t do enough hits per cast to proc Shadowblight often enough. It also costs too much essence to spam.
Blight is a harder hitting version of miasma CE, but when you can have 20-30 miasma CE pools versus 3-4 Blight pools, Blight becomes redundant.
There’s a more important point: at any time, Necro can only cast a spender or use CE, we can’t do both. This makes shadow spenders all the more janky to use, and when they are already underperforming compared to miasma CE for shadow builds, they end up being cast aside for other utility spells like Corpse Tendrils or Decrepify.
There are waterfall effects to this. That the shadow spenders are so lacklustre means essence generation isn’t important to shadow builds. This invalidates aspects like “Long Shadow” and essence regen for uniques like “Bloodless Scream”.
Devs, you guys seriously need to take a long hard look at the shadow spenders if we are going to have any meaningful build variety for Necros. I don’t want to go from season to season with the choice of either Bone Spear, Infinimist, or some subpar variant of Blood Surge or Blood Lance.