Diablo 4 Season 8 has arrived, and for players looking to master the dark arts of the Necromancer, RageGamingVideos's guide provides a comprehensive Necromancer leveling build designed to effectively take you from the early game to the endgame. With new additions and enhancements to minion builds, this season offers an exciting gameplay experience for Necromancer fans.
Leveling Strategy
Key Skills
Traditionally, Blood Surge has been an excellent leveling option due to its efficiency and minimal requirements for Aspects or setup. However, minion builds have also shown to be effective. This season, the key passive associated with minions has been improved: when a minion dies, other minions become enraged, dealing increased damage for the next three seconds.
New Additions
Several interesting features have been introduced this season for minion builds:
• Aspect of Service and Sacrifice: Skeletal Warriors explode upon death.
• Skeletal Mages: Take reduced damage and deal increased damage.
• Sanguivor, Blade of Zir (Unique Two-Handed Sword): Grants your summons the ability to inflict Vampiric Curse, which counts as a proper curse, enhancing your curse benefits.
With the combination of minion damage, Vampiric Curse generation, and corpse consumption (stacking up to 20 souls), this build promises to be both fun and effective.
Leveling Build Overview
Boss Powers
Boss powers are crucial for maximizing your leveling efficiency. While some powers will only be available during world bosses or once you reach Torment, many can be utilized early in your leveling journey.
Main Skill and Modifiers
Main Skill: Choose a primary skill that will activate frequently.
Modifiers: Select three modifiers that provide passive benefits to your main skill.
For your main skills, here are two options to consider:
• Hatred's Embrace's Haste: Increases movement speed when casting shadow or fire skills.
• Torusk's Rage: Grants a damage multiplier, movement speed, and attack speed when damaging crowd-controlled enemies.
Recommended Modifiers
• Beastmaster's Training: Increases damage based on crit strikes from items and Paragon.
• Outlaw Sharpshooter's Eye: Increases damage to distant enemies.
• Flesh Reaper's Disruption: Boosts vulnerable damage based on crowd control duration.
Skill Tree and Leveling Order
• Reap and Enhanced Reap: Start by investing in Reap for attack speed.
• Sever: Level this skill to Supernatural Sever for enhanced damage per minion.
*You will need to drop Reap at one point, so save a point on this later!
• Acolyte's Reap: Generate corpses frequently.
• Enhanced Corpse Explosion and Blighted Corpse Explosion: Make a darkness skill, which will be important later.
• Skeletal Warrior Mastery
• Enhanced Iron Maiden: Enhance essence generation.
• Skeletal Mage Mastery
• Corpse Tendrils and Plagued Corpse Tendrils: Make enemies Vulnerable.
• Sever: Dump core power into the skill.
• Golem Mastery: Enhance survivability and damage.
• Inspiring Leader and Hellbent Commander
• Amplify Damage: Lets enemies affected by the curse of Iron Maiden take increased damage.
• Kalan's Edict: Key passive for attack speed and damage multiplier.
Filling Out Passives
• Death's Defense: Improves minion survivability.
• Bonded in Essence: Further enhances minion durability.
• Fueled by Death: For increased damage.
• Grim Harvest: Generates essence.
• Skeletal Mage Mastery
• Decrepify: Take out Iron Maiden and swap to Decrepify and enhance it to Horrid Decrepify to execute enemies below 10% life.
Maximizing the Benefits of Passive Skills
To maximize the utility and benefits of various passive skills, you will want to choose the nodes below:
• Reaper's Pursuit: Grants more movement speed and damage for each darkness skill equipped.
• Death's Approach: Further enhances movement speed, addressing the typically slow nature of the Necromancer.
• Death's Embrace: Crucial for increasing close-range damage and damage reduction.
After that, fill in the skills for Inspiring Leader and Death's Defense. Additionally, generate some Fortify using Necrotic Carapace. Necrotic Fortitude will provide advantages from Titan’s Fall, and you will also gain armor from Spiked Armor, which will benefit your minions.
With just four points remaining, invest in Hewed Flesh to increase your chances of generating corpses. Finally, with the one point left, you can put it into Crippling Darkness to give your darkness skills a chance to stun, which will be a nice addition.
The Book of the Dead
For your minions, consider the following upgrades:
• Skeletal Warriors: Choose Skirmisher for increased count. If you die repeatedly, you can use Defenders Upgrade 2, which reduces your damage taken by 99%.
• Skeletal Mages: If essence is an issue, use Cold Upgrade 1 for essence generation. If essence is not an issue for you, you can choose Shadow Upgrade 1 for more damage.
• Golem: Choose Blood Upgrade 2 for tankiness and healing.
Aspects To Gather & Aim For
There are a few key items you'll want to acquire, but many will come your way as you progress. Flexibility is essential during the leveling process, as you'll likely change your main hand and off-hand frequently, depending on whether you're using a two-handed weapon, focus, or other factors.
Amulet
The amulet is the most crucial slot for this build. You can easily equip an amulet and use your Codex to add something beneficial early on, which will serve you well for a long time.
• Aspect of Reanimation: This Aspect boosts your minions' damage if they remain alive for 10 seconds or longer. Since your minions will typically stay alive, this will significantly enhance their DPS, which is vital for your overall damage output. The alternative option is Aspect of Frenzy Dead. This Aspect increases your minions' attack speed each time they damage an enemy. While this is fantastic, the raw damage boost from Reanimation is more beneficial for your amulet. You might consider placing Aspect of Frenzy Dead on a ring or glove instead.
• Aspect of Grasping Veins: A classic choice that provides early critical strike chance and damage to enemies affected by Corpse Tendrils, which you'll be using frequently. This Aspect can also go on a ring or glove.
• Aspect of Occult Dominion: This is a must-have aspect that should ideally go on your chest, helm, or boots. It increases the count of your warriors and mages, greatly enhancing your overall experience. Aim to get this early along with Aspect of Reanimation on your amulet.
Additional Considerations
• Aspect of Hardened Bones: Offers damage reduction, a staple for all Necromancer builds.
• Aspect of Disobedience: Provides armor, especially in the early game.
• Juggernaut's Aspect: Grants armor but increases the cooldown of your Evade, so use it wisely.
• Aphotic Aspect: When you use your Skeletal Priests, your warriors will deal shadow damage and have a chance to stun enemies, which can be advantageous in boss encounters.
In summary, prioritize acquiring the Aspect of Reanimation for your amulet and Aspect of Occult Dominion for your gear. These will significantly enhance your minion effectiveness and overall gameplay.
Runes and Gems
You'll find runes randomly as you play. Just use whatever is relevant when you have available slots. Here are some runes worth considering:
• Gar: Increases your critical strike chance, which is particularly impactful early in the game.
• Qua: Provides movement speed, making it great for leveling up quickly.
• Ceh: Provides occasional Spirit Wolf Companions, which can boost your minion DPS temporarily.
• Thul: Generates freeze and vulnerability with your skills.
• Ohm: Offers a straight damage increase for 6 seconds when activated.
In general, use any runes that are relevant to your build. As for gems, it is recommended to stack Intelligence in any available slots early on to maximize your effectiveness.
Recommended Mercenaries
Raheir
In the early game, Raheir is a good option. He offers significant damage reduction and survivability benefits. He can heal you a bit, provide protection with his Ground Slam ability, and grant resistance to all elemental damage with Raheir's Aegis.
Also, Bastion creates a protective bubble that reduces damage. While inside this bubble, you can also deal extra damage, thanks to the Inspiration ability.
For the Reinforcement, you can choose Varyana for the classic Bloodthirst ability, which increases your attack speed. This boost helps enhance the DPS of your minions.
Early Paragon Boards
First board: Amplify provides a direct damage increase against cursed enemies. Since you'll be cursing everything you fight, it's an easy way to boost your early damage output. Additionally, it's an Intelligence glyph, which makes it easy to activate due to the surrounding Intelligence nodes.
Second board: Focus on Cult Leader. This node increases your minions' damage based on their attack speed, up to 100%. For every 20% attack speed, your minions deal more damage, providing a nice boost early on.
• Deadraiser Glyph: With this glyph, each time your summons deal damage, your enemies will take increased damage from you. It's another easy-to-activate Intelligence option, and you can see that it's active even without any upgrades.
• Overlord: Enhances summon damage.
• Puppeteer: Increases summon damage and attack speed.
• Infused Caster: Improves skeleton mage damage and adds elemental resistance for summons. Also, pick up nodes that further enhance skeleton mage damage.
Conclusion
This Necromancer leveling build for Diablo 4 Season 8 combines strategic enhancements to minion capabilities with efficient skill progression. By prioritizing key Aspects, runes, and Mercenaries, you'll be well-equipped to conquer the challenges ahead. Subscribe to RageGamingVideos's channel for more updated builds and tips. Happy adventuring!
