The Necromancer is one of the hero classes in Diablo 4. These followers of Rathma make use of the dead and spirits, conjuring spells made of bone or casting curses to debilitate foes. Here’s our Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build guide to help you pick the best skills for the campaign.
Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build for the beta
The Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build focuses primarily on area-of-effect (AoE) and additional survivability. Likewise, characters are capped at level 25 during the beta, so we only have a few picks to go by. Also, for a more in-depth explanation of each ability, you can visit our Necromancer overviews regarding active skills, talents/passives, and the Book of the Dead minion summons.
Basic Skill: Hemorrhage (Initiate’s) – Basic skills can be spammed to generate essence, and Hemorrhage even provides extra healing by way of Blood Orb generation. Not only that, but another perk grants Fortify, which acts as extra HP/overshield and bonus damage from Overpower attacks.
Core Skill: Blood Surge (Paranormal) – Blood Surge will likely be one of the best skills for the Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build. This is because it’s an AoE ability that heals you. As for its two perks, we feel that Paranormal is more reliable when trying to proc Overpower, especially if Hemorrhage is being used to add to the Fortify value.
Corpse: Corpse Explosion (Plagued) – One of the more iconic Necromancer abilities is Corpse explosion. Assuming Blood Surge kills multiple fodder foes, you can follow up with several Corpse Explosion casts to deal tremendous AoE damage. This ability doesn’t cost essence either, as it consumes the dead bodies that litter the battlefield.
Curse: Decrepify (Horrid) – Decrepify acts as both an AoE debuffer (lower damage dealt) and crowd-control (slow and stun).
Ultimate: Army of the Dead (Prime and Supreme) – This conjures an undead army for a few seconds, leading to an explosion. The Supreme perk also raises all skeletal minions that have fallen, so you won’t need to resummon them using corpses.
Passives – You can add a few points into any of these if you have enough to spare:
- Hewed Flesh – This adds a chance for your hits to create a corpse at the target’s location, with a doubled percentage against bosses. This comes into play in boss fights where your opponent rarely summons minions that you can kill, so as to make additional corpses.
- Skeletal Warrior Mastery – More often than not, you’ll be relying on your Skeletal Warriors. You might as well buff them up a bit.
- Amplify Damage – This is more of a suggestion that you can go for later, though you need Grim Harvest as well. This temporarily increases the damage you deal after consuming a corpse, which you’ll tend to do often anyway.
Book of the Dead – These are the specializations and undead minion types you’ll want to look into for the Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build:
- Skeletal Warriors: Reapers – Reaper attacks against enemies that are slowed, stunned, immobilized, or vulnerable reduce the cooldown of their wind-up attacks.
- Skeletal Mages – There are a couple of viable options here:
- Cold – Enemies that are frozen or attacked while frozen by your Skeletal Mages become vulnerable for three seconds.
- Bone (Sacrifice/None) – Increase your Overpower damage by 30%, but you can no longer summon Skeletal Mages.
- Golem: Bone – Ideally, you’ll want to pick the Iron Golem. However, due to the beta’s level cap, you won’t be able to unlock other variants until the launch. So, for now, you could just go with either of the two Bone Golem upgrades.
Diablo 4 is currently in its beta stage. As such, some of the information here may change as we get closer to the game’s official launch on June 6. We’ll update this guide accordingly. For now, you may visit our class hub.
