The Necromancer is a solid leveling class in Diablo 4, offering players opportunities to steamroll enemies with the hordes of undead, utilize magic schools to overpower everything, or destroy everything with Bone magic. No matter you’re preference, there’s some form of Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build for Season 1 that is viable. Below you’ll find our suggestions, and the skill point leveling builds for each.

Diablo 4 Necromancer Leveling Builds¶

In terms of leveling builds for the Necromancer in Diablo 4, we recommended the following archetypes. Feel free to click the links as it will auto scroll you to the appropriate build you’re interested. If you want a synopsis of a build before you go forward, we have quick one paragraph summaries of each build. But, the sections on each build will have listed skill points, and recommended legendaries to get while leveling.

1. Bone Spear Leveling Build
2. Blood Nova Leveling Build
3. Minion Leveling Build

The premise of the Bone Spear leveling build is that you are front loading your damage into the Bone Spear crit amplification, which will destroy packs and bosses very easily using Bone Spear’s sniping damage, as well as collision shatter for more single target and AOE damage DPS boosts. You also take skills like Bone Storm for defensive, damage and Crit Amp, alongside Corpse Tendrils, an explosion for more pack destruction. It’s got everything you need to gather, cc, and nuke foes while leveling, albeit its movement is on the lower end

The Blood Mage’s Blood Surge leveling build playstyle is all about AOE. The Necromancer’s Blood Surge skill will allow the player to get up close into packs, and nuke enemies around it and afar by siphoning life and causing blood explosions around the player. You also want to use Reap and Corpse Explosion to generate more damage tools and still filter resources while offering better single damage and corpse generation than Hemorrhage would. Group them together With Corpse Tendrils for clumping and Vuln, and its easy to apply your CE, Reap and Blood Surge echo radius’ damage to packs for very good clear speeds, and somewhat fine boss damage.

The Necromancer Minion leveling build uses minion and a mixture of shadow damage to overwhelm packs and bosses alike. The idea is to use Reap as a Corpse generator, while your Sever deals increased damage depending on your active minion count. You also want to gain an additional skeleton for that added minion count, shadow mages for more shadow bolts on attacks for better single target output, and the Healthy blood Golem option as that will be your tank, and offers better damage output versus something like the Iron Golem’s shockwave. If your Golem loses its Health, you can always re-summon it. You then want Corpse Tendrils and Corpse Explosion for the Vuln and Crit amp, while CE is used to mop up extra corpses for bonus damage.

Diablo 4 Necromancer Leveling Builds: Bone Spear¶

The general idea of the Bone Spear build in Diablo 4 is to use the Bone Splinters and Bone Spear as your main resource builder and spender. You then want the core leveling kit of Corpse Tendrils and Corpse Explosion to group enemies together for that combo, while combining either snipes from your Bone Spear, or the impact shatter against bosses for as much DPS application as possible.

Your main leveling legendaries for this build are the Splintering Aspect, to assist with boss damage and Vulnerable enhancing damage for your Bone Spear, making it better for pack destruction and bossing alike. You also want Aspect of Torment for Resource Generation, especially once you have unlocked Bone Storm’s crit amplification node, and Wind Striker Aspect for added movement speed for when you do crit, which becomes fairly often, and its the only reliable way to get movement speed.

It also goes without saying you want to sacrifice your minions for this build, looking for more crit passives from the Skirmisher sacrifice, and Iron Golem sacrifice when you unlock Iron Golems, and then the Vuln sacrifice perk from Cold Mages.

1. Bone Splinters
2. Enhanced Bone Splinters
3. Bone Spear (BS)
4. Enhanced BS
5. Paranormal BS
6. Acolyte’s Bone Splinters
7. Corpse Explosion (CE)
8. Enhanced Corpse Explosion
9. Blighted Corpse Explosion
10. Bones Spear x4
11. Corpse Explosion x3
12. Corpse Tendrils
13. Enhanced Corpse Tendrils
14. Plagued Corpse Tendrils
15. Grim Harvest x3
16. Hewed Flesh
17. Bone Storm
18. Prime Bone Storm
19. Supreme Bone Storm
20. Serration x3
21. Compound Fracture x3
22. Evulsion
23. Capstone - Ossified Essence
24. Evulsion x2
25. Hewed Flesh x2
26. Stand Alone
27. Memento Mori x3
28. Stand Alone x2
29. Imperfectly Balanced x3
30. The remaining points your choice, you can go for some more defensiveness, upgrade CE or get max resource increases since you now generate lots of resources via Corpses and our Basic Skill.

Diablo 4 Necromancer Leveling Builds: Blood Nova Build¶

The idea behind this build is to use Reap as a Corpse and Essence generator, followed by your Nova to deal AOE close range, and stack Overpowering damage, making you a unit in both AOE and single target bossing, especially with Blood Surge legendaries attached. You then want to use Blood Mist, and Decrepify as defensive tools largely, since you’re going to face tank a lot of enemies, and reduce the overall Blood Orbs generation since you won’t use Hemmorage, as that lacks damage output to speed this leveling up.

Legendaries to use while leveling are Aspect of Grasping Veins, for bonus crit with Corpse Tendrils activation, and Blood-bathed Aspect, which you can get really early from Fractured Peaks. if you happen to get the new Gore Quills Aspect added in Season 1, then you may swap to Blood Lance, and essentially do the same thing with this build, albeit with lock on Blood Lances.

As for your minions, you want to sacrifice Skirmishers, Bone Mages, and the Blood or the Iron Golem, depending on your needs for more crit or more survivability.

1. Reap
2. Enhanced Reap
3. Blood Surge
4. Acolyte’s Reap
5. Enhanced Blood Surge
6. Paranormal Blood Surge
7. Corpse Explosion
8. Enhanced CE
9. Blighted CE
10. Blood Mist
11. Grim Harvest
12. Decrepify
13. Enhanced Decrepify
14. Horrid Decripfiy - Acts as an AOE execute for enemies below 10% HP with either CE or Blood Surge
15. Corpse Explosion x2
16. Corpse Tendrils
17. Enhanced Corpse Tendrils
18. Plagued Corpse Tendrils (only source of Vuln in this build)
19. Grim Harvest x2
20. Hewed Flesh x3
21. Enhanced Blood Mist - Lowers CD when you overpower, which you will via Surge’s modifier.
22. Ghastly Blood Mist - Spawns corpses periodically while in Blood Mist - use to generate more corpses for that CE damage and resource generation from Grim Harvest.
23. Fueled By Death x2
24. Stand Alone
25. Memento Mori x3
26. Capstone - Rathma’s Vigor
27. Stand Alone x2
28. Amplify Damage x3 - You can potentially place these where Hewed Flesh is if you want to.
29. Unliving Energy x3
30. Imperfectly Balanced x3
31. The remaining talents you can use on upgrading Blood Surge and CE.

Diablo 4 Necromancer Leveling Builds: Minion Leveling Build¶

There are a few ways you can go about this build, using either blood to remain tanky on the front with your minions while casting Blood Surge. You can go Decompse + Blight into a Corpse Explosion minion Build, too. However, both of these are harder to setup due to legendary requirements, skill point usage, or nerfs in the case of the Blight minion build. So, we think using Reap and Sever as minion damage scaling builds is safer.

Your general playstyle here is to get Sever’s damage boost via your minion count, while Reap is there to generate corpses and resources. You need to use +1 extra skirmisher, and Shadow Mages +1 bolt every 5 attacks, which helps with DPS output and minion damage scalings. You also need the Blood Golem’s Healthy perk to be the main tank, since this build and your minions are squishy, especially with the minion nerfs. The other skills you want are Corpse Explosion and Corpse Tendrils for general DPS output, grouping into Sever and Vuln spreading.

As for leveling legendaries, your main legendaries you want are Reanimation Aspect, and Aspect of Grasping Veins. The main issue here is these legendaries unlock rather late into the campaign, so, if this is your first class, then this build takes slightly longer to get rolling, but, if it’s an alt, and you have the aspects already unlocked, it’s much better.

As for the leveling build, you want the skills as follows

1. Reap
2. Enhanced Reap
3. Sever
4. Acolyte’s Reap
5. Enhanced Sever
6. Supernatural Sever
7. Corpse Explosion
8. Enhanced Corpse Explosion
9. Blighted Corpse Explosion
10. Sever x4
11. Grim Harvest x3
12. Corpse Tendrils
13. Enhanced CT
14. Plagued CT
15. Reaper’s Pursuit x3
16. Gloom x3
17. Terror X3
18. Crippling Darkness x3
19. Skeleton Mage Mastery x2
20. Capstone - Shadowblight
21. Skeleton Mage Mastery
22. Corpse Explosion x 4
23. Bonded in Essence x3
24. Death’s Defense x3
25. Inspiring Leader
26. Hellbent Commander
27. Hewed Flesh x3

If you opt for a blood build using minions, you will want to prio more points into Hellbent Commander, and change the shadow passive buffs around 17-19 to blood passives, and alter the capstone to Kalan’s Edict. If you use Blight and Decompose, you will use the same build, but change the prio order to Corpse Explosion over your core skill instead.

This concludes the Diablo 4 Necromancer Leveling Builds for Season 1. Hopefully, there’s a build of interest for you here to assist you with your leveling for Season 1!

Looking for more leveling builds? Check out other class’ leveling builds below:

• Diablo 4 Barbarian leveling build
• Diablo 4 Druid leveling build
• Diablo 4 Rogue leveling build
• Diablo 4 Sorcerer leveling build