Updated for Season 8
Build Introduction
The 
Blood Surge Necromancer leveling build is a high-damage build that brings great consistency to the battlefield, ensuring the damage output is kept high even when you’re building up your Essence to continue casting Blood Surge. This makes it an incredibly smooth build to level your Necromancer with!
Solo play can be fun, and playing with friends can be great, if you have the right spec! The high damage output makes the build very attractive to have in a party with friends. Most importantly, the build is designed to be extremely resilient, making you become more than a high damage dealer, but also a front-lining tank.
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Quick Navigation
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Allocation of Skill Points
Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points
Important to point out that for this build we are using both 
Decrepify and 
Iron Maiden, but only one will be on your action-bar. The idea here is to use Iron Maiden for generic clearing and only switch it for the Decrepify curse when fighting harder bosses such as World-Bosses and/or Capstone Dungeon bosses.
Blood Surge 
Corpse Tendrils 
Summoning Skill 
Blood Mist Decrepify 
Hemorrhage To prepare yourself for what happens after level 60 when you get access to your Paragon Board head over to our Necromancer Builds page and chose your weapon!
Necromancer Class Mechanic – Book of the Dead
Necromancer’s class specific ability is the Book of the Dead, which provides three different type of minions that unlock by leveling up. This build thrives on using skeletons when leveling whilst the golem will be sacrificed for better attack speed.
- Melee Skeletons – Reaper will be our choice as they will be generating corpses for our Corpse Tendrils and make us Fortified.
- Mage Skeletons – Cold Essence generating skeletons will help sustain our essence pool.
- Golem – Bone sacrifice provides us with increased attack speed.
Gear, Stats, Gems, and Runes
Prioritize a higher total damage output when it comes to your weapon, as the higher it is, the better. It should be kept in mind that if you find a higher Item Power 1-handed weapon, it could very well be better than a 2-handed weapon if coupled with an off-hand or even a shield, as shields scale your main-hand weapon by 80%!
Legendary Aspects
To unlock Aspects in the Codex of Power, you must complete the corresponding Dungeon where the specific Aspect drops or find it naturally. Visit the Occultist to imprint this Aspect onto an item. Aspects from the Codex of Power can be used often on weapons.
There is really only one Legendary Aspect that is truly powerful and worth mentioning for this build, which is the 
Blood-bathed Aspect , unlocked by completing the Hoarfrost Demise dungeon in Act 1, Fractured Peaks.
This Aspect allows us to have our Blood Surge echo hitting twice, increasing our clear time as well as boosting our single target damage output.
Aspects found on dropped Legendary Items have stronger effects than those applied from the Codex of Power. Additionally, it is important to know that certain Aspects can only be obtained by finding them on a Legendary Item, and are not accessible through the Codex of Power. Extract Aspects from unusable Legendary Items to imprint them onto well-rolled Rare Items. Avoid imprinting valuable extracted Aspects onto weapons, because weapons get replaced often while leveling. We recommend strongly that you apply this to one of your rings; this will allow you to have more free room to equip upgrades (in case of a great ring drop, you can replace the ring without the Aspect) without wasting precious materials re-applying the Aspect every time you find an upgrade.
Outside of the obvious Blood-bathed Aspect other aspect powers can be of great use to further scale the efficiency as you’re leveling:
We have a dedicated in-depth Aspect and Codex of Power guide that you can check out for more information.
Stat Priority and Tempering Affixes
Keep in mind that this is only possible if you’ve found tempering manuals as you progress this leveling guide. There’s really not many modifiers worth bothering during the leveling stage but the recommendation is the same as our stat priority listed above for defenses such as Life and armor. For offensive scaling you’re only looking for summoning damage or specific minion damage such as Skeletal Mage damage.
When it comes to modifiers on your gear as you progress this build you’ll be looking for the following stats:
- Life
- Armor
- Intelligence
- Attack Speed
- + Ranks of Blood Surge
Gems and Runewords
Listed below are the best Gems to socket into gear for each slot type.
Gems
- Weapon:
Ruby for increased overpower damage output. - Armor:
Topaz for +#% Increased Intelligence. - Jewelry:
Diamond for all Resistance or any gem that provides you with the resistance type you lack the most.
Runewords
When it comes to Runewords for the leveling stage of this character the main one to look for is 
Xal. You can enable the required offering for this in a variety of ways such as 
Poc, 
Tam to name 2 optimal ones.
Boss Powers (Season 8)
In Season 8 we will have access to Boss powers granting some absolutely crazy abilities that we’ll utilize to enhance our builds power. Below, you’ll find a list of the recommended powers we use for this build. However, since these powers are coming from specific bosses they will either require you to be in the end-game content of the game or killing specific world bosses. Our recommendation during the leveling stage is to use whichever powers you come across as you progress till the end-game. Once you switch over to your desired end-game build this is where targeting specific boss powers becomes more important.
Mercenaries
Aldkin is a great choice with crowd-controlling features, but the comfortability of using Subo, who brings the ability of revealing enemies and materials in the area, makes him a natural preferential decision. The mercenaries are a nice addition to the game and whichever you chose to run is up to you. The recommendation for this build will be to run Subo.
Skill-tree wise we’ll grab the left-hand side first for 
Wire Trap to provide stuns with the following node is up to you. 
Trip Mines is the next big notable to grab, taken for safety reasons. We finish that tree with 
Mastermind.
For the reinforcement, stick with Raheir, utilizing his 
Bastion skill being cast when the player becomes injured.
Build Mechanics
Rotation and Playstyle
The build starts off with casting Blood Surge as your main source of damage output coupled with Hemorrhage. Combined with the blood passive nodes from your skill-tree, the build stacks Life Leech and inherit defenses, turning your Necromancer into a proper tank with higher damage output, but most importantly high area coverage with your damage.
When fighting bosses you essentially want to dump all your Essence by casting Blood Surge. Thanks to Hemorrhage combined with Acolyte’s Hemorrhage, we can quickly build our Essence back up to continue casting Blood Surge, creating an easy to play build. Utility wise, we do have access to corpses via 
Hewed Flesh, which will be used with our Corpse Tendrils.
It’s important to keep in mind that this build uses both Decrepify as well as Iron Maiden. The Maiden curse will be used when clearing packs of enemies and we will only switch that curse to Decrepify when fighting endgame, or World bosses!
Which Elixirs Should You Use?
To gain an edge in your adventures, head to the Alchemist in any major town, and craft Elixirs that enhance your stats and experience gain for 30 minutes. Remember to gather the necessary crafting materials by foraging plants. Select an Elixir that provides the resistance you need most, or try the 
Assault Elixir to boost your Attack Speed.
Return to the Alchemist again around every 10 levels to upgrade your potion. The extra healing is essential to survival.
Season 8 Updates
For a complete overview of Season 8, mechanics and theme, new leveling activity, and other changes coming please take a look at our comprehensive season hub here.
Additionally, Season 8 isn’t changing anything notably for the build outside of providing the new Boss powers.
Difficulty and Endgame
This guide is designed to get you to level 60 in a smooth and enjoyable way. Once there, you’ll want to look at a proper endgame designed build guide. Make sure you pick one of our recommended ones!
Changelog
- April 21st, 2025: Guide updated for Season 8.
- January 20th, 2025: Added Recommended Runewords.
- January 18th, 2025: Guide updated for Season 7.
- October 12th, 2024: New Paragon tool added.
- October 7th, 2024: Paragon board added.
- October 2nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 6.
- August 5th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 5.
- May 12th, 2024: Guide updated for Season 4 Loot Reborn.
- January 22nd, 2024: Guide updated for Season 3 Season of the Construct.
- October 28th, 2023: Improved Vampiric Power decisions and clarified the double-curse decision.
- October 16th, 2023: Optimized the build.
- October 15th, 2023: Build made ready for Season 2 Patch 1.2.0
- August 5th, 2023: Build added.
