Looking for a great Diablo 4 Necromancer build? We’ve got you covered! The game has been breaking concurrent records since its release according to its developer, with players all across the world hopping in to create their own character and take on the world. One of the best characters for solo players is the Necromancer due to its ability to create corpses and then use them to dominate the battlefield.
In order to truly maximize your Necromancer build, you should make sure that you’re taking advantage of the right skills, which means creating as many corpses as possible and investing points in the skills that bolster those opportunities.
Best Skills for a Necromancer Corpse Build in Diablo 4
When playing with corpses in mind, you should focus on the abilities that are going to get the best potential from them. This means that the skills that create and manipulate corpses are going to be your best bet in a fight.
A pretty basic thing is making sure that your weapons are up to snuff, which means having the strongest thing you can in each hand. I tend to go more with the one-handed weapon and Focus build.
Most importantly, make sure that you equip the Decompose skill when you start, as it has the constant base ability to summon a corpse at your enemy’s feet every 2.5 seconds, which is obviously extremely useful, but I’ll go into more detail below.
Your optimal loadout for skills on a corpse build should include the “Raise a Skeleton” and “Golem,” as these will allow you a mini army that’s useful whether you’re alone or playing with allies. While it does take up two slots, and that can be jarring at first, it’s incredibly useful to have both kinds of allies on the field, with the Golem acting as more of a constant.
Of course, you’ll need to customize your Book of the Dead, which means getting to a high enough level where you unlock most of the options.
Best Book of the Dead Settings: Necromancer Corpse Build
There are three different options in the Book of the Dead and they are all unlocked at different levels. You’ll need to reach at least level 30 before you’re able to equip the following settings, but they will increase your corpse spawn and provide a decent defense.
- Equip your Skirmishers as Reapers
- Set skill to the second node, giving Reapers a 15 percent chance to spawn extra corpses.
- Equip your Skeletal Mages in Bone form
- Set skill to the second node so that every time a Mage dies, it leaves behind a corpse and you get fortified for 11 percent of your base life.
- Equip your Golem as the Bone form
- Set skill to the first node, giving your Golem the ability to shed a corpse when it takes up to 20 percent damage of its maximum life
As you can probably tell, this will increase the number of corpses that spawn, but the death of the skeletal mages ensures you’ll also have a proper defense to help while you replace your allies.
Best Abilities and Upgrades for Necromancer
There are a few different abilities that you should equip as you level up and improve your Necromancer build in Diablo 4, but thankfully you can respec at any point.
Try equipping these abilities to your hotkeys for the best abilities for the Corpse build:
- Decompose: Creates a corpse every 2.5 seconds while also slowly draining enemies’ health.
- It doesn’t matter which upgrades you choose as long as you use this as your primary attack. You should constantly be draining your enemies.
- Corpse Explosion: This takes advantage of all the corpses you’ve worked hard to spawn, working as an AOE bomb that deals 295 damage.
- Upgrades don’t affect the build, so choose your favorites.
- Corpse Tendrils: This draws in all the enemies in an area into the corpse with the tendrils, stunning them for three seconds and dealing 139 base damage. Then you can use the Corpse Explosion ability to take advantage of the cluster.
- Upgrade to the first node to slow enemies and keep them from escaping the corpse.
- Choose the Plagued Corpse Tendrils upgrade, applying Vulnerable and making your corpse explosions more impactful.
- Army of the Dead ultimate: This summons volatile skeletons that explode on contact with enemies over seven seconds for 189 damage, but the benefit comes from
- The first upgrade has the opportunity to spawn a corpse 15 percent of the time when the volatile skeletons explode.
- The second upgrade causes the ability to resurrect all your Skeleton Skirmishers and Mages without exploding them.
Some additional stat upgrades you can use:
- Necrotic Carapace: Every time a Corpse is formed by your minions or skills, you are Fortified for 2/4/6 percent of your base life.
- Golem Mastery: Increases the damage and life of your Bone Golem by 25/50/75 percent, meaning it will be able to spawn more corpses.
- Reaper’s Pursuit tree: This whole tree will benefit your Decompose basic attack, but the first ability increases your movement speed by 5/10/15 percent for three seconds.
- Grim Harvest tree: Using a Corpse will generate 2/4/6 essence for your character.
That’s it for our Diablo 4 Necromancer corpse build! Feel free to customize the build and test things out to find out which skills are best for you. While you’re here, check out our guides on the Wandering Death world boss and how to level up faster.
