Best Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build in season one

Diablo 4 brings back iconic characters from various entries in the series in one massive open-world game. One of the most recognizable character classes since Diablo 2 is the Necromancer.

All Necromancer skills in Diablo 4

Necromancer from Diablo 4 surrounded by skeletons — Spooky. Image via Blizzard Entertainment

The Necromancer’s skill tree is divided into six main focuses.

Basic skills: The starting skills that you pick at the beginning. No Essence cost.
- Decompose: Channels the spell, dealing damage per second and generating corpses.
- Reap: Deals damage to all enemies in an arc and increases your damage resistance.
- Hemorrhage: Ruptures the enemy, dealing damage and generating Blood Orbs.
- Bone Splinters: Shoots bones at the enemies, regenerating Essence with consecutive hits.
Core skills: The main damage skills that scale well over time. Costs Essence.
- Blight: Launches Blight at an enemy, leaving a puddle behind that deals damage over time.
- Sever: Expels the Necromancer’s spirit to attack with a scythe, then returns to their body and launches another attack.
- Blood Surge: Drains the blood from enemies and launches it in a Blood Nova, dealing additional bonus damage depending on how many enemies were drained.
- Blood Lance: Fires a lance at an enemy that attaches to them, dealing damage over time.
- Bone Spear: Launches a spear that pierces through all the enemies it hits.
Macabre skills: The secondary damage source to complement core skills.
- Corpse Explosion: Explodes corpses, dealing damage to all surrounding enemies.
- Blood Mist: Turns into a bloody mist, becoming immune to damage and moving faster. All enemies hit by the Blood Mist take damage over time.
- Bone Prison: Traps an enemy in a prison made of Bone, immobilizing them.
Curse skills: The support skills that cripple enemies or buff allies.
- Iron Maiden: Curses enemies, reflecting a portion of the damage they deal back to them.
- Decrepify: Curses enemies, slowing their movement and crippling their damage.
Corpse and Macabre skills: Additional late-game skills to complement the early skills.
- Corpse Tendrils: Spawns veins from a corpse that pulls in all surrounding enemies, damaging and stunning them.
- Bone Spirit: Consumes all of your Essence to conjure a spirit that seeks out enemies. Upon contact with enemies, the spirit deals area damage based on the Essence consumed.
Ultimate skills: The strongest damage skills in the Necromancer’s arsenal.
- Army of the Dead: Continuously spawns corpses that detonate themselves when they come in contact with enemies. Refreshes all of your summons.
- Blood Wave: Creates a massive wave of Blood that deals damage and knocks back all enemies around you.
- Bone Storm: Conjures a storm of Bone around the Necromancer and the Golem, dealing damage over time for its duration.

Apart from these skills, the Necromancer’s unique feature, Book of the Dead, contains additional skills to support all of their summons. There are three summon skills that the Necromancer can focus on, each with three variations of their own.

Skeletal Warriors: Early-game frontline warriors that can soak up and deal damage.
- Skirmishers: 30 percent increased damage in exchange for 15 percent reduced life.
- Defenders: 15 percent increased life but reduced damage.
- Reapers: Area of effect slow with a powerful wind-up attack that deals massive damage.
Skeletal Mages: Mid-game crowd control units that can also deal heavy damage.
- Shadow: Deals bonus Shadow damage.
- Cold: Freezes and slows enemies with Cold damage.
- Bone: Launches projectiles of Bone that deal high damage at the cost of their own health.
Golems: Late-game tank that can absorb a hefty amount of punishment and generate corpses.
- Bone: Taunts all enemies around the Golem.
- Blood: Drains life from surrounding enemies and redirects damage dealt to the Necromancer back to the Golem.
- Iron: Charges into enemies and stuns them to shut them down.

Later in the game, the Necromancer can choose to forego all of their summons in favor of bonus damage and survivability from the Book of the Dead instead. Certain builds work out better the further you progress into the game, especially once you acquire the Aspects you need.

Best early-game Necromancer leveling build in Diablo 4 Season One

An image showcasing the Necromancer's skill tree in Diablo 4. — Here’s where you’ll start with your Necromancer build. Screenshot by Dot Esports

The build of choice that works for the smoothest leveling process in Season One, the Season of the Malignant, is the Bone Spear build. We will focus on spells such as Bone Splinters and Blood Surge to maximize the damage from your earliest levels. Once you get Corpse Explosion into the mix at level eight, your damage numbers should skyrocket, allowing you to clear through a lot of early-game content with no problem.

Bone Spear skill point assignment: levels one to 15

Take Bone Splinters at level one, then Enhanced Bone Splinters at two before pumping five levels into Blood Surge. Afterward, pick up Corpse Explosion and Enhanced Corpse Explosion as soon as possible before alternating each level between Hewed Flesh and Grim Harvest.

By level 15, your build should be:

Level one: Bone Splinters
Level two: Enhanced Bone Splinters
Level three to seven: Blood Surge
Level eight: Corpse Explosion
Level nine: Enhanced Corpse Explosion
Level 10 to 12: Hewed Flesh
Level 13 to 15: Grim Harvest

From this point onwards, we will be redirecting our skill points into Bone Spear since it scales better than Blood Surge from this point onwards. Bone Spear also has a much longer range, allowing you to keep a safe distance from dangerous enemies while you deal damage.

Bone Spear skill point assignment: reset and reallocate levels one to 30

Reset your skill points and allocate everything you invested in Blood Surge to Bone Spear, then allocate the rest of your skill points to the same skills we mentioned above. Now that you’re level 16, you must first focus on maxing out your Bone Spear and Corpse Explosion. This is how you proceed until you reach level 30.

Level 16: Enhanced Bone Spear
Level 17: Supernatural Bone Spear
Level 18: Plagued Corpse Explosion
Level 19-22: Corpse Explosion
Level 23: Serration
Level 24: Compound Fracture
Level 25: Evulsion
Level 26-27: Serration
Level 28-29: Evulsion
Level 30: Unliving Energy

As seen above, you must focus on strengthening your Bone Spear as much as possible by allocating points to talents that will benefit your Bone skills. Plagued Corpse Explosion will do additional damage to enemies affected by any form of disable, which fits into this build ideally. We also add Blood Mist and Decrepify to our arsenal of skills from this point onwards.

Bone Spear leveling skill point assignment: levels 31 to 50

The focus from here will be improving your Bone skills to the max while making sure your minions scale with the levels you’ve gained. The progression from this point on will last until level 50, beyond which you will enter into the late-game territory and acquire the strongest improvements to your skills.

Level 31: Blood Mist
Level 32-34: Skeletal Warrior Mastery
Level 35: Decrepify
Level 36-37: Compound Fracture
Level 38-39: Unliving Energy
Level 40: Fueled by Death
Level 41: Imperfectly Balanced
Level 42: Necrotic Carapace
Level 43: Enhanced Decrepify
Level 44-45: Fueled by Death
Level 46-47: Imperfectly Balanced
Level 48-49: Necrotic Carapace

Level 50: Death’s Reach

With Blood Mist in your offensive skills, you gain a form of immunity if you get caught out in a bad position. Ideally, you want to maintain your distance from your enemies, which will be amplified with Death’s Reach. Imperfectly Balanced synergizes with Unliving Energy, further increasing your damage depending on the Essence you have stored up.

Your improved minions will benefit from Decrepify, having increased life that can absorb even more damage with the damage reduction aspect of your curse. Fueled by Death and Necrotic Carapace rounds off your offensive and defensive aspects, getting you ready for the post-level 50 grind.

Which Book of the Dead upgrades should you choose?

Corpses and a statue inside Necromancer Golem cave in Diablo 4. — Getting your Golem finishes up your build. Screenshot by Dot Esports

The final part of this build revolves around your minions of choice for the level grind to 50.

Skeleton Warriors: For the choice of Skeleton Warrior, the Reapers would be your ideal option. While the slow and bonus damage is very nice to have, the main reason for choosing the Reapers is the corpse generation aspect. You will always have corpses ready when needed.
Skeleton Mages: The choice of Skeleton Mage would be the Cold variant for a couple of reasons. The first reason is crowd control through freezing attacks, and the second reason is rapid Essence generation on attack, ensuring you will have enough Essence in fights.
Golems: The best Golem choice would be the Bone Golem. The taunt is a great defensive option, but the additional corpse generation from the Bone Golem will give you even more corpses to explode constantly.

Best Malignant Hearts for the Bone Spear Necromancer in season one

In season one of Diablo 4, you’ll be working towards collecting Malignant Hearts, and the best ones for the Bone Spear Necromancer include the following:

Caged Heart of the Decrepit Aura
Caged Heart of the Great Feast
Caged Heart of Tempting Fate
Caged Heart of the Malignant Pact
Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious

I found myself running out of my primary resources too quickly, so I switched to using the Caged Heart of Determination for a while, but if you’re not encountering any resource issues stick to one of the above.

That should be all you need to get to level 50 and move on to the late-game grind. Once you get to level 50, many choices open up, and switching to an end-game build is the way to survive in higher World Tiers such as Nightmare and Torment.