Necromancers have access to arguably the best pull ability in Diablo 4. Corpse Tendrils has a large radius and a short cooldown, allowing you to group up enemies as long as there’s a corpse near them. And with the Aspect of Grasping Veins, this ability can become even deadlier.
The Aspect of Grasping Veins is among the best Aspects for Necromancers in Diablo 4, and it has a low barrier of entry. This Aspect is a useful tool in any Necromancer build that uses Corpse Tendrils (so basically any Necromancer build, provided you’re not focusing entirely on Minions). Much like learning how to summon a Golem and getting your screen completely obscured by Blighted Corpse Explosion, Discovering Aspect of Grasping Veins is almost a rite of passage for all starting Necromancers. The second we used it, we knew there was no coming back to anything else.
Since you’ll likely be using Corpse Tendrils anyway, you should make the most of it by using the Aspect of Grasping Veins. It’s an effective yet cheap tool and one that will grant you tremendous benefits from the tutorial in Nevesk to the ultra-endgame. Here’s a breakdown of what it does, where you can find it, and why you probably won’t feel like running something else either.
What does the Aspect of Grasping Veins do in Diablo 4?
The Aspect of Grasping Veins grants you 10-20 increased critical chance for six seconds after casting Corpse Tendrils, and it also boosts your critical damage by 30-60 percent against enemies affected by that ability. You can raise these bonuses even more by imprinting the Aspect of Grasping Veins into a two-handed weapon (doubling its effect) or an amulet (which grants a 50-percent boost to its effect). This boost applies to both the critical chance and critical damage.
The base version from the Codex of Power has the lowest stats on both parts, so it “only” boosts your crit chance by 10 percent and your critical damage by 30 percent whenever you cast Corpse Tendrils. Even the base version on a two-handed weapon can already be a huge help to your damage, though, especially in the early game. With a two-handed weapon, you’re looking at 20 percent more critical chance and 60 percent more critical damage against enemies affected by Corpse Tendrils, which also has a somewhat short cooldown.
With a max-stat Aspect of Grasping Veins and a two-handed weapon, you can get up to 40 percent critical chance and 120 more critical damage to enemies affected by Corpse Tendrils every 10 seconds or so, depending on the cooldown of Corpse Tendrils. Between Paragon Points, good rolls on gear, and the Aspect of Grasping Veins, this was enough to turn our Bone Spear Necromancer into a Nuke-o-mancer. Don’t leave home without it.
Where to get the Aspect of Grasping Veins in Diablo 4
You can obtain the Aspect of Grasping Veins through two means. You’ll unlock the base version of it as a freebie in the Codex of Power by completing the Corrupted Grotto dungeon in Kehjistan, which is located just outside the Gea Kul waypoint in the southwest part of the zone. This is the simplest way, but it gives you the weakest version of this Aspect.
The other way to obtain it is by finding a Legendary item with this Aspect imprinted into it. This hinges on RNG, but it can give you the biggest effects. Even if the item itself is not that great, you can always extract the Aspect from it, and you’ll have an Aspect of Grasping Veins in your back pocket.
Like other Aspects from the Codex of Power, the base version of the Aspect of Grasping Veins will only grant you the lowest values (10 percent critical chance and 30 percent critical damage, with extra bonuses from two-handed weapons and amulets). As you level up, this version will become less and less efficient, so you’ll need an Aspect with higher numbers. While there is a degree of randomness to what drops you get, it’s worth spending some of your Murmuring Obols to see if you can obtain a higher-tier roll of it.
You can find and imprint Aspect of Grasping Veins in these items:
- One-handed weapons
- Two-handed weapons (effect increased by 100 percent)
- Gloves
- Ring
- Amulet (effect increased by 50 percent)
If you’re just starting to tinker with Necromancer builds and Aspects, we highly recommend you check out the Corrupted Grotto just outside Gea Kul in Khejistan and you’ll see how much of a difference this Aspect can make. It’s so helpful that if we were rerolling our Necromancer or building one as an alt character, we would imprint this aspect on our weapons whenever we swapped them.
How to extract the Aspect of Grasping Veins in Diablo 4
If you’re looking to save an Aspect of Grasping Veins for when you get a really good piece of gear, you can extract it by speaking to an Occultist in any major city. Select the Extract tab, then input the item that has this Aspect. You’ll have to pay a fee, but you’ll get an Aspect that you can imprint into other gear.
Keep in mind you can’t extract an imprinted Aspect, though. This means once you’ve used that Aspect into a weapon, you can’t get it back (though you can overwrite it, which will cause it to vanish). The values on your Aspect don’t take into account multipliers from two-handed weapons or amulets, so calculate those accordingly.
For instance, our Band of Grasping Veins came with a 15 percent bonus critical chance and a 45 damage boost, sitting exactly in the middle of the range. If we extracted this Aspect, we would have a copy of it with the same stats. Putting it on an amulet would bump its effect up, and imprinting it into a two-handed weapon would give us the most benefits. In this particular case, this extracted Aspect would grant an extra 30 percent critical chance and 90 percent critical damage per cast of Corpse Tendrils if we put it in our greatsword. Add that to Paragon points and other gear bonuses, and you’ll be creating Corpses in no time—and not from Hewed Flesh or Acolyte’s Reap.
