The best Diablo 4 Necromancer build will focus on making corpses explode, literally. Particularly suited to home-keyboard users, finding the right balance of skills, passives, and materials is the way to blow up your enemies exactly the way a dead person would, by making pests of their flesh and innards.
Blowing up bodies to instant kill or severely hurt – and if you’re playing on Inferno, outright kill – your enemies is always going to be pretty strong in a RPG game, and with corpse explosion abilities in the Necromancer skill tree, paired with Plagued Corpse Tendrils and Explosive Corpse, you’ll find this the best Diablo 4 Necromancer build out there.
Best Diablo 4 Necromancer build skills
It’s possible your entire party will double-down on what you’re doing and bring the pain, but you can cast Plagued Corpse Tendrils and wait for up to three called enemies to run over and drop deliciously squishy corpses for Explosive Corpse summons and Corpse Explosion in your possession.
Here are the best skills for this build:
Of course, as you get higher, you’ll want to take the active skills in your skill tree, but these will set you on a speedy path to exploding corpses and, in our testing, destroy most – if not all – enemies.
Try not to do obvious Corpse Explosion pushes where the active marks the fourth point – that’s what explosive corpse is for. Plagued Corpse Tendrils are excellent for pulling enemies from all around and applying stun, slowing, and vulnerable. If you can get them all afflicted, Explosive Corpse can be as strong as four Corpse Explosions at once, dealing self-damage and applying blind, impaired, and slowed.
Fortunately, Diablo 4 has made some of the best mainstays of the Necromancer class tree free – Corpse Explosion being one of them. If you’re aiming for the best Diablo 4 Necromancer build, the best way to gain corpse generation is by taking Reaper Skeletal Warriors, two at a time, with the Hewed Flesh passive. If you can stay alive and can cast, you’re likely to be sweeping through bodies.
To get corpses to explode some more, and any dropped by The Unforgiving – which we’ll talk more about in the armour section – you need to enhance your Corpse Explosion with key passives. The skills you find can get surprisingly strong without having to put anything in there, but those that are highly dependent on what you’re using are going to demand some points elsewhere, but they’re worth it. The Grim Harvest passive gains a charge whenever you get a kill or assist when enhanced, and heals a percentage of your health for each. Similarly, Fueled by Death gives a percentage of your stat pool when your enhanced abilities are used, and Necrotic Carapace helps with stat-pool maintenance by giving a percentage for keeping it topped up.
When adding passives, add those that create more corpses. The Blood Getter aspect gives two extra reapers for extra corpse production, perfect for this build’s tendency to blow up bodies. Iron Golem slam attack applies both stun and vulnerable – that’s a lot of punishment to the enemies on the receiving end, and perfect for ready potential explosive corpses. Cold skeletal mages can actually apply vulnerable too – they’re particularly useful as they’ll apply frozen every so often to enemies, and when you pair that with Coldbringer’s Aspect to summon a blizzard to slow, freeze, and deal extra damage. When you have Viscous Aspect, you get two extra mages for even more freeze – a total of 12 for even more MMP, or just about everything with vulnerable on them.
If you can get the Coldbringer’s Aspect, Coldbringer’s Pelt, and Bone Chitin Roll into the mix – and we’ll talk about integrating key accessories into your build later – you can begin to focus on specific damage types. With this cold build, the unique Deathless Visage helmet creates mini-explosions in each of the spear’s wake. It’s a bit slow to build, and also asks some serious questions of your running speed and stamina regeneration, but it’s an enormous amount of damage in a ludicrous amount of places.
The Dreadful Aspect is another contender – while you can get more skeletons with the red Reaper Aspect, the damage boost to both you and your minions is generally more widely applicable. The Deep Cuts passive grants additional attack speed for each minion swing, which your skeletal warriors and mages will take care of for you. Finally, the Cryptic Talisman’s Arcane Enhancement