The Necromancer is at the top of the meta in Season 6 of Diablo 4 and the Bone Spear build remains the best setup. Here’s how to assemble the build for leveling and endgame and if we’d recommend it for PvP play.
The Bone Spear Necro build involves the Necromancer using this classic move as their primary offensive weapon while utilizing other skills and gear that boost its power. This Necromancer build is ranked as A-tier in the current meta, so it’s a great choice for those fond of the Priests of Rathma.
From there, we’ll detail how to optimize the build for endgame, giving you the best skills, items, Aspects, and Glyphs to target on your journey. For the PvP players out there, we’ll also inform you if we think the Bone Spear Necro is effective this season.
Best Bone Spear leveling build in Diablo 4 Season 6
As you level while playing through either the campaign or the new Season 6 content, you’ll want to make sure that you’re selecting your skills in the following order:
| Level | Skill |
|---|---|
| 1 | Reap |
| 2 | Decompose |
| 3 | Bone Spear |
| 4 | Bone Spear |
| 5 | Enhanced Bone Spear |
| 6 | Paranormal Bine Spear |
| 7 | Bone Spear |
| 8 | Bone Spear |
| 9 | Bone Spear |
| 10 | Blood Mist |
| 11 | Grim Harvest |
| 12 | Iron Maiden |
| 13 | Enhanced Iron Maiden |
| 14 | Amplify Damage |
| 15 | Amplify Damage |
| 16 | Amplify Damage |
| 17 | Corpse Tendrils |
| 18 | Unliving Energy |
| 19 | Imperfectly Balanced |
| 20 | Imperfectly Balanced |
| 21 | Imperfectly Balanced |
| 22 | Bone Storm |
| 23 | Prime Bone Storm |
| 24 | Supreme Bone Storm |
| 25 | Fueled by Death |
| 26 | Fueled by Death |
| 27 | Gim Harvest |
| 28 | Death’s Approach |
| 29 | Death’s Approach |
| 30 | Death’s Approach |
| 31 | Skeletal Mage Mastery |
| 32 | Skeletal Mage Mastery |
| 33 | Skeletal Mage Mastery |
| 34 | Ossified Essence |
| 35 | Unliving Energy |
| 36 | Unliving Energy |
| 37 | Hewed Flesh |
| 38 | Hewed Flesh |
| 39 | Hewed Flesh |
| 40 | Hellbent Commander |
| 41 | Hellbent Commander |
| 42 | Hellbent Commander |
| 43 | Necrotic Carapace |
| 44 | Fueled by Death |
| 45 | Golem Mastery |
| 46 | Skeletal Warrior Mastery |
| 47 | Skeletal Warrior Mastery |
| 48 | Inspiring Leader |
| 49 | Inspiring Leader |
| Renown 1 | Inspiring Leader |
| Renown 2 | Serration |
| Renown 3 | Serration |
| Renown 4 | Serration |
| Renown 5 | Compound Fracture |
| Renown 6 | Compound Fracture |
| Renown 7 | Compound Fracture |
| Renown 8 | Evulsion |
| Renown 9 | Evulsion |
| Renown 10 | Evulsion |
These skills will help you to craft the ideal Bone Spear build. Of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Renown points to use the extra ten, so if you find it more convenient, level Evulsion, Compound Fracture, and Serration before the minion Mastery skills.
The above skill selection will help focus your abilities around Bone Spear, making this your most powerful skill while reducing its cooldown time. Of course, you’ll be able to fall back on Reap and Decompose if you run out of Essence, but this will become increasingly unlikely as you level up.
Best Book of the Dead setup for leveling
When it comes to using the Necromancer’s unique Book of the Dead skills for a Bone Spear build, we recommend selecting the following:
- Skeletal Warriors – Skirmishers
- Skeletal Mages – Cold
- Golems – Iron
This Book of the Dead setup is the best for this build, letting your Skirmisher Skeletal Warriors focus on melee combat while your Mages support them from a distance with Cold Magic. This will slow enemies down while your Skeletons, Golem, and yourself strike at them while they’re vulnerable.
We’ve selected the Iron Golem for this Book of the Dead setup as it’ll allow your Golem to protect your Mages and yourself from mobs and elites while you fire volleys into the fray.
Your minions are effective allies while leveling, but as you reach endgame, you’ll soon outgrow the need for them and will be able to do more damage by Sacrificing them – at least with this build.
Best leveling rotation
- Summon Minions – If not already active
- Iron Maiden
- Corpse Tendrils
- Blood Mist
- Bone Storm
- Bone Spear – Main Skill
- Reap – Close Combat
For this build, you’ll likely already have your minions with you, so your first attack should be to strike a mob with Iron Maiden so that they’re likely to take more damage when the battle starts.
Next, cast Corpse Tendrils to stun enemies and increase the likelihood of producing extra corpses to re-supply your minion army. From here, hit them with your main attacks, using Blood Mist to do devastating damage from a distance once your minions engage the mob.
Now you can use your two most effective skills, Bone Storm and Bone Spear. Once you’ve cast Bone Storm, fire a volley of Bone Spears into the fray. You can fall back on Reap and Decompose if the need arises.
By now, Corpse Tendrils will have worn off, so hit them with another round of it, maximizing your corpse generation, stunning the survivors, and even topping up their poison levels.
Of course, whichever rotation works for you will be the best to use, but the above is a logical, tried, and tested method to combine skills into one powerful set of attacks.
Best Legendary Aspects
While Legendary Aspects will become more useful in the endgame version of the Bone Spear build, there are some you can hunt down while progressing to level 50 or while playing through the story. Here’s where you can find them:
| Aspect | Power | Dungeon | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Splintering | Bone Spear makes enemies vulnerable | Guulrahm Slums | Dry Steppes |
| Grasping Veins | Increased critical strike chance for Corpse Tendrils | Corrupted Grotto | Kehjistan |
| Disobedience | Boosts defense based on your minion damage output | Halls of the Damned | Kehjistan |
Best Bone Spear endgame build in Diablo 4 Season 6
Once you reach endgame in Season 6 by beating the story, hitting level 50, and unlocking the Paragon Board, you can then respec to the endgame version of the Bone Spear Necro build. This is very similar to the leveling build, but there are some key differences in terms of point allocation that we’ll go into below.
First, you’ll need to switch your active and passive skills. As you’ll already have your 50 skill points to use, along with any Renown points you’ve unlocked, allocate them to the following active and passive skills:
| Active Skill | Upgrades | Points allocated |
|---|---|---|
| Reap | – | 1 |
| Decompose | – | 1 |
| Bone Spear | Enhanced, Paranormal | 5 |
| Blood Mist | Enhanced, Ghastly | 2 |
| Decrepify | Enhanced, Abhorent | 5 |
| Corpse Explosion | – | 1 |
| Corpse Tendrils | Enhanced, Plagued | 1 |
| Bone Storm | Enhanced, Supreme | 1 |
Here’s which Passive Skills you should choose:
| Passive Skill | Points |
|---|---|
| Unliving Energy | 3 |
| Hewed Flesh | 3 |
| Grim Harvest | 1 |
| Fueled by Death | 3 |
| Imperfectly Balanced | 3 |
| Amplify Damage | 3 |
| Death’s Approach | 3 |
| Memento Mori | 3 |
| Serration | 1 |
| Compound Fracture | 3 |
| Necrotic Carapace | 2 |
| Evulsion | 3 |
| Stand Alone | 3 |
| Rapid Ossification | 3 |
| Ossified Essence | 1 |
This build still primarily focuses on Bone Spear as a primary skill, but now no longer uses minions and instead doubles down on support spells and attacks.
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We’ve also switched curses, replacing Iron Maiden with Decrepify. This will slow enemies down and give you time to pepper them with attacks that trap them in a kill box.
Best endgame Book of the Dead setup
The key difference between the Book of the Dead skills in endgame is that you’ll be Sacrificing all your minions to really buff yourself. This build has little need of them, so take the sacrificial buff to make your Bone Spear damage even more deadly.
- Skeletal Warriors – Sacrifice
- Skeletal Mages – Sacrifice
- Golems – Sacrifice
Of course, if you’d prefer to use minions, feel free, just know you’ll be less powerful as an individual Necromancer.
Best endgame rotation
For endgame, use the following skill rotation when approaching mobs in battle:
- Decreptify
- Blood Mist
- Corpse Tendrils
- Bone Storm
- Bone Spear
- Corpse Explosion
The rotation of attacks in endgame involves first casting Decreptify to slow enemies, then hitting a mob with Blood Mist, Corpse Tendrils, then Bone Storm. This will likely weaken many of them, so then hit them with volleys of Bone Spear.
Now cast Corpse Explosion to turn the dead bodies of your enemies into bombs that kill even more of them. Repeat this simple rotation and feel free to miss stages against smaller mobs. Blood Mist for example works whenever you like.
Remember, while you do have access to Reap and Decompose, it’s mostly to ensure other skill chains remain unbroken when leveling up. You’ll not have room for them as active skills while you’re already using six others.
Best Legendary Aspects
Now that you’ve reached endgame, you’ll have access to many more Legendary Aspects to boost your build and add special powers to buff your primary skills. Some are the same as in the leveling build, but now there’s even more. Here’s where and how you can find them:
| Aspect | Power | Dungeon | Region | Gamble Obols |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grasping Veins | Increased critical strike chance for Corpse Tendrils | Corrupted Grotto | Kehjistan | – |
| Splintering | Bone Spear makes enemies vulnerable | Guulrahn Slums | Dry Steppes | – |
| Disobedience | Boosts defense based on your minion damage output | Halls of the Damned | Kehjistan | – |
| Torment | Critical Strikes with Bone Skills increases your Essence regeneration | Black Asylum | Fractured Peaks | – |
| Great Feast | Increased minion damage | – | – | Focus |
| Serration | Ossified Essence increases critical strikes | – | – | Focus |
| Concussive Strikes | Attacks have 20% chance to Daze enemies | – | – | Focus |
| Shielding Storm | Bone Storm generates Barrier | – | – | Pants |
| Hardened Bones | You and your minions get damage reduction | – | – | Pants |
| Metamorphosis | Evade triggers Unstoppable for 2.5 seconds | – | – | Boots |
Remember, you can also strip these Aspects from their original item and apply them to an item of your choosing.
Paragon Board
Once you reach level 50 you’ll stop earning skills points and start earning Paragon points instead. This leveling system works very differently and involves you selecting updates from various boards with different themes and buffs.
Every path is different, but the good news is that by targeting different Glyphs as you move around the Paragon Board, you’ll start buffing your Bone Spear Necro in the ways that matter most to the build.
See below to see which Glyphs you should target first.
Best Glyphs
Level 15
- Gravekeeper
- Corporeal
- Control
- Essence
- Sacrificial
- Exploit
- Amplify
Level 21
- Essence
- Control
- Exploit
- Amplify
- Corporeal
- Sacrificial
- Gravekeeper
Once you reach Paragon Level 15, work your way towards the above Glyphs. You’ll also unlock more across the Paragon Board as you earn more points, but selecting these particular Glyphs in this order will keep you on the best possible path for the Necro Bone Spear build.
Best Bone Spear endgame item build
| Item | Socket | Item type | Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deathless Visage | Ruby for extra life | Helm | Bone Spear leaves behind exploring echoes |
| Runic Mail of Shielding Storm | Ruby for extra life | Chest Armor | Bone Storm has chance to trigger Barrier |
| Splintering Runic Gloves | Ruby for extra life | Gloves | Bone Spear makes enemies vulnerable |
| Runic Leggings of Hardened Bones | Ruby for extra life | Pants | Increased Minion damage |
| Runic Cleats of Metamorphosis | Ruby for extra life | Boots | Increased Skeleton Priest damage |
| Spinal of the Great Feast | 2x Emeralds for poison damage | Main Hand | Chance to cast Bone Spear twice |
| – | – | Offhand | – |
| Choker of Serration | Diamond for extra attack power | Amulet | Boosts Evulsion and Compound Fracture |
| Ring of Torment | Diamond for extra attack power | Ring 1 | Boosts Torment |
| Loop of Grasping Veins | Diamond for extra attack power | Ring 2 | Boosts Grasping Veins |
It’ll take time to track down this exact set, but once you do this will make up your endgame gear. Of course, it’s up to you which gear you equip and you may want to mix it up, but this setup will give you a decided advantage.
Alternative to Necromancer Bone Spear build for PvP
The good news about using the Necromancer Bone Spear build for PvP is it’s the same exact build we’ve described above in our endgame section. The build is rated A-tier for PvP this season, so while it’s not at the very top, it’s still deadly and a great choice for taking down other players.
Now that you know how to craft this top-tier Necromancer build, make sure to check out our guides for the Druid, Sorcerer, Rogue, Barbarian, and Spirtiborn.