Want to demolish enemies without worrying about health and essence recovery? We got you covered with our Diablo 4 Vampiric Blood Necromancer build. Necromancers are users of dark magic and can manipulate their enemy’s blood. By combining their magic skills with the summoning of the dead, we have managed to create a new build that will satisfy both veterans and newcomers alike.
Vampiric Blood Necromancer Build in D4 focuses on passive healing from Blood Orbs dropped from attacking enemies. This build has no loopholes thanks to a lot of conjuring skills and ability to Fortify the character passively. In this guide, we will extensively dive into the skills, gear, aspects and paragon points to create one of the best builds Diablo 4 has to offer; the Vampiric Blood Necromancer.
Jump To:
- Skills and unlock order
- Necromancer Book of the Dead
- Playstyle and skill rotation
- Gear, Gems and Stats priority
- Paragon Board
- Unique Items
- Legendary Aspects
- Elixir choices
Vampiric Blood Necromancer skill progression and unlock order
The Vampire Necromancer build deals massive amounts of damage with the help of active skills, passives and minions while providing the players with health, essence and protection in return. All the skills in this build work in tandem to create a beautiful symphony of destruction upon enemies.
Here is a brief list of active skills from the Diablo 4 Necromancer skill tree we will be using in our Vampiric Necromancer build.
- Hemorrhage (basic)
- Blood Mist (macabre)
- Raise Skeleton (summoning)
- Corpse Explosion (corruption)
- Golem (summoning)
- Bone Spirit (macabre)
- Army of the Dead (ultimate)
There is a total of 48 skill points in Diablo 4 which can be earned by leveling up. However, this number can be increased to 58 by completing 5 Renown tasks scattered through the 5 regions of Diablo 4. Each task provides 2 skill points. As Vampiric Blood Necromancer is an end-game build, we will be going with 58 skill points allocation. You can allocate these points in any order you want.
Just make sure to follow the table below for proper upgrades.
| Unlock Order | Skill Name |
| 1 | Hemorrhage (Rank 5) |
| 2 | Enhanced Hemorrhage |
| 3 | Initiate’s Hemorrhage |
| 4 | Unliving Energy (Rank 3) |
| 5 | Hewed Flesh (Rank 3) |
| 6 | Blood Mist (Rank 5) |
| 7 | Enhanced Blood Mist |
| 8 | Ghastly Blood Mist |
| 9 | Skeletal Warrior Mastery (Rank 3) |
| 10 | Corpse Explosion (Rank 5) |
| 11 | Enhanced Corpse Explosion |
| 12 | Skeletal Mage Mastery (Rank 3) |
| 13 | Death’s Embrace (Rank 2) |
| 14 | Bone Spirit (Rank 5) |
| 15 | Enhanced Bone Spirit |
| 16 | Dreadful Bone Spirit |
| 17 | Gruesome Mending (Rank 3) |
| 18 | Transfusion (Rank 3) |
| 19 | Coalesced Blood (Rank 1) |
| 20 | Drain Vitality (Rank 2) |
| 21 | Tides of Blood (Rank 1) |
| 22 | Golem Mastery (Rank 3) |
| 23 | Rathma’s Vigor |
| 24 | Blood Wave |
| 25 | Prime Blood Wave |
| 26 | Supreme Blood Wave |
| 27 | Necrotic Carapace (Rank 3) |
Most of the skills that we have selected above are to support Hemorrhage. With its enhancements, hemorrhage not only deals damage to the enemies but it also generates blood orbs for passive healing. Consuming the blood orb from Hemorrhage also generates essence for attacking enemies. Unliving Energy increases maximum essence while Hewed Flesh increases chances of creating corpses.
These corpses can be raised as minions or explode by using Corpse Explosion. On the other hand, Blood Mist makes you immune and generates health in addition to corpses. Skeletal warrior, Skeletal Mage and Golem Mastery passive skills fortifies our minions and grant them additional attack power. They also receive additional health from blood orbs by using Transfusion passive skill.
Gruesome Mending improves healing of the players, while Drain Vitality grants you fortification at the cost of enemies’ life. Necrotic Carapace passive skill fortifies the minions whenever a corpse is created on the battleground (replace this passive skill with ultimate if you want).
Blood Wave ultimate skill deals massive damage to enemies and knocks them back. This skill also slows enemies for up to 50% for a few seconds and leaves behind 3 blood orbs for the players to pick up. Rathma’s Vigor key passive increases maximum health by 10% and overpowers blood skills if the players are healthy for 15 seconds or more.
This is a brief explanation of all the skills we have selected and how they synergize with each other perfectly. Attack enemies, create corpses, raise minions, increased damage, blood orbs, essence regeneration, more corpses, more damage and the cycle continues. This build is a death sentence for bosses and elites during the end game.
Best Vampiric Blood Necromancer Book of the Dead
The unique class mechanism for Vampiric Blood Necromancer is the Book of the Dead. This unique item unlocks after completing a priority quest at level 15. Book of the Dead allows necromancers to raise three minions, each with three further variations. Each minion has its strengths and upgrades to further attune their qualities.
Book of the Dead also lets the players sacrifice any summon permanently in exchange for buffs. We won’t be sacrificing any of our summons as they will be protecting our character throughout the high-level run.
- Skeletal Warriors – Skirmishers: This is a basic level 5 unlock which unleashes an army of sword wielding skeletons. With the first upgrade in place, you can summon an additional skeleton warrior.
- Skeletal Mages – Shadow: A level 15 unlock which summons caster of shadow magics. These skeletal mages fire an additional shadow bolt after every fifth attack.
- Golem – Bone: Bone Golem can only be summoned after reaching level 25. It not only protects the players from taking damage but also creates a corpse after losing 20% of its own health.
Diablo 4 Vampiric Blood Necromancer playstyle and skill rotation
Vampiric Blood Necromancer specializes in dealing massive AoE damage while summoning its minions from dead enemies. This build has great ranged attack power and defense which is strengthened by Fortify and Golems.
The main reason for going with this build is to generate insane amounts of health and essence passively. The whole build revolves around the concept of creating blood orbs from enemies and generating essence passively from each strike.
We have explained all the mechanics that will create the unique playstyle for our Diablo 4 Vampiric Blood Necromancer.
Blood Orb
A Vampiric Blood Necromancer is strong as its ability to generate blood orbs from enemies. These orbs regenerate health, increase attack power and even restore essence with proper gears and skills.
- Hemorrhage: This basic skill has a 20% chance to create a blood orb from an enemy.
- Supreme Blood Wave: This ultimate skill generates 3 blood orbs.
Fortify
Lacking armor and prone to a lot of damage, the Necromancer class relies heavily on Fortify to enhance their defenses.
- Initiate’s Hemorrhage: This enhancement fortifies the players by 1.6% of their base life per attack to the enemies. It also has a 1.5% chance to trigger a 100% fortification.
- Drain Vitality: This passive skill has a 25% chance to fortify players for up to 8% of their base life.
- Necrotic Carapace: This passive skill fortifies the players for 6% of their base life upon creating a corpse.
Increased Damage
No build in Diablo 4 is complete unless it can dish out insane amounts of damage to enemies. Fortification, health regeneration and resource management, all of them are useless if you can’t take down the hordes of Lilith in time.
Here is a small list of skills to enhance Vampiric Blood Necromancer’s attack powers by a huge margin.
- Hemorrhage: This skill deals 25% damage to surrounding enemies.
- Enhanced Corpse Explosion: This enhancement deals up to 50% damage to enemies over an extended radius.
- Skeletal Warrior Mastery: This passive skill increases the attack power of Skeletal Warriors by up to 45% on rank 3.
- Death’s Embrace: This passive skill allows players to deal up to 6% more damage to close enemies.
- Skeletal Mage Mastery: This passive skill increases the attack power of Skeletal Mages by up to 60%
- Raise Skeleton: This active skill conjures a mage, upon reaching the limit of skeletal warriors, who increases the attack power of all the skeletal minions.
- Coalesced Blood: This passive skill Increases the damage caused by Blood skills by up to 18%
- Golem Mastery: This passive skill increases the attack power of Golems by up to 75%.
Healing
As we are ignoring active healing in favor of passive one for the Vampiric Blood Necromancer, learning the skills and passives that constantly generate health and increase its base value are of utmost importance.
- Gruesome Mending; This passive skill allows the players to receive additional health from blood orbs.
- Rathma’s Vigor; This Key passive increases the maximum health of players by up to 10%.
Essence Regeneration
Necromancers use essence as their primary resource to cast skills and summon minions. However, a lot of Necromancer skills use a huge amount of Essence which can put the players in a difficult spot. You can manage and increase your essence by learning the following skills and passives.
- Enhanced Hemorrhage: Attacking any enemy after picking a blood orb generated from Hemorrhage skill grants 2 essence per strike.
- Unliving Energy: This passive skill increases maximum essence by up to 9.
- Dreadful Bone Spirit: This enhancement generates 30 essence per strike for the next few seconds.
Corpse Creation
A lot of gameplay mechanics for Vampiric Blood Necromancer revolve around creating corpses and then use them for various purposes. These corpses can be exploded for extra damage or raised as minions.
- Hewed Flesh: A 12% chance to create a corpse at the point of attack. 24% against bosses. This is a Lucky Hit.
- Ghastly Blood Mist: This enhancement creates a corpse every 1 second.
Vampiric Blood Necromancer Damage Rotation
Unlocking skills, learning their impacts, and what effects we can achieve during combat is all but theoretical knowledge. Diablo 4 dungeons and the armies of Lilith residing in them don’t play by your rules.
To overcome these adversaries, we need to equip and use the active skills in a way to maximize the results we are aiming for our Vampiric Blood Necromancer. This whole process is known as Damage Rotation.
- Hemorrhage with the Initiate enhancement
- Raise Skeleton
- Golem
- Blood Mist with Ghastly enhancement
- Enhanced Corpse Explosion
- Bone Spirit with Dreadful enhancement
- Supreme Blood Wave
Start the battles by casting the Initiate Hemorrhage skill. This damage skill bursts enemies’ blood and makes them drop blood orbs which heal our character passively. Using blood orbs allows the players to deal additional damage and generate essence from each hurting enemy. It further grants them fortify to absorb a lot of incoming attacks.
Follow up the attack with Ghastly Blood Mist. This protective spell makes the players immune for up to 3 seconds and damage enemies to recover health. It also creates corpses from dead enemies.
Cast Raise Skeleton to summon an army of your own from the corpses. With Skeletal Warrior mastery passive skill enabled, these minions from beyond deal up to 45% more damage to the enemies. This damage is further increased by 20% if you manage to summon maximum number of skeletons.
With enough Essence build-up with active and passive skills, cast Dreadful Bone Spirit. This is a very high-powered attack that deals up to 90% damage by using all the essence. This attack is further increased by 3% for each point of essence spent making it devastating during the endgame sections. This attack also generates 30 essence per second for hitting one enemy.
With enough corpses, health, and essence, follow up by summoning Golem. It protects the players by absorbing up to 15% damage and becomes Unstoppable by attacking enemies. Golem relies on enemies’ health to restore its own health.
If you have enough minions to aid you in the battle, stop using summoning skills and cast Enhanced Corpse Explosion instead. This macabre skill deals an additional 50% damage to surrounding enemies.
At any point in the rotation if you run into trouble, cast Blood Mist to slip through the hordes of the enemies undetected. Wrap up the rotation by casting Supreme Blood Wave ultimate skill. This skill deals massive damage to the enemies and knocks them back while generating 3 blood orbs for the players to use.
This is the basic rotation to use with Vampiric Blood Necromancer in Diablo 4. However, you can always change the order of skills to match your unique playstyle.
Gear, Gems, and Stats priority
Like the rest of the four classes in Diablo 4, Necromancers have access to four primary stats. These stats are independent of the builds and have the same impact over a class regardless of the player’s selection of a specific playstyle.
Here is our recommended order to upgrade the stats for Necromancer class depending on their primary and secondary effects.
| Order | Stat Name | Stat Effects (Primary/Secondary) |
| 1 | Intelligence | Each upgrade point in Intelligence increases Necromancer’s skill damage by 0.1% and resistance against all elemental attacks by 0.05%. |
| 2 | Willpower | Upgrading Willpower by one point enhances resource generation by 0.1% and overpower damage by 0.25%. Willpower also has a positive impact on healing received (0.1% per upgrade). |
| 3 | Dexterity | Dexterity upgrade is directly related to increased chances of critical strike by 0.2% and dodge chance by 0.025% (per upgrade) |
| 4 | Strength | Being casters and summoners, Necromancers are not primarily affected by increase in strength stat. However, it increases their armor by 1 per upgrade. |
As always, Gems are a very personal choice. However, here is the list of gems to socket for our Vampiric Blood Necromancer build in D4
| Type | Gemstone | Effect |
| Weapon | Diamond | Diamond in weapon slot for Necromancers increases their damage from ultimate skills. |
| Armor | Ruby | Ruby in armor slot increases maximum life by a fixed percentage for Necromancer class. |
| Jewelry | Skull | Skull in jewelry slot adds up to 250 additional armor to Necromancers. |
For the endgame sequence, we recommend rare or legendary items equipped in addition to a few unique ones. However, most armors have generic affixes that may or may not match your playstyle. A build-specific armor is defined by the item affixes it carries.
Gear Affixes can be re-rolled as much as you want with the help of an Occultist. Here is a list to look for the bonuses when selecting an affix.
- Increased Damage from Skills
- Increased Ranks for Skills
- Increased Minions Damage
- Increased Minions Attack Speed
- Increased Maximum Essence
- Increased Maximum Health
- Increased Damage Output after using a Blood Orb
- Increased Overpower Damage
- Increased Movement Speed
- Increased Damage from Critical Strikes
- Increased Damage from Ultimate
Paragon Boards for Vampiric Blood Necromancer
As we are dealing with a level 50 and above build in this guide, Paragon Board and its passive buffs will play a major role in enhancing the capabilities of Vampiric Blood Necromancer in Diablo 4.
Paragon Board is unique to Diablo 4 and it replaces skill points with paragon points (4 points per level). These points can be used to purchase Paragon Board nodes and glyphs. We recommend buying nodes with magic and skill upgrades in addition to strengthening your minions.
Below is a list of some rare/legendary nodes and glyphs from the Necromancer Paragon Board in D4 to complement our Vampiric Blood Necromancer build further.
Aggression: This rare node increases all kinds of damage by 10% and overpower damage by 30%.
Recuperate: This rare node increases life generation by 9.5% if the players don’t take damage for a few seconds (works well with Blood Mist).
Blood Begets Blood: This legendary node increases damage up to 15% after using a blood orb.
Invigorated: This rare node increases damage by 12.5% while you are in a healthy state. It also increases damage by up to 10% for a few seconds after using a blood orb.
Blood Drinker: This rare node increases intelligence rank by 10 and healing from blood orbs by up to 5%.
Cult Leader: This legendary node increases the damage of minions by up to 45% if all 3 types are active at once.
Prime: This rare node increases maximum health by 4% and damage by up to 10%.
Knowledge: This rare node adds 10 additional ranks to the intelligence stat and increases damage by up to 10%.
Undaunted: This rare glyph increases attack power by 1.9% every time you purchase 5 intelligence from the nodes in its vicinity.
Blood-Drinker: This rare glyph increases bonuses of all magical nodes in the vicinity by 30%.
Dominate: This rare node increases overpower damage by 5.9% by purchasing 5 willpower from its surrounding.
Unique Items
While being the most powerful items in Diablo 4, unique items appear during the extreme endgame sections and very difficult to obtain. As we are already focusing on an endgame build, finding and equipping these items shouldn’t be a big issue for the players.
Here is a list of recommended Necromancer unique items for Vampiric Blood build in Diablo 4.
Black River: This unique scythe allows the Corpse Explosion skill to use 4 more corpses to explode, dealing an additional 8% damage to enemies with increases radius.
Blood Artisan’s Cuirass: This unique chest armor grants a free Bone Spirit after collecting 5 blood orbs. It also increases healing from blood orbs and total armor.
Deathless Visage: This unique helm increases maximum essence by 5 and total armor by 2.1%. It also increases total physical damage by a fixed percentage.
Howl From Below: These unique gloves summon a volatile skeleton from corpses on using Corpse explosion skill. This skeleton deals a lot of damage to enemies and the following corpse explosion gains 10% attack power.
Ring of Mendeln: This unique ring has a 10% chance to overpower all minions which explode causing 360 damage each to the enemies. It is a Lucky Hit and only activates if you have 7 or more minions active.
Legendary Aspects for Vampiric Blood Necromancer
Legendary Aspects in Diablo 4 can be obtained from the Codex of Power or extracted from legendary gear. These aspects can be applied to any rare or legendary item with a matching slot to give them the characteristics of the said aspect.
Below is a list of our favorite Diablo 4 Necromancer legendary aspects which you can apply to any gear of your liking (keeping in mind the bonuses of other affixes we mentioned above).
Aspect of the Potent Blood: Affixes to rings. This legendary aspect allows Blood Orbs to grant 20 essence if the players have already full health.
Aspect of Reanimation: Affixes to weapons, gloves, amulets and rings. This legendary aspect increases the damage of minions (minus golems) by 20% if they remain alive for 10 seconds.
Aspect of Swelling Curse: Affixes to weapons, gloves, amulets and rings. This legendary aspect increases the damage of Bone Spirit from 15-25% depending on the distance traveled by them before attacking enemies.
Requiem Aspect: Affixes to rings. This legendary aspect increases the maximum amount of essence up to 5 depending on the number of active minions.
Aspect of Explosive Mist: Affixes to every gear item minus rings. This legendary aspect allows Blood Mist to explode corpses in its path by using Corpse Explosion skill for free.
Elixir and Potion Choices
Vampiric Blood Necromancer build is based on passive healing from enemies and blood orbs they drop. Spending resources on active healing for this build is useless and a waste. However, you can still visit an alchemist to upgrade your health potions to gain extra advantage against bosses and elites.
For elixirs, we don’t recommend any specific one for this build. You can craft a few that further enhance your skills or attack damage by skills. A lot of elixirs are enemy specific too. Before heading into a dungeon, using these will come in handy.
