Best Early Game Necromancer Build in Diablo 4

The Necromancer in Diablo 4 is your classic skeleton-summoning, bone-blasting badass that feels excellent to level with. The class really benefits from having lots of minions around that can distract enemies and block attacks, freeing you up to focus on dealing damage effectively. This guide will outline the best early-game build to use to level your Necromancer through the Diablo 4 campaign up to the level cap, addressing Aspects, Gear, Gems, skills, and summons.

Best Necromancer Leveling Build for Diablo 4

There are a few core things to focus on when leveling to get the best experience possible in Diablo 4, and I’ll be covering each of these in this Necromancer leveling build.

Aspects

We have a full explanation of Aspects in Diablo 4. However, Aspects are basically powerful enchantments you can obtain from dungeons and apply to your gear, and there are a few specific ones that you’ll want to pick up for a strong leveling build: Aspect of Disobedience to apply to your helmet, Unyielding Commander’s Aspect to apply to your gloves, Splintering Aspect to apply to your Amulet, Aspect of Torment to apply to your first ring, and Requiem Aspect for your second ring.

Gearing

Don’t worry too much about specific gear when you’re leveling your Necromancer. Simply keep an eye out for equips that have an arrow symbol indicating that they are an upgrade to what you currently have equipped, and swap gear in and out as you progress for stronger pieces as you find them. Along the way you’ll likely find a bunch of uniques, and using those will generally give you a fairly good boost to character performance.

Gems

When you start finding Gems, you’ll likely already have some gear that has sockets on it for you to start slotting some Gems into. For Necromancer you’ll want to use Emeralds on your weapon sockets, Rubies on your Armor sockets, and Skulls on your Jewelry sockets. These will increase Critical Damage, Life %, and Armor value respectively.

Skill Build

Bone Splinters will be your basic attack generation skill. This is very efficient at generating Essence to spend on using skills. Bone Spear will be your main DPS skill, as it deals a lot of damage and scales well with Critical Damage to help you nuke down enemies. Corpse Tendrils is our stun; it’s never a bad idea to have something up your sleeve to get you out of a sticky situation, and Corpse Tendrils stun is perfect for just that.

This build is more summon-focused rather than skill-heavy, which allows us to take more passives for better damage and survivability and use the skill slots to keep our summons going. We’ll be making use of Raise Skeleton, Summon Golem, and Army of the Dead as our other skills. These will give you a solid variety of summons to use. You’ll always have your Skeletons around, and the Golem and Army of the Dead are excellent for bursting down rare mobs and of course in boss fights.

You can find my full skill tree to follow for this best Diablo 4 Necromancer build — simply click on the Skill Tree tab to view it.

Summons

With Necromancers in Diablo 4 you can customize the summons that you use, and each has different strengths and weaknesses. For this build we’ll be going with Reapers for our Skeletons: Their heavy damage-dealing scythe attacks are very strong, and their first tier upgrade enables them to do more DPS against enemies we use Corpse Tendrils on.

For your Skeletal Mages you’ll want Cold Skeletal Mages to deal Chills and Freezes against the enemies, which have great synergy with the Skeletal Reapers. Plus, slowing and disabling enemies gives a nice survival boost as well.

Lastly, for your Golem, you’ll want to use the Blood Golem and at upgrade level 2. Blood Golem can drain the life of enemies to sustain it and bolster its abilities. At level 1 it absorbs 15% of the damage that you take, and level 2 lets it take 25% less damage and deal 50x increased damage when Healthy, which it will often be thanks to its life steal.

That concludes our Necromancer leveling build guide for Diablo 4. If you follow this, you’ll be sure to have a great run through the campaign while you level up your Necromancer to the endgame! For more, check out our guides for best Druid build and best Rogue build.

Related: Diablo 4 – Overpower Damage Explained on Twinfinite