Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred (D4)

Necromancer Blood Wave Endgame Build (Season 8)

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred Walkthrough Team

Last updated on: July 5, 2025 04:58 AM

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This is a Necromancer Blood Wave endgame build and guide for Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred (D4). Read on to learn more about the Blood Wave build, including its skills, gear, gems, runes, mercenaries, and paragon boards, as well as how to play the build for Season 8 (Belial's Return)!

Attention!	This build is a Legacy Build that was created from Season 8 (Belial's Return) and is not updated for the current season.

All Necromancer Guides
Class Guide	Best Builds	Book of the Dead

List of Contents

Build Guide
Build Summary
Skills and Class Mechanic
Aspects and Affixes
Gems and Runewords
Mercenaries
Paragon Boards
Playstyle and Tips
Related Guides

Blood Wave Build Guide

Blood Wave Build Summary

Click on a Link to Jump to a Section!
Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Build Summary
Blood Wave Endgame Build
Blood Wave Endgame Build	Focus: Endgame, Torment Pushing
Insane Amount of Burst Damage Excellent Survivability and Surprising Amount of Crowd Control Aspect Nerf prevents Blood Wave Spam

The build utilizes the Cooldown Reduction mechanic of Fastblood Aspect and the Blood Wave's Blood Orb generation while utilziing Overpower triggers from Rathma's Vigor.

Season 8 Leveling Guide

Blood Wave Build Skills and Class Mechanic

Click on a Link to Jump to a Section!
Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Blood Wave Build Skills and Passives

※ More skills can be seen by scrolling vertically.

Active Skills
Basic Skill Tree ┗ Decompose (1/5) ┗ Reap (1/5)
Core Skill Tree ┗ Blight (1/5) ┗ Sever (1/5) ┗ Hewed Flesh (3/3)
Corpse and Macabre Skill Tree 1 ┗ Blood Mist (1/5) 　┗ Enhanced Blood Mist ┗ Necrotic Fortitude (3/3) ┗ Titan's Fall (3/3) ┗ Spiked Armor (3/3)
Curse Skill Tree ┗ Death's Embrace (3/3) ┗ Death's Approach (3/3) ┗ Amplify Damage (3/3) ┗ Precision Decay (3/3) ┗ Decrepify (1/5) 　┗ Enhanced Decrepify 　　┗ Abhorrent Decrepify
Corpse and Macabre Skill Tree 2 ┗ Necrotic Carapace (1/3) ┗ Reaper's Pursuit (3/3) 　┗ Gloom (3/3) 　　┗ Crippling Darkness (1/3) 　　┗ Terror (3/3) ┗ Coalesced Blood (3/3) 　┗ Tides of Blood (3/3) ┗ Necrotic Carapace (1/3)
Ultimate Skill Tree ┗ Blood Wave (5/5) 　┗ Prime Blood Wave 　　┗ Supreme Blood Wave ┗ Finality (3/3) 　┗ Memento Mori (3/3) ┗ Stand Alone (3/3) ┗ Inspiring Leader (3/3)
Key Passive ┗ Rathma's Vigor (1/1)

Sever Build Book of the Dead

Skeleton Warriors	Skeleton Mages	Golem
Skirmisher Sacrifice	Bone Sacrifice	Iron Sacrifice

Our main damage sources are Overpower, Critical Strike, and raw Damage multipliers. The best multipliers we can obtain from our Book of the Dead would be sacrificing warrior Skirmishers, Bone mages, and Iron golems.

Skirmisher would increase our Critical Strike Chance, with our Aspects, this would be almost a 40% increase to crit chance. Bone Mage would straight up increase our Overpower damage and lastly, Iron would multiply our Critical Strike damage even further..
Book of the Dead Guide

Best Boss Powers

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Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Boss Power	Effect/Modifiers
Urivar's Lobbed Bombs	Effect: After you Cast an Ultimate Skill, lob 4 bombs that deal XX Fire damage. Gain 15% Cooldown Reduction.
Belial's Eye Beams	Modifier: Activating your Main Boss Power grants unbreakable Stealth for 2 seconds. You deal XX increased Overpower Damage while Stealthed.
Hatred's Embrace's Haste	Modifier: Gain XX Critical Strike Chance, increased by XX for each 1% Shadow Resistance from bonuses you have, up to a maximum of XX.
Sinerat's Flames	Modifier: Gain XX increased damage to all Elements. For each 1% of an Element's Resistance from bonuses, gain 0.2% increased damage for that Element, up to a maximum of XX.

As an ultimate focused ability, Urivar's Lobbed Bombs makes it a perfect main power for the build. It also lowers your cooldowns by 15% which is the main highlight of Urivar's Lobbed Boms as an active boss power since our build doesn't really rely on its main damage output.

Belial's Eye Beam is the best modifier to include as everytime you use Blood Wave, you'll gain an unbreakable stealth which makes it a mini-version of Shroud of False Death. Hatred's Embrace and Sinerat's boss powers are then good support powers to amplify our darkness and critical strike damage even further.

Best Boss Powers and Modifiers Guide

Blood Wave Build Aspects and Affixes

Click on a Link to Jump to a Section!
Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

※ More gear Aspects can be seen by scrolling vertically.

Gear	Aspect and Affixes
Head	Aspect of Hardened Bones ・ Maximum Life ★★★ ・ Elemental Resistances ・ Cooldown Reduction Temper: ・Utility - Thorn Army 　┗ + Ranks to Spiked Armor ・Defensive - Worldly Endurance 　┗ Maximum Life
Chest	Aspect of the Cursed Aura ・ Resistance to Element★★★ ・ Maximum Life ・ Intelligence Temper: ・Utility - Thorn Army 　┗ + Ranks to Spiked Armor ・Defensive - Worldly Endurance 　┗ Maximum Life
Gloves	Aspect of Ultimate Shadow ・Overpower Damage ★★★ ・Critical Strike Damage ・Resistance to an Element ・Lucky Hit: Up to a [X%] Chance to Apply a Random CC.
Pants	Kessime's Legacy ・Ultimate Damage ・Damage Reduction While Fortified ・Blood Wave Cooldown Reduction★★ ・Chance for Blood Wave to Deal Double Damage★
Boots	Aspect of the Cursed Aura ・Movement Speed ・Maximum Life ★★★ ・Lightning Resistance Temper: ・Utility - Thorn Army 　┗ + Ranks to Spiked Armor Mobility - Natural Motion 　┗ Movement Speed
Amulet	Sacrificial Aspect ・Ranks to Tides of Blood ★★★ ・Maximum Life ・Intelligence Temper: ・Offensive - Blood Finesse 　┗ Blood Overpower Damage ・Defensive - Natural Resistance/Worldly Endurance 　┗ Resistance to an Element / Maximum Life
Ring 1	Fastblood Aspect Stats: ・Overpower Damage ★★★ ・Maximum Life ・Critical Strike Damage Temper: ・Utility - Necromancer Efficiency 　┗ Ultimate Cooldown Reduction ・Offensive - Blood Finesse 　┗ Blood Overpower Damage
Ring 2	Aspect of Apogeic Furor Stats: ・Overpower Damage ★★★ ・Maximum Life ・Critical Strike Damage Temper: ・Utility - Necromancer Efficiency 　┗ Ultimate Cooldown Reduction ・Offensive - Blood Finesse 　┗ Blood Overpower Damage
Weapon	Tidal Aspect ・Maximum Life ・Critical Strike Damage ・Overpower Damage ★★★ Temper: ・Offensive - Blood Finesse 　┗ Blood Overpower Damage ・Weapon - Blood Augment 　┗ Chance for Blood Wave to deal Double Damage

Blood Wave Build Best Gems and Occult Gems

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Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Blood Wave Build Gems

Weapon	Armor	Jewelry
Ruby	Topaz	Skull

Ruby will increase our Ultimate's damage together when it triggers with Rathma's Vigor. Topaz is a straight Intelligence multiplier so let's socket these for our our free armor slots. Lastly, we want Skull or Diamonds for our Jewelry as we'll likely have a lot of time before obtaining all the Occult Gems.

List of All Gems

Blood Wave Build Runewords

Runeword 1	Runeword 2
Zan Wat	Igni Qax

Zan Wat is the most urgent rune combination we want to equip as this will trigger our Curse effect and increase our survivability. This will apply a Decrepify to all enemies that will likely be hit by Blood Wave and triggering Amplify Damage from our skill tree.

Igni and Qax is a great bossing rune combo as it can charge up our burst and deal insane damages with our Blood Wave when it triggers its effect. Since we don't use Resources, this effect will always trigger a 100% damage increase.

List of All Runewords

Blood Wave Build Mercenaries

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Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Mercenary	Reinforcement
Varyana	Raheir

The best mercenaries for the Blood Wave Build are Varyana and Raheir.

Varyana is a great debuff bot so we'll want to have her as our main mercenary. Make sure to take her left most skill tree path and take Intimidated to get our much needed free damage reduction.

Raheir is a standard Reinforcement thanks to its Bastion save.

List of All Mercenaries

Blood Wave Build Paragon Boards

Click on a Link to Jump to a Section!
Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

Paragon Boards
1. Starting Board (Eliminator)

2. Blood Begets Blood (Sacrificial)

3. Bloodbath (Dominate)

These are the three main boards you'll be having for the Blood Wave build. We focus these boards for their blood-focused effects while slotting in Glyphs that will allow us to passively increase our damage.

These will roughly cost around 170+ paragon nodes, you can spend the rest of the nodes from other nodes to focus specific stats like damage to elites, resistances, or take stat nodes to trigger additional effects from the rare nodes in the first three existing boards.

Blood Wave Build Playstyle and Tips

Click on a Link to Jump to a Section!
Summary			Skills and Passives			Boss Powers			Aspects and Affixes
Gems			Mercenary			Paragon			Playstyle

The Blood Wave Build uses Blood Wave to dish out your main damage output. With all the multipliers we stack and the new Kessime's Legacy unique pants, this will be the only skill we'll spam throughout the game.

Use Blood Wave.
Use Blood Mist to escape if needed against Crowd Control or getting surrounded.

While it may look simple, you'll actually be able to use the build's cooldown steroid by picking up blood orbs. So you'll need to rotate our move repeatedly on the blood wave area to replenish the skill's cooldown. This will allow you to spam Blood Wave while sustaing your HP, Fortify, Overpower Triggers, and Blood Orb damage bonuses.

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Necromancer Blood Wave Endgame Build (Season 8)

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Necromancer Blood Wave Endgame Build (Season 8)

Blood Wave Build Guide

Blood Wave Build Summary

Blood Wave Build Skills and Class Mechanic

Blood Wave Build Skills and Passives

Sever Build Book of the Dead

Best Boss Powers

Blood Wave Build Aspects and Affixes

Blood Wave Build Best Gems and Occult Gems

Blood Wave Build Gems

Blood Wave Build Runewords

Blood Wave Build Mercenaries

Blood Wave Build Paragon Boards

Blood Wave Build Playstyle and Tips

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