Diablo 4’s Sins of the Horadrim season appropriately features one of its darkest classes prominently within the Season 9 meta. In a world where fighting off demons is commonplace, the Necromancer still ends up being one ofDiablo 4’s most disturbing classes. Given the dark nature of the Necromancer’s lore, it seems fitting that the class would be one of the best of the season, with one particularly sinful build standing out.
While classes like the Spiritborn and Sorcerer have been getting a lot of the attention inDiablo 4’s Season 9 meta, the Necromancer has quietly risen to stand among these giants as well. A key reason why the class has made such an impact this season is due to its ability to deal a lot of damage in a wide area over time, which continues this season’s trend of meta classes being strong passive damage dealers. The Shadowblight Necromancer build is perhaps the class’s best option for accomplishing this task, leveraging its Darkness skills to drain foes of their lives.
Diablo 4’s Shadowblight Necromancer is Worthy of the Sins of the Horadrim Season Name
Shadowblight Necromancer Takes Advantage of Diablo 4’s Darkest Skills
The main goal of theShadowblight Necromancer buildis to create pools of Blight that can stack Shadow Damage to take advantage of the Shadowblight passive. This passive deals 200% damage every eighth instance an enemy takes damage while being affected by Shadowblight, so players will want to stack as many continuous sources of Shadow Damage over time as they can. To do so, this build focuses on skills like:
Reap acts as the Necromancer’s Basic Skill on this build, primarily as a source to generate Essence for players to cast the Blight Core Skill. Blight acts as the focal point of this build, creating pools that hit enemies with Shadow Damage over time within a large radius to continually activateShadowblight’s passive effect. Corpse Tendrils is great for pulling enemies into the Blight pools, while Bone Prison can also be used to trap enemies within them so they sustain Blight’s damage over time.
Corpse Explosion is especially important when upgraded to its Blighted variant, since it becomes a Darkness skill that creates a Corruption Damage-dealing miasma when triggered, which can be used to stack damage on top of Blight. Shadowblight’s other effect increases its damage by 70% of the player’s Corruption and Shadow Damage bonuses up to 450%, so adding skills with Corruption Damage is beneficial. Soulrift can be another great source of Corruption Damage alongsideBlighted Corpse Explosion.
In Season 9, Shadowblight Necromancers can benefit from using the Disintegrate Horadric Spell when paired with Blight. Using the Nebulous Extract Infusion allows this spell to act as an additional source of Shadow Damage.
Season 9’s Shadowblight Necromancer Flips the Script on a Cardinal Sin of Diablo 4
What’s odd about this build compared to some ofDiablo 4Season 9’s other meta builds is that it doesn’t focus so much on maximizing a particular skill’s damage output as much as it does stacking multiple instances of damage sources to trigger Shadowblight. Typically, aDiablo 4build uses a single Core Skill or Legendary Affixas its cornerstone, adding in other tools to help support the damage it deals. The Shadowblight Necromancer goes against this conventional wisdom, with players wanting to use as many skills that can create areas of damage over time as possible, as is the case with Blight, Blighted Corpse Explosion, and Soulrift, to ensure that Shadowblight’s effect is constantly active and draining enemy health.
To support this goal, theEbonpiercer unique amuletis a must-use piece of gear because of how its unique affix augments Blight. This unique spreads the area of the pools Blight creates by shooting four additional projectiles of Corruption Damage that pierce enemies. Adding this unique into the mix adds just another source of damage to stack on top of the build’s existing options to further aid the activation of Shadowblight and optimize this build’s overall damage output.
