Blood Lance

Blood Lance is a fairly weak build in Season 9 but its still very fun to play. With this Blood Wave setup, you'll be doing quite a bit of damage while having a lot of survivability.

1. Cast Blood Wave every 8 seconds
2. Cast Blood Lance to get a few corpses
3. Use Corpse Tendrils to group up enemies
4. Cast 3 Corpse Explosions to proc your corpse consumption buffs
5. Spam Blood Lance for damage

Blood Lance was massively nerfed going into season 9 and the build is now quite weak. However its still a really cool build that fun to play. It has great AOE potential with insane damage scaling thanks to Blood Seekers, and it has great scaling thanks to a load of great aspects and uniques.
 
Blood Lance is also still able to deliver massive hits when your Blood Seekers is fully ramped, which is quite fun. It's a build that can perform very well in Torment IV and is actually pretty decent at farming. It's not going to scale into a late game power house and it won't be clearing the highest pits, but its strong enough to clear all of the main game content.

Blood Wave

With the recent nerfs to Soulrift and the addition of Indira's Memory Blood Wave ends up being way more damage while still having great survivability. It will require a Chance to Restore Primary Resource roll on your weapon to work properly but once you have it you'll be doing way more damage. If you don't have that roll, run Soulrift instead.

Resource issues

If you are having any resource issue you can add Iron Maiden to the build. This will allow your Aspect of Cursed Aura to automatically apply Iron Maiden and proc the resource generation.
 
Chance to Restore Primary Resource is also vital on your weapon, make sure you have it!

Uniques

Heir of Perdition: This Mythic Unique gives a 60% damage multiplier as well as some good stats in the form of Crit Chance, Movement Speed, and Lucky Hit Chance.
 
Mutilatoor Plate: One of the best uniques in the whole game giving huge amounts of both damage and tankiness.
 
Ring of Starless Skies: This Mythic gives more damage than any other available option while also giving 50% resource cost reduction and a nice lucky hit roll. Cannot pass this up.
 

Mythic Priority Order

Ring of Starless Skies > Heir of Perdition

Elixirs and Incenses

With the abundance of herbs now in the game it is now very easy to grab some consumables to either shore up big weakness with your character or to massively increase your strengths. I highly recommend you regularly keep Elixirs and Incenses running. Below I laid out the best consumables to use for every situation.
 

Elixirs

If you need more of any specific resistance or armor, use those elixirs first. Once your armor capped and resistance capped, look to use the Elixir of Advantage for the extra attack speed. If you're having trouble staying alive and your armor capped and resistance capped, you can use the Elixir of Fortitude to gain a 20% hp multiplier.
 

Incenses

For incense you have a couple of options, depending on what your character needs.

Core Stat

• Sage's Whisper: Generally the best option as it gives the most amount of damage.
• Spiral Morning: Not a bad alternative, as the all stat gives some armor and also helps hit breakpoints in paragon tree. Only use if there's specific paragon nodes you're trying to reach.
   

Resistance

• Soothing Spices: Best all around option as it gives +10% all resistances and +2% max resistance to everything. Only use another option if needed to hit resistance caps.
   

Defensive

• Song of the Mountain: Great early game option for the +300 Armor
• Reddamine Buzz: Gives +750hp, best option if you are already armor capped.

Defensive Layers

Always make sure you have 1000 armor and 75% all resistances as your number one defensive priority!

Our defense is highly reliant on our skill tree and paragon board. Stand Alone from our passive tree is the single strongest defensive passive in the entire game. We also generate lots of barrier from Necrotic Fortitude due to dealing so many instances of damage, leading to high amounts of Lucky Hit procs. In this vein, we are also able to generate all of our Fortify from a combination of Necrotic Carapace and Hewed Flesh.

From the paragon board we get lots of maximum life percentage, making it very important to get Maximum Life rolls on gear as these two things scale well together. We are also getting lots of damage reduction from Scent of Death and the other damage reduction nodes on that board. Finally, we get access to Damage Reduction While Fortified nodes from the Bloodbath board.

All in all this build is wildy tanky, and can clear the hardest content with ease.

Masterworking and Greater Affixes Explained

Masterworking

Masterworking (MW) enhances an item's stats. Each MW rank boosts all affixes by 5%. Ranks 4,8,12 give a 25% bonus to a random affix (MW Crit).

In this planner, the color blue on an item denotes that the affix got one MW Crit, the color yellow denotes that the item got two MW crits and the color orange denotes that the item got three MW crits.

For future reference the amount of MW Crits on an affix will be denoted by 1MW, 2MW, 3MW.

Greater Affixes

Greater Affixes (GA) on an item force the affix to roll at the top of it's range of possible values and then applies a 50% increase to its value. GA increases are additive with Masterworking increases.

In this planner, the yellow star to the left of an affix denotes that is a GA.

Example

To put it all in to practice, let's calculate what stat increase a GA Affix on a 12/12 Masterworked item with 2 MW Crits gets:

Ranks 1-3, 5-7, 9-11 all give 5% -> 9 * 5% = 45%

Two MW Crits -> 2 * 25% = 50%

GA = 50%

Total = 45% + 50% + 50% = 145%

FAQ

9/19: Updated For Season 10
10/8: Updated for Patch 2.4.1