I believe most Diablo players have used Blood Lance Necromancer build as I have.It looks amazing, and super fun to play and I am climbing toward Nightmare 100, but there is one major roadblock preventing further progress. It literally breaks the game.
What Is The Major Roadblock?
When you are using Blood Lance, depending on the severity of the situation, you can experience mild stutters, freezing for a few seconds to half an hour, disembodied camera, movement and so on, all the way to blue screening your PC. Blood Lance lingers in enemies for 3 seconds, and every time you hit an enemy with Blood Lance, any enemy with this debuff is also hit.
Enhanced Blood Lance can pierce enemies that are already debuffed, helping us spread it further. And what brings it all together is the aspect of hungry Blood that can fire off additional Blood Lance when they hit targets that are debuffed.
Knowing this, with enough attack speed and essence, we can group packs up, spread the debuff and every proc of the aspect also hits everyone debuffed. This leads to an incredible cascade of damage. But Diablo 4 Gold you get for defeating the enemy at the end will not be affected.
When Will It Happen?
Most of the time I can use it normally, despite the huge number of calculations happening, so long as the enemies will die after a few cascades it works just fine. Using this build can be problematic when the enemies have higher health, like in a very high nightmare dungeon, or when there are these purple shield monsters in a group, or both.
I don't know exactly what's going on behind the scenes in the game, but it seems like this damage reduction aura adds another layer to the calculation, if the enemy is high health pack or elite, I'm basically guaranteed to freeze for a few minutes, or if the enemies have very high health as well, I'll freeze forever or even blue screen.
The Technical Limitation: Freezed State
When you enter this freezed state, you can still move around freely and path through normally locked doors and any other barriers until you reach sections of the map that haven't loaded in yet. Interestingly, this lag doesn't just happen to me, a player called StruthGaming shared his experience on Reddit. Everyone in the same dungeon has the exact same lag time as me.
Even more frightening is that people in the same division of the world also share this lag. World lag so far has been far less dramatic, the spikes are much shorter and resolve quickly. It seems like the open world has a much higher budget for processing all of these calculations.
That being said, I suspect if I had far less damage and was in a busy zone like a Helltide, the results would be devastating for everyone so this is something Blizzard needs to address soon. This puts me in an odd position.
Some Unpleasant Experiences
This type of build feels like when Blood Necromancer goes naturally to the top level of a Nightmare Dungeon, Blood Lance is only effective if it has fast attack speed, good essence economy, and high health enemies. If you do easy content with this build it feels terrible, for every enemy that dies early, it's one less enemy to generate cascades of damage.
Yet in the harder content this ability is apparently designed to do, it simply cannot function. I've been experimenting with a number of builds which has lead me to having a severe lack of aspects and some Diablo 4 Items. Still, I was able to level up to Nightmare around 80, but the character abilities were missing a lot.
And it's quite frustrating that my ceiling with this build is a technical limitation, and a very annoying one at that. A dungeon that should take 10 minutes, may take an hour with a few extended lag events which isn't sustainable or enjoyable.
My Concerns About This Build
Considering the danger this build poses to the wider world and player experience, there's a chance blizzard may fix it but I fear they may just nerf it into oblivion or totally change how it works. I want to do an in-depth guide on how to play this build, but I may have to wait for it to run more consistently. In the meantime, you can still keep using Blood Lance if you want to explore something yourself, and maybe you'll find some new discoveries.
Essentially, it all revolves around accumulating attack speed, reducing essence cost, the chance of lucky hits generating essence, and if you have some lucky hits and wands, using Blood Lance for overwhelming upgrades, stacking overpower damage and life, and grouping enemies with corpse tendrils and then spamming Blood Lance through them in the best line you can see.
