While the official release of Season 11 is still some time away, Diablo 4 has already revealed most of its major content, including the new unique items available to each class. This has led to a surge in new builds crafted around these items.
Among them, the new gear for Necromancer is Gravebloom. As a unique weapon, besides its basic attributes, its biggest highlight is its ability to summon golems to deal damage, and these golems respawn very quickly.
Based on this, we'll introduce crafting tips for a golem summoning build centered on Gravebloom.
What Is Golem?
In Diablo 4, besides skills and gear, each class has a unique mechanic that not only serves as a buff but also reflects the class's characteristics. For Necromancer, Book of the Dead is the exclusive mechanic.
This mechanic allows you to summon an assistant for Necromancer and customize its usage. Available types include skeletal warriors and mages, and a golem. Each type has three variants, and each variant has two upgrade opportunities.
Note that you can only choose one of the two upgrade methods: upgrade or sacrifice. Choosing sacrifice means that your summoned creature cannot be summoned again afterward, but it will retain a permanent buff.
The golem introduced here is a massive, ferocious-looking creature with three variants: bone, blood, and iron. Their main functions are:
- Bone golem: Taunts enemies, forcing them to attack the golem.
- Blood golem: Drains the life force of nearby enemies to heal and strengthen itself.
- Iron golem: Becomes a fused steel entity, stunning enemies by slamming the ground.
Gravebloom Introduction
As the core Diablo 4 item of the build introduced here, Gravebloom's most important item effect is that it allows you to summon three small golems, each dealing 40-60% of normal damage, while also providing a 30% attack speed bonus and a 50% golem respawn speed bonus.
Other attributes include:
- 298 Damage Per Second
- + 10% Attack Speed
- + 94 Intelligence
- + 457 Maximum Life
- + 50% Chance for Golem to hit twice
- + 2 Golem Mastery
Gravebloom Golem Build Overview
Based on this mechanic and item, to craft this build and make it effective, you first need to activate two golems as quickly as possible to allow them to deal damage, and then you must add Aspect of Fel Gluttony.
This item, as a Necromancer-exclusive Legendary Aspect, not only allows golems to trigger a second instance of damage upon activation, but also directly increases the golem's damage multiplier.
This, combined with the significant changes to key passive skills in Season 11, means that regardless of the number of summoned minions, everyone will uniformly gain higher attack speed and damage.
How To Choose The Golem Type?
As we've already discussed, Necromancer can summon three golem types, but not all are suitable for crafting Gravebloom Golem Build - the blood golem is the best.
Why this conclusion? We'll analyze it for you.
First, compared to the iron golem, while its active damage is slightly higher than the blood golem, the blood golem has a damage multiplier against single targets.
Furthermore, the iron golem's attack speed is more than 50% slower than the blood golem's, and the blood golem's attack speed is 50% slower than the bone golem's.
Therefore, in terms of overall attack pattern, speed, and any buffs, the iron golem's performance is not outstanding, making it the quickest to pass.
As for the bone golem, it spawns five corpses upon activating its skill and can taunt enemies.
However, its problem is that its normal activation skill doesn't actually deal damage, and AoE damage characteristic that originally belonged to the bone golem is now present in all golems.
In contrast, the blood golem has two advantages: it provides a 50% damage bonus and reduces damage taken by the target, while also restoring your health when activated. More importantly, it deals three times the damage of a normal attack to a single target.
While its speed is slower than the bone golem, this shortcoming is negligible given the significant damage bonus. Furthermore, the blood golem's activation itself deals damage, although this isn't displayed in its skill description.
Based on this, after deciding to choose the blood golem, you can further upgrade it at level 28. The upgrade and sacrifice effects are as follows:
- Upgrade: Your Blood Golem will absorb 15% of the damage for you. When your Blood Golem is healthy, it has 25% damage reduction and a 50% damage bonus.
- Sacrifice: Your maximum health is increased by 10%, but you will no longer be able to summon golems.
More Crafting Tips
To make this build deal high damage and repeatedly sacrifice summons, you need to unlock Hulking Monstrosity legendary node. This increases golem's maximum health by 40% and deals double damage.
In addition, for the two other Book of the Dead variants, skeletal warriors and mages, you need to select their sacrifice effects. Combined with Memento Mori and Sacrificial Aspect, this will grant an additional 60% golem damage bonus.
Furthermore, Gravebloom mace itself is clearly designed specifically for golems. While you can also use it in regular summoning builds, ultimately, the attribute slot it occupies doesn't increase the damage of all summons, only benefiting certain golems.
Overall, this build fully utilizes the value of the new unique items and gives the classic Book of the Dead mechanic a chance to shine in the new season.
If needed after Season 11 goes live, you can also use your creativity to further enrich the skills and gear options of this build based on the guide we have provided, making it more complete and effective!
