News Tag: Diablo 4 Blood Lance Necromancer

With the beginning of Season of the Construct, the world of Diablo 4 has received a large amount of new content and items, and Mutilator Plate is one of them.

This Unique Chest Armor of Necromancer class will not only provide significant stat bonuses to Lords of Death, but will also be a great addition to the meta build. Eventually, you can reverse Blood Lance’s damage and turn your weakness into a strength.

In this guide, we’ll cover two ways to obtain a Mutilator Plate. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Two Ways To Find Mutilator Plate

However, no matter how hard you work to obtain Mutilator Plate early in the game, the process will be much more difficult. Of course, players can earn Mutilator Plate as a random reward in many World Tier 3 events. However, the chances of success are slim, prompting players to resort to other methods.

Random Rewards

As mentioned before, the first way to get Mutilator Plate in Diablo 4 is to rely on luck. Starting in World Tier 3, players can find this and other unique items as random Diablo 4 item rewards in many endgame activities.

Participate in World and Seasonal Events, challenge World Bosses, explore Nightmare and Vault Dungeons, and you might just get lucky in the end.

However, the chances of success are negligible, since besides the rarity of unique items, it’s also worth considering that you might not get what you want.

Challenge Beast In The Ice

Alternatively, players can challenge Beast in the Ice. You will encounter this Uber boss in World Tier 4, which is a serious challenge for any player. However, the chance of getting a unique item after defeating this enemy is much higher.

To find this boss, head to Fractured Peaks area and visit Kyovashad Gatehouse to the southeast. Next, walk a little further east until you reach Glacial Fissure dungeon. The entrance to this high-level dungeon will only appear in World Tier 4, but that’s not the only requirement.

To enter this dungeon, players will need to use Glacial Fissure Nightmare Sigil, which can be crafted by simply bringing 9 Distilled Fear and 250 Sigil Powder to any Occultist.

Players can obtain Distilled Fear by completing Nightmare Dungeons Tier 30 or higher, while obtaining Sigil Powder requires recycling unnecessary Nightmare Sigil from Occultists.

However, once you reach World Tier 4 and get Glacial Fissure Nightmare Sigil, it doesn't mean you will be 100% successful. Of course, defeating Beast in the Ice increases your chances of successfully obtaining Mutilator Plate. However, you may get other items and Diablo 4 Gold as reward, or you may not defeat this powerful enemy at all.

Stats

If your Necromancer is lucky enough to get a Mutilator Plate, it will make a great addition to its late game build. In addition to the stat bonus, the developers are also increasing the damage done by Blood Lance by 10-20%.

More importantly, using Blood Lance after equipping Mutilator Plate will not cause damage to itself, and you can even gain Fortified with 1-2% of your maximum health each time you use it. 

Additionally, there is a 5% chance of forming a Blood Orb after casting Blood Lance. This is really crazy! Regardless, this is a great unique item for Blood Lance Necromancer build!

Blood Lance build I’m working on looks great, is super fun to play, and is working its way up to Nightmare Dungeon level 100. But there’s one major hurdle preventing further progress, and it really breaks the game.

Blood Lance

The effect of Blood Lance usually lingers on the enemy for 3 seconds. Every time you hit an enemy with Blood Lance, any enemies with this debuff will also hit. The enhanced Blood Lance can pierce through already debuffed enemies, helping us spread it further.

And what holds it all together is an Aspect of Hungry Blood. When they hit a debuffed target, we can fire additional Blood Lances. Knowing this, with enough attack speed and Essence, we can group packs up, spreading the debuff. And every process of that Aspect will also debuff everyone.

This can cause incredible cascading damage. Most of the time, this is fine. Despite the heavy calculations that take place, it works fine as long as the enemy dies after a few cascades.

Glitch

But problems arise when enemies have higher health, like in a high-level Nightmare Dungeon, or when there are these purple shielding mobs in a group.

Depending on the severity of the situation, you may experience minor stuttering. Including freezing for a few seconds to half an hour, camera disappearing, and moving. This happens until your computer has blue screens.

I don’t know what exactly is going on behind the scenes, but it seems like this Damage Resistance Aura adds another layer of calculation. And this enemy may be in high health or elite status. I can guarantee a few minutes of freezing. Or if the enemy’s health is also very high, I’ll freeze forever or even a blue screen.

When you enter this frozen state, you can still move freely and pass through normally locked doors and any other obstacles. Until you reach a part of the map that hasn’t been loaded yet.

Interestingly, this lag doesn’t just happen to me, anyone in my instance gets affected as well. Everyone in the same dungeon has the same lag time as me. Even scarier, anyone in the same partition of the world will also share the latency.

The world lag so far has been far less severe, the peaks are much shorter, and it resolves quickly. The open world seems to have a higher budget to handle all these calculations.

That being said, I suspect that if I had far less damage and was in a busy area like Helltide, the results would be devastating for everyone. So Blizzard needs to fix this as soon as possible.

Implications

This type of build feels like Blood Necromancer’s natural entry into the top tier of Nightmare Dungeon. But Blood Lance is only effective when the attack speed is fast. Essence economy is good, and against enemies with high health.

It will feel bad if you do simple content with this build. For every enemy that dies early, there is one less enemy that deals with cascading damage. In harder content, however, it doesn’t work at all.

I’ve been trying a few builds that have resulted in me being severely lacking in Aspect and sub-optimal gear. Therefore, I highly recommend that you accumulate more gear through Diablo 4 Gold before you start, in case you need it.

Also Read: Diablo 4: New Lead In Search For Secret Cow Level! - An Interesting Encounter

Still, I could advance to a round Nightmare Dungeon level 80, but the characters were missing a lot. Frustratingly, my cap on this build is a technical limitation, and a very annoying one at that. A dungeon that should have taken 10 minutes could now take an hour, with some long lag events.

But if you can’t upgrade quickly because of this limitation, or you want to reach a higher level urgently. You can choose Diablo 4 Boosting Service, which not only helps you quickly level up but also boosts the stats of all your characters.

Given the impact this build had on the wider world and player experience, Blizzard needed to fix it. But I worry they might just nerf it into oblivion or change the way it works entirely.

Final Thoughts

I’d like to provide an in-depth guide on how to play with this build, but I may have to wait for it to run more consistently. In the meantime, if you want to explore something on your own, you can still clear some high-level content until the enemies get healthy.

Essentially, it all revolves around accumulating attack speed, reducing Essence cost, Lucky Hit Chance to generate Essence. If you have some Lucky Hits and Wands, you can use Blood Lance for an Overpower upgrade. So stack Overpower damage and health, and group enemies with Corpse Tendrils. Finally, send them Blood Lance on the best route you can see.