Diablo 4’s Season 9 is out, and it’s got some really cool new ways to build your character.
These builds change how you play and give you new stuff to do. If you like blowing things up, having an army of minions, or being a tank that hurts enemies when they hit you, Season 9 has you covered.
We’ll look at three strong builds: the Hydra Sorc, the Summoner Necro, and the Poison Thorns Spiritborn Build. We’ll show you how they work, how to play them, and what’s good and bad about each.
1. The Hydra Sorc Build
The Hydra Sorc Build offers one of the most enjoyable gameplay loops in Season 9, combining immense power with streamlined mechanics designed for players who want both efficiency and simplicity.
The core of this build revolves around summoning massive hydras that dish out area damage and scale explosively with your mana pool.
Here’s how the Hydra Sorcerer works:
Key Mechanics:
- Aidan Iris Amulet: Transforms Hydra into a core skill and summons a three-headed hydra that deals area damage. Additional heads grant bonus damage, making hydras immensely powerful.
- Two-Handed Weapon: Temper your weapon to grant summoned hydras an extra 12 heads, offering up to 1,200% bonus damage.
- Mana Pool Scaling: Hydras consume all your mana, adding 5% damage per mana point spent. With endgame gear, you can reach up to 317 mana, boosting damage by over 1,500%.
Essential Gear:
- Chain Lightning Pants: Provides up to 80% increased maximum mana and resource generation. This pants piece is a cornerstone for scaling your mana pool.
- Holican Crest: Adds ranks to your skills, reduces inferno cooldowns, and boosts resource generation for building mana quickly.
- Seed of Bindings and Primordial Binding: These items increase summon damage and mana regeneration, ensuring you can maintain your hydras at full power.
Gameplay Loop:
The Hydra Sorcerer excels in open-world content and high-tier dungeon clears. From Tier 4 content to Tier 80 pits, the gameplay loop follows a simple yet effective rotation:
- Summon Hydras: Always cast hydras when your mana is full to maximize bonus damage.
- Teleport: Use teleport to reposition and evade enemies while maintaining momentum.
- Spam Ultimate: With inferno cooldowns reduced, use the ultimate frequently to further amplify damage.
The high mana consumption, bonus damage scaling, and strong AoE capabilities ensure the Hydra Sorcerer dominates in both boss fights and mob clearing. For enchantments, Hydra Fireball Explosions add even more impact to your fiery summoning spree. However, this build is heavily reliant on perfect gear and masterwork rolls, meaning it performs best at endgame levels.
2. The Summoner Necro Build
If summoning hordes of undead minions and relying on raw power excites you, then the Summoner Necro Build is worth exploring. This build combines durability, consistent damage, and sufficient survivability to make it a top contender for bosses and high-tier dungeons.
Key Mechanics:
- Hand of Nas: Turns skeletal mages into arc mages after 25 attacks. Arc mages teleport away when damaged and occasionally deliver high explosive attacks. While currently bugged and lacking consistent damage boosts, this mechanic remains crucial for scaling.
- Lucky Hit Barrier Generation: The undead mages provide survivability through lucky hit barriers, keeping both you and your minions alive during tough encounters.
- Army of the Dead Ultimate: Increases overall damage, with multipliers stacking up to an impressive 365%.
Essential Gear:
- Aspect of Service and Sacrifice: Boosts mage survivability and increases their damage by 200%. This ensures you can focus purely on offense without risking minion death.
- Critical Strike Scaling: Bonus crit stats and multipliers allow your undead army to consistently deal billions in damage.
- Corpse Tendons: Enhances critical hits and further compounds damage output.
Gameplay Loop:
The Summoner Necro Build aims to overwhelm enemies with a constant barrage of attacks from 12 summoned mages, each enhanced by mastery and passive bonuses. The rotation centers on:
- Keeping Mages Active: Use corpse explosion and other skills to support your mages.
- Trigger Barrier Generation: Barrier ensures survivability as you push through high-difficulty content.
- Army of the Dead Spam: Make use of the ultimate ability for massive AoE and direct boss damage.
Although the Hand of Nas feels buggy, its thematic addition to the build remains valuable. For top-tier optimization, focus on greater masterwork rolls for stats like mage mastery damage, attack speed, and maximum life. This build is well-suited for Torment 4 boss fights, especially when critical strike chance is maximized.
3. Poison Thorns Spiritborn Build
The Poison Thorns Spiritborn Build focuses on tankiness combined with poisonous thorns damage.
This build uses mobility skills and passive enhancements to multiply thorn damage and poison ticks for massive AoE effects.
Despite some nerfs to overpower mechanics, this build stands strong in Tier 4 pits while remaining fun to experiment with.
Key Mechanics:
- Balance’s Max Lattle: Converts thorns damage into poison damage for close enemies, enabling deadly AoE and ticking effects.
- Qu Rune Invasion: Enables mobility skills (e.g., Rock Splitter) to trigger decrepify from the necromancer’s style, boosting thorns damage.
- Dexterity Scaling: Builds dexterity to amplify thorns damage. Key passive bonus increases core stats by up to 75%.
Essential Gear:
- Razor Blade Armor: Greater AIX armor with significant thorns buffs.
- Seposant Tank: Ensures thorn damage is always triggered, maximizing potential white damage and crit.
- Loyalty’s Mantle: All stats bonuses aid dexterity stacking, with high dexterity pushing thorns damage beyond 15,000.
Gameplay Loop:
The Thorns Barbarian thrives on mobility and constant DPS output. Its rotation is highly active:
- Activate Barriers: Barriers increase thorns by 20% and provide survivability.
- Rock Splitter Spam: Use mobility attacks like Rock Splitter for constant thorn triggers.
- Scale Poison Damage: Amplify poison ticks with strategic positioning in close combat.
While this build lacks optimization for Torment 4 bosses, it performs exceptionally well against densely packed enemy mobs. When fully geared and refined, the concept promises a unique and fun gameplay style that could see thorns damage scaling up to 20 billion at peak performance.
Challenges and Limitations
While all three builds provide powerful endgame options, they come with challenges:
- Gear Dependency: Both Hydra Sorcerer and Minion Necromancer require perfect masterwork gear to maximize damage and efficiency.
- Bugged Items: Hand of Nas lacks reliable scaling for critical situations, limiting the Necromancer’s potential.
- Overpower Nerfs: Poison Thorns Spiritborn Build lost some of its season 8 strength, although newer mechanics provide alternative paths to massive damage.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, Season 9 in Diablo 4 brings some great character builds to the table.
You can pick based on what you enjoy – maybe it’s fire-breathing Hydras, a swarm of minions, or a super-tough Thorns setup.
Each one plays differently.
The Hydra Sorc is a good starting point and packs a punch. The Summoner Necro Build is solid for summoner fans, especially later in the game.
And the Poison Thorns Spiritborn Build is a fun, different way to play if you like being a tank.
What’s your pick?
Hydras, an army, or thorns? Tell everyone which build you’re starting with in Season 9!
