{3.10} Speaker for the Dead | The Mass Minion Summoner | League Starter, Leveling Guide 💀

The life recovery from flasks is the "also". The whole point of it is not taking extra damage from bleed while moving.

I'm going with Aul's ammy for Envy. This way I won't need a jewel with chaos damage to spells for ball lightning to poison, and cuz...Envy.

On a side note, I'm tempted to ditch Phantasms for Hypothermia. Not impressed with them, their uptime or their usefulness.

OP, I PM'd you heads up

@ Karyoplasma:

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Karyoplasma wrote:

Is it worth speccing into Commander of Darkness while your gear is bad and then respec later? If yes, what would you remove?

Personally, I didn't because I never felt the need, but capped resists will make you nearly immortal through the storyline. You couldn't get the Skeleton node until Merciless Lab, but a From Dust jewel can help diminish this downside.

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@ Schnubbel_:

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Schnubbel_ wrote:

Why is bloodgrip so good? Because life recovery from flasks or the extra regen? Is it really that strong?

I know its good since i saw it also on other builds but i dont get exactly why since im not that experienced

1. Cheap with solid Life

2. Common enough drop to easily buy up and mass-Vaal for a corrupt implicit like +1 curse.


3. Doubles life recovery from flasks.


1872 life and 979 instant life times 220% becomes 4118 and 2153 life. I can instantly recover to full life from almost dead with a mere drum across these two flasks.

3. Makes you practically immune to most bleeds. Perfect against Labyrinth traps.

4. Life regen is great for summoners. It's a bit less important on this build, though, because of all its Life on Hit. Still great for mitigating things like burning ground, desecrated ground, caustic cloud, poison, ignite, bleed, and other sources of damage over time.

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@ DamageIncorporated:

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

I'm going with Aul's ammy for Envy. This way I won't need a jewel with chaos damage to spells for ball lightning to poison, and cuz...Envy.

It can also let you benefit from Commander of Darkness without a Clarity aura, if you opt for that node.

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

On a side note, I'm tempted to ditch Phantasms for Hypothermia. Not impressed with them, their uptime or their usefulness.

Individually they may not seem like much, but all together they are in fact dealing significant damage. But most importantly they increase your area of effect. When a Spectre kills things at max range and spawns Phantasms, those Phantasms can turn outward and attack things even further out. With so many, they are more likely to be able to attack in directions your Spectres aren't facing. A few monster kills in a room puts Phantasms in that room to clear everything else in it. They have built-in pierce, making them reliable against packs you haven't or can't curse with Projectile Weakness. They are also 11 more chances to land a proliferated freeze, thanks to Hatred giving them cold damage.

Uptime shouldn't really be a problem while clearing, and they're not intended for bosses.

If you want to focus on Spectre DPS, don't forget Vile Toxins provides a generic 50% More damage as long as you're poisoning things.

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

OP, I PM'd you heads up

Yep, I got it. I suppose I can just answer here: I like to keep old gear in case I need to go back to it for a test or present it as an example like earlier. Sorry!

So, level 78 now, all goes well. Well put together build for sure. I tend to stay away from builds that cant fit in Kaom;s Roots for Uber Elder, but I was thinking, that might not be a big deal. Ditch Mark of Submission and use Dream Fragment. There ya go; can't be frozen, can't be chilled.

Question though< I was running around with three Frost Sentinels and then I recalled your front page...
Why the Solar Guard?

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

Question though< I was running around with three Frost Sentinels and then I recalled your front page...
Why the Solar Guard?

Under the 'Playstyle' tab, it's stated: "The one lone Solar Guard is there to proliferate Ignite. Any kills with Damage Over Time count as your own, which in turn will trigger Victario's Charity's 10% chance to grant a Power Charge to nearby Allies on Kill."

@ DamageIncorporated:

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

So, level 78 now, all goes well. Well put together build for sure.

Awesome! =oD

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

I tend to stay away from builds that cant fit in Kaom;s Roots for Uber Elder, but I was thinking, that might not be a big deal. Ditch Mark of Submission and use Dream Fragment. There ya go; can't be frozen, can't be chilled.

I'm pretty sure Elder's 'chill' isn't a normal chill, as otherwise an "of Heat" flask would suffice. However, you could still wear Kaom's Roots. You would lose Hatred and CWDT+Spirit Offering, but neither are core to the build. Just be sure your resists are solved elsewhere or swap out the curse ring for a strong resistance ring.

The only real downside is if you're using +1 Spectre boots. Since the build does not rely on Spectres for damage, this is also fine, but it presents a larger cost to get back a level 84 Spectre from Oba's Cursed Trove. Alternatively, if you plan to frequent Uber Elder fights between normal mapping, you could settle on level 83 Spectres freely raised from completed 270+ Delve nodes. One level is a difference of 10% more life and damage, but again the build does not rely on Spectre damage. Heck, go all the way and throw on a Kaom's Heart. (Freeze prolif might still be useful against the adds, though.)

This needs testing, but since Charged Dash is a teleport that doesn't rely on your attack speed, and as long as the Elder chill isn't dropping the value of your movement speed and instead is only changing your character's animation rate (like Temporal Chains), you might be able to easily escape the chill field using Charged Dash.

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DamageIncorporated wrote:

Question though< I was running around with three Frost Sentinels and then I recalled your front page...
Why the Solar Guard?

TerenceCSZ answered, but I'll follow up: Every once in a while I'll notice a blue orb around my minions. It's not reliable at only a 10% chance, because the rest of my minions just kill so fast that it's not often mobs die to a degen, but it does occasionally happen.

Three Frost Sentinels are perfectly fine. I just like the look of Ignite degens littering the whole area, helping to purify stragglers. "Welcome to Hell, boys."

At one point I was testing having one lightning-based Risen Vaal Advocate to proliferate Shock. In the end I felt I was crippling him too badly with EE. I thought of switching to a Fire trigger, but that'd hurt Added Fire, and Ball Lightning, Charged Dash, and Static Strike were just too good. What about Avatar of Fire? Kills poison.

I also tested the physical Risen Vaal Advocate, thinking it was okay if their clear sucked since I had Phantasms for that. I had hoped they'd be powerful against bosses with their Mortar's AOE overlap, but they were sooo weak. Barely any faster than the other Spectres against a boss, if at all. I wondered whether it was because they didn't actually have AOE overlap, or if their damage was just very low to compensate. Now that we have actual monster damage data, I can see it was the latter. So disappointing. I would have loved the purity of having all physical minions.

GUIDE UPDATE
I have added a new Overview section to the main post. The purpose of this section is to help clarify how the build works and what its goals are.

Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can improve this section! It often helps to have fresh eyes on something I'm overly familiar with and end up overlooking the simplest of things.


Art by Ivan Vilmant

I Like that section. Good overview im not missing anything so far. Gj Just reaches a8 solaris temple so the real fun is only starting for me now

I moved on but this was up there with one of my favs.

Just killed red Elder (T11) at lvl 82 with no Empower Gem and almost no lvl 20 gems.
Died once but only because i suck and didnt notice game mechanic and did not move, totally my fault, could have been deathless ez.
Still have so much to improve (life only 4600ish, uncapped res and some jewels and gear missing/to improve) and build already delivering, can't wait to see what it can achieve.
AND, most important, it is really fun! :)
If no incoming nerf, this will be my starting build next season, thanks Hercanic for the build, for the VERY nice guide and for the outstanding "customer service" :)

Keep it up!

Super new player here (Diablo refugee, what's up) looking around for a solid summoning build that looks to be fast and fun and end game effective so I can learn it and maybe run it when the new league starts. The work that went into this one is intense! Bravo.

This doesn't look super newbie-friendly, but I'm going to give it a run anyway. I'm going to struggle a bit I think without a fully fleshed-out leveling guide for it (bc noob), but I'll try to manage. When I'm super early and running around with only 3 (will grab 4 soon) links to work with, what's my best setup? I figure the zombies are just meat shields so right now I have skeletons + minion damage + phantasms support and then a flaming skull damage spell to spam. Didn't know if I should bother getting minion damage on the zombies.

Anyway, fantastic looking guide, looking forward to getting deeper into this game with it and trying to make it work, the gameplay in your videos looks like a blast.