💀3.15💀 iLL3aT’s Cold Skeleton Warriors/Archers/Mages ❆ League Starter ❆ All Content ❆

Finished the league this weekend at lvl 95 and want to post my results!

Switched over from the physical build a few weeks ago. Changing to the gloves resulted in me being short 5% in fire resist and I never got above 0% chaos resist, but for the first time thru on a necro build, i just dealt with it and I don't think it hurt too bad!

I also did not have the same cluster jewel setup as i just went with my own crafts.
Large: Call to Slaughter and 2 sockets.
Medium: Precise Commander and Vengeful Commander.
had a lot of To Dust jewels too!

overall I pretty much had enough DPS to take on all bosses. Sirus at A8 is above my skill level though, I knock him down to the final stage easily enough, I quickly lose track of him and then just keep getting one-shotted after that. but the DPS is there if i was better! :)

Did 3 Delve bosses at a depth of around 300 with no issues at all too.
Conquers and guardians melted pretty easily as did Catrina the one time i ran the mastermind.

Full juiced T16 maps were slow but doable with no issues as were the simulacrums although wave 19 and 20 started to stress my build. I can see where the rebirth cluster mod can come in handy at that point!

Spectres and AG: in the end i had 2 redemption sentries and 2 Kitava's herald and the typical AG setup with the king maker which i would say is a required item, post nerf. They all survived all encounters without issues.

Cost:
Wands were 7 exalt each and took a lot of patience and off hours live price checking to get them at that price, Amulet was another 1.5 exalt. Total cost was around 20 exalt. Prolly never spent more than 5 exalt on a build before too...

Physical vs Cold:
They seem to be fairly even in the DPS when they do when mapping. Although the freeze is a nice bonus in maps and the delve.
I tried using the bossing gems, deathmark and multistrike a few times but didn't use them enough to see just how much more of a boss killer they were (always forgot to bring them with to swap out!) which means the map setup took care of the bosses good enough!
I would prolly take the cold over the physical in the end though.


POB: https://pastebin.com/GDbKptCU

Might look at doing a Spectres build next league but will make that call then. if not will try these guys out again!
Thanks for the build!

Hi Guys,

Sorry for the lack of replies lately - work has been way too busy. I'll try to respond to everyone this weekend.

Harvest looks cool so far. No major to the build(s) so far based on what they've revealed, but since we use mostly rare gear, I suspect there is probably a few ways to pick up a few points of damage or some additional survivability.

The league mechanic itself seems like bestiary with a few extra steps - but it looks fun to me.

Hi, if you rework/look at your guide. Please have a look at the pob and the guide in the gem section. Gems are not the same in the pastebin to the written guide.

What about Fleshcrafter ?

Could help with cold damage ?

Following this build in SSF, i can definitely recoment it for next patch cause i don't think it will be hitted hard (since we have been hitted twice in a row so far(knocking wood)). I am sitting at 4Mdps in a few days of playing, compared to phys version freeze and shatter helps a lot, dps seems comparable and most of the mobs keep getting freezed. I tweaked your pob and in ssf you can definitely reiably reach 1M per skellie without much headache.

"

Dudekroc wrote:

What about Fleshcrafter ?

Could help with cold damage ?

- While minions have energy shield, their hits ignore monster elemental resistances
I think this chest will make us DPS gods

"

Samodin wrote:

"

Dudekroc wrote:

What about Fleshcrafter ?

Could help with cold damage ?

- While minions have energy shield, their hits ignore monster elemental resistances
I think this chest will make us DPS gods

It's not good for the built it will do 2 things.

1) it will make us better against normal mobs
2)but it will decrease our boss DPS.


The reason that happens is we use elemental equilibrium.
you would need to cut it if you use the Fleshcrafter.
How it works is we increase enemies elemental resist to fire/lightning and decrease their cold resits
frost bomb for example give them -25% resits to cold
Elemental Equilibrium:Enemies you hit with Elemental Damage temporarily get +25% Resistance to those Elements and -50% Resistance to other Elements.

so if you hit them with armageddon brand or a random fire/lightning skill they lose 50% cold resistance.

the chast make their resistance always 0. You can use it but its more of a leveling gear for this built a completely different built or if your to lazy to even want to use a spell to proc Elemental Equilibrium.

from my experience i only had problems with normal mobs when they have endurance charges and extra resistance and only because they were under delirium. and when i started to delve around 250+

if its good for this built its not because of the ignore elements resistance but because of the ES. It will mean they are full life for longer so they have double damage because of Renewal on a cluster yewels longer.(Minions have 10% chance to deal Double Damage while they are on Full Life)

it also comes with the very big downside of not being that good defensively for you.

s summary of what it does.
pro's
-more dps against normal mobs(white blue yellow)
-3-6 extra skill point depending if you want the jewel socket
-a extra skill gem slot
-makes Renewal better

cons
-less boss dps
-less survivability because the chest isn't that good defensively.

the question is is the pro's better than the cons and make up for the loss of dps against bosses because we lose EE.

I also say this but we're also getting a skill tree rework and EE might just move to a spot were it isn't worth picking up.

Hey Exiles,

Thanks for all the comments! I'll try to answer them all here. With patch notes this week, I plan to update the guide for 3.11, and will be more active here again once league picks up.

@Danik0409 - I'll add one in the 3.11 update, or in a following one.

@critter19 - For +2 chests, you look for unlinked ones as well, with the cost to six link being extremely cheap in delirium (and likely in harvest as well).

@b4timert - A huge congratulations to you for hitting 40/40! Sirus is a really bad fight with any kind of ping unfortunately - his die beams have killed me a few times before they actually fire/hit the area I am. Anwswers:

Added other elemental/physical/chaos damage for minions is fine. Only you the player dictates elemental equilibrium. I believe elemental equilibrium maps are only the monsters against you. Beast bosses: no idea, though reef was known to get craicic monsters more often back in betrayal.

For curse gloves, I use an elemental weakness pair on my AG (went with +1/life on mine). Enfeeble/temp chains are also useful. For AG, I used a cheap version all league, except with a kingmaker. He died twice, but with kingmaker at 50c, it was easy to replace. Upgrades are more or less in the order in 8(12). Anything past the awakened melee phys is really just min maxing and you don't get a lot compared to the earlier upgrades.

Minion related: Spectres, especially redemption sentries if you're okay with that. I test drove a homebrew version of them in 3.10 and will likely play them in 3.11 (old tendinitis in my wrists flared up, I'm going to try to play PoE one handed). I used lesser multiple projectiles and chain - very satisfying to watch. Alternatively, probably something to do with the new generals warcry. Another alternative I wanted to try out was Cast while channeling SRS (w/ minion instability) - fleshcrafter can let minions die right away...so it's probably just a bad version of cyclone.

@Tallion99 - Sirus is one where you have to know all of his attacks by heart. I failed 4 of my first 5 fights in metamorph, but through learning the fight and watching videos, he's okay now. I believe in you. :) Simu 19+ and especially kosis are difficult for most builds. I just ran around in circles barely looking at the screen in simu - with phase run and phasing (flask), you're pretty hard to hit, but the hits hurt.

I agree on kingmaker - as long as it's 50c (delirium price) and not 1.4 ex (metamorph price). At 1.4 it's too expensive for most players. I think the DPS for phys and cold is pretty similar on bosses for most players, but I think min/max cold is better due to better medium jewels (outside of very expensive megalomaniacs). I league started phys before I got my 4g triads.

the only difference between phys and ele skelies are gems, the gloves and some points (EE for example).
And after some days you will get most of the gems at level 19 for some chaos.

So it is a easy way to play phys and than, if you have the gloves etc. you can switch for some chaos to elemental if you want.

Pt 2 of replies, and some general thoughts:

@the_Arkain - Yep, that's on my list. I had updated post 1, but life got in the way when I got to post 2. I changed a few things from pre-3.10 and 3.10 after playing a few weeks.

@Dudekroc, Samodin, b4timert - Fleshcrafter is interesting. b4timert, I think we're both interpreting it differently. I interpret it as more akin to the mod on The Eternity Shroud url]https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Eternity_Shroud[/url]. Those players still use despair for additional - res I believe, so it's not always setting it to zero. I might be wrong though.

I'm not 100% on how it works, but based on my reading, I interpret ignoring onster elemental resistances as basically -50% elemental resistances for bosses. Assuming no frost bomb and that the only -resist we have is elemental equilibrium and -9% from the helmet (on an AG), this could be as much as a 46% more multiplier (159/109). With more sources of -res (elemental weakness on hit gloves, frostbite either as an aura or as a "on hit" on a ring, frost bomb/avatar of fire), the upside gets worse (~30% more).

To minmax fleshcrafter, ideally, you want 49% minion chaos resistance (get the stat on ghastly jewels). There is not a lot of scaling if at all for minion energy shield, so presumably it's the same EHP, but just ES based instead of life. I presume the faster start of ES recharge goes to 100%, which means they start regenerating in one second. A few more hidden upsides here: damage on full life support works - 4r2b is a possible usable chest now. No new for renewal.

The chest also suggests to play an ES style instead of life. Some spectre player got to 8k ES, but I'm not sure how viable this is for skeletons. For me in delirium at least, the chest was a huge source of life for me. I'll probably try out the chest if I get one, but I doubt I stick with one since a +2 chest is probably just better (unless of course I hit a +2 one of these - depends on the cost).

@Fucrem2 - That's good to hear from a SSF standpoint! I would love to play SSF at some point, but I like challenges too much. I would probably do it if we could play trioSF (with two friends) or something.

@the_Arkain - At the end of the day, they are pretty similar. I had plans to write in a phys section, but ran out of time. I'll see if I can do so when writing the pre-3.11 update.