[3.14] Kitava's Herald spectre melee/physical necro build (hardcore viable)

+ very tanky (go hardcore!)
+ The spectres never die
+ fun AF and different
- not fastest spectre without UH
- needs some positioning (can't facesmash the keyboard)
- not very cheap to get the most of it

Severed in Sleep: This sword allows your minions to poison 60% of the time they hit. This is how we scale single target damage in this build.
Poison is based on physical damage+chaos damage given, so remember that scaling physical damage we also scale our poison damage!


Double curse: you need whispers of doom or the amulet corruption for this;
1st curse is vulnerability, which will amplify your physical damage by a lot
2nd curse is despair, which will improve the chaos damage and scale very well with the poison mechanics
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Whispers_of_Doom
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Vulnerability
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Despair

Kitava's herald spectre : you can find them in acts 5 or 10, at the Cathedral Rooftop.
They have 3 basic skills: cleave, leap slam and mortar. In this build we focus on the melee part, which is cleave + leap slam
https://poedb.tw/us/mon.php?n=Kitava%27s+Herald

Unending Hunger https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Unending_Hunger : Very offensive. Mandatory. New divination card set "The craving" gives you this.

Grave Intentions : this scales even more the poison/chaos damage of the build
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Grave_Intentions

Carrion Golem: This is a golem that adds physical damage to your non-golem minions, scaling even more our damage output.
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Summon_Carrion_Golem

Vaal Summon Skeletons is both offensive and defensive as it deals damage and disctracts bosses.
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Vaal_Summon_Skeletons

Victario's Charity: For frenzy charges!
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Victario%27s_Charity

Defenses
Call to arms: If you are not aware, we can put skills in our "move mouse button" in order to use them on cooldown all the time.
I did this with guard skills (immortal call, steelskin, molten shell) all the time instead of linking them with the Cast When Damage Taken Support gem.
But after Warcry changes and Soul of Steel notable nerf in 3.11, it's currently a very decent setup to put "Call to Arms" in our mouse button to generate endurance charges all the time and immortal Call linked with Cast When Damage Taken Support.
https://i.imgur.com/nHXsmb7.png

Block!
By using Mistress of Sacrifice together with Bone Offering , we can achieve a decent ~50% attack block + ~25% spell block whilst healing some life during block. This is one of the best defense layers of the game.. don't skip this even on softcore! (remember that dead dps is no dps).
Normally I generate corpses with a desecrate socketed in an unset ring, but you can skip this if you are not focusing so much in endgame bosses that provide no corpses.
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Mistress_of_Sacrifice
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Bone_Offering

Leap slam + fortify I use leap slam + fortify to move around. Because we have spiritual command we move very fast even without a faster attacks support linked
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Leap_Slam
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Fortify_Support
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Spiritual_Command

Convocation
Important for positioning
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Convocation

https://pastebin.com/hAzUgknj

Chaos damage version > https://pastebin.com/MUbFg28G
https://youtu.be/veXgEGNl0qk