[Advice] The Ravenous Hoard (Melee Crit Skeletons, with a Whispering Twist)

Hi all! 👋 I'm working on a build, but I find that it's stagnating somewhat around T10-T11. While I know that the synergy between Dead Reckoning and Fleshcrafter makes for a very high DPS build for relatively cheap, SkeleMages is also extremely meta, and so the gear for it is harder to find and more expensive when found than it would be otherwise.

For this build, I really wanted to lean into the fantasy of a ravenous horde, crawling across a map and killing everything into which it can sink its teeth. So I have a focus on Skeleton Warriors with Feeding Frenzy, so that they can leap to nearby enemies. I've augmented my horde with defensive Zombies and Carrion Golems, Phantasms linked to the Skeletons, and some support Spectres as is pretty standard.

When I was browsing uniques listed on the wiki page for Minions, I came across Ancient Skull, a helmet which reduces minion HP, but increases minion movespeed and crit chance, as well as giving "Whispers" when minions critically strike:

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Minions which hear the whispers take 20% of their maximum life as chaos damage per second, have 50% increased attack speed and damage, and do not listen to you

"Do not listen to you" means that minions don't follow the Exile, are aggressive by default, don't focus targets marked by Signal Prey, and are not recalled by Convocation.

Because of Ancient Skull's crit synergy, I took a number of nodes that emphasize minion crit damage, supported my skeletons with Increased Critical Strikes, as well as grabbing Assassin's Mark and Precision supported by Generosity.

The current PoB is here, and while I think I've configured everything appropriately, the damage seems a little high. I'm not sure how "Total DPS" is calculated, but I can confirm that this build doesn't do anywhere near 1.3 million DPS 😂

I'd planned on using this character for map-clearing, as well as speeding through content like Delirium Mirrors, Blight, Incursions, Delves, Legion, Abyss, Expedition, etc. I do not expect this to do well versus bosses, though I'd like to beat Maven or the Searing Exarch some day 😣

So I present this here to you, the experts, in the hope that you can offer me some advice. I have all of 20 Chaos to my name right now, but maybe I could farm something with my Bane occultist. THe question is how best to spend that currency? Obviously I need to get my defensive flasks in order. I'd also really like to keep Ancient Skull, just because it fits so well with the thematics I'm going for. It's possible that melee skeletons just aren't a viable option past white maps, and that's a real shame, but I'd like to at least try and find out, and ask for optimizations where I can.

Any advice you can offer would be great. "This is dumb, just play X" wouldn't be particularly helpful, but I'd appreciate anyone stopping by nonetheless. Thanks, and good luck!

You don't want to link phantasms to your skeletons.
Reason being that skeletons scale best with melee gems while Phantasms scale with spell gems. In your build however, both your skeletons and phantasms get full value of the supports you're running, but it's rather weak supports.

You should probably not run Ancient skull, it's inconsistent and requires you to have alot of crit chance on your minions. Also, it literally kills your other support minions. Not sure if your 5% life on minion death mastery is outhealing the effect on your support minions though.

I think it's better to run Maw of Mischief for aggressive minions and fully link your minions with proper support gems. Completely ditch the Phantasms linked to your skellies. If you want to run Phantasms I suggest running another damage minion, preferably a spellcaster spectre and link your phantasms to it.

Since you're not really scaling block I suggest running Victario's Charity to get charges for your minion, use Necro Aegis with it. This opens you up to run other spectres.

Lastly, your aura setup is very questionable. You probably just want to run either Pride if you're going full physical dmg or Hatred if you're doing elemental dmg.

Just changing your helm and the gems(Assuming 6-link) would give you these results: https://pastebin.com/E9ZLeXWt

As for upgrades:
6-link -> 21/0 Skelly gem -> Awakened Gems(Cost very cheap at this point of the league) -> Other changes

How does this look?

https://pobb.in/SfGwLMK7_SH2

The damage gets up to 885k per skeleton, 11 skeles max. But that's with *perfect* gear (at least as far as I could tell), and 9.7 million DPS doesn't seem like very much for "absolutely best rolls possible on all gear."

It could be that melees skeletons just aren't in a workable place right now 😕

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Spooky_Noodle wrote:

How does this look?

https://pobb.in/SfGwLMK7_SH2

The damage gets up to 885k per skeleton, 11 skeles max. But that's with *perfect* gear (at least as far as I could tell), and 9.7 million DPS doesn't seem like very much for "absolutely best rolls possible on all gear."

It could be that melees skeletons just aren't in a workable place right now 😕

There's alot of things to learn with minion scaling, it's pretty straight forward once you understand it, but that type of gear is far from perfect.

Melee skeletons are the highest single target dps minion in the game, nothing comes close to them. You just gotta figure out how to scale them.
I run a melee skeleton build supported by other minions and it does absolute insane dps. Since I'm the creator of my own build I've been developing it for several leagues now so I've had time to learn how to scale minions and minmax them.

This is my PoB Label:
https://pastebin.com/w5UDYmv0

These are the type of numbers you achieve when you truly have BiS gear and scale them correctly. (Note that configs are the same as yours, in reality you should check the box "Is the enemy a boss" and pick Guardian or Pinnacle boss)

I suggest you take another PoB session and try to figure out how to scale your version of melee skellies best you can. At first glance I can tell that there's alot of improvements you could make. I will say though, chaos conversion minions are kinda weak compared to other versions. Chaos in general have very few damage multipliers it can abuse.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

There's alot of things to learn with minion scaling, it's pretty straight forward once you understand it, but that type of gear is far from perfect.

Tell me more! I'd be very interested to find ways that I could improve the gear especially. I thought I grabbed every minion-related modifier I could find on https://craftofexile.com, but I'm sure I missed something.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

I will say though, chaos conversion minions are kinda weak compared to other versions. Chaos in general have very few damage multipliers it can abuse.

😩 That's a shame. I thought I could maybe use Withering Touch (or Skeletal Atrophy, once I have the points for it) to ramp up single target DPS.

If you feel like sharing any clues as to what I should try out next for Skeletal Warriors DPS, I'd very much appreciate it.

I recently made a ancient skull crit build for mage skeletons with necromantic aegis. To really get high ddps crit skellies that go apecrap on things you will resummon quite a bit but it rips t16 maps and (as an admittedly awful player) deleted doubled guardians and such without much trouble. A few tips if you want to go glass canon necro aegis. Use light of lunaris and take the block nodes just above necro aegis to scale crit multi. Lunaris scales until they hit max block. Link feeding frenzy to a golem (I prefer stones they die much less then chaos in rippy stuff). generosity on hatred/precision. Make sure you run the frenzy and power charge spectres. I prefer to link them with zombies and minion life and speed (they will crit something and take off to kill something anyways so meatshield is useless). The best gems imo for a crit build are crit damage, multistrike, then it depends upon if you are elemental or straight phys. I still prefer minion damage as the skellies are throw away minions and die fast. Then either elemental damage with attacks OR whatever melee support gives you the most damage in pob. DO NOT TAKE damage on full life unless you want to summon every 2 seconds for that extra 2%.... IT IS very useful to get the raise skeleton gem which gives them a 2 second cannot be killed on summon and/OR have a jewel with blessed rebirth for when things get rippy and the screen is filled with DOT effects etc. The idea is they have to kill stuff fast and when the build gets done you will literally have to pace yourself running thru maps not due to lack of things dying, but to keep the whispers stacks from killing your permanent minions. It SEEMS to stack but only on the minion that crits. I have watched spectres slowly die for 30-40 seconds. DO NOT run an AG unless you can max his Chaos and give him a ton of regen (which kind of limits you to making him just another meatshield).

Running vaal haste and saving it for tougher bosses or rippy places helps a lot.
A second curse is awesome especially if you are triad grip cold based.

Running ancient skull is very intuitive based. You have to watch your permanent summons and on rare occasions give them a few seconds to recoup from whispers. Probably the fastest map clear on skeletons you can get BUT comes with the downside of having to max their chaos res and watch closer as they are not near as tough as normal summons with whispers.

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Spooky_Noodle wrote:

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Deadandlivin wrote:

There's alot of things to learn with minion scaling, it's pretty straight forward once you understand it, but that type of gear is far from perfect.

Tell me more! I'd be very interested to find ways that I could improve the gear especially. I thought I grabbed every minion-related modifier I could find on https://craftofexile.com, but I'm sure I missed something.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

I will say though, chaos conversion minions are kinda weak compared to other versions. Chaos in general have very few damage multipliers it can abuse.

😩 That's a shame. I thought I could maybe use Withering Touch (or Skeletal Atrophy, once I have the points for it) to ramp up single target DPS.

If you feel like sharing any clues as to what I should try out next for Skeletal Warriors DPS, I'd very much appreciate it.

First of all, you're missing three very large sources of additional damage in your PoBs:

1. Proper Auras
2. Curses/Hexes
3. Animate Guardian

Your skill tree is also pretty suboptimal.
I've never made a chaos conversion skelly build, but I'd figure I made it something like this:

https://pastebin.com/VH1Ez9ZD

For now, this is the highest I can push it while making it a playable build. Afaik, something like this would be true BiS items costing 1000s of exalted orbs to craft or mirror. Most of these items already exist though and you can simply just mirror them from trade.
Keep in mind that this is all out on offense though so you got the template for a chaos build skelly build doing alot of dmg here. Defenses are probably pretty low, just basic resistances, armour, life and Molten Shell.
Making it tanky would require going full block with a Life on Block shield setup.

Minion survival is also probably low here, to make the build truly feel good, sacrificing one cluster and a wand for a shield setup and running minion + block wheels is probably adviced.
A tankier version would probably look something like this:

https://pastebin.com/gcXW9ZgS

If you want to learn how to scale chaos skeletons, study this PoB and it should give you some hints of what you're lacking.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

I've never made a chaos conversion skelly build, but I'd figure I made it something like this:

https://pastebin.com/VH1Ez9ZD

For now, this is the highest I can push it while making it a playable build.

Then for melee skeletons, would you generally recommend elemental damage over Chaos, because there are more options for scaling?

While it's not as aesthetically pleasing as Chaos, a fire or cold approach could be interesting. "March of the Damned" for a kind of hell theme, or "Winter is Coming." Since I was partially interested in this build as a way to stomp Blight, the chill/freeze from Cold minions could be helpful there.

I know this is going back to Chaos, but do you know if "Increased Effect of Withered" from the passive tree affects Withered applied by Skeletons, or would it only count for Withered applied by the player/totems?

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Spooky_Noodle wrote:

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Deadandlivin wrote:

I've never made a chaos conversion skelly build, but I'd figure I made it something like this:

https://pastebin.com/VH1Ez9ZD

For now, this is the highest I can push it while making it a playable build.

Then for melee skeletons, would you generally recommend elemental damage over Chaos, because there are more options for scaling?

While it's not as aesthetically pleasing as Chaos, a fire or cold approach could be interesting. "March of the Damned" for a kind of hell theme, or "Winter is Coming." Since I was partially interested in this build as a way to stomp Blight, the chill/freeze from Cold minions could be helpful there.

I know this is going back to Chaos, but do you know if "Increased Effect of Withered" from the passive tree affects Withered applied by Skeletons, or would it only count for Withered applied by the player/totems?

When it comes to scaling minions I believe this is the optimal damage setup:

Cold > Phys > Lightning > Chaos >>>>>>>>>>>> Fire

Cold is the best cause you can get additional scaling from Skitterbots with Bonechill and since Hatred just is, hands down, the best aura by a mile.
Cold also have access to Crushclaw spectres which further boost cold dmg by a large margin with their debuffs. With a cold(and fire) setup you're able to run items like Legacy of Fury and Crown of the Tyrants on your Animate Guardian to boost damage alot aswell. Cold builds also have access to the 9-link mirror tier helm which isn't as strong for phys/chaos builds.

Phys is also pretty strong cause you have access to Dread Banner for Impale. Due to how armour functions, boss armour don't affect phys damage as much as it affects elemental and chaos damage. Pride is also a very strong aura when at full effect.

Lightning scale their damage via Doriyani's Prototype to push enemy resistances as close to -200% as possible. Lightning minions also get access to 50% shock effect due to the massive lightning damage you deal.
The shortcomings of Lightning builds is that Wrath is a pretty awful aura so you can't get very good aura scaling. Lightning also has access to Primal Rhex Matriarch spectres, which like Primal Crushclaws also increase damage taken by 50%. But for Lightning damage instead of cold damage.
I haven't made a lightning build though, Lightning might very well be the best version to run minions if you can manage to get down to -200% lightning res, but I don't think you can do that in the current PoE climate.

Chaos is decent. Much better than I thought it would be. But as I said earlier, the problem with Chaos is that there's very few ways to scale Chaos. Envy is a garbage aura, so is Malevolance as it's a dot Aura. Unlike Lightning builds which can be carried by Spectres, Exposures and Doriyani's, Chaos only has Wither going for it. Chaos builds also have Spirit Offering available which is a large modifier. But it requires you to either ditch Flesh Offering or run Leash of Oblation like I did in the PoB which means you can't run Mageblood or Headhunter.

Fire is just a complete disaster. No ways to scale and Anger is a sorry excuse for an Aura unfortunately. There's absolutely zero reasons to run any type of fire build. Back when SRS were 50% phys converted to fire you actually ran Hatred and 4 green Triads to convert 66% to cold while 33% remained fire.
Now that SRS are 100% fire converted you can't use Triads for them anymore and it's a dead skill cause it does zdps.

As for affixes on gear et.c. In case a modifier or affix doesn't mention "minions" or a specific minion in it's name it doesn't affect them.
An item that says: "X% increased effect of wither" only applies to you. It's you wearing the item after all, not your minions.
However, if it would say: "X% increased effect of wither applied by minions" it would obviously affect minions.

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ZRzAJBlvNx wrote:

I have watched spectres slowly die for 30-40 seconds. DO NOT run an AG unless you can max his Chaos and give him a ton of regen (which kind of limits you to making him just another meatshield).

You can block whispers on support minions with

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Deadandlivin wrote:

Primal Crushclaws also increase damage taken by 50%.

It's actually 20% and it was added to POB last league. Look in calcs. It's called Frgid Roar. :)