❄️The Snowflake - Cold Crit Holy Relic of Conviction - shatters, zoomzoom, bossing, T17 ❄️

PoB: https://pobb.in/wyJI4EoLbQFN

Video of T16 mapping + Expedition: https://youtu.be/ySgMQqJLZ3s

my current character: https://pobb.in/2PQJ9L_H8PwE

T16 Deli+harvest mapping: https://youtu.be/6RiMETswT48
70q feared first attempt: https://youtu.be/9CWcX7by0jg
T17 Lycia fight: https://youtu.be/MrS-TzJk4MI

Variant 1: Mage bane, EE Keystone, Max Roll Atziri without corruption:

https://pobb.in/7N4HBlvv91_L

Variant 2: Rare boots, pathing to Inveterate, grabs EE Keystone

https://pobb.in/7te3XH_Dr2rO


The hardest to get items can be a chest with Elemental Equilibrium, Life gain on Hit Sword and impossible escape jewel. These PoBs provide alternatives to these items that are much more available to a broader playerbase.

Life gain on hit is solved with an Elder Ring, Supression cap is reached through the Tree and the Elemental Equilibrium keystone is used directly. It comes at the cost of losing one Large cluster jewel, it is a bit of a damage loss, but the stats it provided are then gained through the passive tree itself, so the overall damage loss is not that big.

Open jewel slots can all be %life and Minion damage Cobalt Jewels with other useful stats. However a Fortress Covenant jewel Socketed in the cluster Jewel spot can be great damage too. You can try and see if other Witch Ascendancy Nodes are available for cheap on Forbidden Jewels that might add power to your character.

A tip on a timeless jewel:

Apart from Elegant Hubris, this one



has 20% Minion Damage on "Faith and Steel" and "Devotion" left of the templar Start, and gives you alot of Dexterity there.

The PoB show the must-have stats on the items, you have to fix Resists and Attributes by filling in the empty Affixes on items, buy rare jewels, and use Tattoos to Balance out your attributes for Rational Doctrine.

Useful Wiki Page which Tattoos are useful

Pros:
- cold crit shattering
- butter smooth mapping with screenwide aoe and oneshotting tough rares
- the first minion build to be great with Legions and Breach
- semi-zoomy feel, can replace Hatred with Haste to be faster
- no influenced items needed, no time wasted rolling implicits!
- niche items and a character progression that feels "fresh"
- great bossing dps with investment
- low amounts of buttons to press
- single target setup same as clear
- no ramp-up, instant damage delivery

Cons:
- niche items might get scarce/hard to get. If you aren't creative enough to find alternatives, you might get stuck
- super-endgame not as good as other meta builds, very hard to 1-phase uber bosses, builds like CoC DD have better options there
- when Animate Guardian dies, it sucks
- medium entry cost

1) A clever implicit ...

Synthesized Swords and Axes can roll "Life gain on Hit" as implicit -> use it to replace LGoH as a gem link, so we can use 4G Socket gloves easily!



These are very rare however, if you can't find one, it is okay to use LGoH Gem with 3G+1R gloves, it is about 10% dmg loss, so not a big deal. but we are a special snowflake so we use the niche weapon :D


2) ... to double the sustain



Since I am choosing to go EB/MOM with disciplin Aura as a defensive layer for more max hit/Ehp, and we already have life gain on hit ... why not add ES Gain on hit too? These watchers are way cheaper than the overpriced meta vitality on hit, and effectively double the sustain of your EHP. It also solves all mana problems. If we do not add Zealotry to generosity (wouldnt add much dps anyways) we now create consecrated ground on hitting rare and uniques, that applies 10% increased damage taken with the second watchers property if you can get it.


3) Elemental Equilibrium and Forbidden Jewels

Enemies have -50% Cold resist .... sounds great?


(-25% from EE, -25% from the pair of forbidden jewels)

Since we self-hit all the time, it is very feasable to use the good old Elemental Equilibrium Keystone! Combined with semi-affordable "Mastermind of Discord" Forbidden jewels ("Void Beacon" would also be a great choice, however it is very overpriced atm), this is a massive Debuff to enemies, that you will apply instantly over the whole screen, if you just have a tiny bit of the right element on the damage of your weapon.

If only we could get that keystone for free...


4) A forgotten Chest

People atm only discuss Fourth Vow as a defensive, Diallas Chest as an offensive option. The perfect middle ground however are Skin of the Loyal/Skin of the Lords! It provides + to gem Levels, and 100% increased total defenses, a perfect balance between offense and defense. I use it to Scale both Armour and Energy shield (EB/MOM) to get alot out of it. Streamers tend to avoid recommending that chest, as it can get very scarce as a result, but here I am telling you to get one.



This is perfect for the build, the free keystone is amazing as there are many useful options, EE being by far the best for us as it saves us so many points. BIS!


5) Rational doctrin and an unexpected synergy


Rational doctrin in a minion build? Yes! With the addition of Tattoos (knockback tattoo being very underated here btw) it is very easy to balance Str and Int in this build. It provides you permanent Consecrated ground that gets scaled with Devotion Notable near Templar to give 7.2% Life regen and 62% reduced effect of curses on you! Combine it with a recently added jewel affix and a tattoo,



To become almost curse immune. Neat!

Now Rational doctrin also adds the chance to create profane ground on crit. Profane Ground makes enemies -10% all Resist and Hits against them have 100% increased crit chance. Insane! all you need is to hit the enemy with a crit yourself ... oh wait. We picked Mistress of Sacrifice as an Ascendancy Node, mainly for utility of 50% Skill effect duration (Divine Blessing hello) but now it adds a ton of Crit chance for us through Spirit offering (I get up to 12% atm) so with 10+ Projectiles per hit from lancing Steel it is very easy to crit, and therefore have Profane ground up! Cool!

6) Suppression cap with Azubis Step



Far beyond its prime, these old boots finally have a use in my build. When trying to squeeze in Spell Suppression, this ended up to be the most point efficient!

7) Fixing stats while scaling damage



The above jewels tend to be relatively "cheap" (paid 15d each) as the people crafting them try to hit 35% effect with the suffix "minion attack and cast speed" which is not needed in our build, because Relics do not scale off of cast or attack speed. The above jewels are a byproduct/failed crafting attempt and often sold cheaper. These are great, they give a MASSIVE boost to attributes and resists, making other gear pieces cheaper and letting you equip more rares without resists.

The budget version omits those, and instead grabs some resist nodes that also give block, and picks more minion damage nodes to counterbalance.

Synthesized Swords or Axes with the "Grants life per enemy hit" can be hard to find. (you can upgrade them with a blessed orb if you didnt know).

A cheap alternative to using the Life gain on Hit gem and losing the conversion is the following:



Elder influenced rings can roll life gain on hit as a prefix, it rolls up to 20 and you can use a fertile catalist to bump it to 24.

Either buy, or craft these with Harvest "reforge Life". it can be hard to roll a decent one, so plan at least 2-3 div worth of lifeforce.

1) if you are using Elemental Equilibrium, make sure you do not get ANY amount of cold damage to yourself.
you can check by hovering over the skills bar, and look at the damage values of your lancing steel. If it lists any amount of flat cold damage, your build is broken and needs fixing !

2) put desecrate BEFORE spirit offering in your gem links.
the gems are triggered in order left->right, up-> down. If you have spirit offering first, you will not detonate any coprse in the boss fight, then trigger desecrate. then you have to wait 8 seconds until spirit offering is triggered again, making it a whole lot worse.

3) do not forget to use life gain on hit
This is a big one for survivability. If you dont have the implicit sword, check the section above that shows how to get it on rings. You will feel alot safer with it!

4) Do not miss on the Small Cluster Jewel



A small cluster jewel, 2 nodes, with the Notable "Enduring Composure" will give you almost permanent 3 endurance charges, since you get hit often in tough sitations, it provides 12% physical damage reduction and 12% all res to be overcapped too. It is so good in fact that in my final tree i spent a point to get a 4th Endurance Charge for a whopping 16% physical damage reduction on top what we already have! It makes you alot tankier against scary physical hits. Do not forget to use one!

Thanks to MrGeeky for pointing this out. It looks like the craft of exile website is again doing lots of mistakes when calculating optimal values for crafting minion shields. We went on it manually and picked the right combination of corpses for you to cheaply craft a shield, or sell it for profit:

Craft of exile configuration for minion shield

As you can see, with only 63 corpses used we get a 84% chance to hit it. If you want you can add additional less physical, less mana, less defenses, or more minion graves, but this is the config I would go with. All the corpses are cheap. I also recommend to add 200% chance to fracture a modifier, which will give you two fractured ones, in case it bricks you have a good chance to fracture two good modifiers that can be then used as a bases for e.g. essence crafting.

I got this:



on my first try. It had Minion Life as a 3rd Suffix, which i luckily anulled, but with the two fractured modifiers, it would have been a great base for Essence of greed crafting too. I Recommend getting one with open suffix to craft Spell Suppression here.

The main Damage gem of this build is the transifgured version of Summon Holy Relic:



It summons up to two, or three with a common unique helmet) relics that closely follow you. Whenever you hit an enemy with an attack, it will trigger a physical spell nova with a short cooldown. It used to be a funny small utility gem for melee-type summoners like dominating blow guardian. The small, but important difference to the original gem is that the nova will be able to target monsters, instead of being cast around the relic like other nova spells. Think of a built-in astral projector. The AI of this minion turns out to be great, and you will hit screenwide and beyond with it, as long as you have an attack skill that can hit minions from far away.

The second important step now is to have a ranged-like attack that hits enemies further than just melee range. At first, one might think of bow skills, but the current meta has a new OP gem that basically makes this build shine:



Yet another transfigured gem of an old clunky skill: Lancing steel. This bad boy shoots over 10 Projectiles without the need for GMP, the Projectiles pierce all targets without having to spec into pierce, and since it is a delayed-kind of release, it also shotguns single targets like barrage would. All in one gem? Awesome! Now this all sounds a bit too good to not get nerfhammered, so use it while it lasts.

The "downside" of this gem is that you have to use it with either swords or axes. But with the help of our little friend,
we can give swords damage for minions too!

Now we have the cornerstones of the builds set. Use a sword and lancing steel to hit as many enemies as fast as possible. Scale the physical spell of holy relic as much as possible, then figure out defenses, and there you have the build! Simple, right? The first mandatory item is this unique helmet I mentioned earlier, it allows you to summon an extra minion for effectively 50% more damage (2->3 minions):


Summon holy relic does physical damage to begin with, and a whole lot of it. We basically have three options:

1) scale physical damage (Pride Aura, minion crit)
2) get 100% chance to poison and scale that (malevolence, unholy might, etc.)
3) convert to elemental and scale it

While 1) is very easy, budget friendly and strong, it lacks the explosions or other added effects of elementals. The poison variants have been explored, I personally do not like the rampup time and the boring looks of it.

So we pic option 3) Among all the elements, of course Cold is the most fun! Chills slow down enemies, and freezing shatters corpses with a satisfying sound.

The only viable option to convert minion damage right now is through these gloves:

Scaling crit now allows you to freeze and shatter all the enemies, adding a huge layer of defense to the build, since frozen enemies cannot hit you!

The current mainstream(ers) want you to believe that elemental minion builds are better played with the Guardian ascendancy from templar, mainly because of the node "Unwavering Crusade" that provide free Anger, Wrath and Hatred Auras.

I strongly disagree here. While the guardian is very good for early leveling and mapping, due to a very powerful minion from "Raidant Crusade", for an endgame optimized Build, the guardian has very little to offer for you.

The block and spellblock from "Bastion of Hope" is very nice, but in this build we do not frequently cast spells like summon skeletons, we only attack, so the spell block will be very hard to keep up. And if you want block, the Bone Offering together with Mistress of Sacrifice is a good replacement as a Witch/Necromancer.

The "Time of need" might be a decent defensive addition, but it does nothing for your minions.

The minion from "Radiant crusade" has to be re-cast and won't do much if your endgame-scaled minions clear the screen before him.

The Auras from "Unwavering Crusade" might seem nice at first, but in a dedicated elemental build, you usually want to scale one element to the max, and omit the others. For attack-based minions it might be good, but in our case, we deal physical spell damage with a high base flat amount. Anger will add little to the build, Wrath adds more lightning damage to spells, which adds 0 in our case unless we convert to lightning. Hatred Aura sounds good, but self-casting it with generosity and a buch of aura effect can make it twice as good as getting it from that ascendancy.

On top of that, the templar has very little interesting nodes to get trough Forbidden flesh jewels in the endgame setting.

As you can see, the Templar/Guardian has little to offer for this build, so I highly advise against it.

Necromancer however has great utility: Important Resist for you AND your minions through "Commander of Darkness", making you and your minions much more tanky through "Bone Barrier" and "Mindless Agression", very hard to get Skill effect duration (50%!) and great utility and versatility through "Mistress of Sacrifice" - hell yes!

Also, it has very interesting options for Forbidden Flesh jewels: Extra Golems, Stronger Exposure, Regeneration, Shock, Elemental Bastion, Occultist pops, the options are endless!

The list here is very short. Since the minions do not benefit from cast or attack speed, all we can do is lower the cooldown. This is only possible through gem quality. So we can only use Ashes of the Stars and Enhance support to do so. The cooldown reduction has certain breakpoints, it is explained in all detail in the above mentioned videos, and I added a small section below.

We get "Minions deal increased Damage" wherever possible, combined with Minion Crit Chance and -Multiplier.

Lastly, we lower the Enemy Cold Resistances as much as possible. Since we have to constantly hit enemies, it is very easy to apply the good old Elemental Equilibrium.

I found basically three options here:

1) Scale block/spellblock
2) Scale Max. Chaos resist and use Lethal Pride/Fourth Vow
3) Try to get Spell suppression, Armour and alot of EHP

The budget version goes with 1), for Endgame I decided to go with 3).

Until you have Garb of the Ephemeral on your Animate Guardian (see section on it):

Major Pantheon: Soul of the Brine King (upgrade cannot be frozen asap)
Minor Panteon: Soul of Garukhan for the reduced shock. Combine with tattoos or jewels to get 100% reduced effect if possible.

After you have the Garb on the AG:

Change Major Pantheon to Soul of Lunaris and upgrade it completely.

You can only trigger a spell once per server tick. PoE has 0.033s server tick rate for cooldown skills. That means, your Procs per second will always be rounded to the next available breakpoint.

Holy Relic has a base cooldown of 0.3 seconds.

The only way in the game to lower the cooldown is to scale the quality of the gem. % increased cooldown recovery on gear does NOT scale it (since it applies to you, not the minion.)

We get 1% cooldown recovery per quality on the skill gem.

The breakpoints to reach are: 2%, 14%, 30%, 52%, 82%, 128%

The different ways to get more quality are:
- Quality on the Gem itself - up to 20% (or 23% corrupted outcome)
- Enhance Support Gem (8% per level above 1)
- Dialla's Malefaction Chest if put in green socket
- Ashes of the Stars Amulet

Since we do not use Diallas, and a 23% corruption is very expensive, we use a

20% gem
30% ashes
Enhance level 3 (gets to level 5 because chest has +2 gem level) -> 32%
to Reach the 82% breakpoint. Going higher is too much of a cost.

If you don't get an ashes with 30%, it is okay, but you should compensate by either getting more quality on the gem through corruption outcome, or getting enhance level 4.

Example:
20% gem
Enhance level 4 (becomes 6 in the chest) -> 40%
Then an Ashes with 22% gem quality is enough. Get whatever is cheaper.

I recommend reading the info on the wiki about it https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Animate_Guardian if you haven't yet.

Basically, there are 3 tiers of gear for the little fella.

I again recommend reading the Wiki section about possible choices:
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Raise_Spectre#Popular_Spectres

In our case, my recommended spectres are (in order of importance)

1)


Carnage Chieftain (Grants Frenzy Charges - get them by desecrating Act2 "The old fields"

2)


Pale Seraphim ( Screech applies 15% increased Damage taken + 15% reduced action speed) - very good but rare beyond demon, their corpses also disappear after a short time. I recommend going to global channel 6666 and kindly ask people there to help you. If you cant get help, you can also try to find me in game and I will desecrate you the corpse if I have time.

3)

You can only get the third spectre if you have a level 25 Raise Spectre gem. We can achieve this by getting a Level 21 corrupted gem, +1 minion gem on the shield, +1 gem on the ashes, and then socketing it in either the corrupted helmet or boots that have "+2 to level of socketed minion gems". It is an endgame option however, and you do not truly need it.


The third spectre I recommend is Primal Crushclaw (from Harvest). It applies a debuff, google says 50% increased cold damage taken, but I am unsure about the uptime. It is also very tanky and a good damage sponge. Again, ask /global 6666 for help if you can't get them.

I strongly reccomend following Asmodeus' recent guide on minion league start, I followed it as well and can recommend, he has made to so easy and its a perfect guide to follow. Respec into the build when you have the necessary items from the budget PoB ready.