[3.9] Pure Phys Skeletons & Friends Necromancer — Beginner/SSF/Budget Build

I made a few changes of my own to the build over the past couple of weeks that took it from OP to completely bonkers. I am now SIGNIFICANTLY tankier than the ahn's shield version, with much more damage. Sitting at 5.3 million damage per skeleton and almost unkillable due to very high block chance.

If anyone is interested I can post an explanation of the build, but here is my POB:
https://pastebin.com/L1kwTBcm

In order to show my 9% phys aura from helm as well as mervails curse (which casts 50% vuln according to https://poedb.tw/us/mon.php?n=Merveil%27s+Retainer and multiple forum posts, I had to use a war banner + high level vuln combined to get to 59%. I am sure there is a better way to show this, but even without vuln it is over 4 million per skelly. Working on crafting some gear that will take it over 7 mill per skelly if I can get the right rolls.

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Bainand wrote:

I made a few changes of my own to the build over the past couple of weeks that took it from OP to completely bonkers. I am now SIGNIFICANTLY tankier than the ahn's shield version, with much more damage. Sitting at 5.3 million damage per skeleton and almost unkillable due to very high block chance.

If anyone is interested I can post an explanation of the build, but here is my POB:
https://pastebin.com/L1kwTBcm

In order to show my 9% phys aura from helm as well as mervails curse (which casts 50% vuln according to https://poedb.tw/us/mon.php?n=Merveil%27s+Retainer and multiple forum posts, I had to use a war banner + high level vuln combined to get to 59%. I am sure there is a better way to show this, but even without vuln it is over 4 million per skelly. Working on crafting some gear that will take it over 7 mill per skelly if I can get the right rolls.

Interesting belt. But are both offerings up when you don't use desecrate in trigger wand? Or are you casting desecrate manually?

You have "Is feeding frenzy active" ticked in POB. But your Carrion golem do not have feeding frenzy.

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varmemester wrote:

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Bainand wrote:

I made a few changes of my own to the build over the past couple of weeks that took it from OP to completely bonkers. I am now SIGNIFICANTLY tankier than the ahn's shield version, with much more damage. Sitting at 5.3 million damage per skeleton and almost unkillable due to very high block chance.

If anyone is interested I can post an explanation of the build, but here is my POB:
https://pastebin.com/L1kwTBcm

In order to show my 9% phys aura from helm as well as mervails curse (which casts 50% vuln according to https://poedb.tw/us/mon.php?n=Merveil%27s+Retainer and multiple forum posts, I had to use a war banner + high level vuln combined to get to 59%. I am sure there is a better way to show this, but even without vuln it is over 4 million per skelly. Working on crafting some gear that will take it over 7 mill per skelly if I can get the right rolls.

Interesting belt. But are both offerings up when you don't use desecrate in trigger wand? Or are you casting desecrate manually?

You have "Is feeding frenzy active" ticked in POB. But your Carrion golem do not have feeding frenzy.

Couple of other things also. You didn't have shaper/guardian chosen as bosses and you have 2 dread banners running in the gem section. Turning those on/off you have 3,793,160.5 still more than enough for anything.

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Rebur wrote:

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varmemester wrote:

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Bainand wrote:

I made a few changes of my own to the build over the past couple of weeks that took it from OP to completely bonkers. I am now SIGNIFICANTLY tankier than the ahn's shield version, with much more damage. Sitting at 5.3 million damage per skeleton and almost unkillable due to very high block chance.

If anyone is interested I can post an explanation of the build, but here is my POB:
https://pastebin.com/L1kwTBcm

In order to show my 9% phys aura from helm as well as mervails curse (which casts 50% vuln according to https://poedb.tw/us/mon.php?n=Merveil%27s+Retainer and multiple forum posts, I had to use a war banner + high level vuln combined to get to 59%. I am sure there is a better way to show this, but even without vuln it is over 4 million per skelly. Working on crafting some gear that will take it over 7 mill per skelly if I can get the right rolls.

Interesting belt. But are both offerings up when you don't use desecrate in trigger wand? Or are you casting desecrate manually?

You have "Is feeding frenzy active" ticked in POB. But your Carrion golem do not have feeding frenzy.

Couple of other things also. You didn't have shaper/guardian chosen as bosses and you have 2 dread banners running in the gem section. Turning those on/off you have 3,793,160.5 still more than enough for anything.

I see I missed the shaper/guardian box which lowers the dps some. I moved both feeding frenzy and maim from golem to zombies for higher uptime so they have both 100%. I was using an old skill tree for that pob too, here is one with the updated one, and fixed the dread banner too:
https://pastebin.com/QbNzewCy

Takes it down to 4.3M dps per skelly but still good. The key for this build is the 64% attack block/46% spell block (with rumi's up which is very easy most of the time), and every time I block I gain 750 health which is INSANE survivability. Once my ES drops, my health keeps bouncing back up even when getting beat on. This is SOOOO much more tanky than ahn's ever was. Minions get the block and lifegain from bone offering too, which is way more than indomitable army was. Even my skellies rarely die. I ran Max attack block and 56% spell block from a shield for a while, but it was honestly overkill so I dropped it.

As for offering uptime for the 3 offerings, it is 100% easy. When mapping, just summoning skellies and flame dashing keeps all three up. For bosses, with no corpses, three desecrates takes around 0.5 seconds with the faster cast gem and the cast rate from flesh offering, and they last 9 seconds, so extremely easy to keep up all the time.

Note: Desecrate in the trigger wand doesnt work in this build due to the 4 second internal cooldown for the trigger. Manual is almost instant though anyways.

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Bainand wrote:

I see I missed the shaper/guardian box which lowers the dps some. I moved both feeding frenzy and maim from golem to zombies for higher uptime so they have both 100%. I was using an old skill tree for that pob too, here is one with the updated one, and fixed the dread banner too:
https://pastebin.com/QbNzewCy

Takes it down to 4.3M dps per skelly but still good. The key for this build is the 64% attack block/46% spell block (with rumi's up which is very easy most of the time), and every time I block I gain 750 health which is INSANE survivability. Once my ES drops, my health keeps bouncing back up even when getting beat on. This is SOOOO much more tanky than ahn's ever was. Minions get the block and lifegain from bone offering too, which is way more than indomitable army was. Even my skellies rarely die. I ran Max attack block and 56% spell block from a shield for a while, but it was honestly overkill so I dropped it.

As for offering uptime for the 3 offerings, it is 100% easy. When mapping, just summoning skellies and flame dashing keeps all three up. For bosses, with no corpses, three desecrates takes around 0.5 seconds with the faster cast gem and the cast rate from flesh offering, and they last 9 seconds, so extremely easy to keep up all the time.

Note: Desecrate in the trigger wand doesnt work in this build due to the 4 second internal cooldown for the trigger. Manual is almost instant though anyways.

Still, your skeletons do not have frenzy which the ticked box assumes.

And are you sure you're offerings are up for 9 seconds (try hovering over the offerings in the bar) considering you are wearing the "reduced offering duration" belt.

Will try myself if I can keep offerings up without desecrate in trigger wand. Would also like to try running multible offerings with that belt. Will also have a look at rumi's. Aren't you missing a flask with immunity to curses?

Note: When you say it's not working in this build, I presume you mean that desecrate is on the 4 second cooldown/cycle together with the other socketed gems and hence is not that useful. Maybe you're right. Will try it. The other socketed gems will cycle more frequently without desecrate (I'm running spirit and a curse, since im not using that belt - yet).

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varmemester wrote:

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Bainand wrote:

I see I missed the shaper/guardian box which lowers the dps some. I moved both feeding frenzy and maim from golem to zombies for higher uptime so they have both 100%. I was using an old skill tree for that pob too, here is one with the updated one, and fixed the dread banner too:
https://pastebin.com/QbNzewCy

Takes it down to 4.3M dps per skelly but still good. The key for this build is the 64% attack block/46% spell block (with rumi's up which is very easy most of the time), and every time I block I gain 750 health which is INSANE survivability. Once my ES drops, my health keeps bouncing back up even when getting beat on. This is SOOOO much more tanky than ahn's ever was. Minions get the block and lifegain from bone offering too, which is way more than indomitable army was. Even my skellies rarely die. I ran Max attack block and 56% spell block from a shield for a while, but it was honestly overkill so I dropped it.

As for offering uptime for the 3 offerings, it is 100% easy. When mapping, just summoning skellies and flame dashing keeps all three up. For bosses, with no corpses, three desecrates takes around 0.5 seconds with the faster cast gem and the cast rate from flesh offering, and they last 9 seconds, so extremely easy to keep up all the time.

Note: Desecrate in the trigger wand doesnt work in this build due to the 4 second internal cooldown for the trigger. Manual is almost instant though anyways.

Still, your skeletons do not have frenzy which the ticked box assumes.

And are you sure you're offerings are up for 9 seconds (try hovering over the offerings in the bar) considering you are wearing the "reduced offering duration" belt.

Will try myself if I can keep offerings up without desecrate in trigger wand. Would also like to try running multible offerings with that belt. Will also have a look at rumi's. Aren't you missing a flask with immunity to curses?

Note: When you say it's not working in this build, I presume you mean that desecrate is on the 4 second cooldown/cycle together with the other socketed gems and hence is not that useful. Maybe you're right. Will try it. The other socketed gems will cycle more frequently without desecrate (I'm running spirit and a curse, since im not using that belt - yet).

The skeletons do have feeding frenzy as it is a buff on the owner, and affects all minions (it shows up as a buff on the top of your bar) all minions are affected by feeding frenzy when it procs.

Never had an issue with curses. The annoying one to me is temp chains, but my animate has the armor that make me immune to it.

For the 4 second cooldown on trigger, it doesnt work because each spell in the wand can only cast every 4 seconds. I have 3 offerings to maintain, so desecrate casting every 4 seconds doesn't work. Bone offering is very critical for this build.

For the offering duration, base duration with 5 corpses (all the time) and 20% quality is 11 seconds. Various duration passive in the tree bring that to 18 seconds. Then the belt cuts that to 9 seconds. The tooltip doesn't show it correctly since it doesn't count the extension for each corpse consumed, but I have verified it at 9 seconds (I think 8.8 exactly).

Thanks viper for the wonderful guide, I've been having a lot of fun trying the build out. However I still find myself dying to some juiced T16 maps (Sextanted, Sac Frag) and certain legion encounters with Bone Armor skill up. I've listed my equipment below, any advice from the community on how to improve? I'm still pretty new to PoE so I would love all the help I can get. (Desecrate is on a separate unset ring)




PoB Overview: https://imgur.com/a/YyArdUS
PoB Link: https://pastebin.com/N2TU0QeG

Thanks in advance!

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Bainand wrote:

The skeletons do have feeding frenzy as it is a buff on the owner, and affects all minions (it shows up as a buff on the top of your bar) all minions are affected by feeding frenzy when it procs.

Never had an issue with curses. The annoying one to me is temp chains, but my animate has the armor that make me immune to it.

For the 4 second cooldown on trigger, it doesnt work because each spell in the wand can only cast every 4 seconds. I have 3 offerings to maintain, so desecrate casting every 4 seconds doesn't work. Bone offering is very critical for this build.

For the offering duration, base duration with 5 corpses (all the time) and 20% quality is 11 seconds. Various duration passive in the tree bring that to 18 seconds. Then the belt cuts that to 9 seconds. The tooltip doesn't show it correctly since it doesn't count the extension for each corpse consumed, but I have verified it at 9 seconds (I think 8.8 exactly).

Wow, I was sure that was how frenzy buff worked. But after reading a bit I can see you're right.

Concerning the duration, very nice.

Thanks, will definitely try and copy some things from you're build

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varmemester wrote:

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Bainand wrote:

The skeletons do have feeding frenzy as it is a buff on the owner, and affects all minions (it shows up as a buff on the top of your bar) all minions are affected by feeding frenzy when it procs.

Never had an issue with curses. The annoying one to me is temp chains, but my animate has the armor that make me immune to it.

For the 4 second cooldown on trigger, it doesnt work because each spell in the wand can only cast every 4 seconds. I have 3 offerings to maintain, so desecrate casting every 4 seconds doesn't work. Bone offering is very critical for this build.

For the offering duration, base duration with 5 corpses (all the time) and 20% quality is 11 seconds. Various duration passive in the tree bring that to 18 seconds. Then the belt cuts that to 9 seconds. The tooltip doesn't show it correctly since it doesn't count the extension for each corpse consumed, but I have verified it at 9 seconds (I think 8.8 exactly).

Wow, I was sure that was how frenzy buff worked. But after reading a bit I can see you're right.

Concerning the duration, very nice.

Thanks, will definitely try and copy some things from you're build

If you move over to triple offering, make sure to get the +25% offering chest as it cancels out the reduced 25% effect from the belt so you get all offerings at full strength.

I have done a lot of tweaks to make mine work just right but the essentials are:
- Oblation belt

- +25 offerings chest (these are cheap since no one seems to want. I crafted the one I have with +active gems quite cheap)

- Trigger socketed spell when cast wand. max quality offering gems for duration.

Those three changes give a significant dps increase alone, with an insane survivabilty boost. The following changes I also made are just extra on top of the offering rework

- Spirit offering gives 32% of phys as extra chaos. 44% with a +12 enchant on helm like I have, so make sure you remove brutality gem to get the chaos damage.

- All of the zombies, golems, spectres, and animate guardian combined do less damage than ONE skeleton, so ignore all the dps gems for them, they hit like a wet paper bag compared to skellies. Just feeding frenzy and maim for zombies to buff skeletons. This makes room for the extra gems I use like bone offering, faster casting, stone golem, etc.

- Bone offering is super key, and I feel even stronger than the other offerings if supported properly. I am playing around with a 75% block chance option atm where I don't think I could die if I tried in a juiced t16 using a 10c yellow shield since I heal 750hp every time I block, which is most of the time.

- I didnt find much use for 2X carrion golem, and stone golem gives a ton of regen. With stone I sit at 772 health/second regen which is around 11% per second. Chaos golem could be an option, but with such high block, physical isnt much threat.

- I used to run essence worm, but I switch to a ring with good mana regen and enchanted it with reduced mana cost so I can run pride+banner with no issues. I get a ton of regen from mystic bulwark passive as my block is so high, so it is pretty much impossible for me to run out of mana, plus I get tons of life and resists out of the ring over essence.

- I compared my -9 phys helm (which I bought for 1 ex with the enchant. Without the enchant they are dirt cheap) to my 50ex+ pog bone helm I crafted with +3 gems, and pseudo 6-socket minion damage and life, and the -9 phys helm easily came out on top. I cant figure out the range of this though since there is no visual. I am wondering if I can run one of animate guardian as well for another -9 phys?

How do you guys go about getting your wands, just alch spam and craft from there. Or do you just buy the crazy wands?