{3.10} Speaker for the Dead | The Mass Minion Summoner | League Starter, Leveling Guide 💀

I love this build for mapping, especially with that cyclone & soulrend setup someone posted here earlier. It makes mapping a breeze and I have no problems clearing mobs in t16 either, 90% of packs just drop dead as I go through them, so thats great.

But I am having "problems" with guardians. I pop vaal skeletons, normal ones and start hitting with my balls. This build says I should have like 4 mill dps, shouldnt I drop guardians in couple seconds then? But that is just not happening. I feel like I am doing sub 1mil dps if guardians have approx. 12mil hp.

I see some cyclone guys dropping minotaur in a second or two with like 20 exalt gear and it makes me jelly and really wanting to swap to something like that, cuz I failed killing him today, my dps was sucky and some falling rocks just one shotted me without any indication. I feel like I am doing something wrong but no idea what that is. Crawler pops up as it should and does enormous dmg and is basically the workhorse clearing in maps, but guardians just arent melting. Or are my expectations too high? I will probably roll to something else if thats so, cuz im still a noob and want high dmg to make it all easier to eventually kill those big guys.

I'm having a hard time building virulence stacks and no clue as to why.
Anyone got any ideas what could be going wrong?

Edit: I'm an idiot and used a jewel which added Chaos damage to my wand attacks instead of my spells.
Thank you Aylear.

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TheObeseSpy wrote:

I'm having a hard time building virulence stacks and no clue as to why.
Anyone got any ideas what could be going wrong?

Do you have a source of Adds # to # Chaos Damage to Spells? You need a source of flat chaos/physical damage added to spells to poison enemies with Ball Lightning. Easiest way to acquire one in my experience is on an Abyss Jewel in a Stygian Vise.

GAME UPDATE
Apparently, there was an interaction bug between Raise Spectre and Unleash that allowed you to raise bosses as Spectres. Some kind folks managed to capture video of the feat before it was fixed:

1. Goddess Spectres (Plaza Boss)
2. Various Boss Spectres
3. All four Guardian Spectres vs. Shaper


Art by ArturVilela

@ Downswing:

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Downswing wrote:

This build says I should have like 4 mill dps, shouldnt I drop guardians in couple seconds then? But that is just not happening. I feel like I am doing sub 1mil dps if guardians have approx. 12mil hp.

1. The listed damage was based on my items (which still have room for improvement). So your damage will depend on your items (and whether you deviated from the main setup at all). You can find out your own DPS by importing your character into PoB, then setting up the correct config (Virulence stacks, Spectre level, Frenzy Charges, Minions Killed Recently, # of Poisons on Enemy, Bleeding, Maimed, Enemy was Hit by Light. Damage).

2. Map mods? Defensive mods like monster life, boss life, resistances, etc, will change the value of their base 12mil life.

3. Under Pros & Cons, it was explained this build has a ramp-up time to reach full DPS. With Ball Lightning, if you can pre-cast before activating the boss, then 3 Frenzy Charges and 10 stacks of Poison shouldn't take longer than ~1 second to generate, but Bleed is a dice roll that may take several seconds before it procs.

4. Since Skeletons are melee, a boss who moves or burrows effectively avoids Skeletons until they catch up. Likewise if when you first summon them and they are not right next to the boss, there will be a DPS delay until they can begin attacking. Vaal Skeletons theoretically add another 6.8 million DPS, but only if its 23 additional melee Skeletons are able to attack the same target (264k DPS per melee Skeleton).

5. Looking at your character, SuomiLeijona, it looks like you're missing a few things, such as Poison/Bleed gloves and +1 Maim claw. You have Skeletons in your wand, what did you have in your helmet? Most of our boss DPS comes from Skeletons, not the Agony Crawler, so if this was how you had set your build up then you were not at 4mil DPS. You have many other changes (different tree, Storm Brand, Zealotry/Haste), so am I correct in guessing you tried following a different build after asking your question?

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Downswing wrote:

I see some cyclone guys dropping minotaur in a second or two with like 20 exalt gear and it makes me jelly and really wanting to swap to something like that, cuz I failed killing him today, my dps was sucky and some falling rocks just one shotted me without any indication. I feel like I am doing something wrong but no idea what that is.

At long-range, like with a bow build, you can offscreen him to avoid the falling rocks, but must be wary of his Burrow. At short-range, like with a melee build, he won't use his Burrow. At mid-range, like with Summoners, we have to deal with both his Stonefall and Burrow. This is what makes him particularly hard for us.

Normally, one of our main advantages is we can dodge while still dealing damage, at the cost of things like Leech. However, when Minotaur burrows, he can't be damaged, so our advantage is meaningless. It's doubly bad for us since it puts our Skeletons out of range, further delaying our DPS.

To counter this, prevent him from burrowing by being aggressive and keeping close to him. Ideally behind him. Blind and Acrobatics should help against his melee attacks. Put Fortify on Charged Dash to keep it up.

Finally, stacking physical damage reduction is your best bet to prevent his one-shots. +3-4 additional Zombies (Grave Intentions cluster on passive tree, helmet/chest craft), Chaos Golem, +1 minimum Endurance Charge craft on ring/amulet, Singular Focus on passive tree, Basalt Flask. That'd give you:

11-12% from Flesh Binder
8-12% from Endurance Charges
4% from Chaos Golem
4% from Singular Focus
15% from Basalt Flask
-------------------------
= 42-47% physical damage reduction

If you lose control of the situation and cannot keep close to him without insta-dying, switch tactics and stay at long-range. Blindly throw out Skeletons at max range and rely instead on your Spectres and Agony Crawler. Move every few seconds to preempt any oncoming Burrows. It travels in a straight line once he starts, so it can be avoided by side-stepping.

Thanks for your reply. As you guessed right, I changed to kayellas spectre build to test it out, so my gear is different now. I had good gear for this build, +3 socket helmet, 6link belly and gloves were setup correctly etc. I felt trapped, bcuz there wasnt huge improvements coming anymore from gear which would make a big difference, but my perfomance was lacking a lot.

I remember buying some piece of gear for this guide and asked the guy why he was selling it, didnt he like the build? He said its a strong build but complicated. I thought what he is talking about, its just mashing a button or two at most and thats it, whats so complicated about it? But I realize now that he was talking about bossing and not mapping, cuz right now with spectre build, i can just walk around and focus on dodging everything, with occasional right click on the boss, to keep spectres attacking and proc EE. Its easy and simple and dps is there all the time.

But with this build, which probably does more dps at the end, but you have to keep track of your skeletons sticking on target and you have to ball light occasionally and this all is required, because otherwise my dps will drop significantly, whereas with just spectres basically nothing is required from me to keep dps going and I can put 100% of my focus to dodging spells, because I dont have to think about other things which can distract my mind and to keep my dps significant.

I am not saying this is super complicated or anything, with some practice you can nail it for sure, but since I have to keep track of dodging, ball lightning (which is annoying cuz that half a second on one place casting it might get u killed if u dont know what u r doing, like me) and having to re-summon skeletons fairly often, which also makes u stuck on one place casting, and sometimes get u killed if u dont know when to cast it and when not to.

So this all complicates the matters. For a noob like me, who just got his first uber elder kill today (yay!) spectre focusing build was just so much more simpler for me, because basically all I had to do was focus on dodging spells and spectres did the dps for me.

But I understood why u dont want to rely on spectres so much, I got mine killed couple of times and had to re-summon in between deaths, which can get nasty if you want deathless kills, but suddenly your spectres are not there to help you.

Also I loved very much the agony crawler aspect of this build and will definitely look for ways to incorporate it somehow into my current build without losing too much of other things. Thanks!

My zombies (9) keep dying during hard legion encounters.
What can I do to keep them alive? Or replace them with something else?
Hard legion encounters is the only thing that kills me regularly now.


Finding shaper claw with +1 gems is impossible now it seems. I dont really want to lose the LoH from claws, since I have seen +1 gems on other shaper weapons. Lvl 4 empower is super expensive (4-5 exs) and I only got a lvl 3 now.


Btw with the Bloodgrip corruption and applying an additional curse - where would the course come from? Another auto-curse ring? Manual casting?

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Aylear wrote:

I have also experimented with removing GMP for Fortify. Cyclone procs it instantly and safely which feels really nice. Besides, I was hoping for an excuse not to run Shield Charge on one of my characters, experimenting a bit with Phase Run + Enhance Support + Increased Duration Support. Unfortunately, Shield Charge is every bit as OP as everyone says it is for Phase Run to be a great alternative. Fun in Delve though.

How do you use Shield Charge?

I only use it when running from packs to packs. During fight I am cycloning all the time, no Fortify proc. Unless I replace GMP with Fortify, which might work out.

Tried Soul Rend instead of Essence Drain in one map now and I am loving it. My CPU not so much...

hey ! I was wondering if its possible to use energy armor over hp ?

Do you take flesh binder for the phys dmg reduction? Both other options seems to offer more dps?

Also people talking about using cyclone instead.. how do you live without a teleport skill to jump over edges and chasms? I would be going insane or wasting another slot for flame charge.