💀3.15💀 iLL3aT’s Cold Skeleton Warriors/Archers/Mages ❆ League Starter ❆ All Content ❆

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BlackFlame wrote:

Can someone tell me the exact name for skeletons archer variant skill gems on poe trades ? just to be sure i type the right on when i want to find it . Thanks !

In the official PoE trade site, under "miscellaneous" there is a drop down menu by "Gem quality type." You can select phantasmal there. I suspect it will be very rare unless a lot of people run heists.

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Gneerox wrote:

Always fun to play this build. I think I'm on my 4th or 5th league of this as a league starter.

Now that I'm farming T16s, I have a major problem. Literally _ALL_ my minions die when I encounter Sirus's Empowered mobs in T16 influences.

I haven't dared try getting together an animate guardian yet because those mobs go through my fully juiced zombies with minion life+feeding frenzy+ele army. I haven't even bothered running around with spectres because they just die every other map.

Not really sure what to do about minion health. This build still does more than enough damage to sustain T16 maps with a medium amount of juice, but it would sure be nice to push full juice with AG+Spectres, but I can't find a way to make them live through influence.

My guess is that I only have +3 to gems so far, and that minions will feel better once i get the +2 on my chest, +4 on my wands and the last +1 on my amulet (i already have +1 to int), but that will take a few days at least before I get there, but I'll report back.

In the meantime, anyone else doing high reds and having their minions die constantly? Anyone have work arounds? This has been a theme for me all league.

I haven't gotten that far yet, but rituals are definitely hitting hard since I've lost a couple beefy spectres (350% hp+). If even those are dying, then the only option may be primal crushclaws (1200%HP). I haven't bothered with zombies this league, but the carrion golem is pretty easy to resummon. No idea on how the AG would fare yet since I haven't seen the damage of the Sirus mobs.

For skeletons, you'll probably just have to get a blessed rebirth medium jewel.

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Sirgeoff7 wrote:

New to the skelly side of things, and I may have overlooked it on you char. But if your little one's are hitting hard and fast, a little life leach goes a long way. Just guessing I must say, I am not that far yet.

I believe that the max a skeleton (and PoE character) can leech is 20% of their life per second. It used to be a thing I recommended in the 3.9 version of the build, but nowadays blessed rebirth (medium cluster jewel) and constant resummons seems to be more efficient, especially with the requirement to keep minions at full HP for renewal on cluster jewels.

How is your guys mages? i didnt like the bossing so i switched back to melee

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grubberry wrote:

How is your guys mages? i didnt like the bossing so i switched back to melee

Mapping is nice, but yeah, bossing is a pain. The problem is that you need two greens for mapping to feel good, but the greens for bossing are terrible (I'm using pierce/slower projectiles.

I think once I get a phantasmal skeletons gem I'm going back to archers (basically more reliable mages with better bossing power).

Going pretty well with this so far. Managed to score a decentish corrupted 6l on day 2 which has helped a lot.

Also got a two green pair of Grips from a ritual, so four greening them wasn't too expensive.

I've deviated from the suggested tree a bit to pick up useful minion passives since I haven't wanted to invest in cluster jewels just yet.

For physical skeletons, what is being used to proc the curse on hit ring for vulnerability?

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Shentx wrote:

For physical skeletons, what is being used to proc the curse on hit ring for vulnerability?

For physical you use cast curse manually or use profane proxy.
On unrelated note, i was testing some other items, what works quite well with this build is.. arakaali's fang.
For clear this is miles ahead of skeletons, because how insanely fast these spiders are. We lose dps from weapon (and can't use 2nd wand), but for pure map clear, we don't need millions of dps per skeleton.
Worst thing about skeletons for clear is recasting and fact that they don't follow. Spiders are immortal, and they follow you super fast.

Issue with standard spiders build is how annoying they are to spawn. Normally you'd need jar flask, create corpses with desecrate, and then land a kill hit on worms, before your minions hit, in order to spawn spiders. And then need to pay close attention to spider count, to repeat this, as their base duration is 30s. Pretty annoying.
There is however one item that makes it easier, it's helm called Speaker's Wreath. "Minions Hits can only Kill Ignited Enemies". That line prevents minions from killing enemies, unless ignited or if minions deal poison damage. Spiders deal physical (before conversion to cold via triad grip) and poison (viper strike). This means spiders will self-generate upon killing enemies if used with the helm. Without helm spider hits (which is far greater than poison part) will kill the enemy and not spawn another spider. Minion poison kills count as player kills, that is the reason it works, it also has further implications.
When we start map, our minions engage first pack, can't kill it because of the helm (reduce their hp to 1), and then we cast whatever we use to proc EE, that spell kills these enemies, and if there are corpses around (from desecrate), we spawn spiders. Any amount starts chain reaction and spiders then replicate on their own, full map we have 20 of them. So we don't even need a jar flask.
If we want spiders for bosses, ones which have no enemies around to kill, such as sirus, elder etc. then we need jar flask. Cast desecrate for corpse, spam brand on them and then use jar flask, spiders appear. Can be other spell, whatever works, some are better than others.

But point here being, if we go with spiders, and still keep 6L skeletons, we can use skeletons as default single target skill, remove permanently melee splash (keep that on spiders). And we use skeletons/vaal skeletons on act bosses, on rituals, and rest of the map is facerolled by spiders. Against big bosses we can still swap splash to dps support on spiders. With my basic gear, and early red maps, spiders deal about 40% of damage of skeletons per minion, but thers 20 of them and they always hit, since they are so quick, no downtime.

There are some potential other combos to use with spiders, as their kills with use of the mentioned helm, count as player kills. Their hit doesn't kill, poison does finish the target and that counts as our kill, and any "on kill" effects trigger. Notable example here would be explody chest. Same goes for certain passives from tree, like elusive on kill. But chest seems to be big one, which would speed up the clear even more.

Btw nothing is stopping us, from just replacing the dagger with proper +2 wand, and go pure skeletons into big boss fights, its really preference. I wouldn't underestimate single target combined dps of 20 spiders though.

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Divinehammer wrote:

Going pretty well with this so far. Managed to score a decentish corrupted 6l on day 2 which has helped a lot.

Also got a two green pair of Grips from a ritual, so four greening them wasn't too expensive.

I've deviated from the suggested tree a bit to pick up useful minion passives since I haven't wanted to invest in cluster jewels just yet.

Good to hear! I included in the new PoB (as well as 6(4)) a tree with nothing extra on the tree for league start purposes. You can use that one as a reference as well.

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Shentx wrote:

For physical skeletons, what is being used to proc the curse on hit ring for vulnerability?

As aerial says, you can cast it normally, but personally I dislike the cast time, so you can use a curse on hit ring/glove with (funny enough) armageddon brand for a near instant cast time.

I would advise against profane proxy though, since both the pride or dreadbanner-generosity & flesh and stone-maim links offer more damage for the mana reservation.