Cold ANIMATE WEAPON Summoner | League-Start & Leveling Guide

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Petardinjo wrote:

how can you lose guardian if he has for example 65k life? My guardian died once in meta league just because i didnt have kingmaker axe lol, after equiping it, he had like 66k life and with fortify his hp never reached half ?

are you sure it's 11% more dmg ?

He doesn't get fortify from kingmaker, for once. Also, yes, culling strike is just removing 10% hp from enemies. Instead of 100%, you have to do 90. So if 90 is like doing 100 to a normal enemies, you gain 100/90 = 11,11% damage.

Also, yes, AG doesn't die usually. However, several bosses are instant killing minions builds, and if you forget about it, it's a loss of several exa. As I said, it's a choice, you can say "just remove it before such bosses!" and you would be right. But it's not a chase unique as something you can definitely lose on poor circonstancies is a poor chase unique.

Ok than people should know that no no map beside dangerous map mods is : acid caverns map.

That map can spawn boss who can actually melt your AG, but I thought that is common knowledge but if there is anyone who is not aware - OP can add in first post as NO-NO map for finishing with AG. Usually I clear all map and skip that boss as you do not know which bosses will spawn.

I maybe over reacted with that A MUST, I was excited actually that someone made a guide for one of the easiest game play very rewarding build.

I know I will pay max 160-180c in first few days for it so I can enjoy that perma fortify+culling, as I have a feeling this time we're going to swim in currencies :D this is def. breach 2.0 plus everything so far.

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Rudruffl wrote:

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Guardian very much inferior choice to Necro, barring some really heavy-handed nerf that kills the class (unlikely). Your build would be more efficient if you read the guide.

Can you (or just anyone pls) explain why? If I use this Pob and swap it over to guardian the dmg loss is minimal.

NVM, read the part.

But Im not convinced it is "very much inferior", seems like it just comes down to personal taste no?

Im very much noob so please explain:

1) While it is true that with necro I can get onslought and Flesh offering, how will my minions get onslought? With guardian, my minions are faster, no?

2) If I have onslought without ahns, I can use something like necromantic aegis and victarios charity, is that not a good option for frenzy charges for my minions? Also frees up 2 jewel sockets. (Also I find those jewels are just unrealistic and a bit dishonest)

3) The defense guardian gives does not require extra skill gems like bone offering or spirit offering, and this build seems very full on gems. Also I can only have 1 offering active at a time, right? So more defense in that case would cost me offense.

I played an SRS guardian this last league. You don't notice different in the DPS but a lot in quality of life. Particularly, there are no minion HP boosts from guardian, while necro gets these incidentally (both directly and with +2 minion gem levels, which boosts HP). Animate Guardian from a Guardian class (ironically) is much more likely to get killed, as are your other minions.

To your questions:

1. Flesh Offering = Onslaught, effectively. In theory guardian minions can benefit from both, but when you play a minion skill with duration, boosting your own cast speed is very important. It makes the skill feel a lot better to play. Witch can get both, Guardian can only have one of the two.

Guardian has onslaught when you have 5 nearby minions - there is no guarantee this is always the case. When you have no AW summoned yet is when you especially would want cast speed... and that's also the time you won't have it.

2. I don't like necromantic aegis because it gives up a lot of defenses, paths to a part of the tree we don't want, and we get frenzy charges from summoned spectre monkey chieftains anyway so Victario's Charity is unnecessary.

3. What defense does guardian even get? If you want to do a mana stacking build that's fine, but it will be very different from what I have here.

Anyway, all I can really tell you is I played Guardian with SRS thinking "oh the DPS is about the same, let's mix it up and be different" but in reality it was much worse than the same skill with Necro. Go ahead and try it if you want but as far as I can tell the only reason to play guardian is for the novelty of being different. But it's worse to play and after doing it myself once I'd never do it again.

Plus, Templar = hobo with no pants. "I am nah beast of burden" PUT IT IN YOUR DAMN HOBO SACK

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(Also I find those jewels are just unrealistic and a bit dishonest)

None of the DPS figures before patch notes really matter anyways. If I really wanted to puff the DPS up I'd have filled in all the gear slots with rares, be using awakened gems, a wand with minion damage instead of Clayshaper, etc etc. I stuck some really good gems in the build because I wanted to see where the scaling for cold started to be better than fire.

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Rudruffl wrote:

I see, ty for explaining. I played necro this league, and found it dreadfully boring ascendancy wise, and never played guardian, so I guess thats why :)

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Well some block with 40% uptime. Again never played guardian, but it doesnt sound too bad. Also when doing a CI version of this build it gives some nice energy shield, but they mentioned they would tune that down.

Yeah Necro does feel a bit overplayed, I agree. I'm tempted to do Scion even if it's worse, just to hear some different lines.

The big HP boost for necro minions is actually the +2 gem levels: for example, L20 Animate Guardian has 8959 HP, vs 10849 at L22, and that +2000 HP is further scaled by any minion life on the tree. It's not something you notice until red maps probably, but around there the guardian minions begin to feel squishy.

True that I underrated the block chance associated with guardian. I'd rather have a slightly smaller buff that is up more consistently though.

Of course all this could change tomorrow with patch notes - but I suspect Guardian and Necro get hammered equally. Still slightly hoping for Scion to suddenly become better, unlikely as that as...

Does any one know if the POB coders get the patch notes ahead of time or do they have to start their coding updates at the same time we are reading them?

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AndyLovesHisBge wrote:

Does any one know if the POB coders get the patch notes ahead of time or do they have to start their coding updates at the same time we are reading them?

Same time as everyone else

Anyway, I must have missed something, but why do you say that Cold conversion will be end game only? I mean, with 70 added physical damage (the chance we get that from the beginning with the patch only is large...) compared to now, cold build is already superior. No way it will need end game gear to shine.

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Keyen wrote:

Anyway, I must have missed something, but why do you say that Cold conversion will be end game only? I mean, with 70 added physical damage (the chance we get that from the beginning with the patch only is large...) compared to now, cold build is already superior. No way it will need end game gear to shine.

If you compare the two elements with both having zero flat added damage from gear, I see fire doing about 400k DPS. Switching to cold, it's about 350k DPS. (POB: https://pastebin.com/4v8zCZ7f )

(Editing to add, on a 5-link it's actually even more noticeable, 250k vs 200k; 4link is 170k vs 125k)

As you start to get a handful of jewels with flat added damage, then cold can outscale fire because cold has better "more" multipliers. But until you get those jewels, fire has the advantage because Immolate + Anger gives a huge chunk of added damage all by itself.

This is why we had our disagreement back a few days ago-- I was calculating DPS with no gear on and favoring fire, you were calculating with cold and having some flat added damage from gear and getting better numbers. That's what convinced me that cold is better once your gear is decent... But if the gear is terrible, fire is the place to start.

(Also, you need to be high enough level to have taken enough jewel sockets to place your damage jewels into for cold to be better.)

All of this may change with patch notes of course. But I think the general principle that it's better to start with fire and then switch to cold later - when the better scaling matters more because your base damage is higher - may still hold true.

1) Do you really believe that they won't add 70 damage on the base skill + animating a bladefall weapon?

2) Even if they somehow do that, and add for instance only 50 damage, do you really believe it's worth it to go into a element which become inferior as soon as you get your first source of flat damage? Is being a little better for the part which matter the less really necessary compared to level up the right gems and get the right stuff from the beginning?

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Keyen wrote:

1) Do you really believe that they won't add 70 damage on the base skill + animating a bladefall weapon?

2) Even if they somehow do that, and add for instance only 50 damage, do you really believe it's worth it to go into a element which become inferior as soon as you get your first source of flat damage? Is being a little better for the part which matter the less really necessary compared to level up the right gems and get the right stuff from the beginning?

If the stats on the gem change so that fire is always worse I'll revise the guide.

And there are other side reasons to not use cold right away:
- getting 4 green in Triad Grip is not trivial
- the mana situation is harder (higher mana reservation with Bonechill)
- Added Cold gem has highest dex requirement, which must be met with gear
- gem socket colors make it hard to auto-cast Bladefall, as it probably has to go in gloves
- don't have minion life gem socket available for Animate Guardian, so it needs to be higher leveled to not die

etc etc. There's a whole list of issues that come out of requiring 4 green sockets in a piece of gear, when we're already very stretched on gem sockets.

I don't think the transition to cold will be that hard to do when the time is right, just buy a Level 21 Hatred and a quality Added Cold gem and that's about it. But all the other gearing choices surrounding it may be awkward until you've got more currency to work with.

Basically Cold is higher damage but Fire is easier in a lot of ways. And I want the guide to be noob friendly so the easy option has to stay in, in some form, unless the patch makes fire terrible.