[3.10] Tanky Animate Weapon Guardian [SSF][HC?]

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Hopeless91 wrote:

I figured it out you just need to make your minions tankier and its fine, im clearing up to tier8/9 quite easily with 4-links.

Make sure you take Indomitable Army / Righteous Armoy nodes and any HP node for minions, it helps a ton.

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loczek123 wrote:

Exactly, you need to invest a bit in the survival of minions, after the mentioned nodes from the tree I use 1h with "Trigger Socketed Spell when you use a skill" I have Desecrate and Bone offering under it, so my AW have over 40% spell and attack block, I plan to use Fortress Covenant in one jewel socket (The ideal place is under Constitution between the start of Duelista and Marauder, does not strive for any notable), which will give me damage and an additional block in total AW will have ~ 55% spell and attack block. I think that's enough for endgame. We can use as well new notables, they are very good for minion survival. For sure Rotten Claws must be now, I use it already and I can really see the difference. In total, it gives us 88% impale chance on minions.

So I will use 1h (Rune Dagger) with Trigger, will give +1 to gems (+2 on the endgame is possible) and Cold Iron Point Dagger. In total, it will be +4 like Staff, but I will get a Trigger (in theory Staff can also have a Trigger but we do not want to have 6 skills as a Trigger because the rotation will last forever, then finding +4 to games with Trigger will be a hard thing) and you can use Whirling Blades.

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Sprigum wrote:

Playing a similar setup - came here looking for ideas to help scale damage/survivability. I'm doing it in SSF but the concepts are pretty much the same here - I scaled Phys damage.

according to the PoB, these things have 23k life, yet in Red Deliriums, they still die instantly - I attribute this mostly to the gross amounts of chaos splash damage happening that I can't avoid or control with minions. You can check my character profile - I've tried several variations and even with 23k life and 1.2k regen/s

I don't think the DPS justifies the amount of micromanagement required for this build to work. HoAG and Herald of Purity or a simple Zombie/Skelly build are all basically much less annoying to play and do just as well if not better in almost all scenarios.

You pretty much have to use melee splash for clearing and in this day and age I'm not really interested in doing gem swaps for bosses.

Even on a 6L the damage isn't that good and you end up being functionally a warcry berserker because if you aren't hitting the Animate weapon button every 3-4 seconds they despawn if they haven't died.

Don't recommend playing Animate Weapon right now, maybe there's some niche way to make it not terrible, but it really just *feels* bad even if the numbers aren't that bad.