General's Cry

Mirages have ass for aim when striking.

My problem is extra bad because I have knockback (staff build) and that increases the chance for subsequent strikes to miss but holy crap I wish mirages didn't run to like furthest distance possible from enemy and slowly strike because they really do just swing at the air, fizzle, and disappear. This skill does not encourage high attack speed but you need it just to minimize the chance monsters walk backwards 1 step while being struck at.


Otherwise I really like this gem, though it is really hard to use for anything other than single target.

I have been playing a General's Cry Heavy Strike build for a little now and have found that it seems the Mirage warriors do not inherit the Heavy Strike unique jewel properties.

It also seems that when linked with Melee splash there is no splash even happening. All in all the Mirage warriors just seem to use a default Heavy strike like melee splash and Threshold jewels weren't even there.

I have been playing General's Cry with Sweep as a main skill on a Terminus Est and General's Cry linked to another Sweep on a 6-linked chestpiece (character name WeabooGeneral). General's cry adds clearspeed and single target, and sometimes it becomes the safe option since you can run around while your Mirages hit the boss. I deliberately chose Sweep as the skill because I make sure that the hits of the Mirages actually hit from far away instead of having to walk up straight to the strongest enemy to hit it. I absolutely love the idea of this skill ie. making Mirages (a la Saviour, another item I love) as a mechanic since I always play melee builds.

The are a couple of downsides I experienced. One is that it is very clunky, mainly the corpse requirement. lack of reliable corpse generation basically makes this skill useless. You either have to channel Desecrates, use a Benchcraft to trigger a spell when a skill is cast, or the new Unique item, Corpsewalker. Second, the fact that your Warriors die then respawn when you reuse the skill creates a scenario where just as a Mirage is about to attack, you use the skill again and they disappear and never use the skill. If your aim is to lower the cooldown of General's Cry to spawn as many Warriors as possible as soon as possible to deal damage, then this downside is very annoying.

Possible improvements might be to remove the corpse requirement. I can see this skill being very versatile and would have a blast building around it if that was removed. Also, if the Mirages refresh the timer instead of respawn if they haven't used a skill would make the minions less clunky.

Does General's Cry benefit at all from Warcry Buff Effect?

Does the enchant that gives crit chance if you haven't killed recently work similar to the way totems do in that if the use general's cry and the mirage warriors are doing the killing then it doesn't count as you?

And if so, then does it mean the added phys damage from flawless savagery ascendancy won't trigger from crits made by general's cry?

I want to bring to your attention a specific reddit post that fits my build like a glove: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/hf58p9/generals_cry_mainskill_difficulties/

Being hard capped and then nerfed like this suddenly by improving on the cooldown recovery rate feels really bad. I had several notables with the following effects:

From Escalation
Recover 10% of Life when you use a Warcry
20% increased Damage for each time you've Warcried Recently

From Admonisher
Remove an Ailment when you Warcry

So can you guess what was my plan? Shout as much as possible! :D I stacked all I could warcry speeds and cooldown recovery rates and selected as much warcries as I could to my buttons. :D

The end result when I got to red maps: I have 6 warcries, including General's cry for my main damage and I shout about 8 times in 4 seconds consistently in big fights. I had a cry on mouse 1, and the 5 other cries in other buttons. It was a no-brain-activity build, as I would just hold all of the cry buttons down in the big fights, eg. Ritual and Heist, and it would automatically move and stop to shout when any warcry was off cooldown. I just needed to dodge/stepshout big things. It was nonstop. It was hilarious, safe, chaotic, fun and it was working. <3

The absolute banger was testing all the different skills that could go with General's Cry. Earthshatter was spot on as I could have more than 15 spikes and their explosions with the shouts was so satisfactory. Then the 5 simultaneous Earthquakes made me mad laugh at the mad screenshakes I had, because I had 0 idea what was going on before the screenshakes, so they were like an icing on a cake. Bladestorm was like finding a hidden gem to utilize attack speed bonuses, which for other skills did not benefit as much after the bare minimum. Vaal Double Strike was like having a small army. :)

But as my build progressed and I progressed Atlas to red tier maps the build started to fall off. I thought it was starting to get expensive or something and I had difficulties to ramp up the damage and I did not know why. To improve General's Cry effectiveness I started testing it in Hallowed Ground, which is the only map with the least clutter and an immortal boss to actually see what is going on. Then I noticed the hidden drawback of having too much cooldown reduction when it took more than the cooldown timer for all of the mirage warriors to appear, found the reddit post, and now am here writing this feedback.

TL;DR: I loved the skill and it's progression. I did not like the static timer between summoning each mirage warrior. The least I expected was for it to be nonexistent or scale with cooldown recovery rate.

Can general's cry support the active skills from items?
I thought it could but it doesn't work with doryani's fist in 3.14.
Here is my PoB: https://pastebin.com/gJi962jh
Character ID: ULT_TOUCHGOD

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General's Cry

Mirage Warriors now channel for a duration of 0.6 seconds (previously 1 second).

Does this mean channeling skills wont make it to the max stages without extremely high speed modifiers?

The skill is trash.
There are simply too many things that need to be done just to hit anything with it.
you need to create corpses
you need to use the warcry
the mirage warriors need to summon (it's not instant)
mirage warriors need to WALK ON THE FACE of a target no matter your aoe (unless you use travel skills)
and THEN they attack.
and your reward is for all this bullshit - LESS damage and 1 less support gem in main skill.
Also, the primary way to use this skill is to go crazy on cooldown recovery however, mirage warriors constantly disappearing when walking to a target cause next warcry has been used.
Also, mirage warriors disappear when performing an attack due to short duration and slow attack speed (nobody wants to build attack speed on a build that doesn't benefit from it)