[1.3.0] Too Many Clones! -- PvE Templar Archer Summoner

That's why i thought about temporal chains as second curse, since i'm short of slots.

Maybe instead of Vaal haste i could use Vaal rain of arrows (Linked with increased duration wich is a nice plus) but i don't think is a worthwhile exchange

That might work really well.

Could VaalRoA + CoH + curses, since honestly, I don't need curses for 99% of enemies, it's just the hard ones. This linkage would allow me to pin an enemy down and single/double curse them which should be good enough (and the skill duration from the tree makes Vaal RoA snare for even longer).

I'll give it a shot if I can get the gem to drop from a CZ.

The problem with the Vaal version is that once the curse expires you cannot easily refresh it, even with the increased duration nodes, that's why i'd rather have a spammable skill, not to mention that asaik bosses cannot be pinned down

Okay so i've been playing around with blink arrow / mirror arrow summoner build and testing what works or not w/ it.

If you're interested in leveling with this build - it's very very effective and very safe.

All you need a good attackspeed roll on Storm Cloud bow and a quiver with %ele dmg with weapons, +cold damage and attackspeed. the attackspeed and weapon ele will super scale with anger/wrath and elemental equilibrium.


Support blink/mirror arrow with |trap|multitrap|minion dmg|pierce|weapon ele in that order if you can (or get tabula rasa)
In your Deerstalker run blink/mirror arrow with multitrap|lmp|pierce

if you have another 4 link or 5 link on stormcloud, you can run a blink arrow and mirror arrow linked with faster attacks, weapon ele dmg and minion damage. (this gives you mobility and an extra 3-4 minions that do massive single target damage to bosses)

I chose to go only LMP on the deerstalker link because i find that aoe is absolutely no problem and everything dies when you throw 2 traps down since pierce gets the job done well. That way your other links can be used without LMP to increase single target damage (by using weapon ele gem or minion dmg gem instead)

For the bosses that 1 shot aoe all your archers down (looking at you, vaal), minion instibility makes easy work of them.

remembering positioning with blink arrow + using convocation properly makes a huge difference in how much effective damage your minions do

I'm currently finishing up merciless with literally level 1-20 items still. The beaty of the build is that you dont need ANY stats from gear. you can become super tanky, or just run pure item rarity on all your gear ***although i'm not sure if your minion kills apply the rarity***

I haven't tested this out in maps yet, but it seems like the more aura nodes you get, the better it will scale. Might buy a good attackspeed thicket bow with + ele dmg on it instead of stormcloud and try that out.

Do you guys find more success using a physical bow / quiver and hatred or fast attackspeed bow with ele dmg + anger/wrath?

Anyway, hope this helps anyone interested in leveling w/ the build and having some fun!

That matches my experience as I leveled the build.

Super cheap to gear, and since damage mostly comes from wrath/anger, weapons were whatever I could find.

Minion Instability is super important since the minions have a truly outrageous amount of base life (higher than zombies!) and because it solves tricky situations that you otherwise would be unable to solve.

Minion kills will apply your rarity. No clue on what happens if you have rarity on your bow/quiver (though not sure any have iir).

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Regarding weapon speed, I've conducted a pretty full test with everything from a base 1.1 bow (Infractem) to a base 3 bow (Quill Rain) and it appears strongly that the minions use their own attack rate regardless of which bow you summon them with.

If you summon a clone with QR, then manually start right clicking with a Quill Rain, you'll notice that the player attacks with no interruptions while the minion takes little breaks in between each shot for inexplicable reasons. Worse than that, my minions have attack speed (from the tree) and my character doesn't and they still attack slower that I do manually.

With that knowledge, I see no reason to not use the biggest, fattest bow you can get your hands on. Infractem will last an absurdly long time due to the piercing, but the next upgrade from it for me is something like a well-rolled physical Harbinger (or Maraketh with 12% wed).

That being said, Wrath/Anger are still the best scalars for the damage imo. They're very competitive with Hatred/Haste and they allow you flexibility in picking which bow to use. Party members also usually appreciate them a lot.

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OldMenWithBows is level 79 now and I've been doing a ton of 66-70 maps. My biggest problem right now is just getting enough damage for good clear speed.

I survive pretty well (could use more armor/mitigation ala CoD or LC) with 4200 life, especially when surrounded by clones. I've got pretty good single target by weapon swapping to SRS (could use better single target lockdown for things that run away).

So for damage, I've got:
- 4L Blink/trap/multi/lmp
- 4L Mirror/trap/multi/lmp
- L18 Wrath + Anger + Generosity (+RMC)
- Infractem
- 30wed/21crit/20multi rare quiver
- 60% minion damage, 20% minion attack speed from tree

The next big steps seem to be getting 5/6L summoning linkages to massively boost my damage, getting a much better quiver, and getting 2 more levels on wrath/anger (ideally +2 more from Alpha's Howl).

It's starting to get very expensive, so upgrades are getting fewer and farther between. I could buy an Alpha's Howl (~1-2ex right now), Drillneck is a bit farther away (~5ex right now), and it probably would not be hard to get a 5L chest to boost one of my clone linkages (minion damage support is ~27% MORE damage since I only have 60% from tree + ~100% from blink/mirror levels). Getting the 5+L Infractem (or better rare) would be pretty rough but also doable.

Hey! I've been looking at a build similar to this, and here's what I came up with:

gems
mirror arrow * trap * multitrap * lmp * added lightning (with quality, for shocks)
blink arrow * trap * multitrap * lmp * WED
raise zombie (in a +2 level helm) * multistrike * melee splash * added fire

wrath * anger * generosity * reduced mana
flesh offering * ice nova (for EE) * ele weakness * faster casting

Then I'd have convocation and my own movement blink arrow on extra sockets / unsets.

TREE:

My tree looks a bit different from yours; I get Influence and EB, going through witch and getting those minion nodes as well. I don't have the links for more auras, so getting charisma doesn't seem too effective for me. I also get EE, which seems like a nice damage boost and might make it worthwhile to drop ele weakness for, say, temp chains or enfeeble.

I'm planning on getting a bow with lots of ele damage, and maybe use maloney's for a quiver, otherwise I guess an ele-damage-conversion corrupted quiver would be nice. I was going to get a good ele thicket bow until I read what you said about bow attack speed not influencing minions :( I guess Maraketh is the go-to now. I'm also not sure whether to use sunblast or bones of ullr, and I'm considering running purity for extreme convenience, what with the 42% inc aura effect.

My question is, what's the clear-speed like? It seems like it takes a bit of setup to kill each mob. And, I haven't actually played the build, but if I get all the duration in the tree, are increased duration gems necessary? It seems like I'd rather have WED/PPAD for more damage, since my clones will last about 6 seconds with what I have anyway. Lastly, in your opinion is it viable to go pure ele, or should I think about a good phys bow?

Thanks, and cheers for the hilarious build

If you can stand the zombies, more power to you. I find them to take up a considerable amount of time that could better be spent summoning more clones.

EE is a very powerful idea with clones that do light/fire damage. I ran an EE map the other day and noticed that my blink/mirror arrow damage was applying -light to enemies (guessing I do cold/fire from gear) and they were tearing things apart. With a better focus on EE, I'm sure it would work wonders. My only concern is that Ice Nova is a bit slow and the build doesn't take much cast speed (or get it naturally on gear) and that it requires you to be too close to enemies.

Note that you could run something like Wrath/Hatred instead, and then use Firestorm (or some other large aoe, fast, ranged fire skill) for -light/-cold EE.

EB is also a good idea if it's easily reachable (though the build doesn't hurt for mana that much, unless it's to start running AA).

Definitely seems like your tree favors two stronger auras over the hope of running three, which is probably a good thing since it looks like tri-aura requires an Alpha's Howl and will be a pretty tight fit for mana.

Your tree also makes sense to start as Witch instead of Scion, since for 1 more point exiting through her right side, you get like 30% increased mana regen. Alongside EB, that should open the way for running AA (which would help a ton).

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Re: bow, Infractem is going to be extremely hard to top just due to the pierce. A well rolled maraketh could out-damage it, but it'd be close (and you'd need to run Chain/Pierce).

Re: Sunblast/Ullr, neither help as much as just having a really good rare in that slot instead (or possibly Deerstalkers in the boot slot, which I've been using for a long time and greatly enjoy).

Re: linkages, X/Trap/Multitrap/LMP base, then the competing gems to fit in the remaining 2 slots imo are: Chain, Pierce, WED, Minion Damage. The first two are mutually exclusive and can both be skipped if you get an Infractem. Between WED and Minion Damage, it's extremely close. WED probably wins out unless your bow has a ton of physical damage. I wouldn't go added lightning ever since Wrath adds more than enough lightning damage to reliably shock things and WED adds more damage overall. Increased Duration is... questionable. It'd only keep them around for a second or two longer which, while great, probably isn't as great as more damage.

Re: clear speed, it's a mixed bag. With really high enemy density, if you can toss out 6/9/12 clones really fast, then they'll clear up that pile and any piles nearby as you're moving around. With low enemy density, the clear speed suffers quite a bit. For single targets in particular, I've resorted to using a caster staff with an SRS linkage to put the hurt on them since trap-clones are too unreliable to summon against a single, moving target.

You have to keep moving really fast, and can't spend much downtime at all otherwise your dps falls off a cliff. If you clear up all but one enemy in the pack, that one enemy can take as long to kill as the entire rest of the pack.

Past that, my clear speed would be a lot better with better damage. I also really wish there was some way to get some skill duration off my gear instead of only the tree + the support gem.

Overall, it's not on the same level as the uber-fast clearers (LW+IceNova, Kinetic Blast, crit split/nado, flicker prolif, etc). There is a non-removable delay between throwing the trap and summoning the minion, and between summoning the minion and them shooting arrows. Even if the minions 1shot everything, clear speed can't keep up with the more "point and click" style of builds due to these built-in delays. Additionally, trap throwing range is considerably shorter than full-screen projectile range, so it loses out some there.

I will say that it clears faster than an SRS/anim-weapon build, though, since it behaves similarly except the minions can shoot at anything on the screen and do quite a bit more damage per volley. It has no problem clearing maps at all, and with proper (read: expensive) gear, I can easily see its damage scaling into the higher maps.

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I've been thinking a lot recently about replacing Anger with Hatred. The overall damage would drop a bit (Hatred adds base cold equal to 36% of my Infractem = 71 base cold, Anger adds base fire = 89 at level 18), but the freezing might help out more since I do crit semi-reliably.

I've also been considering trying to use a Blink/Mirror/?/? linkage both for mobility (from Blink) and to just get Yet More Clones into the pile. Given that one of my biggest problems is cleaning up stragglers, having "easy" clones on hand might help a lot there.

I know there's a ton of socket pressure already, but this might be worth more than, say, Convocation, or possibly even a curse.

Lots more to test. :)

On the boss in Gorge map (the Kraityn-like dude) it was going so unnoyingly slow; i removed my LMP from the link and it seemed like he is dying faster so i guess for fastmoving single mobs replacing LMP with added cold could boost the damage a bit.

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BGkamaz wrote:

On the boss in Gorge map (the Kraityn-like dude) it was going so unnoyingly slow; i removed my LMP from the link and it seemed like he is dying faster so i guess for fastmoving single mobs replacing LMP with added cold could boost the damage a bit.

Very true. LMP just adds to the problems against single targets.

I stand by my weapon-swap-to-SRS for them, though. If you haven't tried it out yet, it works exceptionally well.

I tried SRS and i have to say you were right about that. Even more that i have some cast speed increase because i am a Shadow and its literaly on my way :)

My SRS gem is atm only lv 13 and i am in lv 70 map and in a 4 link with faster ataks - spellecho - multi (thats the collors i could get with my limited currency) with it i already kill single mobs for the same time as with my mirrors. However i do not like the idea of weapon swapping and i do not have a staff or a +2 helm so for now i just put it in my bow. I have to say it feels great so far to be able to use the mirrors and at the same time the spirits. It makes it easier to change from mobpack to 1target tactics and the mirrors can still tank for you while using spirits.

On another note the new Maloney quiver works absolutely awesome for peoples that cant afford Drillneck. It is like invented to go along this build. Its defence and damage buff with that smoke and all the mirrors around taking tons of hits are awesome and it is cheap enough so you can vaal it for +1 arrow. Thats what i did and i removed LMP and the kill speed looks the same. I would like to ask you witch is better to put instead LMP - added cold, weapon elemental damage or phys proj damage? (using the pierce bow)

I had never so much fun with another build in this game. Thank you guys for the cool idea :)