Witch Hybrid SRS build 2.0

Hey everyone! I know there's a bunch of SRS builds out there that are pretty similar to each other but I was asked to make a guide and figured why not.

I chose to do Hybrid because I always felt it more survivable compared to low-life. This was important to me leveling up because nothing sucked worse than dying at level 97+. We can't leech and can't flask ES back. We can invest in recharge but SRS trees are generally pretty starved of passives as we need to reach all over the place...especially now with jewels.

So first I'll start off with my passive tree (at level 100):



As you can see I use 12 jewels in my tree mainly focused on cast speed and minion damage. This is where SRS really scales up in power. Unfortunately SRS does auto-target but they need travel time to reach their targets so throwing out as many SRS as quickly as possible will be important if you ever plan on competing with other powerful builds. If you don't have the gear to have a decent health pool (>3k life and >2.5k es), you should use less jewels and invest more passives towards life or ES. Damage is great, but can't do it while dead.

Now for gear and gem link setup:



There's a current debate as to whether Pledge or +3 staff is better than another. I and many other SRS players feel that Pledge seemed to work well with lesser tier gear where cast speed was more difficult to come by. Once you get a higher tier +3 staff (19% cast speed or more), +3 staves seem to take over. This is especially true once you are able to reach the 50 minions cap with vaal haste where cast speed is meaningless for total potential damage. You will then rely on the other few sources of damage scaling: Gem level. This is currently difficult to calculate however as GGG has not released the true numbers and we're only able to imply what they are based on what few clues we were given. I've run the numbers using Matrixfactor's numbers and also the datamined values from the wiki and I found that using pledge with my current gear, I actually have about 500k less single target damage as they both reach the minion cap. This is also assuming the SRS will not be damaged to allow melee damage on full life to work properly (which is rarely the case as AOE is very common to hit your minions).

Other than that, gear is fairly self-explanatory. Because I chose Hybrid, I made sure I had T1 life rolls on all gear and as decent ES as I could get. Helm is lower in ES than I'd like but the stats are decent and that minion corruption is awesome. Chest is huge on life/es and boots give a good INT roll. My belt is purely for the increased duration which is incredibly powerful and allows me to reach the minion cap. While leveling up, I chose a belt that had Life/ES/Resist and room for Flask duration mod.

Gem links as shown in the gear list:
SRS + Echo + Minion damage + Empower lvl 4 + Melee physical damage + Melee Damage on Full life(Single target) or Melee splash(AOE).

Enlighten + Haste + Clarity
Enlighten + Generosity + Hatred
Flesh offering in unset ring
Phase run + Vaal haste + Vaal discipline + Increased duration
Animated guardian + Vaal Grace + Raise Spectre + Minion life
Spell Totem + Arc
Desecrate + Chaos golem (Had an extra blue slot so why not extra dmg mitigation)

If I were doing Uber Atziri, I would switch out Phase run for an extra vaal haste, and I'd charge a third vaal haste. Gem switching gets annoying but I can't sacrifice having 3 vaal hastes for each of the 3 split phases and it's extremely nice to have that Vaal disc + Grace in case I get some bad Mirror RNG.

Flasks are:


I think these are pretty obvious. Taste of hate is incredibly powerful and I chose to get a legacy rumi flask as it works extremely well with Taste of hate + Vaal grace. Flask nodes are very powerful and they really do serve the only defenses SRS have as we have no freedom to invest in armour/eva passives. Having those flat dodge/block stats is really a nice thing. Switch out taste of hate for a ruby flask for Uber.

For spectres, I always go for the necromancer cursers. Preferably Elemental weakness (Defilers) from act 2 crypt and replace them with higher levels as available. Frost biters are also nice. Could also get 1 Necromancer curser and 1 Evangelist for that nice prox shield. I don't get Revenants or other "dps" spectres because as SRS become more and more powerful, it always felt more efficient just to have that instant curse to augment their power. Plus, I don't link spectres with any DPS gems as I reserve gems mainly for more Vaal gems. This setup is very much inspired from Ghazzy's low-life build geared for Atziri except I adapted it for jewels and hybrid life/es setup.

Last.....Animated Guardian!

He's pretty much my best bud and he's named SirBuffsalot. He deserves a name because the amount of damage he provides is incredible. I give him Dying breath staff and Leer cast helmet. Most people know this amounts to a 33% inc to damage to all allies including minions. For minions, this is huge. But a lot of people don't give enough credit to Dying breath's other amazing ability: 18% increased curse effect taken by enemies. This is so huge for anyone that uses necromancer curse spectres. This is basically a few free curse effect passives in the tree and your spectres curse for you so you can have full uptime on SRS casting.

Defensive gear I give him is 40% belly of the beast. There's simply nothing better. AG has a little over 8.1k base life at level 20 and even legacy Kaom's wouldn't compare. Also that 50% increased life from flasks mod is undervalued. You can find cheap corrupted bricked ones every now and then. Gloves and Boots are just T1 life and enough resists to cap him (minions always start off with 0% resist in any difficulty so it's easy to cap). All together, he has over 19k life when linked with minion life gem and 30% minion life from the tree. I DO keep that minion damage node in the templar tree and part of the reason is the 1.5% minion life regen node just before it. That's over 200 life regen per second for AG with that gear and it allows me to almost always ignore him as he can tank an incredible amount of crap. If he does take a good deal of damage, flask works and having Vaal grace+Disc will always protect him. I would seriously need to put him through some ridiculous situations to get him killed (Horrible map mods Villiage bosses, Malachai or maligaro core map, etc).

Hopefully this makes sense! It's not a budget build by any means but I hope it shows what an end-game Hybrid SRS build would look like. Using matrixfactor's calculator assuming those base values are accurate, my max DPS with this build would reach 9.2m dps. Without Animated guardian + Curse spectre, my DPS would reach around 6.8m dps. But again we don't know what the base values are but these calculators were great for helping me theorycraft in a comparitive way.

This is imo one of the best srs builds out there, although it is still "just" a srs build I feel it is better than the others, previously I have been on a party with him and well lets just say everything just melted.
I think you should probably add some pictures or videos so people can see what you can trully do.

This build is s tier. Totally agree with you RLSNS the build is raid boss compared to pve content

I see a lot of summoner builds going CI, is there any reason why you didn't?


By the way that's not a complaint. I love the build. Great job.

"

This is imo one of the best srs builds out there, although it is still "just" a srs build I feel it is better than the others, previously I have been on a party with him and well lets just say everything just melted.
I think you should probably add some pictures or videos so people can see what you can trully do.

I have spoken with him before regarding most of my doubts on his build, if I remember well the reason why he didn't choose CI or Low Life is because of the survivability, you can get a high amount of effective "life" by going hybrid, as you can see the pattern on his gear he focus on high Life/ES, Res, and the basic SrS rolls people want for srs (cast, mana, mana regen, etc...) and for refining his gear he was looking for good rolls corrupted with decent corrupts, such as + duration, before +cast speed(I think he doesn't need it anymore), basically stuff like that.

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kylelurty wrote:

I see a lot of summoner builds going CI, is there any reason why you didn't?


By the way that's not a complaint. I love the build. Great job.

Sorry haven't checked out this guide in a while. I actually have 2 different builds. This Witch Hybrid and a Scion CI. What I've found is that it's much easier to scale damage/cast speed with hybrid build because you don't need as much gem links for other auras and you don't need as much passive points for defenses. Though the difference will be almost nothing except you can make use of spectres in a permanent way for auto-cursing. However I will say I am loving my CI right now. I'm shocked at how much I love being curse immune and I've made her so she uses Animate guardian permanently with almost no chance of him dying. 1461501 is the other thread. This build here is more about getting massive damage even on somewhat of a budget.

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RLSNS wrote:

This is imo one of the best srs builds out there, although it is still "just" a srs build I feel it is better than the others, previously I have been on a party with him and well lets just say everything just melted.
I think you should probably add some pictures or videos so people can see what you can trully do.

Thanks! I'd love to do that...but not sure my computer can make videos in good enough quality to do that. I'd have to play around with it.