[2.0] Null's Inclination Bow/Summoner Build Guide

- Shipyard - Rare with strongboxes. This uses Elreon jewelry.
- Zana Daily - 5min timed mission
- Gorge Run #1 in 4:00
- Gorge Run #2 in 4:13
- 79 Rare Corrupted Arsenal - I get wrecked by my first 79 map. I manage to bring down the exiles and Bameth but die once to Ephij and have to park him. I'm rewarded at the end with some item level 84 bases (my first ever).

As of Ascendancy, starting Witch allows us to choose Necromancer for the following upgrades:
- Mistress of Sacrifice: Since Flesh Offering is automatically cast inside Nulls, this gives us 30% move speed, attack speed, and cast speed during combat. The skill duration improves our timed minions and Vaal Haste as well as a small bonus to our curse. You can also run CWDT + Desecrate + Bone Offering + Convocation for defense. It's the best passive ever.
- Beacon of Corruption: Helps with Chaos resist, our Null's chaos damage, and some minion dps.
- Commander of Darkness: We choose this last when our 3rd aura is up. It's the only passive left since we don't run Zombies or specters.

Another option is Ascendant because the +40 stats are great for Null's 212 int and 212 dex requirements. You can lean more toward your bow or your minions, your choice.

The ideal starting place is the Scion because we need to span the tree and her jewels are versatile and powerful. We are scaling flat elemental damage with attack speed because Null's Inclination deals weak physical damage and moderate Chaos damage.

Shadow is another potential starting point with Elemental Damage if that's your thing or you don't want to have to find/craft/trade for extra minion damage jewels. There is potentially a Eldritch Battery variant using Minion Damage + Energy Shield Gained on Hit Cobalt jewels. I plan to try this soon. Chaos Inoculation might be possible but you reintroduce the mana problem while being unable to run Clarity on Blood Magic support (theuberelite' solution) or Blood Magic support on all your active skills while fully reserving mana (ZenocideGenius's solution) or wasting the amazing +30 life gained on hit from Thief's Torment. I will revisit this when more or better mana solutions are added to the game.

Ranger can be a great starting point with her attack speed and immediate north exit to the Static Electricity jewel slot for fast leveling as a bow. I leveled with a bow in Tempest as my first character and it was awful, slow, and dangerous, and I didn't have Static Electricity. You have to walk around the Scion evasion wheel which might be a great choice if you have an amazing evasion body armor.

- Our weapon is Null's Inclination. Here you will put your summon gems. You'll want to immediately 6socket then 4l the Null's, and when you go to try to 5l or 6l it you need enough fusings to stop at a 4l again so you don't brick your build. Linking will consume any whetstones you put in! I ran with a 6s 4l until about level 70. 5link Nulls works similarly to a 6link because you can use Flesh Offering in the off socket which is functionally similar to linking Minion Speed. The increased Int requirement makes it easy to roll blue and green sockets, but it's crazy hard to get lots of red sockets without using Vorici's crafting bench. If you have a choice, you want a 12% attack speed one since that's what the rest of the build scales. Even though the bow grants 1% minion damage per 10 dex, we don't go ham on dexterity because 100 dexterity only adds 10% minion damage, whereas a jewel slot can add 16% minion damage. Ideally, we want a well-rolled Nulls corrupted with Culling Strike.
- Our Body Armor is any armor and/or evasion 5link or 6link for our bow skill. We don't want Energy Shield because Blood Rage will keep ES depleted. Belly of the Beast is a great option because of the high life, easy to roll red and green sockets, and it helps our Catalysed Life Flask of Animation heal us and our minions better.
- Our helmet of choice is Alpha's Howl for our auras. We're a summoner that doesn't use Generosity, leaving room for Enlighten. Like Nulls, this is another big chromatic sink that can be frustrating to roll correctly. Without Alpha's Howl you will only be able to run 2 auras so Anger and Wrath. It's possible to run three 50% auras Anger, Wrath, and Haste with a Geofri's Crest or The Vertex because the +1 helps Enligthen, leaving you with a very small amount of mana (I have 24 which is enough for my 23 mana cost Split Arrow) that might work.

Mana Solutions
- The ring slots are where you can solve your mana problems. Solutions include:
: Using a Thief's Torment. In addition to the increased Item Quantity helping our raw number of animatable weapons, the +15 mana on hit solves all our mana problems. This simplifies the build because we don't need any mana regen and enables us to run the No Life or Mana Regen map mod without noticing (and we can kind of run Elemental Reflect maps). We also don't need to find other expensive rare rings or even level up Elreon. Whenever we run out of mana, we will automatically default attack, which is still augmented by (+2 mana on hit Jewels)/Thief's Torment +15 mana on hit. One or two of these attacks connecting with a monster and we're back to shooting and maintaining our Split Arrows. I have killed quite a few bosses mano-y-mano this way with Blink Arrow.
: Getting enough sources of Mana Gained on Hit in our Viridian jewel slots (Life Gained on Hit is also nice to have on your rings, amulet, and/or Crimson jewels) but only Cobalt jewels can roll 14-16% Minion Damage.
: Crafting Elreon jewelry which gives up to -8 to mana costs (flat reduction) per ring and amulet. This could potentially give you a zero mana cost 5link Arrow skill if you can cover your hp and resists. Your will probably need some mana regen or a Mana Gained on Hit viridian jewel to supplement. Elreon jewelry crafting tutorial by ProjectPT
: You can get lots of the mana regen stat, use Rallying Cry frequently, and run Clarity + Blood Magic support so it reserves a flat amount of your life.
: You can socket a Blood Magic support to your Arrow skill and both your gloves and boots 4links for your utility skills.
: As far as ideal rings for the build go, you can theoretically equip a strange Ventor's Gamble with negative Item Rarity and positive Item Quantity to help animate weapon.
: You can craft +2 life gained on hit onto rings which has proven very powerful with Split Arrow + Chain or Tornado Shot + Greater Multiple Projectiles.



- Our Amulet, Belt, Gloves, Boots, and Quiver are good rares that fill out our resists, life, and the dex+int requirements of Nulls and other gear. Ideally the boots have 30% movespeed, the gloves have the Catarina-crafted prefix mod Minions deal 10-15% increased damage, and there's weapon elemental damage where you can get it. I pick up and Alchemy orb high ilvl Turquoise Amulets and chance orb Onyx Amulets (hoping for Astramentis) and Gold Rings (hoping for Ventor's Gamble with negative Item Rarity and positive Item Quantity, then a good corruption that wipes the implicit Item Rarity). Gold Amulets are actively bad because increasing Item Rarity will lower the number of animatable weapon drops. That unique that grants Gluttony of Elements might be best in slot but I don't have one.

Flasks
Our flasks give us survivability and utility. We want some combination of:
- Life Flask of Animation - to heal us and our minions
- Flask of Staunching - We attack so quickly that Corrupting Blood will kill us
- Granite Flask of Iron Skin - We need some amount of physical mitigation
- Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline - to keep up momentum.
- Flask of Heat if you don't have an Alpha's Howl
- Flask of Warding is nice on a flask that isn't life or mana (so the duration lasts as long as possible) if you don't have Thief's Torment which makes curses half as effective on you.
- If you haven't solved your mana problems any other way, you have to run a mana flask here. A Saturated Sanctified Mana Flask has a very long ~20second duration, but maybe you want one with more uses.



We have Resolute Technique so the Surgeon's mod is blank for us. We don't like getting hit so the Avenger's mod is also not ideal.

Once we get momentum with an army, we get lots of flask charges, to the point that we can press 1+2+3+4+5 just to use a charge from all our flasks as they refill.

While most summoners are gem-starved, this summoner/bow hybrid is especially short on sockets because we dedicate our body armor to our bow and Thief's Torment removes any ability to have Unset rings.

Weapon

There are plenty of options on how to socket your Null's Inclination:


- Summon Raging Spirit is the burst damage summon. In this setup they last 6.79 seconds.
- Animate Weapon is our sustained damage summon. In this setup they last 72 seconds.
- I have tried Summon Skeletons but it's a poor choice because they walk slowly to new targets and you can't Convocation warp them to the next pack. If you want Zombies or Spectres, instead use them in a 4L to augment your army.
- Blink Arrow and Mirror Arrow do NOT work in Nulls because they are attacks (using your attack speed) not spells (using your cast speed). Nulls only casts gems that both "Minion" and "Spell".

Many support gems have merit:

- Increased Duration adds time to our summons, which makes the build even more momemtum-based. If your minions always time out and never die to damage then this support would help.
- Melee Physical Damage and/or Added Fire damage and/or Weapon Elemental Damage make harder-hitting minions (especially the animated weapons who deal more than 200% of their base weapon damage as physical).
- Melee Splash gets the most damage out of the minions short lives at the cost of worse boss killing (but we were already bad at fighting bosses). Melee Splash helps naturally kill those Vaal Totems that make everyone stay at 1 hp.
- I've gone with Faster Attacks, Multistrike, and Minion Speed (or Minion Damage which has a more multiplier) to scale the flat elemental damage from Anger and Wrath the most while giving me a little better boss killing than melee splash.

The off-socket has Flesh Offering which automatically casts on kill, blowing up corpses for a minion attack and move speed buff. This is like linking another Minion Speed while destroying all corpses, more or less making a 6socket 5link Nulls as powerful as a 6link Nulls.

Chest


We must socket our culling payload skill in our 5l or 6l chest. There are more than one option here:

2L - Split Arrow + Chain
-OR-
2L - Tornado Shot + Greater Multiple Projectiles

4L + Weapon Elemental Damage + Culling Strike
5L + Faster Attacks
6L + Item Quantity!! (Permanent league only!)

Our payload skill must be good at filling monsters with Culling Strike arrows. The minions can tank and do lots of damage, but we need to sneak an arrow into every monster when it gets ~10% life left so that Culling Strike gives us the kill and procs our bow to summon more minions. If minions get the kill, we don't summon anything.

WED is our best "more" damage multiplier, and Culling Strike helps us steal kills from our minions. From there, we add Faster Attacks in a 5link. I don't have the luxury of a 6link but my favorite gem is Item Quantity for more loot for Animate Weapon.

Split Arrow delivers many arrows with our flat elemental damage from Anger, Wrath, and gear to the enemies. Chain delivers even more arrows, and we don't even have to aim, but we are bad at single target damage (hopefully we have lots of animated weapons for that). Split Arrow is very strong in the 2.0 version.

Tornado Shot + Greater Multiple Projectiles is another strong bow skill that can clear packs while being decent at single target. Try to aim just behind the monster so more arrows connect.

I have also tried Ice Shot + Greater Multiple Projectiles which is ok but not amazing. It has built-in AoE but we don't get any AoE nodes, we get the duration nodes. The chill slowing effect is nice and defensive and at the time I was cursing with Warlord's Mark which could stunlock monters, but ultimately the monsters lived too long and Split Arrow or Tornado Shot kills them faster instead of slowing them down + stunning them. Perhaps there is a stunning build buried in there with the right quiver and ascendancy class.

Helm


We put our auras Anger, Wrath, and Haste in our Alpha's Howl as well as an Enlighten gem. Without Alphas, we just run Anger and Wrath (while leveling an Enlighten in weapon swap in a Haku weapon that grants +6% to socketed gem quality!).

You could also try a Geofri's Crest because its automatic +1 gem level helps Enlighten, which might get your auras and mana in better shape until you get an Alpha's.

Gloves and Boots



We have a lot of utility gems we want to run:
- Vaal Haste - you can try corrupting a normal Haste with a Vaal Orb to get a Vaal Haste. On some maps this build doesn't need Increased Duration on Vaal Haste to keep it active most of the time.
- Convocation - You can yolo run up to a boss and Convocation going for a fast kill. It's often that or no kill at all because animated weapons will quickly die to boss AoE attacks. I have a Cast When Damage Taken setup to keep me safer in high level maps, but I sometimes unsocket the CWDT just before the boss room so I can cast Convocation.
- Rallying Cry - Huge damage boost to us and our minions plus some mana regen. We don't really need the mana regen thanks to Thief's Torment but we want that damage!
- Blink Arrow - our movement skill. We deal more damage by continuously firing Split Arrow and using Blink Arrow reposition, but it's dangerous to needlessly allow Blink to be on cooldown. Sometimes it takes Blinking 25 times while dancing around a boss to get the kill and hopefully a map drop.
- Elemental Weakness - Our curse of choice since we deal mixed elemental damage (so we can't use Elemental Equilibrium keystone like other summoners). Most thing die faster if we just keep attacking, so this curse is used on bosses with high HP.
- Blood Rage - Gives us attack speed and frenzy charges on kill. If your regen or hp pool is hurting then you can play without Blood Rage. Because of our increased skill duration passives, this lasts a long time - you can unsocket the gem or unequip the item it's in to turn off the degen. This buff degens energy shield and won't let it recharge so any energy shield we get is mostly wasted.
- Cast When Damage Taken + Immortal Call - Once I got close to level 80 maps, the incoming damage was so high and all my mana reservation is offense so I needed CWDT + IM as a safe period to either Blink Arrow away or keep firing so Thief's Torment and flasks healed me up. While Alpha's makes me immune to freeze, I'm not immune to stunlock, so this helps there, too.
- Flame Golem - Adds a nice 20% damage boost, but this is a luxury. You could run Chaos Golem for more physical mitigation. You can link the golem to a high level Cast When Damage Taken to automate it.


I have also run Nulls with a Split Arrow + Culling Strike + Curse on Hit + Elemental Weakness + Temporal Chains setup (getting Whispers of Doom and minion nodes in the witch tree) but it was far weaker at clearing content. This would be better in a party since you're probably not getting the killshots anyway, but in that case you should equip something other than a Nulls for a more powerful support build.

Oak - Kraityn - Kill/Kraityn

We want +40 life by helping Normal Oak.
Next help Kraityn in Cruel for +8% attack speed.
Finally, you have choice in Merciless. If you plan to use Blood Rage, kill Kraityn for the +1 maximum Frenzy charge. Otherwise, kill all for the skill point.

Using Blood Rage is not a requirement, but it helps clear speed and has a long duration from our passives. Sometimes in 77+ maps I turn off my Blood Rage because of the sheer amount of incoming damage, reduced regen mods, and/or huge boss hitpoints where Blood Rage becomes more of a liability.

At some point in the passive tree around level 80, the most tempting nodes are 4% attack speed nodes. That's why helping Kraityn in Cruel and Merciless is the best option, assuming you'll get into the 80s. (a Frenzy charge gives 4% attack speed along with a 4% more damage multiplier, so it's mostly better than a 4% attack speed node).

The monsters we like fighting include:
- Monkeys
- Crabs that slough their shells (we get two killshots from one monster)
- Monsters that spawn minions like Sea Witches and Carrion Queens. I have killed Residence Dominus from a fresh TP by letting him spawn enough monsters I can kill to summon SRS and weapons in bursts.
- By destroying corpses with Flesh Offering in our Nulls, Necromancers and Avian Wretches are much easier.
- Jungle Valley boss

We don't like fighting:
- Big hulky single monsters like Rock Golems, cleave Bears, and rare Rakangos if we don't already have minions.
- Anything with a loading screen like Vagan underground arenas because it wipes our army.
- AoE attacks from high HP bosses like Beyond bosses, Storm Heralds, and some Rogue Exiles like Antalie Napora's lightning arrows. These fights must end quickly with momentum from a large army or you might have to park the boss until you get another army. You can work a Vaal Grace into the build for these occasions.
-Goatmen are especially deadly to summoners because 2.0 changed their AI where their mission in life is to jump over your minion wall right on top of you. Many of them like to do this in unison. Blink Arrow seems to fool them. It's wise to keep them at the edge of the screen in case their a rare one.
-Bosses I've failed to kill:
--Torture Chamber boss (Storm Herald, shoots lasers, lightning warp totems do huge aoe damage)
-- Whakawairua Tuahu boss (white Siren 2nd form where it runs away spamming cold skills)
-- Malachai (I joined a public party...)
-- Atziri (I'm not even going to try)

For my Animate Weapon characters, this is one line of code near the end of your item filter will show normal melee weapons in a large font so its easier to click on them (that don't have other rules set of them like 6s or chromatics). I use this with Null's Inclination to help me lure monsters to a trove of weapons to animate. You need to be about 3/4th of a screen close to a weapon for Null's to animate it, and this works even if monsters you kill are on the opposite side off screen.

#Animator - show normal melee weapons in a large font so it's easy to click them
Show
Rarity Normal
Class "Claws" "Maces" "Swords" "Axes" "Staves" "Daggers" "Sceptres"
SetFontSize 40

If you're reading this from the future, your Nulls build is probably looking for:
- New skill gems with the "Minion" and "Spell" tags
- Another great reason to scale Dexterity
- Increased Item Quantity for Animate Weapon
- Reduced Item Rarity - More white items will drop, which helps Animate Weapon
- Increased Skill Duration for temporary minions
- Something that makes Null's Chaos damage better, such as a new Chaos crit effect
- Better Aura effectiveness options
- Easier or more effective ways to Culling Strike. For example, if somehow your minions couldn't deal killing blows then Nulls would be stronger not weaker.