[Prophecy, 2.3.0] Hardcore Blink arrow / Mirrow arrow Necromancer trapper capped block

Character name = Shmizz_steals_a_build
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Shmizz/characters

Character level 86

See pack of enemies
Drop a number of traps determined by the difficulty of the pack
blink to the next pack, bone offering behind you
repeat.

Witch does NOT get blink arrow as a gem reward, so you'll have to buy two of them from another player or mule them from brutus yourself, then turn one of them into mirror arrow.
In order to get mirror arrow, vendor a blink arrow skill gem and an alteration orb at the same time.


Blink arrow teleports you forward, leaving behind a clone that will fire arrows for a short time, then despawn.
Mirror arrow shoots out a clone at your mouse cursor which will also fire arrows for a short time before despawning.
Any clones you spawn from either of these skills gain a copy of your bow and quiver along with all the stats on them.
Both blink arrow and mirror arrow have a several second cooldown, and each one only summons a single clone even with Lesser or Greater Multiple Projectiles. This means that your damage is severely limited since you can only summon up to 4 clones at once (with increased skill effect duration).
We bypass this problem with the use of traps. When you link blink arrow to the trap support gem, the trap has its own cooldown which overwrites the cooldown of blink arrow itself. With any trap you get 3 charges and gain a new charge every few seconds. We then use the cluster trap support gem, which causes us to throw out four traps with each throw instead of one (note that this still only consumes one charge of the trap). Since we throw four traps, each trap individually casts its own blink arrow, which means you spawn four clones every time you throw your traps. With both a blink arrow and a mirror arrow, each one has its own separate cooldown, meaning you get a total of 6 trap charges. If you spam all of your trap charges at once you can reach 24 clones of yourself at once, spawning an army out of your pocket.

Since traps normally require enemies to step on them before they activate, this build wouldn't be much good unless you can reliably activate all of your traps at once. That's why we use Sunblast:
as well as Cheap construction:
the salient stats here are "Traps trigger at the end of their duration" as well as reduced trap duration.
Normally traps have a certain duration they lay on the ground for. Sunblast makes it such that when that duration expires, the traps trigger rather than simply despawning. If you use sunblast and two cheap constructions, you can get up to 100% reduced trap duration. This means that your traps trigger instantly as soon as they touch the ground, no enemies have to be nearby and every single trap will always trigger.

It is important to note that even with 100% reduced trap duration, there is still a few frame window where traps can be damaged and destroyed after hitting the ground but before being triggered. We do not use clever construction in this build, so you simply have to be aware of where you are putting your traps and try to throw them away from ground effects that break traps instantly.

ALWAYS have one blink arrow setup AND one mirror arrow setup. It is significantly better than having two of either (even ignoring the cooldown sharing). Blink arrow traps will leave behind a clone exactly where they hit the ground, which means you can place your clones wherever you want and position them outside of dangerous aoe clusterfucks and ground damage effects. Blink arrow has problems with mechanics like proximity shield though. If you throw your blink arrow trap outside of a proximity shield, the minion will just uselessly shoot at the shield all day. If you throw your blink arrow trap INSIDE a proximity shield area, there are very likely to be other ground effects inside the shield, which will destroy your traps instantly and you'll have a sad time. This is where Mirror arrow comes in. Mirror arrow trap will shoot a clone out from the original trap position. This means you have no control over where the mirror arrow clones appear, however they always teleport to melee range of the nearest enemy. They can stick themselves in a nasty aoe situation and die instantly, but you can also throw a set of mirror arrow traps outside of a proximity shield where the traps are guaranteed to trigger, then the clones will teleport INSIDE the shield and kill the enemies inside.

So, now we have a large army to deploy anywhere we want, but that's not very useful unless we can make them hit hard. In order to do this, we scale all of our clones up through the use of minion damage in the tree as well as the anger and wrath auras to add flat damage to every single arrow that each clone shoots. Scaling your auras is the most important thing for the damage of this build and with really good gear this could be one of the highest single target damage builds in the game.

There is little clear consensus on this, but as I understand it Blink arrow and Mirror arrow clones have an Attack Speed Cap meaning once you reach a certain break point, more attack speed does literally nothing for your clones. Use a 1.6 APS bow with just the one or two attack speed nodes in the tree and your minions will hit attack speed cap. This makes flesh offering effectively useless for the build and bone offering is already god-tier as necromancer, so we always use bone offering.

Even though it looks like it, clones NEVER benefit from shrines, flasks, or other buffs on your own person, they only benefit from aoe buffs like auras.

see my character Shmizz_Steals_a_build for more in-depth information.
The two most important gems are obviously blink arrow and mirror arrow. Both of these should be linked to (in order of priority):
Blink arrow/Mirror arrow - Trap - Cluster trap - Lesser Multiple Projectiles - Minion Damage - Weapon Elemental Damage.
It is best for this build to have two six-links, one in the bow and one in the chest, however the build works really well with two five-links or just a single six-link with the setup :
Blink arrow - Mirror Arrow - Trap - Cluster Trap - Lesser Multiple Projectiles - Minion Damage
Note: Multi-trap is NOT a viable alternative to cluster trap. Do NOT ever use multi-trap.


The next most important links are your auras. Simply link:
Wrath - Anger - Generosity
all of your damage comes from your minions, so generosity is a massive damage boost. Quality is highly recommended on all three of these gems. More aura radius means your auras will affect your clones even off-screen.

The rest of your gem links are simply quality of life / utility skills.
I use:
Clarity (This buffs our damage as well through commander of darkness)
Desecrate
Bone offering (this is mandatory, it is one of the best defensive mechanics in the game.)
Projectile weakness (because dealing 1.4x damage is a good thing)
a single linked blink arrow for mobility
Cast when damage taken - Immortal call
Raise spectre - Minion and totem elemental resistance (Act 4 giant statues are some of the tankiest mobs in the game. Spectre two statues and they are almost invincible free tanks for you. This is why we get the 1% minion life regen node in the tree. Statues have such a ridiculous life pool that with 1% regen their life bars don't ever move except on very dangerous bosses.)

Use Storm Cloud from 10-66.

It is very important to understand the complex mechanical interactions of the build in order to understand how to scale the damage of the build.
First things first: Trap damage does NOT scale the damage of this build. Bow damage does NOT scale the damage of this build. Elemental damage does NOT scale the damage of this build. Minion attack speed does NOT scale the damage of this build (they are already at capped attack speed). Accuracy does NOT scale the damage of this build (we use lioneye's glare, so our minions can never miss).

The only ways to scale the damage of this build are minion damage, and auras/aura effect.
We get all the minion damage in the tree, and as much aura effectiveness as is reasonable, the rest of the tree is life nodes.

It is vitally important to reach 100% reduced duration on our traps. We happen to gain 30% increased skill effect duration from Mistress of sacrifice in the ascendancy tree. This means that we need a total of 130% reduced trap duration in order to reach 100% net. Sunblast only has 80% reduced duration on it, which means we need to use five(5) Cheap construction gems. This is a relatively unfortunate side effect, but it is WELL worth it to have access to bone offering on ourself.