[2.4] Whaitiri's Chaotic Null's Inclination Necro - all map mods, 73/65 block without Rumis

Guide won't be updated anymore! The original setup is simply outclassed by CwC and/or Severed/United SRS or AW builds nowadays.
Tried building around Beacon of Corruption and other minion types, but nothing is really reliable due to on-kill mechanic. Nulls badly needs a rework!
____________________________________________________________________________________

Welcome to my Null's Inclination guide, fellow exiles!

I'll try to keep the introduction short, so here's what this build is about:
it's a poison-focused archer witch using minions, with up to 73/65 permanent block and ~13s complete elemental damage immunity on a relatively low budget.

Sounds quite confusing right?

We achieve all this with an array of unique items, the main one is:


I've been playing around with many different Null's setups every once in a while since it was released. While there are a few potent ones, this is the setup i find to be the strongest.
____________________________________________________________________________________

copy&paste Version for the Lazy


____________________________________________________________________________________

Pros & Cons

I'm not gonna try to win you over with some peak DPS calculations here, those are irrelevant due to how this build works and would just give you a wrong picture.

Instead, i'll give you a summary of pros & cons for you to decide if the build is something for you.

Let's start with the bad.

"

✧ We highly rely on duration-based minions which spawn by us killing stuff.
This means we have to stay in motion and plan ahead to get the most out of them, and can't leave the map for trades nor chat alot during mapping.

✧ Maps with lots of backtracking or low pack density easily kill our momentum. A prime example for the latter is Village Ruin, i usually have a hard time keeping up enough minions to kill the bosses there.

✧ Good transistion to the next issue: multi-stage bossfights. While i've found workarounds for some, there are bosses we simply can't do. This is an intended design aspect of PoE, but i'm mentioning it anyway so you don't get your expectations up too high.

✧ Another issue is party viability. We need to get kills to be useful, and that's not always possible in big parties and conflicts with dedicated cullers. Smaller parties however work fine.

✧ Last but not least, you may end up animating white 6s or even 6L weapons in more hectic situations.

So what's even good about this build then?

"

We..
✧ can run all mapmods
✧ are reflect immune
✧ have up to 73/65 block without needing Rumi's
✧ get ~600 Life back on block
✧ don't need any 6L for full potential
✧ get automated corpse disposal
✧ can keep Vaal Haste up permanently
✧ can kill most deadly elemental bosses easily
✧ can sit back and play one-handed if needed

I'm aware this won't be the new meta, but it's a decent build to relax while others pretend to be super serious about their exp/h and then get burned out after a few days.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Passive Tree, Bandits & Leveling

First things first, Null's Inclination requires Lv60 and there is no alternative giving the same build enabling effect, so we inevitably have to level as something else.

I find SRS works quite well, and lines up with the end build. Use them with Melee Splash and Minion Damage in a +1 Fire Gems wand or Reverberation Rod. If you don't use the latter, put SRS into a 4L with Spell Echo once it becomes available.

This is roughly where you want to be at around Lv60, when switching to Null's.

Next step is filling out the scion life wheel and getting Whirling Barrier plus the jewel socket below.
You may ask "How do staff nodes help us while wearing a bow?" - This is where Lioneye's Fall comes into play.

Place it into the socket below Whirling Barrier and voilà..


Here is the finished Lv90 tree, if you level further get jewel sockets at scion area.

Bandits are Oak (Normal) - Passive (Cruel) - Passive (Merciless)

Necromancer is our Ascendancy of choice. Get Commander of Darkness, Mistress of Sacrifice, Spirit Eater and Beacon of Corruption in that order. If the last one lags you too much, just get two small Minion Damage nodes.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Gear, Enchantments & Jewels

This build requires five unique items to work properly. While most of them are fairly cheap, they're all in higher rarity tiers and might not be readily available at the start of a new league.

"

✧ Null's Inclination: The core of this build. Null's enables a completely new playstyle, which we make use of in both an offensive way in form of SRS and Animate Weapon, and defensive way with Bone Offering.

✧ Rearguard: All stats on this quiver are good for us, but selling point are the huge block and spell block it gives. +1 Arrow corruption is a luxury we don't need, but it won't hurt if you really wanna get one.

✧ Lioneye's Fall: As explained above, this jewel allows us to convert Whirling Barrier for another 10% block chance.

✧ Reckless Defense: This one can get expensive, but we need it to up our spell block immensely. If you want, you can use a second one to cap block and spell block at the cost of another jewel socket and additional chance to get crit.

✧ Blood of Corruption: The oddball in the bunch. This amulet doesn't look like much, but it grants an extremely powerful vaal skill. During it's duration, Gluttony of Elements makes all elemental damage we receive heal us and our minions instead - extremely good for some bosses, volatiles or that bearers pack you might end up in. The skill requires 96 souls and lasts 13.2s with all our duration nodes, enough time for most situations we'd use it for.

Aside from those, there's also a few optional uniques that can further refine this build.

"

✧ Cospri's Will: This chest allows us to run another curse and have them up during Hexproof maps. The poison it grants is rather irrelevant and unfortunately doesn't apply to minions.
It's a rather expensive piece, if the investment isn't worth it to you, wear a rare chest and..

✧ Doedre's Damning: The cheaper option to run a dualcurse setup. Can be corrupted for some extra chaos damage, but don't go out of your way for that.

✧ Asenath's Gentle Touch: These allow us to automate our second curse without reserving any mana and even give some life and int. You could also use rare gloves with temp chains or vulnerability on hit corruption, but that could get expensive for a good pair.
The jackpot would either be corrupted gloves with life+minion dmg, or corrupted Asenaths with vulnerability on hit. Each choice requires a different curse setup, which i go into detail about in the gem section.

Fill the remaining slots with rares.

We need 48 dex and 20 int from gear, and then just the usual life and resistances on each slot.
I highly recommend 30% movespeed boots and gear with high evasion, and maybe some armour.
Perfect rings have some mana regen and a free prefix to add chaos damage with Elreon.
A Bone Helmet base is great for its Minion Damage implicit. The helmet drops in Crypt maps.

Flask setup is pretty basic. One Seething Divine Life Flask, Atziri's Promise for a little extra damage and leech, Experimenter's Basalt Flask and Experimenter's Quicksilver Flask.
Suffixes you want are ..of Adrenaline on Quicksilver and ..of Heat and ..of Staunching on the others. Last flask slot is up to what you wanna use.

Enchantments are more a convenience than a necessity for us.

"

✧ Helmet: Animate Weapon duration is the best here, followed by Animate Weapon or SRS damage. +x secondary Tornado Shot projectiles, any curse effect or reduced reservation are nice too. Or use a Bone Helmet for the Minion Damage implicit.

✧ Gloves: If you don't have a pair of corrupted gloves, ..of the Grave or ..of War are sweet enchantments for us in this slot.

✧ Boots: Attack Speed, Life/Mana Regeneneration or Movement Speed are all great here.

Main priority on jewels is Minion Damage. Secondary are Maximum Life and Attack Speed. Good filler stats are Dexterity, Intelligence, All Attributes or any of the remaining minion related affixes.


____________________________________________________________________________________

Gem Setup

All gems are in order of importance!


We use Tornado Shot to proc our minions. I've tested all different bow skills and setups, and this GMP Tornado Shot setup is the most consistent. All the projectiles flying around get you culls all across the screen without needing to aim precisely.

While we aren't the main damage source, we still need some damage to get the dice rolling.
Added Chaos Damage and Pierce, together with some minimal passive investment cover this part.
We don't need a 6th link, it only messes with our mana for no real gain.



This setup goes into Null's. Bone Offering doesn't need to be linked to the other gems.

Bone Offering is sick! It doesn't just add some good survivability boost to our minions, but thanks to Mistress of Sacrifice also to us. And we don't even have to manually cast it!
Summon Raging Spirit and Animate Weapon are our minions of choice - both duration based, both dealing good base damage and both are pretty fast. Added Chaos Damage and Poison seems like an odd choice at first, but i found it very thematic and it's actually really strong!

The last gem choice is situational - Melee Splash is generally better in areas with high mob density or linear layouts, Increased Duration wins in zones with lots of backtracking, low mob density or longer bossfights (spawn animation etc.). If you feel you have a too hard time getting enough minions out, try switching these both around.



Distraction, slowing effect and damage boost all for just two links. We only really need it for tougher bosses though, most drop before you have a chance of dropping the totem.



Typical CwDt + IC setup. Vaal Haste helps us to keep going without losing too many minions, and speeds them up aswell. Thanks to all the duration nodes and Increased Duration gem, we usually can keep it up throughout the whole map.



Our fixed aura setup. Haste helps with our momentum and just as Vaal Haste is good for our minions too, Clarity gives some base mana regen. Keep the latter at Lv1, we mostly use it as an additional "Commander of Darkness" buff.



We only use one of these, and it depends on what gloves we wear:

Asenath's/Temp Chains on Hit corrupted rares: use Blasphemy + Vulnerability
Vulnerability on Hit corrupted rares: use Blasphemy + Temp Chains
Vulnerability on Hit corrupted Asenath's: use Purity of Elements

The curses synergize well with the poisonous theme of this build, while Temporal Chains also adds a defensive aspect.
Purity of Elements caps our minions resistances and procs another "Commander of Darkness" buff.



None of these need to be linked to anything, put them wherever you got sockets left.

All golems except Ice Golem are useful to us in some way, but i prefer Stone Golem. The flat regen equals to about 2% life regen and he gives free taunt. Blink Arrow to cross obstacles.
We need high attack speed to reliably cull once our minions are out, Blood Rage helps with that.
Convocation is for when your minions are stuck, or you wanna force them to switch focus.



These are situationally required and don't need to be in your gear all the time.
Desecrate helps keeping up Bone Offering manually in some bossfights, Spell Totem linked to SRS is your backup plan if you should completely run out of minions in a longer bossfight.
Mana Leech is only needed in No Regeneration maps.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Maps, Labs & Atziri

Just a little warning: This builds clearspeed is extremely RNG-dependant.

Not just will the obvious bad "lots of backtracking" layouts slow us down, but our clearspeed is also directly related to the amount of monsters in map and how closely they are packed together.

The equation is simple: More monsters = more drops = potentially more weapons to animate = more damage to kill monsters

Certain monster types naturally spawn in smaller packs, and that's just bad for us.

Only thing you can do against dry streaks is manually summoning a weapon or two once in a while.
To do that, you need to put the following code into your lootfilter, it will highlight all non-ranged white weapons in a bright red. Change the colour if you want to.

No matter what, the first moments in a map will always feel awful until you get some minions out.

As an upside, we can run pretty much every mapmod, only two require some small changes:
No Regeneration: switch Pierce with Mana Leech
Blood Magic: Disable all auras

Bossfights aren't all so forgiving to this build. Most indoor layouts require you to plan ahead how you clear the map in a way that you'll have the most possible minions out for the boss.
Most multi-stage bossfights are straight up impossible unless you get lucky with summoning lots of weapons right before the bossroom, or resort to lots of kiting with a SRS totem up.



____________________________________________________________________________________

Videos

Huge thanks to my friend Marttern for recording these for me!

Small Boss Compilation
Waterways w/ Enfeeble

____________________________________________________________________________________

Alright, that's it, hope you liked the build! Post questions or concerns in the comments.

Stay safe out there and remember to be nice to each other!

Updated for 2.4, which wasn't much work since nothing really changed for us.

What map(s) does the Bone Helmet drop from?

@MGJanes: We don't know yet, but i'll add this information in once location is known.

How do you feel about using a Worm Flask to give yourself a boost to get yourself rolling?

I would like to play a CI version of this but seems too point stretched.

@dandan88: I've actually used it for a while to get the first SRS out when i made this build, but atleast for my playstyle it wasn't impactful enough for the flask slot.
However i've seen the video you've prolly got this idea from, so just give it a try if you like it.

A CI version should be possible, maybe something like this. Just a quick tree, obviously not very polished, play around with aura-, curse- & mana nodes until it feels right.
You'll lose a duration cluster and the life gain on block by going CI, but the rest of the build should stil lwork.

Thank you so much for posting this build! I was searching something like that, you know? something different! I always wanted to try null's inclination bow! It's just a amazing! I just started the Breach League and I will try this, I am level 30, but I hope that I won't die haha

Currently trying this build on breach. I'm going to switch out animate weapon for summon skeletons. This should remove the RNG dependant part of the build.
To resolve the slow speed will switch out SRS for minion speed and maybe Melee splash for Melee Damage, that will require some testing in the future.
Add some Army of bones cobalt jewels instead of the rares and we'll get lots of skeletons, duration will still work as it will be countered with the nodes on the tree.
Having skeletons will also make the poison clouds from Beacon of corruption proc whenever we reach cap and summon more of them as the oldest skeleton dies in order to summon a new one so I'll switch Spirit Eater and Beacon of corruption in the Ascendancy priority list.

I have high hopes for this, I've alwas wanted to try a Null's build, hopefully it will work out as expected. Given that skeleton's aggro enemies it should also increase the defense in this build too

This looks fun, is anybody playing it in 2.5?

Wow, totally forgot about this thread.

Haven't tested its viability in 2.5, it's definitely worse than a United in Dream AW summoner, but also much cheaper. The skeleton idea sounds interesting too, although i don't know if their base life is high enough for the poison clouds ot matter, but it's worth a try.

Goodluck to everyone who's playing this right now!