[2.6] Chaos Animate Weapon Necromancer (EHC level 100!)

More information in general
Guide on editing filters to make animate weapon filters
Video guide on Animate Weapon

This build is based off the skill, Animate Weapon. Animate Weapon has an EXTREMELY high base damage, meaning any flat damage added to it is scaled immensely. On top of that, you have high numbers of weapons throughout the map.

On top of this, poison is an immense damage increase due to heavy amounts of double dipping modifiers with Chaos + Minion Damage modifiers.

* Can kill bosses up to t15 on a 5 link extremely fast
* High effective life for a life based build
* High curse effectiveness makes anything close to you slow and deal very little damage
* High minion movement speed which allows your summons to keep up with you and constantly be with you
* Compared to elemental animate, chaos damage weapons do not require to be in range of your auras to deal good damage
* In maps you don't feel comfortable in, you can opt for Bone Offering which gives you block, spell block, and a ton of life each time you block something
* Minions block lots of projectiles for you making you much safer from long range attacks

* Requires a decent amount of focus to play
* Must be prepared to log out if your Animate Guardian is low on HP or your weapons get wiped
* Annoying to clear trials of the Uber Labyrinth with - highly recommend getting help with them if you need them
* Slow at the start of maps when you don't have weapons or Vaal Haste up
* Can be annoying to play in a party for those using other curses (although you can also recolour your helmet for that)
* Can't level as animate weapon - have to level with something else until 75
* May not be good to attempt to make with no currency
* Very complicated build that can go many paths in it's tree and gearing.
* Can't solo Untainted Paradise (tfw 1 portal untainted...)
* 2 of the 4 T16 guardians are poison immune + have phases, meaning its a pain at bare minimum to kill them (might be possible, though)

5-Man Xoph Breachstone (includes an aurabot, but still an amazing display of what this build is capable of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osGuaIsoO5w

This section is my old top-end bow version that hit 100 on BHC.

This is about as high tier in gear as you can get, your build will probably not use a bow for some time - the build itself is much more budget




Flask swaps for specific reasons:


Jewels:

First things first, you'll want to try to buy a high quality Animate Weapon and start leveling it in your offhand as soon as possible. Quality gives movement speed for the weapons which is very important as it lets them get from mob to mob faster as well as makes them able to keep up with you.

You will not want to start out leveling as Animate Weapon -- as a matter of fact, it's a bad idea until level 75+. The most efficient method of leveling I've found are Summon Raging Spirits.

Use normal skills until you can use melee splash + minion damage, maybe until 18 where you can use melee physical as well.

4L: Summon Raging Spirit - Minion Damage - Melee Splash - Melee Phys.

You can craft a +1 minion helmet on an es/armour base by getting the 4 link helmet, a bone spirit shield, and a life flask like so:
Vendor: Life Flask + 1 Transmute + bone spirit shield for a Flask of Animation
Vendor: 4 Link RRBB helmet + 1 Transmute + Life Flask of Animation for +1 minion gems 4 link RRBB helmet

This will carry you to level 50+ where you can get a 5 link +2 fire staff and add in either Minion Speed or Elemental Focus. Run Hatred on Generosity and use a mana flask.

May expand on this later.

We will be using a Necromancer Ascendancy for this build.
* Normal Lab: Mistress of Sacrifice (Your offering skills affect you). This means you can use bone offering while leveling to be super safe, or flesh offering to go faster.
* Cruel Lab: Commander of Darkness. This basically gives us and our minions 20% all res for free.
* Merc/Uber Lab: Spirit Eater or Beacon of Corruption. It is up to you which one you feel is better to take first.

Normal Bandit: Help Oak
Cruel Bandit: Kill all
Merciless Bandit: Kill all

Now that we are level 75 or higher, we can start our respec for Animate Weapon. First things first is to make sure we have the gear to transition.

This section assumes you have at least Severed in Sleep. If you don't, go back to the "Transitioning into Animate Weapon" section to see that setup.

You'll want to get a decent life+ES 6 link to use. Your 6 link will look like this:

Animate Weapon - Added Chaos - Minion Damage - Melee Splash - Void Manipulation - Spell Totem

You will either have Multistrike or Increased Duration in inventory to swap in instead of Spell Totem for when you feel you need it for bosses (<20 weapons in maps with an arena, T16 bosses, Breachlords). Please be careful about doing this in maps, it does cause lag swapping it in! Most of the time you can live off Spell Totem.

You can upgrade Severed in Sleep to United in Dream with a Blessing of Chayula. Once you have United in Dream, you will want to finish the Sovereignty cluster for another 10% reduced mana reserved. You will remove Discipline and put Generosity in the sword (preferably with high quality). Simple as that. Aura Effect nodes will improve damage a bit but are not as important as finishing off curse effect and life as you'll already have insane damage.

Your shield should hopefully be a decent life+ES hybrid. If you can, try to get one with a suffix open to get a Leo level 3 craft on it, Reduced Damage Taken from DoTs. This helps a lot with CB, bleed, burn ground, and chaos degens.


Lab Enchant Helmet is also nice but not necessary. Best enchants:
1. Chance to Copy Additional Animate Weapon
2. Animate Weapon Duration
3. Animate Weapon Damage

Other useful helmet enchants: Convocation cooldown, Wither Duration, Flesh Offering Attack Speed, Increased Buff of Stone Golem, Enfeeble effect, Temp Chains effect. All work fine, but Animate Weapon Copy is the best by a long shot.

You'll want to start off maps by dropping 2 or more identified weapons on the ground and animating them. Try to get an army of weapons started before moving faster through the map. Vaal Haste whenever, and keep Flesh Offering up. Use Wither to direct minions and Convocation to move them in the case that they get stuck. You don't have to animate literally everything that drops - if you have 30+ weapons and a pack is dead just move on.

This is a bit important for maps as sometimes you need to run Bone Offering in order to keep weapons alive.
1. Porcupines - these guys shoot spikes on death and they hit for a lot, really hurts weapons. Highly recommend running bone offering for maps that these are in.
2. Quay(T10) map boss - the rest of the map is fine, but the map boss likes to spam a long duration blast rain on your minions. Use Bone Offering for the boss and you should be okay, just keep spamming it as each phase of the boss dies.
3. Ivory Temple(T12) final pack/boss - these maps spawn perandus packs in and near the boss room. One of the side area has dogs that use Sunder which can really own weapons hard. Can use for boss room too, but mostly need it for the dog pack.
4. Colosseum (T15) boss - the swords hurt weapons a lot. Recommend having a life leech gem instead of melee splash for this too, or fortify.

* Try to have a stash tab of small 3 slot white weapons for when you need it.
* The Grand Arena waypoint in normal lets you open some chests and weapon racks right near the waypoint to get started for the day.
* You can pick up some blue weapons from the boss and ID them even if your loot filter hides them by pressing Alt to prepare for the next map.
* Run Bone offering if you feel like the map is sketchy.
* You can craft a life flask with HP recovery for minions by using: Flask, Transmute, Bone Spirit Shield. You can farm Bone Spirit Shields in Chamber of Sins 1 Normal, and collect small weapons & stone hammers for chisels while there as well.

1. Multiprojectile - more weapons get hit, things with aoe effects overlap like Fire Curtains, probably one of the most dangerous mods in the game at the moment for any build due to shotgunning.
2. Chain - Chain can be absolutely deadly and will destroy a map with porcupines (spikes on death). This can also pair badly with some exiles.
3. Blood Magic - Runnable but we will have no auras. We will actually keep our Energy Shield MoM mitigation, interestingly enough. Be careful in this though. Recommend Bone Offering if you really want to run these.
4. Hexproof - This is runnable but scary. Replace your curses with other auras if you really want to run this. Recommend Bone Offering instead of Flesh Offering too.

The 2 guardian fights are a little different than others, so I wanted to mention how they worked.

Q: Why run Blasphemy gem in Heretic's Veil when it gives a level 22?
A: A level 20 with 20 quality will be upped to level 22 giving us the bonus of quality on the gem, which is Increased Curse Effectiveness.

Q: Cloak of Tawm'r Isley?
A: I think it is overkill, and the +1 gems you can get from bow is better. However you could still use it simply for the blue weapons and the chance to blind. You'll get some extra damage from it, though it isn't really necessary.

This is based off of NeverSink's filter.
Larger weapons: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10208269/NeverSink%204.3anime.filter
Smaller weapons (good for totem!): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10208269/NeverSink%204.3anitotem.filter

2.4 version: http://pastebin.com/TJsgCMqv -- This is a modified version of NeverSink's 4.0 filter