[2.4] Occultist Summoner - You will never want to play Necro again!

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Hakyu wrote:

What about minion survival ability, my minions(zombie and spectre) gets rekted in higher maps, I don't know if it's just I'm playing it wrong or something? I've never played a summoner before. Any tips on how to keep them alive during boss fights? The golem and guardian survives pretty good tho.

Do you have two minion resist jewels? You'll have to do a bit of math and add up how much resist they have and make sure you get them capped, that will help a lot. You only get 16% from the tree, and a level 20 purity of elements with all the aura nodes my tree has is like 40%, so you are only at 56% resist out of 75%. I put two 9/10% minion resist jewels in the tree to get them the rest of the way there, this will cut the damage they take from elemental in half.

Zombies don't get the damage reduction that spectres get against bosses, from what I can tell. You will probably have to resummon them a lot, sadly. However, spectres should be able to survive just about everything unless you seriously neglect to convocate them out of damage. I think the only time I lost spectres in my videos I made was when I let them sit in shaper vortexes for too long. You should pretty much never lose any minion to trash mobs. Make sure you are using smoke cloud/consecrated ground flasks on high damage mobs/bosses, that will help a ton as well.

You know something is seriously wrong , when pretty much every build we see these days is some combination of ci + one exploitable ci item

like soul strike etc...

and it is indisputably 2 - 3 times safer than the alternatives

that being said i am curious with some of your choices in the build

why did you take life nodes? you could have very easily omitted the 6 you take as well as 2 int travel nodes , and then completed the chain you have going from the right int high way to harrier and saved 7 passives

you then could use those passives to pick up more jewel slots to add more stuffs to your minions .

another question is do you really need leadership and harrier?
When i build my summoners i generally follow the rule of aura thresholds .. ie can i get one more aura.


leadership is cool but you can easily live without it by getting quality on your auras (trivial to do ever since uber lab was introduced)

and you can quite easily run 1 50% aura and 2 35%s with the aura reservation nodes you did not take in the sovereignty bubble + a level 3 enlighten and drop all of leadership and harrier saving 3 -4 nodes in the process.

i am also surprised you didnt bother with puppet master since it is a beefy chunk of minion life. unnecessary perhaps?

Also how important is soul strike? i wanted to try this build out with xirgils crank at some point (when the pricks on standard realize its not worth even 1/3rd of 25 exa)

I know a bunch of these ci build tend to abuse how fast its starts es regen.. but i tend to stay away from flavour of the month stuff .. so i dont know..

Yeah now that I look at it OP's passive tree it is strange. Why did you bother with those life and life/mana nodes.

If you do something like this I just saved you 5 pts. I also think getting faith and steel is better then 3x 6%es nodes. You get 17% es but also res and armor vs just 18% es. I also think puppet master is better than grave intentions, I never had any problems with chaos damage for minions ever.

http://poeplanner.com/AAMAATRBQU1EQWdBQWJ3MGZEWHdSVUJYWEZ5OFlhaHBzR3lVYzNCMFVIVThkcWgzWkl2UWtzQ2VwS1Bvc3BpeV9MMjh5MFRRS05iazNaamVEUENoQmgwTlVSQVJGUjBaeFNiRkxya3l6VGJsT2JWWmpWOGxZQjFxUlhHdHFyR3ZiYkF0dEdYQzdlQzk4NVgwWWY4YUFwSUxIZ3dtRVNJVmdocTZJUUloQ2p4cVBScEF6a3llWXJadWhuREtjdnAydW9TLWx4S2FzcHV1bkNLY3JxSDJxeExRTXVKTy1pc0hGdzIzTXZOQWYwX3ZYejlrVDJWdmZpdUdJNlFMcXV1dnU3QmpzaXUtSTctdjBjZmZCOTlmNU5fbm8tdEwtU2NyVHNuQXFVMmFldHpHTWR0a0xLcGo2Z0E9PQAIQUFBQUFRQUEAAA==

Get Dreamer for your mana nodes, so u have something left over to cast.

Leadership and Harrier is not that bad for a one point wonder node. You get a lot of utility stats out of those.

Soul strike is insanely op when combined with occultist. With something like summoner minion taking all the agroo your just regening nonstop.

but is it viable without soul strike is the question

there are a few other things to look at too, for example is hex master really worth your time ?
effectively you are just getting 10% curse effect from 3 nodes since everything else about that node is worthless since you need to cast curse on hit spells every 4 seconds to keep EE proc up.

10% curse effect is over kill vs trash mobs and goes almost entierly unfelt vs bosses these days since they changed it to a less multi on curse effect

you could be better off getting skill duration or the flasks nodes . skill duration is pretty good since with it and a duri gem you get 7.45 second vaal disciplines and you dont need to recast offerings every 5 seconds

I guess if you slow down your playstyle a bit and just rely on the passive faster regen start. You can pull it off with the crank

personally id go with something like this



you dont need to get mana nodes for the sake of mana in most cases .. there are 1 -2 jewel nodes that have mana as their .. "node sacrifices" anyway so he can bum some mana off those and get more jewels


also crank + rumis is basically 50 block 15 spell block so it will proc its recharge start a fair bit

The life nodes are for the energy from within jewel, they give more ES

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Energy_From_Within

The mana isn't super necessary but it is nice, I just barely have enough mana to summon zombies with the leftover after my auras. I'm in a rush now but I'll answer the rest in a few hours when I'm home.

Oh shit. I just realized energy from within is a large radius.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

another question is do you really need leadership and harrier?
When i build my summoners i generally follow the rule of aura thresholds .. ie can i get one more aura.


leadership is cool but you can easily live without it by getting quality on your auras (trivial to do ever since uber lab was introduced)

Do I NEED leadership, probably not, but it provides just a tiny bit of extra security knowing minions are that much less likely to outrange purity of elements (and no purity of elements = death in a lot of cases, ESPECIALLY ele reflect maps). I don't really see many places 1 point would make a difference otherwise, maybe a tiny bit more ES. Harrier is the same logic, imo. The attack speed is nice, the movespeed is nice, so why not.

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and you can quite easily run 1 50% aura and 2 35%s with the aura reservation nodes you did not take in the sovereignty bubble + a level 3 enlighten and drop all of leadership and harrier saving 3 -4 nodes in the process.

Sadly you fall victim to the classic summoner issue - no sockets left in your gear for enlighten. There are simply too many utility spells we absolutely NEED for the game to be playable between desecrate, convocation, blink arrow, flesh offering. You could drop vaal discipline and work it in, but again, as a hardcore player I would never be without vaal discipline as CI, ever. Even with the very short cooldown on ES regen, you never know when you're gonna be stuck in a situation where you have a DoT on you and are taking heavy damage and can't find space to start your regeneration. Vaal disc is basically your life flask as CI and therefore not replaceable by any aura imo. Obviously anyone playing is free to edit my build to whatever they want, though :)

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i am also surprised you didnt bother with puppet master since it is a beefy chunk of minion life. unnecessary perhaps?

So far I've found it pretty unnecessary, my stone golem/guardian already hit 15-20k life and zombies around 10k. Zombies do die to a lot of bosses in t15/t16 but I don't think an extra couple thousand life would change that anyway. As far as spectres/AG goes, totally immortal already.

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Also how important is soul strike? i wanted to try this build out with xirgils crank at some point (when the pricks on standard realize its not worth even 1/3rd of 25 exa)

I know a bunch of these ci build tend to abuse how fast its starts es regen.. but i tend to stay away from flavour of the month stuff .. so i dont know..

It's possible to make a build out of it for sure. I would go necromancer though for the ability to use bone offering on myself. However, I don't think it's very optimal. The only way Crank starts your regen is if you're actively blocking, which means actively being hit. As a summoner you're bound to get hit a lot less because you are using minions to block for you instead. Also, without the reduced cooldown you can find yourself in some bad situations on a bunch of bosses where you are unable to regenerate in time between their attacks. Hydra, for example, would probably be a lot harder with this kind of build. Lastly, you would lose the super-fast ranged curse on hit of rain of arrows, as well as blink arrow, and the build would feel a lot slower to play. Part of the reason I love this build is because it feels much faster paced than the traditional summoner builds I used to make that used arc/ball lightning/etc to curse.

Admittedly, though, you could make an even tankier build this way, and if you swapped to necro you could probably get max block or close and be absolutely stupidly hard to kill. You would probably end up changing a lot of things about the build, though, and would end up coming up with a brand new build entirely :P

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mattc3303 wrote:

If you do something like this I just saved you 5 pts.

That might be better, I didn't really re-analyze the tree to be honest. I pathed through the jewel cluster there because you need all those int nodes to activate Unending Hunger, which is what I used to level with until level 90 or so when I wanted more ES for red maps. I certainly don't think anyone needs to take my tree as absolute gospel :p

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

but is it viable without soul strike is the question

there are a few other things to look at too, for example is hex master really worth your time ?
effectively you are just getting 10% curse effect from 3 nodes since everything else about that node is worthless since you need to cast curse on hit spells every 4 seconds to keep EE proc up.

10% curse effect is over kill vs trash mobs and goes almost entierly unfelt vs bosses these days since they changed it to a less multi on curse effect

you could be better off getting skill duration or the flasks nodes . skill duration is pretty good since with it and a duri gem you get 7.45 second vaal disciplines and you dont need to recast offerings every 5 seconds

I think it's viable without soul strike, but again if you were to go with a Crank/rumis build or a victario's build you would probably want to go Necromancer again, and you would end up essentially having a completely different build altogether.

I think hex master is definitely worth it, curse effectiveness works additively with bosses, and from what I have heard bosses have a clean 60% curse resistance. This means that if you have 60% curse effectiveness your curses just now actually work as advertised again. This means that a 10% difference in curse effectiveness could actually end up being more than 10% in actual effect. Unless I'm forgetting something, this build has 68% curse effectiveness, so 10% is the difference between 58 and 68, or the difference between bosses having 2% curse reduction or 8% increase. If we have 44 enemy resists at 0% effectiveness, this is the difference between -43 resist or -47.5, and I think 3 points for 4-5% more reduced resist is definitely worth it. If you use elemental weakness instead of enfeeble/temp chains, you're close to -100 resists which is the difference between -98 and -108. There aren't a lot of ways to increase spectre damage, so you need to maximize what you CAN do. These points also help your defensive curses, of course, as well as make curses last way longer so you don't have to spam attack as much if you're feeling lazy, which are nice side effects. I think if you compare the end results to the amount of resists bosses have, in extreme cases of extra resistant end game bosses, these points could be worth almost as much as a culling strike support gem. Essentially, every bit of curse effectiveness on the tree is precious and worth its weight if you can fit it into the build.

And mostly, I would ask, what else are you going to grab? An extra jewel socket for 15% minion damage? We already have 140% or so, so this isn't even a 10% total damage increase. At best it's roughly equivalent to the extra -resists we get from flammability/ele weakness. And, of course, for every minion damage jewel you add to the tree, they get effectively weaker and curse effectiveness gets better. I would say they are probably very comparable, so it's up to you naturally, but I doubt you will notice a difference either way. If you start adding in minion damage from essence crafting, master crafted gloves, bone helmets, spectre damage helm enchant, I think the curse effectiveness will definitely become a clear winner.

ahh your info is out of date , ggg recently changed curse effect vs bosses from additive to multi

bosses always reduce your curses by 60% now.

all curse effect does is increase your base curse potency.

so if you had say 60% curse effect you would have 160% * .4 curses or 64% curses vs bosses.

that extra 10% would bump it up to 68%



as for what you can grab instead ... flask effect is great for boosting utility flasks
duration like i said is a pretty sexy quality of life since it effects literally anything with a duration



Also i might be speaking from an unfair perspective as my jewels are pretty damn sexy

i roll with 2 tri minion stat jewels and 2 double minion stat jewels.


alo 140% minion damage is rather low considering im at 370% .. but your concern is clearly durability or you would not have gone occy so damage might not be that important in this context