[3.3] Earendel's Embrace Minion Instability Necro - (Very scary build, not for the faint of heart)

WARNING IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH OR OTHERWISE SENSITIVE TO GRAPHIC VIOLENCE THIS BUILD IS NOT FOR YOU

I haven't actual played this build since Earendel's Embrace doesn't exist at the time of posting so what I say is probably a little dubious

Here's the pob if you don't feel like reading (configured for boss dps): https://pastebin.com/D42VUEuR

CONTENTS:
1. Build concept
2. Pros and cons
3. Skill tree, Ascendancy, and Bandits
4. Gearing, enchants, and pantheon
5. Gem setups
6. Leveling
7. Possible improvements
8. Stats + Potential
9. Final thoughts

BUILD CONCEPT:
You are a devious witch who wishes to relive her experience immolating humans throughout the entire game, except they're just skeletons this time, which might be scarier.

Basically earendel's embrace lets your skeletons hit low life and proc MI pretty quickly, this is accelerated by the -50% max they get with Necromantic Aegis + Maligaro's Lens. That's pretty much it, Earendel's embrace enables MI pretty dang well.

PROS AND CONS:
Pros:
- Hipster build
- Actually does okay damage (200k boss dps per skeleton death)
- Probably survivable (1200 regen from skeletons exploding a lot + Maligaro's lens)
- You can scare your friends
- Probably relatively cheap, not sure how much Earendel's will be
- The build pops off quick (maybe), earendel's is usable from level 35
- Recovery from Maligaro's Lens is probably good in party play for your team's survivability
Cons:
- MI seems a little clunky
- Leveling might feel like you're a wet noodle / a pile of garbage
- Movement is eh, you could do a weapon swap to two bright beak leap slam joke but it'd be clunky

SKILL TREE:
Scaling minions: This build gets all relevant minion nodes for MI, so things like minion res and regen are skipped, if they can be, since we want the skeletons to die asap. This build goes for minion nodes that increase minion damage and life (since MI damage scales off of minion life) as well as max skeletons. This build also gets aura nodes so we can reserve more auras to buff our skeleton's damage. In addition to this we use necromantic aegis + maligaro's lens to make our skeletons die quicker, have increased life, and give good regen. We get EE, which should be extra good this time around since the skeletons should all explode at the same time from the degen, unless they get killed by an enemy or something.The only other way to scale minion damage (directly) is through jewel sockets, which increase minion damage as well as life.

Defense: This build uses energy shield rather than life because there are scarce life nodes that aren't out of the way. You can reasonably hit around 8k es, but you'd probably be closer to 7k on a budget. Maligaro's lens makes skeletons that explode 'nearby' instantly give us 2% of their max health as converted to es with ZO (I hope at least if it doesn't then uuuh you could try a life build instead, 8k es is reasonably survivable though).

Ascendancy:
We're not using zombies or specters so skip flesh binder and soul weaver. Offerings don't do much for us, so skip mistress of sacrifice.
That leaves every other big node, so get them ez (the smalls aren't strong enough to overshadow the damage from the less spectacular large nodes). You might be wise to skip commander of darkness, but it helps with gearing so I keep it.

As far as the order of ascendancies goes I'd go:

Normal: Invoker Cruel: Bone Sculptor; it's a huge amount of damage Merc: Commander of Darkness, but only if you're having res problems, if not go puppet master first. Uber: Puppet master

Bandits:
Kill all, it lets us be more greedy with our jewels. You could possibly do Kraityn for 6% movespeed if you're a weirdo, oak for regen if you're an even weirder man, or Allira for res if you're wrong.

GEARING:
As far as gear goes there are 2 required items, Earendel's Embrace and Maligaro's Lens. Eye of Chayula / presence of Chayula is pretty much needed as well. Otherwise look for high es gear with enough res to cap you out, there's little you can get that would help your minion damage substantially. You could try gear that gives abyssal sockets, but minion abyss jewels are relatively impotent compared to normal jewels. This should be fairly cheap as you've got ~ 6 rares to get your resistances and es on. As far as gear is concerned the hardest thing to get is likely the 7 or so jewels you need, but they do only have 2 relevant properties for damage, so you could easily craft them yourself -- you could also get % inc es, or cast speed, if you wanted but it's not necessary.

Enchant:
There's one very crucial enchant for this build, being 'summon two additional skeleton warriors with summon skeletons'. This is huge, it allows you to summon 5 skeletons at once which, if you don't end up casting faster than they die, is effectively 66% more damage.

Pantheon:
Major: Arakali with the soul Arachnoxia is a lot of survive ability, you could also try Solaris or Lunaris, but they're probably less potent.
Minor: Garhukan for the 6% movespeed, which helps with clear, or maybe Gruthkul with the soul of Erebix, but keep in mind the reduced attack speed is only in effect when an enemy hits you, not your skeletons.

GEM SETUPS
Summon Skeletons (6-link):
Summon Skeleton - Elemental Focus - Fire Penetration/Level 3 Empower - Concentrated Effect - Minion Life - Minion Damage
Note: Fire penetration is better damage against bosses, level 3/4 empower is better for damage against trash. If you're not going to use a 6l a 4l with +3 level of socketed minion gems is better than a 5l setup. For it you'd use Summon Skeleton - Minion Life - Conc effect - Minion damage, you can compare the two in pob, make sure to equip the other helmet first though.

Aura setups
Flammability - Ele Weakness - Blasphemy - Enlighten (level 3 is fine)
Clarity (level 12 so mana regen sustains mana cost) + Discipline

Movement
Phase run -Increased duration-Vaal Lightning trap
Note: You don't have to use Vaal lightning trap, faster casting would probably be a good choice, you could try faster casting, less duration lw too.

Every other gem setup is personal preference, feel free to experiment with whatever you think works best, here's what I would use (you do need cold or lightning skill to proc EO keep in mind):
GOLEM
Cast When Damage Taken - Summon Stone Golem -Minion life - minion and Totem Elemental Resistance
Note: Golems might get bopped quicker than normal because they have -50 ele res from Maligaro's Lens.

OFFERING
Desecrate -Increased duration -Flesh Offering

EE proccer
Orb of storms -increased duration

LEVELING:
I'm not too sure to be honest. Summon raging spirits is probably fine for a while. I'm not sure at what point you're going to want to switch to minion instability, but, you could level with summon skeletons normally for a while until you have the necessary keystones for the build to pop off.

POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS:
There's plenty that you could do, or try. Namely experimenting with the new support gems to see if there's a different way to scale the minion instability that does comparable damage. You could try the build with life instead of es (good luck lol). There's potential to make two Earendel's so that you're basically summoning the skeletons and they're exploding even more immediately. You could try some differing uniques to see what works. There might be some elder or shaper mods that I've missed. There are new corruptions which might show some potential in improving the damage. I'm not certain if we're casting too fast, such that the minions don't die before we reach the cap, ideally you want them to hit low life and explode after 2 casts, so if there's a way to reach that equilibrium more easily then go ahead and figure it out. Whatever works dude.

STATS & POTENTIAL:
Shaper DPS: 128.2k damage per explosion at ~ 1.58 cast speed is about 202.5k dps per minion. With this build the witch ends up summoning 5 skeletons at a time (assuming they explode before two casts) you'd deal 5x the 202.5k dps reaching a cool 1.01 million shaper dps.
Non boss dps" with level 4 empower instead of fire you hit 223.7k damage per explosion, or 343.5k including attack / cast rate. Multiplied by five, again assuming they explode before you can cast twice, you'd hit like 1.765m dps.

You could, probably, easily do shaper with this level of dps, maybe uber atz, maybe uber elder.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Seemingly a meme build, but probably actually strong. MI might feel like garbage to use, so keep that in mind. I would link a video here of what the gameplay looks like, but I think it's going to end up playing out different than other MI builds in the past since you can basically just cast skeletons on guys and wait a bit like a delayed weird storm call.

reserved, I guess

PS: I'll update this when I get real gear to link to the thread in 3.3 (if I even play this build), if people are interested

So...have you tried?
Looks like a nice meme build but I am afraid it may be pointless since you need super-clear speed for incursions in this league.

EDIT: You could also leverage ele overload I think.

wonderfull idea

i try this out atm

Has anyone tried this yet?

How much would a From Dust impact the DPS, do you reckon? You'd get 5 skellies on cast without needing the enchant, but have a 1s cooldown.

I did try this, or sort of...
I am HP based with MoM as that seems way safer.

I only have 3 skellies per cast and it seems fairly enough as they kill stuff anyway and you more likely want to re-cast them into several directions which wouldn't work with 5 per cast (you only have like 11max or 12 based on gear).

Though I do recommend From Dust + spell echo while lvling, until cruel lab where you get skelly ascendancy.

Other than that, I am playing with animate guardian and a golem.
I tried having zombies as meat shields but those idiots just keep dying and I can't be bothered to resummon them even few steps (especially in incursions they just die instantly).

Feel free to browse my chars, should be public - look for SkeletonAkbar, lvl 82 ATM.

From pure DPS perspective, From Dust is only a DPS gain if you had to move a lot or if your cast times are so poor (which they shouldn't with summon skeletons having 0.5 sec base cast). Otherwise in that one second I can summon another group and without much effort I could ATM cast skellies faster then they explode (which I OFC don't want). So I am even fine using some other spell in the meantime for equilibrium - in my case that would be lightning orb with cure on hit and flammability/ele weak.

If anyone has any idea how to get zombies to actually works as a meatshield and not die, I am all ears.
ATM I feel like being too exposed - if monsters choose to attack me instead of skellies, there is very little I can do and they pretty often ignore animated guardian and/or golem.

Hey guys, just wanted to give an update. I did play this build, but I did it using a life based tree rather than ES, because the recovery form maligaro's lens applies only to life. I'm going to update the thread sometime soon and add some videos of me clearing maps with it (only like level ~75 and can clear t4s)

Hello guys,

did you already try placing totems casting dark pact at the skeletons?

"

Schnuerrschuh wrote:

Hello guys,

did you already try placing totems casting dark pact at the skeletons?

I didn't try it personally but I don't feel like I have enough time to make use of that.
E.g. I have about enough time to cast max amount of skellies + one spell for EE.

For most monster groups you don't need it anyway and bosses are about pressing just Vaal skellies.
But it may work against really tough bosses like shaper. Then again, there you need to move a lot hence you will want to use all the time you have to keep summoning skellies.

But I may be wrong...

I was generally disappointed with Earendel's Embrace. I was expecting it to be kinda smoother or, at least, waaay more effective against bosses (one phase bosses are ok, anything multiphase is pain).

This might be fun to see running ascendant and grabbing Necro + Heiro, then sticking skeletons on totems with a second Earendels. With the totems casting the skeletons, you could make use of dark pact for added damage and faster low life.