[3.25] Chaos Zoomancer & Minion Army Necromancer League Starter (All content - Ubers, T17, Simu)

Sorry I have so many questions lol, but again I'm a Necro Noob. :)
Anyway, when leveling, when do you recommend dropping two wands and going to a wand a shield? The damage is so damn good right now leveling that I'm hesitant in making the change, but via your guide, I just allocated a bunch of points that allow the shield a chance to block damage, and so I'm not taking advantage of that. Also I don't have the gem shield charge allocated yet. Appreciate ya.

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Mentoya wrote:

Sorry I have so many questions lol, but again I'm a Necro Noob. :)
Anyway, when leveling, when do you recommend dropping two wands and going to a wand a shield? The damage is so damn good right now leveling that I'm hesitant in making the change, but via your guide, I just allocated a bunch of points that allow the shield a chance to block damage, and so I'm not taking advantage of that. Also I don't have the gem shield charge allocated yet. Appreciate ya.

You should drop two wands as soon as you reach the block nodes that give you block with a shield equiped. You will still have a lot of damage.
You should get shield charge with faster attacks as soon as possible. It will improve your mobility massively. You will zoom through the campaign.

You are right, I made the switch and it's making a huge difference both in speed and defensively. Yesterday I talked a couple of buddies of mine in my guild to run this build and they are loving it. Although they are already to maps. Most everyone else I know who plays is running LS and they are complaining about how squishy they are. It's so nice to run a real tanky build for a change.

Also I already have 18 chaos in only act 5 due to a couple of nice tattoos I got from shipments and sold. Hopefully having the 18 chaos(probably 20 by maps) should set me up well for early maps.

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Mentoya wrote:

You are right, I made the switch and it's making a huge difference both in speed and defensively. Yesterday I talked a couple of buddies of mine in my guild to run this build and they are loving it. Although they are already to maps. Most everyone else I know who plays is running LS and they are complaining about how squishy they are. It's so nice to run a real tanky build for a change.

Also I already have 18 chaos in only act 5 due to a couple of nice tattoos I got from shipments and sold. Hopefully having the 18 chaos(probably 20 by maps) should set me up well for early maps.

Glad you and your guild members are enjoying the build :)

Yeah a few chaos is enough to buy a +1 wand, +2 helmet, bones of ullr for another +1.
The +1 shield has become a bit more expensive but since +2 helmet is much cheaper now go for that instead.
Decent 6L rare

Some life with minion poison jewels.

Thanks for the tips! I'm not sure if I'm going to need to take purity of elements though because after taking the "commander of darkness" from normal lab, my fire is at 128%, Cold is at 141% and Lightning is at 137% and that's at only Act 6. Unless the Purity of Elements is just for the elemental ailment immunity? If I'm asking too many questions, just let me know and I'll shut up lol.

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Mentoya wrote:

Thanks for the tips! I'm not sure if I'm going to need to take purity of elements though because after taking the "commander of darkness" from normal lab, my fire is at 128%, Cold is at 141% and Lightning is at 137% and that's at only Act 6. Unless the Purity of Elements is just for the elemental ailment immunity? If I'm asking too many questions, just let me know and I'll shut up lol.

When you complete act 5 & act10 you will get -30 elemental resistances each time so you want to use it for more resistances.
It is used for elemental ailment immunity as well yes.
You want to get more chaos resistance later so you will probably replace items with a lot of elemental resistance to increase your chaos.

when you explain it that way it makes sense. I'll just load up on chaos resistance later. You obviously know what you are doing because this is by the far the easiest and most enjoyable leveling experience I have EVER had. My health globe rarely goes down. Should hit maps tomorrow.

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Hoffen wrote:

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Peterkin11 wrote:

Sorry, re 1 I meant what is the main piece of the build that now makes the build so much more tanky without guard skills that was not possible with the old cold conversion one.

The cold could be remade into something similar without going CI as this, but it would have lower damage and tankiness compared to this one for the investment.

1. Do you have any more recent showcase videos showing the high or beyond setup for illustration purposes?
2. In terms of the helmet: Coming from your old cold conversion builds that had (at least) hypothermia, minion damage and +2 minion levels on your helmet do you feel the current suggested beyond setup helmet that combines minion levels with spell supression, mana reservation and a despair buff is the best we can craft? As a standard player I would really like to preserve the old helmet, but feel that given Skeletons and Zombies need to go into the chest piece now, the old helmet damage buffs feel a bit wasted on support spectres and chaos golems
3. Do you feel medium and large jewels that still add passive skills like vicious bite and feasting friends are a valid alternative to the +35% increased effect ones?

Hi Hoffen,

Thank you for the maxroll guide, nice progression and very detailed.

There's one thing that's confusing me about gem swaps in mid and late: first you replace melee physical damage with unbound ailments, then you replace unbound ailments with (awakened) melee physical damage.

When is one better than the other? What's the threshold?

Also, for the melee physical damage gem, does the "more physical damage" part apply to the calculation for the poison hit base damage, because the damage is converted?

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djlethal wrote:

Hi Hoffen,

Thank you for the maxroll guide, nice progression and very detailed.

There's one thing that's confusing me about gem swaps in mid and late: first you replace melee physical damage with unbound ailments, then you replace unbound ailments with (awakened) melee physical damage.

When is one better than the other? What's the threshold?

Also, for the melee physical damage gem, does the "more physical damage" part apply to the calculation for the poison hit base damage, because the damage is converted?

Hi, Unbound ailments is used early when you get poison jewels, before that you have melee phys. Before you have poison jewels that gem is near useless for you.
But with poison jewels it becomes a massive damage increase.

Since poison damage is capped at 35m which we later reach in then late setup it is no longer worth having unbound ailments and that is why we change back into awakened melee physical for more flat chaos damage rather than poison damage.
We get intimidate as well.