The Elemental Animator - Animate Weapon, Auras - Life, Hybrid, CI Variants - 1.2.0 Planning

Forever alone! Updated some things here and there, though nothing major.

I've gotten to a point where I can use Animate Weapon as my main skill safely, though without any defensive auras or Necromantic Aegis yet. I suspect once I get both it should be a walk in the park, with the only problem being the animate duration. I'll be changing the second post to contain information about my actual character, with gear, current passive skill tree, etc.

Those weapons better be damn good to warrant investment into mana/regen in a hc league.

The investment into mana regeneration and maximum mana is mainly to overcome having to use Clarity. I guess one could use Clarity with Blood Magic considering the reduced mana reservation from the tree and Reduced Mana, but it isn't necessary with reduced flask charges used and increased flask charges gained on your belt and increased charge recovery on the flask.

As for the damage of Animate Weapon, in theory it will be pretty substantial even with only unmodified weapons. The added damage from Wrath and Anger, which both have 70% increased effect, multiplied by Weapon Elemental Damage, the lowering of enemy resistances with Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Weakness, and the insane base damage modifier of Animate Weapon should be pretty high. That's not even considering their attack speed.

What is your animate weapon DPS?

Would minion instability work with animate weapon?

The tooltip is never right so I'll just calculate what the damage per hit of each weapon would be. Animated Weapon should be affected by Minion Instability, but I haven't tested it out yet.

I've turned the second post into a damage per second calculation for the lowest and highest base attack speeds for unmodified melee weapons.

Keep in mind you can easily stack up more and more weapons, the faster your army plows through content. Just a few can suffice but there's a lot of clear speed potential with a high quality Animate Weapon and enough increased skill duration.

In Nemesis farming parties I can consistently have around 6 up at all times, but easily reaching around 12 consistently if the group is good enough. I haven't tried in maps but it should be effective both solo and in parties.

I love the idea for this build. However it seems tedious to manually summon minions that have a duration...

It can be a little tedious at times, but not as much as you probably think. It's kind of like the play-style of a Dominating Blow build.

The skill certainly needs some changes for usability, especially as a solo player. I don't find many problems with playing it in parties, though. In fact it seems like it'll be very effective in parties.

With better gem placement I managed to fit Clarity in as the fifth aura. You can now also swap weapon sets without losing auras or minions, so even more sockets are available, such as for a Culling Strike spell.

The damage evaluation has been updated.

Also, I'm re-rolling with this build because I screwed my other character's passive skill tree up. This should let me get a better idea of how it progresses from level 1, which I'll include in the guide.