[3.4] LL Classic Summoner - Shaper/Elder/Guardian Farmer

- other reason not to use haste on generosity is because we could not run our aura setup otherwhise. we have to place one of the 50% auras into our prism guardian, but there is no place for a generosity gem. if you put anger into prism guardian and supported haste with generosity, the anger aura would apply to you and make our Elemental Equiblibrium work against us, as our CoH skill no deal fire damage.

- if we put desecrate with the anger - generosity - arctic armour setup, we woul have to get 2Red, 2Green sockets somewhere on our gear, which would be more expensive and difficult than isolating a green socket from for example our gloves, so i decided to set them up that way. and the convocation heal is pretty much a nonfactor anyway - it says 116 per second, that is a joke considering out zombies have 15k+ life.

- ball lightning and arc both are viable choices, if you prefer arc, go with it! the reason i prefer ball lightning is that i have to cast it less often, because it covers a wider area of effect (but yes, it has travel time), it also has better range, which enables me to for example check the edges of the arena in shaper fight for blue orbs, while keeping my spectres at shaper or the monsters he spawns with ball lightning. you also need a high level arc to give it a good "Aoe", a high lvl arc however costs almost double the mana of a lvl 1 ball lughtning, what is a bit uncomfortable in my eyes. As i said, both are viable, but those are the reasons why i prefer ball lightning.

- by using temp chain corruption you would only save 1 gem slot, as you still need the curse on hit to proc the elemental weakness corruption, the corruption on the wand says "grants elemental weakness skill", you still have to use a curse on hit gem to proc that with ball lightning or arc. at the same time you would however loose the ability to swap curses however you like, so you first need to spend a lot of money (or get very lucky with vaal orb) to get very good gloves with that corruption, but now you have issues colouring/linking those gloves and all that for having one more gem slot, which´s colour you can not even change. you also loose the ability to switch curses as you like, for example i like to switch enfeeble for flammability for some fights like shaper or minotaur (once you got used to them and evade their hits), since that way i can kill minotaur before i need to get throuh a single fence and the enfeeble does not do that much for shaper anyways, since he is untargetable during a lot of the attacks and things like his slam are one-shots you have to dodge anyway. if i had infinite money and could just put together my perfect gear i maybe would go for those gloves, but that is nothing you can recommend in a guide to partly new people. "welcome to my guide, for this you need not one, but 2 very specific corruption on your items, so better bring a lvl 8 vorici and a lot of currency!". that´s very demoralizing for new players and what you get from that investment is not even that much, considering you also loose the quality from you second curse. all in all: good idea, but what you get out of it is not worth the investment, at least in my opinion!

- clarity level 4 would reserve 76 mana, we do not even have that much. if we had 2 spare sockets i´d place clarity with blood magic in there, but the corruption on belt is not an option for this - and by having a corrupted implicit on your belt you would loose about 240ES, which wouldn´t even be worth it.

- not using arctic armour would be a mistake in my opinion, physical mitigation is very hard to come by especially with an ES based character, i am very happy we can utilize things like flesh binder ascendancy, chaos golem, basalt flask and arctic armour. dropping arctic armour will not instanly let you die to all physical (or fire) damage, it is afterall just 1 of the many layers of defense we have. when doing this build i tried not to make just an other "get 9k ES + Vaal pact"-build, i put layer upon layer of defense upon each other, removing some of those better be very well justified, and i do not really see a reason to drop arctic armour.

- i tried using animate guardian in the past few leagues and i will probably try it again, but my conclusion from past leagues is he is not worth the time you put into him. he will not die that fast, but there are a few things that can kill him - for example the bleed pillars in uber lab/trials or him derping out of the shield during shaper fight or the pheonix explosion. he adds some nice things, but whenever he dies you will have to buy a new set of items for him, which is not that big of a deal currencywhise (like 5 alchs afterall), but try trading for a 1 alchemy item. and then try trading for five 1 alchemy items. your guardian died? better prepare for 30 minutes of annoying afk/dnd replies, if a reply comes back at all. do not ask me why people even list things for 1 alch, if they are not willing to trade it when they actually get messaged about it, that is a different story.
(i also do not like having to watch that life bar of him, i prefer positioning myself in the fights)

- once you got the flask setup i recommend running and got a vaal discipline you will not have any problems with any strongbox in any map. pop vaal discipline + the flasks and ninja open any strongbox you want. "Detonate dead"? - pfff, 90% fire res. "Ice nova"? - 90% Cold res, easy. "Curse with x curse when opened"? - curse immune. bunch of porcupines spawn and get deleted instantly? 90% all res, ~ 45% phys mitgation (one of the situations which i like arctic armour for) and a bunch of minions who take most of the projectiles. life flasks for minions should not be necessary, your spectres should never die anyway and resummoning a few zombies every once in a while is worth the additional utillity flask if you ask me. if you really wanted to use that animated guardian you could probably go for one of them however, it might save him in some situations.


a lot of things you mentioned (if not all) are definitely viable and mostly come down to personal preferance, so i am not saying these are bad ideas, i am just trying to explain why i decided to take an other route.