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

Other then the obvious (get my gems to 21/20 or 20/23) what can I improve on? I'm in standard just trying to push this as far as I can...

xxWolf, this is a great guide, thank you. The only thing that stood out to me as possibly a bit outdated is your flask setup. I realize you have something that's worked over and over for several leagues, but there are a lot of nice utility flasks now that might outshine going from ~79 to ~87 of an elemental resist. Maybe, it's just a thought.

I've been playing this build for almost 40 days now according to /age in-game and I have to say that it's one of the best I've ever played. The only content that I can't do is uber Atziri since she seems to absolutely destroy spectres, but I've done Shaper and everything below deathless.

In light of the recent 3.0.2 patch that went live about an hour ago from the time of my writing, it seems that the old way of obtaining T16 spectres is officially dead. The Desecrate "bug" that allowed us to obtain low-level spectres and then spawn them in T16 maps has been "fixed". This means that we can no longer, for example, raise a Cannibal Fire-Eater in a Shore map, then hop into a Lair of the Hydra with no "inhabited" mods and spawn T16 Cannibal Fire-Eater corpses.

While I (and a lot of others in the community) consider this to be mostly a nerf, it isn't a kiss of death, merely a kiss of annoyance. Testing a theory, I opened a Lair of the Hydra map with the "inhabited by humanoids" mod and it did indeed spawn Cannibal Fire-Eater corpses, without the need to raise them in Shore first. I'm assuming that other T16 maps with the humanoid mod will spawn them as well, though I have yet to test this. I also haven't tested with any other spectres as I use Cannibal Fire-Eaters for everything these days, but if I had to guess I'd say that maybe "Inhabited by Ranged Monsters" would spawn Flame Sentinels. Hopefully GGG will review this change and either revert it or make further changes to spectres to eliminate this headache altogether.

First of all thanks for the build, I'm having an amazing time with it. Like ILjXYZ above I am slightly annoyed that my beloved spectres (in my case, solar guards, their laser gun sound is amazing!) would be no longer obtainable after 3.0.2. I mean in the old way... I am quite interested to see other people findings regarding various spectre types in the light of 3.0.2

EDIT: Did a quick test for early-mid mapping (up to T11). I think any white and yellow maps can be done with A8 lvl.59 solar guards (talking about this kind of spectres specifically, not sure about others). There might be the odd map where you might want to be careful with them and you might not have the same clearing speed as before (I'm generally slow so I didn't see much of a difference) but generally speaking, they can survive decently... Now, the positive side (if I may say so) is that while mapping you can RNG a map with solar guards and update your spectres then. So, not a total loss, I think, more annoying to get your spectre set and a bit problematic if they die by any chance (finding them again might be painful, some T16 maps becoming quite expensive on poe.trade). So, I think is a nerf but not sure if it really breaks the spectre build...

i tried over 300 desecrates on 5 shore maps, 50 desecrates on 2 strand maps and the same amount in malformation...didn't get a single cannibal fire-eater... :(

maybe i had incredibly bad luck before, now i got it on shore, using increased monster variety (was looking for:inhabited by humanoids) after 2 desectrates

The rare few times where my spectres died were in uberlab's traps, and 3.0.2 made it clear that GGG wants us to be cautious about our spectres death.

Do you think the best way to deal with it would be to replace anger by vitality when needed? Minion life support will not help against traps since the damage scales with the target's life pool.

First map Lair of the Hydra with inhabited by humanoids mod gave me cannibal fire-eaters.
Took me like 80 alts to roll the mod. It could be cheaper to buy map with this mod or use global 6666 to get invitation to already open map with this mod.

I have tried also white t8 shores, 3rd map gave me cannibal fire-eaters.

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Najrah wrote:

The rare few times where my spectres died were in uberlab's traps, and 3.0.2 made it clear that GGG wants us to be cautious about our spectres death.

Do you think the best way to deal with it would be to replace anger by vitality when needed? Minion life support will not help against traps since the damage scales with the target's life pool.

I've been swapping Elemental Focus for Minion Life when doing Uber Lab and regular Atziri and have not had any problems with spectre death. I didn't even think about Vitality but I'm going to try it. Even with Minion Life, those traps that cause bleeding can still bring my spectres to about half health if I'm not careful.

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unsane wrote:

xxWolf, this is a great guide, thank you. The only thing that stood out to me as possibly a bit outdated is your flask setup. I realize you have something that's worked over and over for several leagues, but there are a lot of nice utility flasks now that might outshine going from ~79 to ~87 of an elemental resist. Maybe, it's just a thought.

I honestly think there is no utility flask that can outclass a well rolled magic resistance flask (for this build obviously) - besides maybe taste of hate. 7% max resist + a utility mod is hard to top. wha t flasks would you suggest using instead of the resist flasks?

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LafayetteIA wrote:

Other then the obvious (get my gems to 21/20 or 20/23) what can I improve on? I'm in standard just trying to push this as far as I can...

You could go for +3 rings (or +2 rings and lvl 21 purities), go for the enchantments i suggest in the FAQ section in the post below the guide or (if you want to spend absurd amounts of money) go for a legancy shav´s with up to 250% inc. energy shield.