The Baron: Some testing and opinions.

I had this:
With shav as a guardian and 13 jewels + auras and dual clayshaper or victario shield. Quite nice. You should see them pounding with high attack speed on bosses. I even lowered my 7 harmonies for more eminence jewels (more regen for you and the golems still live anyway) to make them hit very fast with his default attack (melee splash for aoe). You don't want them to hit too much air with slow speed multistrike. Even with a bunch of harmonies, his aoe slam doesn't trigger as much as zombies do. Melee splash simply killed faster in a breach. But when it hits it hits hard.

If you're going to stack golem jewels, you don't want to skip on Clayshapers.
I played with United in dream but I'd rather run the poison gem and have an extra golem, it really was that much better.

I wanted to do a pure stone golem build, but with the Baron now, a 3 or 4 stone golem setup might be amazing.
With zombies as utility and extra damage, frenzied spectres and maybe the Animate Guardian as a pseudo extra golem, compensate a lot better instead of extra golems i hope.
The leech is very good, but doesn't count for golems and that is what I missed in pure golem builds, if you don't intend to cast anything or don't want to die in boss rooms and let the golems finish them while dead.
The sword has his place here, removing multiple poison gem needs and benefit every hitter.
It's not entirely weird to then go with "Raise Zombie - Stone Golem - Multistrike - Minion Damage - Empower - melee splash/melee dmg/whatever in your Skin of the loyal, AG/SRS in the helm and RS in weapon with BM, minion life. Enough room for cwdt and aura/curse.

I am not sure about the reaction of zombies when a golem attacks. Seems more likely they stick with you. Need to look into this.
But as much as I like auto play with autonomous golems, the point and kill with zombies does have it's benefits. AI is the reason everyone played Flame golems, they work so much better than stone golems.
With the blasphemy aoe nerf in mind, and too much distance between the action and you, I'm afraid a curse and attack playstyle is a better solution with stone golem. Primordial Might isn't needed then, although I wouldn't leave it out if I had all other gear. I was actually surprised how good it is without it currently.

Farming with 11 zombies and two golems. Will post some results when I get the jewels in the next week or so.
Currently using this:

"

silumit wrote:

What armor do you use? Did you try Covenant for some more poison damage?

I use a +1 Tabula Rasa.
The +1 gems is key to making this all work, Golems and zombies get much stronger with each gem level.

A Skin of the Loyal would work too.

"

1453R wrote:

Ya gots two hands - Severed in Sleep goes in one, Mon'Tregul's Grasp goes in the other :P

.....

Keep up the good work, man. Tracking thread with interest.

When I was running the zombie dps build, I used Necro Aegis and the shield that gives power/frenzy charges to all allies, so getting rid of it for Montreguls would lose offense from charges, and defense from 24% block.


Thanks for the feedback!

"

blaat1889 wrote:

If you're going to stack golem jewels, you don't want to skip on Clayshapers.
I played with United in dream but I'd rather run the poison gem and have an extra golem, it really was that much better.

Absolutely fabulous to see others experimenting with The Baron!

I run with 4 golems, if I swapped out the severed in sleep for a clayshaper, and replaced one gem with poison, it might make the 5 golems do more damage than the 4 were before, but the severed in sleep affects the zombies and guardian, and the gem I would be swapping out is Minion Speed, which in my opinion is GREAT for dps, golems get to targets much faster! Golems do zero dps while running.

Ok, more changes.

I was able to get a new ring, which does not look like it was an upgrade, but it had just the right resists to allow me to drop a 12% resist node on the tree, and stil keep elemental resists above 169 for over capping. This extra skill point plus some regret use, allowed me to spec into the 2 minion clusters in the Templar area.

Now I have 10 zombies and 4 Stone golems.

Minions gained a lot of health with the switch.

The new ring has strength, just enough to allow me to remove a Str jewel from the tree, and replace with another Harmony, for 2% more life regen, and more cooldown reduction for Stone Golem Slam.
1002 Strength right now.

My New Skill Tree, level 89


Golems now have over 51k life, with 7% regen, thats over 3500 per second.
Zombies have 20k lilfe, and Animated Guardian is at 27k (Guardian is only a level 19 gem.)

Time for me to post my gear.



P.S.
The above poster suggested Primordial Eminence > Primordial Harmony for the attack speed.
Anybody else weigh in on this issue?
It's true, even with 3 harmonies, Stone Golem Slam has a long cooldown, but I do so love an unkillable golem, and 3500 life per second rules!

"

Odif wrote:

P.S.
The above poster suggested Primordial Eminence > Primordial Harmony for the attack speed.
Anybody else weigh in on this issue?
It's true, even with 3 harmonies, Stone Golem Slam has a long cooldown, but I do so love an unkillable golem, and 3500 life per second rules!

P.s I was playing guardian in breach league.
Not sure you want to go this way under necromancer.
I missed the attack speed on a guardian, regen came a bit from aura's.
As a necro, 2 specters equal 45% attack speed for all. This with phys reduction from zombies is already worth 2 Eminence.
I did have 101% aura effect with generosity, so haste and hatred etc were awesome :)

Btw, I was playing yesterday with someone with Mon'tregul's Grasp.
It doesn't leave corpses with the fire dmg on kill. This was an issue for my offering spell, as I don't use desecrate.

I hit 1k recently on my Necromancer.

Monegruls is required for doing higher level content as most bosses will obliterate the zombies otherwise.

I imagine Montegruls and a High ES shield will be the best combination for higher level content.

But for lower level maps there are lots of different fun options.

The Scourge is one of my favorite items in the game. :)

Will be posting a video soon.

.

"

livejamie wrote:

Monegruls is required for doing higher level content as most bosses will obliterate the zombies otherwise.

That's why i gave up on zombie dps, and switched to Stone Golem dps.
With 51k life, and over 3500 life per second, the golems just dont die.
And with 4 of them taunting, it makes rippy bosses SO much easier.

I still have zombies, and they die, but they are not my dps, they are there for leeching and to distract enemies. They die, and I resummon on the spot, as I only support them with minion life and empower, so I can resummon with unreserved mana.

Hi, I hit level 91.
Only 4 deaths so far, so that's pretty tanky.

I been running public map games, doing maps t12-t14.
Peeps are amazed at how tanky the golems are on the bosses.
The taunting of 4 golems keeps most bosses occupied until death.
The glass cannon rangers are the most grateful :)

Not much run speed on this build.
"C" shows me at 30% bonus, and that makes it hard to keep up sometimes.
It also effects clear speed on maps when soloing.
This is not the build for you if you want fast shaped strand runs.

To address run speed, I changed the boots on my Animated Guardian.

Now using:
Victario's Flight (10% increased Movement Speed for you and nearby Allies)

This loses some spell block for the guardain, but ever since i switched to 4 taunting golems, the guardian has been full health all the time.

The 10% run speed is not up all the time, as the range of it is not huge, but its up most of the time.
Really helps in keeping up in multi player map games. Gives me 40% run speed bonus when up.

And again, thanks to all of you posting your ideas.
It's great to see how versatile The Baron is.

P.S.
In one of those public games we did a trial.
Peeps asked me how i could just run thru traps like they were not there.
I have 10% life regen from the skill tree and golem buff, 638 life per sec, on 6.3k life.
Makes this build great for uber lab runs.