[3.1] Facetank w 15-19k EHP - The Immortal Spectre Summoner (all specs, hyper important for HC)

Hi, I'm using the cwdt setup but my spirit offering only seems to proc once even though I'm taking various hits and I'm clueless has why this is happening. My links are cwdt level 1, unearth level 8, volley level 10 and gmp level 1.Ty in advance.

Weird question, but trying specters for the first real time right now, AHC. Is there a "minimum" point where this mechanism really kicks in that you should worry about? I'm still in the leveling phase (50 and been using poets pen), but was looking at swapping over to a "real" specter setup in the near future. I'm bad at math, but it seems until you have x amount of life/es scaling it won't really help too much overall? I've been following https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1971585 guide so far but maybe need to rethink things a bit and follow the hybrid tree it seems? I'm not too far off at the moment since I'm so low.

To help clarify how this works for others and myself, and to generate discussion in case I'm off on something:

Let's say you have 5000 life, and you have 1000 base energy shield from gear/wherever.

You use, let's say, L8 CWDT -> L12 Spirit Offering.

L12 CWDT triggers when you take 1107 damage. Upon taking that damage (say one big hit of exactly 1107), you now have 4893 life and 0 energy shield. At this moment, CWDT triggers Spirit Offering, granting you 2% of your base life as extra flat energy shield per corpse consumed. If you 4-link this into a CWDT->GMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering, you will cast 5 Unearth corpses and immediately consume them with Spirit Offering, giving you at least 10% of your max life as extra energy shield, up to 18% with 9 corpses consumed. Let's stick with 5 corpses for now, giving you 10% of your max life as extra energy shield.

10% of your max life is 500 energy shield. So now you have 4893 life and 500 energy shield - you "healed" 500 ES from the Spirit Offering triggering.

Because this is added as flat energy shield, it scales with your passive skill tree and gear that has #% increased Maximum Energy Shield.

If you have 100% increased Maximum Energy Shield from the passive skill tree, with the above scenario, you will instead gain 1000 energy shield when CWDT triggers (500 flat + 100% flat = 1000 total).

You now have 4893 life and 1000 energy shield - you mitigated nearly all the damage you originally took.

Now it gets a little tricky and where some people get confused when linking in Bone Offering after Spirit Offering.

If you 5-link in Bone Offering after Spirit Offering, you will gain the energy shield "heal" but then immediately also have Bone Offering's shield block bonus (if there are enough corpses to proc this).

One catch about Spirit Offering is you can go above your normal maximum energy shield. If you have 1000 maximum energy shield and cast Spirit Offering on 5 corpses in the above example, you would have 2000 energy shield total for the duration of Spirit Offering. If you then cast Bone Offering, you lose the 1000 "bonus" energy shield immediately, but gain the block bonuses.

The "key" is if you have less than your maximum energy shield, and you are granted any energy shield from Spirit Offering, it won't "remove" that energy shield if it is under your maximum.

For example, if in the above example you have 2000 base maximum energy shield (instead of 1000), and get hit for 1500 damage and are now down to 500 when Spirit Offering triggers, you would gain 1000 energy shield, bringing you to 1500 energy shield. If you immediately cast Bone Offering, you don't "lose" that 1000 energy shield you just gained. It remains at 1500 ES as if it were your own natural energy shield. However, if you go over your maximum, let's say you manually cast it again at this point on 5 more corpses, you'd have 2500 energy shield, but it won't stay over the maximum of 2000 if you then cast Bone Offering, it will drop to your normal base of 2000. This provides for a nice hybrid synergy where you heal your energy shield whenever CWDT triggers Spirit Offering. You don't care about going over your maximum so much as being able to heal flat energy shield, more than a life flask, per trigger. You actually don't need much energy shield investment to make use of this, as even if you only have 500 energy shield, you can assume Spirit Offering is like a full restoration of your energy shield any time it is triggered.

I feel it is a lot of work to achieve this, but pretty fun and has a lot of long term potential for a build.

If you want to keep it simple, just do a L8 CWDT->Desecrate-Immortal Call->Spirit Offering. Then just manually cast Bone Offering whenever you want it. This will at the very least give you a minimum 10% of max life as ES bump whenever it triggers (multiplied by your increased max ES), which will likely be higher due to corpses in the area, but will override your block, and well, you'd have to play with it. Obviously this isn't the same as OP showing that if you focus into multiple Unearth corpses you can become nearly immune to "hits" in the game, as you will recover way more than you take since Spirit Offering triggers at a threshold less than you heal from it.

Spirit Offering in this capacity was always limited due to Desecrate being the only corpse creation tool, and that having a cooldown. Now that Unearth is in the game, you have access to 5+ corpses any time you want. CWDT->GMP->Volley->LMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering is an 18% max-life as extra ES "heal" every time CWDT triggers. With 5000 life and a modest 150% max ES on tree this means you "heal" for 2250 ES every time CWDT triggers, which, due to not needing to level up any of the skills, they can all be level 1 and trigger every 500~ damage.

OP, you can become "unkillable" by now socketing 5 "To Dust" jewels to get a nearly instant despawn of skeletons and then use Heartbound Loop, you can proc your own CWDT every 2 skeletons or so. Depending on how you match your cast rate, you can trigger your ability 3 times per second. Do a slow Scorching Ray with CwC Summon Skeleton and yeah... total meme build with L84 godlike spectres still.

can i use 2 CWDT setup? i want keep 6l for spectre or golem.

"

can i use 2 CWDT setup? i want keep 6l for spectre or golem.

You can use 2 CWDT, but they might not always trigger one-after-the-other as you might expect. Once a CWDT is triggered, the skill goes on cooldown for 250ms, and only after that point does it start accruing "damage" again in order to trigger the skill again. It will work well initially, but might begin to hiccup over time, for example, if Spirit Offering consumes corpses and there are zero corpses available for Bone Offering.

You could get around this problem by having two 4-links, one in the helmet for CWDT->GMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering and another elsewhere for CWDT->Desecrate->Bone Offering->(Immortal Call if you put in a 4-link would be good here too). This would allow the exact same interaction, but take up 8 sockets, and should be quite reliable.

Helmet is first priority so it will cast first. I believe it then goes weapon, body armor, shield, gloves, boots. So plan socket placement accordingly.

You can't use two Unearth gems, because the skill goes on cooldown for 250ms, from any trigger source. Still, this grants you Immortal Call in a setup, and is probably completely legit. The only downside I can see is Desecrate still has it's cooldown, so if it triggers too much you will run out of charges and not proc Bone Offering as much, however there's a good chance it won't be entirely necessary and your setup would generally be smooth.

The Bone Offering part is kind of irrelevant though. That's not the main interaction that's so good here. All you really need is a CWDT->GMP-Unearth->Spirit Offering. With that, and a base energy shield pool of 10-18% of your max life, you will be able to "heal" for 10-18% of your max life as energy shield any time you take 500~ damage (L1 CWDT) from hits. You become "immune" to hits, in a way. You won't need to block hits when you heal for 10-18% of your max life per 500 damage taken.

And I totally forget to emphasize how important #% increased Maximum ES on the passive tree is. It multiplies the added ES, so if you spend 5 points on any build and grab 50% increased maximum ES, you're getting 15-27% of your max life as ES every time it triggers. In other words, the very smallest investment in max ES yields great "shield" returns for even a life-based build.

My full summoner has 5846 life, 1310 ES, and 72% increased max ES from the tree, as I path over towards Shadow for the health nodes. With a simple CWDT->GMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering setup, I would regain 1005 damage every time I took 500 damage in hits with a level 1 CWDT setup. The "downside" is it would trigger so much you wouldn't make use of other offerings, but, perhaps who cares at that point?

The real pro-move is to have two CWDT->GMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering setups, one in your helmet, the other in your boots. One CWDT at Level 1, and the other at level 4. If you take 528 damage, the first CWDT triggers and resets - but the first CWDT still holds that 528 damage, and will trigger the next time you take only 197 more damage, which will put the first gem at 197/528, and give you a weird short-cycle where it procs nearly any time something tickles you. Using this theory, you could actually just make a CWDT build off this alone, with a few tiers of CWDT leading up to a fully level 20 CWDT "damage dealing" setup.

And again, using Heartbound Loop, you could proc your own damage taken by casting Skeletons, giving you "healing" during damage over time effects.

I made a build a few leagues ago messing with Heartbound Loop trying to get it to self-proc but it was unreliable. But self-cast worked fine. It just was not sustainable. But with unlimited corpses and Spirit Offering, now it is. You can make an absurd, 100% CWDT build with this, and litteraly hold down one key and clear an entire map with good time (CWDT->Bodyswap) using a Scorching Ray->CwC->Summon Skeleton->Desecrate to get around... Anyway, much fun.

"

VexusOnTwitch wrote:

Spoiler

To help clarify how this works for others and myself, and to generate discussion in case I'm off on something:

Let's say you have 5000 life, and you have 1000 base energy shield from gear/wherever.

You use, let's say, L8 CWDT -> L12 Spirit Offering.

L12 CWDT triggers when you take 1107 damage. Upon taking that damage (say one big hit of exactly 1107), you now have 4893 life and 0 energy shield. At this moment, CWDT triggers Spirit Offering, granting you 2% of your base life as extra flat energy shield per corpse consumed. If you 4-link this into a CWDT->GMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering, you will cast 5 Unearth corpses and immediately consume them with Spirit Offering, giving you at least 10% of your max life as extra energy shield, up to 18% with 9 corpses consumed. Let's stick with 5 corpses for now, giving you 10% of your max life as extra energy shield.

10% of your max life is 500 energy shield. So now you have 4893 life and 500 energy shield - you "healed" 500 ES from the Spirit Offering triggering.

Because this is added as flat energy shield, it scales with your passive skill tree and gear that has #% increased Maximum Energy Shield.

If you have 100% increased Maximum Energy Shield from the passive skill tree, with the above scenario, you will instead gain 1000 energy shield when CWDT triggers (500 flat + 100% flat = 1000 total).

You now have 4893 life and 1000 energy shield - you mitigated nearly all the damage you originally took.

Now it gets a little tricky and where some people get confused when linking in Bone Offering after Spirit Offering.

If you 5-link in Bone Offering after Spirit Offering, you will gain the energy shield "heal" but then immediately also have Bone Offering's shield block bonus (if there are enough corpses to proc this).

One catch about Spirit Offering is you can go above your normal maximum energy shield. If you have 1000 maximum energy shield and cast Spirit Offering on 5 corpses in the above example, you would have 2000 energy shield total for the duration of Spirit Offering. If you then cast Bone Offering, you lose the 1000 "bonus" energy shield immediately, but gain the block bonuses.

The "key" is if you have less than your maximum energy shield, and you are granted any energy shield from Spirit Offering, it won't "remove" that energy shield if it is under your maximum.

For example, if in the above example you have 2000 base maximum energy shield (instead of 1000), and get hit for 1500 damage and are now down to 500 when Spirit Offering triggers, you would gain 1000 energy shield, bringing you to 1500 energy shield. If you immediately cast Bone Offering, you don't "lose" that 1000 energy shield you just gained. It remains at 1500 ES as if it were your own natural energy shield. However, if you go over your maximum, let's say you manually cast it again at this point on 5 more corpses, you'd have 2500 energy shield, but it won't stay over the maximum of 2000 if you then cast Bone Offering, it will drop to your normal base of 2000. This provides for a nice hybrid synergy where you heal your energy shield whenever CWDT triggers Spirit Offering. You don't care about going over your maximum so much as being able to heal flat energy shield, more than a life flask, per trigger. You actually don't need much energy shield investment to make use of this, as even if you only have 500 energy shield, you can assume Spirit Offering is like a full restoration of your energy shield any time it is triggered.

I feel it is a lot of work to achieve this, but pretty fun and has a lot of long term potential for a build.

If you want to keep it simple, just do a L8 CWDT->Desecrate-Immortal Call->Spirit Offering. Then just manually cast Bone Offering whenever you want it. This will at the very least give you a minimum 10% of max life as ES bump whenever it triggers (multiplied by your increased max ES), which will likely be higher due to corpses in the area, but will override your block, and well, you'd have to play with it. Obviously this isn't the same as OP showing that if you focus into multiple Unearth corpses you can become nearly immune to "hits" in the game, as you will recover way more than you take since Spirit Offering triggers at a threshold less than you heal from it.

Spirit Offering in this capacity was always limited due to Desecrate being the only corpse creation tool, and that having a cooldown. Now that Unearth is in the game, you have access to 5+ corpses any time you want. CWDT->GMP->Volley->LMP->Unearth->Spirit Offering is an 18% max-life as extra ES "heal" every time CWDT triggers. With 5000 life and a modest 150% max ES on tree this means you "heal" for 2250 ES every time CWDT triggers, which, due to not needing to level up any of the skills, they can all be level 1 and trigger every 500~ damage.

OP, you can become "unkillable" by now socketing 5 "To Dust" jewels to get a nearly instant despawn of skeletons and then use Heartbound Loop, you can proc your own CWDT every 2 skeletons or so. Depending on how you match your cast rate, you can trigger your ability 3 times per second. Do a slow Scorching Ray with CwC Summon Skeleton and yeah... total meme build with L84 godlike spectres still.

Phew, someone who gets it!

"

fiyawerx wrote:

Weird question, but trying specters for the first real time right now, AHC. Is there a "minimum" point where this mechanism really kicks in that you should worry about? I'm still in the leveling phase (50 and been using poets pen), but was looking at swapping over to a "real" specter setup in the near future. I'm bad at math, but it seems until you have x amount of life/es scaling it won't really help too much overall? I've been following https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1971585 guide so far but maybe need to rethink things a bit and follow the hybrid tree it seems? I'm not too far off at the moment since I'm so low.

If you read the detailed post by Vex as well as my earlier posts, you will find that a few things must be in place for the "heal" to be noticeable.

BaseLife * (2% * (Number of Unearth Projectiles)) * (1 + Energy Shield Modifier on tree + int bonus)

So if you have THE LEAST COMMITTAL 5k life, 5 Unearth projectiles (GMP), no ES on tree, you get:

5000 * 10% * 1 = 500.

Which is barely noticeable because to even trigger CWDT you must take 528 damage. This at least mitigates 500 damage, so you take 28 total EHP damage instead of 528. If you get hit 4 times in a second spread nicely over the 0.25s cooldown (unlikely) you would have mitigated 2000 damage in a second, nothing to sneeze at even with low investment.

Now imagine if you had my % ES on tree, and 7 Unearth Projectiles (GMP+Volley).

5000 * 14% * 300% = 2150.

So now everytime I take 528 damage, I get 2150 ES back, for a gain of about 1600 per hit. Mitigation is now 8000+ as compared to the 2000 from before.

(some people have pointed out the formula is kooky at the tail end but it does give you a gist of what you have to scale).

Most of the guides out there are pure life, which is why you are in scenario 1 rather than 2 (hybrid). You COULD try 85% life and putting like 5-6 points in ES nodes, there are a few huge 15-20% ones you could grab for little investment and they work wonders considering their proximity (one below dual curse / Death Attunement, some at witch start, Arcane Focus to the right of Lord of the Dead).

It will not always be apparent but you'll generally die less and have much more wiggle room than a pure life flask, primarily due to the "automatic" nature of the mitigation.

EDIT: I would also argue that it is perfectly possible to get healthy ES numbers on 130+ life gear, you're already wearing a Vis Mortis which is 400 base ES, and Abyss Jewels can roll 50 flat for both. While the league lasts, I would definitely go hybrid over pure life, or at least a 70/30% split (DCLara hit 10k in her build, holy moly. Would the shield have saved her? ... maybe the 1% lightning res from Unnatural Calm and 3600 extra shield (10,000 * 18% * 2 = 3600 in the .5 sec) might from that initial burst, can't say for subsequent chains. Not to mention maybe a meagre 1000 base ES from just the rares + Vis Mortis. But hindsight is pretty useless.)

I'm here just to say this is an amazing mechanism, kudos for developing and sharing it.
It can be used on any necromancer setup though, not just summoner, you can play any hybrid setup and slap any skill on top of it while using things like "The Scourge" to boost your own damage.

I personally like to selfcast bone offering with increased duration and keep desecrate/spell echo/spellcascade for OoC offerings

I'm also curious about manually casting Blood Offering from the new unique BloodBond paired with zealot's oath for some dumb ES regeneration

Trying to make a HC-char with this cwdt-setup and add block and MoM on top to be very tanky

pls have a look at my setup and help me to figure out what to optimize to have a very long life in hc


my gear and links so far:



using watchers eye witch energy shield on hit

thx

This concept sounds amazing, but I doubt, it'd work for my life (and MoM) based Necro. First, she only has about 1.2k ES and 22% bonus ES. I could respec a few nodes for a relatively massive boost, but I see two issues:

1) My max ES pool is limited. I get that the application of Spirit Offering also raises the cap value, but this gets lost with every fresh application. So while I would potentially heal to full ES every 0.25 seconds, that would not really save me for it's low total value. I'd still depend on my life.

2) If Spirit Offering gets applied every 0.25 seconds, I lose Bone Offering every 0.25 seconds when it's supposed to be active all the time in a dangerous encounter. That kills my block, which I assume prevents more damage in 0.25 seconds than those ~1k ES heals I might get.