[3.2] The Animated Arsenal (The Dancing Duo + Chains of Command)

This build revolves around using The Dancing Duo and Chains of Command.



The sword, upon gaining rampage, "un-equips" itself from you and turns into two high damage, high movement minions that last as long as your rampage stays active.

The chest empowers our Animate Guardian skill, giving it various buffs as well as causing it to create an animated copy of its weapon upon killing a target - and those weapons it animates can also animate even MORE copies of the weapon. The big drawback of the chest is that you can ONLY summon animated minions; thankfully, our sword counts as such and we can use both!

The end resut is a horde of flying weapons that cut through anthing on the screen.

Getting that rampage started and keeping it going is a very important part of the build, and much of this is done thanks to The Writhing Jar flask.



With some Reduced Flask Charges Used on our belt, three of these flasks together can create 18 worms - enough to start off Rampage from scratch. Then all it takes is a single pop of this flask during a dry patch without mobs to keep the Rampage going!

One Small Problem...

The only issue is a bad interaction between these two uniques. The Dancing Duo weapons eat up a very large number of the "kills" - causing our poor Animate Guardian to be unable to land that last hit on things to summon copies of their weapon. This means that the chest really does not give us a lot of positives and even stops us from summoning other kinds of minions to support our swords. For it to be worth it, we would need the Animate Guardian to get all the kills while also having the swords out.

The solution? Well, another unique. Speaker's Wreath.



This helmet causes minions to be unable to kill targets that are not ignited, leaving them at 1 hp. With this on, both The Dancing Duo swords and our Animate Guardian cannot kill a thing, so long as we don't have sources of ignite.

From here, all we need to do is socket the support gem Decay into our Chains of Command body armor. So long as our Animate Guardian skill gem is also linked in the chest, it gives both the guardian and their weapon copies the ability to place a chaos DoT on targets. This DoT can bypass the "Only Kill Ignited Enemies" property of the helmet. Now, where as most DoT effects do not attribute "On Kill" effects to Totems/Mines/Traps/Minions, the Decay skill is different - anything killed by the Decay counts as a kill for whatever applied the Decay.

Now we have swords that can't kill a thing and a guardian and horde of weapons that will get 100% of the kills (minus any your character kills, of course).

Building From There...

Since I am forced into using the Decay skill on my Animated Guardian and their weapons, I decided to lean into the chaos theme. Unlike many builds that focus on gaining a lot of added elemental damage for their minions - largely by supporting them with powerful auras - I decided to go for mostly Phys/Chaos scaling.

On my Animate Guardian, I link up Added Chaos Damage and Void Manipulation to pair with Decay. I use a two-handed weapon with as much flat chaos and as high physical DPS as possible; usually this is very cheap to get. Then, I stack as much added chaos to minion Abyssal Jewels on my tree as I can get. To boost all that, as my active skill I use Wither linked to Cast While Channeling and Decay - this gives some extra flat damage through the curse and then together with Wither boosts the chaos damage targets take by a large amount. Finally, the skill Spirit Offering gives our minions a further 30% of their physical damage added as chaos for that final push to chaos glory.

Scaling Chaos is certainly not a requirement and this basic build can be done many ways. I decided to go for Chaos because it let me drop a lot of investment into aura nodes that elemental-focused builds usually go for - I only run Haste to boost my minions attack and movement speed - and then used that saved mana for Mind over Matter to boost my own defense.

And Staying Alive...

Keeping ourselves alive is just as important - more important? yea, probably... - than how we kill things. For this build, we use a "throw it all at the wall" approach to effective life. A mix between Life, Energy Shield and Mana with Mind of Matter gives us a large pool of resources to take large hits from.

Regaining those resources is a little harder as a summoner. One excellent way this build survives is through the Mistress of Sacrifice node for the Necromancer Ascendancy. By linking Spirit Offering up to our Wither Cast While Channeling, we explode all the corpses on the ground to give ourselves 1% of our life back as ES *per corpse*. This may not seem like much, but while general mapping you will be exploding a lot of corpses with this. Even on bosses, a handy Desecrate on Cast When Damage Taken and even worm corpses from The Writhing Jar flask help out a lot.

The Writhing Jar flask itself is not just useful for Rampage, as each chug of this flask gives back about 900 effective life through life and mana (if quality and well-rolled). Three flasks with three uses each, and you can spam those bad boys in a panic and be just fine.

Bosses can be a little more tricky without a lot of corpses around or ways to constantly refill flasks, but in my experience it has not been a massive issue for most bosses, since your minions draw a lot of focus - even more with a single Abyss jewel to let minions Taunt - and down bosses very fast if you go in prepared with a horde of weapons.

…

And that's the basics of the build! :)

115 Point Tree:



Asendancy Points:

These are the points I recommend & the order I pick them up in:

• Mistress of Sacrafice
• Puppet Master
• Commander of Darkness
• Invoker

It's quite simple to choose, since all the other options are for specific minion types this build is unable to use. Easy! Still, what we do get gives plently of duration - very important for our guardian weapon copies - and plently of other goodies.

6S (Sword)
BBBRRG

• Minion Damage + Minion Speed + Concentrated Effect + Meele Physical + Maim + Faster Attacks
  

* I've thought about swapping around something like Minion Speed for Added Chaos, but this has been working well for me.

6L (Chest)
BBBRRG

• Animate Guardian + Multistrike + Minion Damage + Added Chaos + Decay + Void Manipulation
  

* If you put your Guardian somewhere else, you can replace it with something like Minion Speed to 7L the weapon copies.

4L
BBBB

• Wither + Cast While Channeling + Depair + Spirit Offering
  

* Your big "active" button to press. Hold this down to target where your minions go, slow everything, curse everything, ramp up the chaos damage, and proc that juicy Spirit Offering through every single dead body.

4L
RRRB

• CWDT (lvl 1) + Immortal Call (lvl 3) + Inc Duration + Convocation (lvl 5)
  

* This gives a just over 1 second duration IC proc with all the duration on the build. Concovation helps bring your entire weapon horde with you when you take a blow.


4L
RRGG

• Vaal Haste + Increased Duration + CWDT (lvl 1) + Desecrate (lvl 7)
  

* Helps by creating corpses to explode with Spirit Offering when you get hit. The Vaal Haste is about 11 seconds of speed, glory and madness.