[3.5] Ghoulish Overkill! Zombie+Skeleton Baron build

Finally I uploaded the T11 Elder fight.Was a walk in the park.

Click me to watch the Retarded video




What makes Elder fight with this buiid easy, compared to Shaper, is that it counters pretty nicely what Elder throws you into fight. Most builds have problem with the attack that holds you into place while the damage you suffer is gained as energy shield by the Elder. Most builds nearly die here. But this build is in full life and thats because of the Baron Helmet. Because you might immobilized but you still leech life through your zombies which are attack free the Elder. Very elegant solution. Also the large amout of zombies + skeletons with their slam attack, which is area, can tackle the portals and the squid-summons.

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Spacecom wrote:

I tried Shaper today, couldnt do it. Zombies, golem, skeletons die almost instantly. Character feels very comfortable during the fight, I even had time to open inventory, change ruthless with bloodmagic gem to keep spamming zombies but still, zombies die faster than I can summon them. Is there a work around with this? I wasn't using minion life gem, just the standard setup. Zombie-conc. effect-minon damage-ruthless-multi-melee physical damage.

You have 2 options:
1) Swap your skeletons into 6-link (multistrike can't support vaal skeletons), let them do heavy lifting and ignore dying zombies.
2) Another route is to swap conc effect with minion life and ruthless with at least empower lv 3, if you can afford upgrade to lv 21 zombie and lv 4 emp. Don't use cwdt + convocation, if you get clipped by the Shaper beam it will get your zombies killed. Instead use it manually to pull them out from the beam when needed. Try to stay within range of your zombies with your auras and place consecrated ground underneath your guys with a sulphur flask whenever possible. Lastly spirit offering over flesh offering will help to boost zombie survivability as well. Each additional level increases zombie survivability quite significantly. Beside zombies, have your Animate Guardian setup properly - corrupted gloves (most common options are sadima's or southbound) with curse on hit vuln and a relentless fury is very powerful to cull difficult bosses.
I'm using this setup with lv 26 (21 zombie, lv 4 emp and +2 from femurs) zombies for the Shaper and I don't need to re-summon them at all.

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and giving your minions more attack speed is actually LESS damage in many cases.

Can you explain why?

How much increased attack speed is needed from which items if we run MULTISTRIKE and 2x VD ?

Thx

Opened post from browser URL cache, got totally confused, did it again, confused, did it again, then actually went to my settings and checkd my last posts to make sure I have the right post...
New title, new start post, new everything. Wow :)

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Dan_Rey wrote:

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and giving your minions more attack speed is actually LESS damage in many cases.

Can you explain why?

How much increased attack speed is needed from which items if we run MULTISTRIKE and 2x VD ?

Thx

The issue lies in the cooldown on slam. With Violent Dead x2 and the ascendancy bonus your Slam cooldown is 1.25 seconds. With multistrike right now, on my level 92, I have a Slam attack rate of 2.02 Slams per second. This means with Multistrike my Slam performs 3 slams in a total attack time of 1.48 seconds. If you attack speed gets too high this balance changes.

If the balance changes and you get your attack rate up to 2.39 attacks per second or higher on Slam. Zombies will start to perform 3x Slams and 3x regular attacks between slam sets. For myself this means my zombie dps drops sharply. Zombie regular attack CAN miss, deals 1/3rd of the damage of slam and has the same attack rate. Meaning if you accidentally break the 2.39 aps barrier then zombies lose at least 25-50% or more damage instantly.

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Spacecom wrote:

I tried Shaper today, couldnt do it. Zombies, golem, skeletons die almost instantly. Character feels very comfortable during the fight, I even had time to open inventory, change ruthless with bloodmagic gem to keep spamming zombies but still, zombies die faster than I can summon them. Is there a work around with this? I wasn't using minion life gem, just the standard setup. Zombie-conc. effect-minon damage-ruthless-multi-melee physical damage.
I am thinking of trying lvl21/20%quality zombie gem + lvl21/20% minion life gem and see if thats enough to survive at least the shapers beam or something.

The 2 solutions posted by Urjoh earlier are ones I would recommend considering. The way I tackled Shaper was to use manual convocation. Swap zombies into the helmet and skeletons into the 6 link. Doing that swap allows your damage to not suffer as much through zombie deaths. Those 2 got me through this on standard, but my gear in that league is a bit expensive. Also make sure to SPAM spirit offering, if you're placing it in the center of the triple desecrate then you will be giving them 18% heals every second or so.

What I did in league was swap to the mom version (it's 5 regrets + shaper's touch gloves.) This swap will allow you to summon mid-combat with minimal downtime. If you need to it takes roughly 8.5s to summon all 15 zombies again while, maybe a bit more while dodging beams/balls. If it becomes crucial to stay max mana for a big hit you also get Vaal Clarity which allows for free summons for 9s.

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TokeMcBong wrote:

If the balance changes and you get your attack rate up to 2.39 attacks per second or higher on Slam.

By 2.39 you mean not YOUR (character attack speed) but that of the zombies, right??

So as long as zombie's attack rate is below 2.39 it's optimal? How much ias% on gear/gems does this account for?

Thanks!

noob question... Why i cant find rare weapons whit "minions deal % increased damage" in poe trade?

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TokeMcBong wrote:

If the balance changes and you get your attack rate up to 2.39 attacks per second or higher on Slam.

By 2.39 you don't mean YOUR (character attack speed) but that of the zombies, right??

So as long as zombie's attack rate is below 2.39 it's optimal? How much ias% on gear/gems does this account for?

Thanks!

PS: How do I check the attack rate? Can someone pls check mine?

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Dan_Rey wrote:

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TokeMcBong wrote:

If the balance changes and you get your attack rate up to 2.39 attacks per second or higher on Slam.

By 2.39 you mean not YOUR (character attack speed) but that of the zombies, right??

So as long as zombie's attack rate is below 2.39 it's optimal? How much ias% on gear/gems does this account for?

Thanks!

Sorry yes, I did mean the zombies attack rate over 2.39. And with a level 20 multistrike it only takes 28% increased attack speed to cause this problem (which can be less than flesh offering gives, hence why i don't recommend flesh offering.)

This is the main reason I run spirit offering and the reason we are suggesting carrying a level 1 multistrike for partying with an aurabot. At level 1 you need 45% attack speed to get into trouble. So this still means Vaal Haste effect becomes a damage loss. At least your regular haste doesn't cause damage loss at this point though.