After playing this build in Betrayal and optimizing it to the extreme (Delve 1000+ etc.) I decided to play it again this league. The primary reason being the (to me new) Cold Iron Point dagger (CIP).
I have seen an interesting build guide for a Necro HoAg cyclone summoner. It uses two CIPs (2x +3), The Coming Calamity (+2), a Necro ascendancy (+2) and a lvl 21 HoAg gem to reach lvl 31 without using empower. This allows to still keep a true 6L with 5 ~50% more support gems. Lvl 31 is an important breakpoint because the crawlers atkspeed per virulence increases. In terms of DPS, lvl 30 to 31 is more significant than lvl 31 to 36. However, I didn't like the dependence on mortal other minions and the defense package of that build in general. Notably, it can reach 5M DPS without an enormous investment.
So I took systemplayerlosts build as a starting point again and modified it to fit my gem level obsession. As I poster earlier, 2 CIPs and a Thief's Torment were a great fit for early mapping. Now I can present my close to final setup:
Jewels are either life, minion atkspeed, life regen while moving or res, life, poison chance/mana gain on hit.
Second weapon set:
I have 9k hp, 100 lgoh with daggers, and insane 11M Shaper DPS under ideal conditions (During focus and with frenzy charges on crawler, full shotgunning, full virulence, 10 wither stacks) Even without focus and weapon swap shenanigans, I have roughly 6M Shaper DPS while continuously attacking. I also assigned high priority to passive life regeneration (slightly above 1k/s) and cyclone attack radius. These aspects are crucial for the Sirius fight for example. Life regen so you don't have to dodge too much and more reach to be able to attack while avoiding the bullshit melee hate. I even consider using increased AOE support for cyclone. The only item that isn't close to optimal is of course the helmet. A good one could turn HoP from mostly a supporter for HoAg doing only 500k DPS itself into a serious 1.5M DPS addition. I couldn't find an ideal base with the enchantment so far though.
I have only beaten 0 watchstone Baby Sirius, but I think he is very much doable on higher levels with my version of the build. Uber Elder is not a problem, although he is definitely beefier now.
How do you break lvl 31 HoA? I can only count +9 levels from what you said (21 gem + 3 CIP + 3 CIP + 2 CC + 1 Amulet).
PS: Other methods to get more lvels include +1 dex, and +1 chaos on Hunter ammy and also woke added chaos lvl 5
Basically you need either +1 corruption on coming calamity and +1 amulet or a +2 amulet. Currently, the first option is just cheaper. Also it allowed me to get a lot of life and life regen from my amulet.
PSA: 6L +1 The Coming Calamity can be made for about 10 ex. Thanks to deathmark support we only need 4 off-colors, resulting in an average cost of 400 vaal 400 chrome to color it. The fixed part is 1850 vaals, 1500 fuses and 350 jewellers. And vaals at 1/3 C are ridiculously cheap compared to betrayal when I had to spend around 30 ex on my +1 coming calamity. Right now it's maybe a bit more than 10 ex.
About woke added chaos dmg: It's just bad. The added chaos dmg does basically nothing for us, as HoAg only scales base phys dmg. And the one gem level is obviously less than empower (which I don't even use, as any of the more multuipliers from the other supports its much better if your gem level is already 31).
I've been loosely following this build in HCSSF (a mode I rarely play). I didn't quite have the mana to reserve HoAg and HoP yet, so I dropped HoP and threw in Flesh and Stone and Raise Spectre. It's been working well enough, but I was looking at the wiki entry for Holy Relic and came across this:
"
Holy Relic explicitly cannot taunt, but can blind if supported with a Blind Support. Ghastly Eye Jewel with an of Stifling suffix will not affect a Holy Relic since its Nova spell is not an attack.
So, with this is mind, I was wondering why you are running Meat Shield on the Relic? Is it just to increase it's survivability?
