3.6 Inquisitor SRS Summoner: cheap league start guide

1) Shroud of the lightless and Iquisitor ascendencies + EE will negate a lot of enemy resists, making your SRS, elemental damage spectres, or skelly mages much better at bossing

2) Inquisitor buffs to cast speed, mana regen, elemental damage reduction are worth a huge amount of tree nodes. This means you can invest tree points into minion damage, more cast speed or defences of your choice

3) decay DoT counts as your kill so you will keep 20 wolves up, and proc consecrated ground a lot. The fast casting speed makes it smoother applying EE and Dot using your choice of lightning spell, or possibly the new bane spell

With a few exalt budget, expect:
* SRS doing about 3 million shaper DPS with 4 casts per second
* Spectres doing 450K shaper DPS
* Wolves doing 1 mill shaper dps
* Option to gem swap minion speed, melee splash, spell echo for mapping joy
* Option to replace spectres with skeleton mages @ 600K dps with GMP included
* Option to replace wolves with soulwrest for mapping safer
* Buffs to both anger and hatred should be perfect for us
* Easy Mana regen
* lots of crits for freezing and chilling with consecrated ground buffs
* lots of frenzy and power charges for all using victarios charity
* negate huge amounts of enemy resists with inquisitor ascendency, shroud of the lightless and EE: Shaper DPS is not much of a drop from trash mob DPS
* Fast whirling blades + fortify
* No 6 link required
* Lots of flexibility with jewels
* Careful planning means we don't need stats from gear
* Get deep into mapping with a 100 chaos maximum budget
* Cheaper gear won't affect you much, and endgame gear is flexible
* smooth levelling: First 2 ascendencies will give great buffs to you, so you don't need to find any early OP gear
* Great for most bosses as you can ramp up your damage while they spawn / change phases. Really fast ramp up time on your damage, then sustained high damage output while you move, so you can kite or collect loot while your minions kill
* really long range on all minions. SRS with minion speed will zip offscreen. Skelly mages will summon ahead of you and fire into the blackness. Frost sentinels are the longest range spectre.
* option to give up spectres in exchange for kitavas thirst, making available easy utility spells, curses, auto damage spells, body swapping/flame dashing madness
*option to give up some cast speed or minion damage for more life

* glass cannon health stats requiring manual dodging. Not suitable for HC.
* not much armour so not good for lab runs
* not much resists from tree or gear, so will need some good jewellery by act 10
* SRS and skelly mages have low life, and low base stats, so your shaper DPS will drop dramatically (briefly) when a crazy stupid AOE boss kills them all.
* SRS need ramp up time of 5 seconds standing still and casting to reach max DPS. Doing this with a low EHP means you will die at times, but remember the long range means you will be at a safe distance a lot of the time.
* No regen map mod will be tough to sustain mana

Weapon 1: The scourge

Weapon 2: victarios charity

Helmet: (cheap) Elder rare with socketed gems have Minion life and socketed gems have minion damage. (better) a third mod, increased duration, or +2 to socketed gems or concentrated effect (and use flame senntinels) (Best) A bone helmet with all the above for an extra 40% minion damage.

Body armour: (cheap) any 6 link chest. Tabula rasa will get you a long way. (best) shroud of the lightless

Gloves: Command of the pit

Boots: (option 1) Bones of Ullr. (option 2) an elder rare with increased duration and spell totem, then throw in melee skeletons for a brainless extra million DPS and more meatshields.

Amulet: Atziris foible

Rings: For your resists, a bit of life and (best) is with minion speed included, or some other sweet crafted mod.

Belt: Resists and life. If you somehow get all your resists capped elsewhere, best belt for DPS and utility would be darkness enthroned with ghastly eye jewels in there

Weapon 1: Minion damage > melee physical damage > maim. Other good options are minion speed, minion life, faster attacks, culling strike, blind, chance to flee

Weapon 2: Hatred, Anger, generosity

Helmet: Raise spectre > spell echo > controlled destruction > cold penetration (you can use elemental focus if you want, but it is harder to get all 4 blue rolls, and a green gem is better to swap in utility for mapping) utility options: GMP, faster projectiles, added cold damage

Body armour: SRS > minions damage > elemental damage with attacks > melee physical damage > elemental focus (for mapping swap in spell echo/minion speed and melee splash)

Gloves: decay with a lightning spell to proc EE

Boots: whirling blades > faster attacks > fortify + flesh offering.

Utility: You may get a slot free (or give up fortify) for: desecrate, frost wall, decoy totem, stone golem, animate guardian, Elemental weakness or defensive curse.

SRS is fun, and is generally considered a levelling skill. It's good for new players because you don't need mechanics, it acts at a good range, you don't need to target with your mouse, and as long as you can get a few casts off, your damage will continue to apply while you kite or hover over monsters to learn about them....
BUT
the base stats of SRS are some of the worst in the game. They are near useless endgame unless you devote a lot of passive points and auras to support them. This means your character is very squishy, or your SRS build can only do late content after you are rich as Jeff Bezos. It also means that you can spend a whole lot of time summoning them, but all 20 get wiped out by one monster spell :(

If you want to survive easier, use a meta skill which is powerful enough that most of your resources can be put to defence (like Herald of Agony). If you still want to try SRS, here are some tips and tricks to try out as your build gets stronger:
* Use phase run or phasing flasks. Not only does this give you increased movespeed (one of the best stats in the game) but it also makes 50% of monsters ignore you. Once you are rich, get a watchers eye with haste mods "gain phasing while you have haste"

* Use decoy totems or frost wall instead of, say flesh offering

* Do not cast in one spot. Develop a playstyle of cast and move. This will get you off ground effects and move you out of the way of monster damage that you didn't see coming

* Use spell totems. You can invest 4 points in the passive tree to get 2 totem limit. Then link your srs to spell totem. Your damage will decrease, but you will get 20 SRS out while you are kiting, instead of having to stand still to cast. This is a huge buff to survivability.

* Give up damage for defences. Anger is optional, and you'll live a lot longer if you use your mana for an enfeeble aura, or purity of elements (if your resists are undercapped)

* use more meatshields. Zombies and skeletons can go lots of places in this build, and provide a great source of taunting, projectile blocking, maiming, blinding, and extra damage.

* farm XP in easier areas. There is a huge difference between level 19 and level 20 skill gems. Only the builds with great synergy can charge into high level maps without waiting for gems to level to max. This is not such a build. Get your gems, ascendencies, and gear sorted on the easier content before you go trying the harder stuff.