3.7| Stress Free PoE - SLOW-MO ZOMBIES |Clear the Atlas with YOUR Items at YOUR Pace (SSF & Co-op)

"

Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

It very well could be broken as it'd be really hard to know one way or another.

The best way I think you could test it would be to unsocket all skills that trigger. Then unsocket all of your zombie supports. Replace your current zombie gem with a level 1 zombie gem and make sure it doesn't level to level 2. Turn off ALL your auras. Find an aura that doesn't improve damage (your Purity of Elements is perfect). Now, with nothing else on your build that can deal damage, take your level 1 zombie gem (with no supports) to a low-level area where the normal zombie attack takes a few hits to kill an enemy. Like you did, only raise one zombie. First, go through the area with NO auras on. Only watch for the damage of the normal hits, not the Zombie Slam. Then, reset the area and turn on Purity of Elements WITHOUT Generosity linked to it. Clear the map again the same way but make sure to stay really close to your zombie as auras have a really low radius at low levels. Zombie damage should go up. Then reset the map and do it again but with Generosity linked to Purity of Elements. Damage should go up again.

If Purity of Elements improved the damage of your minions, you know the offence of Commander of Darkness node is working. If you want to check the defence of the node, just raise a minion, bring up the Tooltip and select the minion skill that you'll be looking at, click on the defence tab, and watch the resists as you turn on an aura (like Hatred) that doesn't improve resists.

All that aside though, thanks for the thanks! I hope you're enjoying the build. Thanks for the thorough post.

Well, I had some time while waiting for map sellers to respond and finally tested this with a single zombie from a level 1 Raise Zombie gem with nothing linked to it. I had to give up my Rime Sentinels to try this, so I hope you appreciate it. I decided to test with no auras running, then Generosity plus Purity of Elements, then remove the Generosity support. start with no auras running. First, I tried the single zombie against enemies at The Coast in Act I, but my passive tree "minion damage" nodes let him one shot everything. Okay, I'm not respeccing my tree just to test this! Next, I tried The Crossroads in Act II, same problem. How about The Marketplace in Act 3? Statues right next to the Waypoint that I can quickly respawn, right? No good, my zombie gets slaughtered by the archer statues so I can't test reliably. How about The City of Sarn then? Lots of Undying Outcast enemies in packs that I can kite to check Attack damage. Success! My zombie tends to take off half the health of an Undying Outcast every time! Now I activate the Generosity supported Purity of Elements, hmm no real damage increase with the basic attack or Slam. Okay, now I'll turn off the aura, unsocket Generosity Support and then re-apply the aura. Aha! My zombie goes from removing around half the health of an Undying Outcast to around 4/5 of it's health.

Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to keep the zombie from using Slam, likely due to the 100% Cooldown Recovery Speed from Fleshbinder, but it's still notable results. Oh, and before anyone starts screaming, "Pics or it didn't happen," I'll do you one better.

Hi "Wrecker_of_Days"

Thanks for the guide, I've used it (mostly) up to level 75 now in my first League season.

I have a question around the use of Hatred and the mace Earendel's Embrace Grinning Fetish.

So Hatred adds cold damage to the Skeletons, and EE allows for a 50% damage buff due to me using Fire damage, but if I'm using (yes I am) the fetish, it grants Avatar of Fire to my Skeletons, which means 50% of their damage is converted to fire damage and they do no other type of damage (which due to EE +25% resistance to fire) means the skeleton damage is crippled severely.

Am I correct in this line of thinking. And therefore should I change my damage (Purifying Flame and Consecrated Path) to Lightning? As the Minions are doing Phys/Cold/Fire...

Or change Hatred to Anger meaning Minions are Phys/Fire only and I can do Cold or Lightning.

Consecrated Path can change to maybe Cyclone or Charged Dash for the Melee
and
Purifying Flame to Cold Snap (for Chilled ground) or shock Nova (more dmg)

Obviously I could also just change my weapon I suppose..

Would appreciate thoughts.

"

MasterZoen wrote:

Spoiler

"

Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

It very well could be broken as it'd be really hard to know one way or another.

The best way I think you could test it would be to unsocket all skills that trigger. Then unsocket all of your zombie supports. Replace your current zombie gem with a level 1 zombie gem and make sure it doesn't level to level 2. Turn off ALL your auras. Find an aura that doesn't improve damage (your Purity of Elements is perfect). Now, with nothing else on your build that can deal damage, take your level 1 zombie gem (with no supports) to a low-level area where the normal zombie attack takes a few hits to kill an enemy. Like you did, only raise one zombie. First, go through the area with NO auras on. Only watch for the damage of the normal hits, not the Zombie Slam. Then, reset the area and turn on Purity of Elements WITHOUT Generosity linked to it. Clear the map again the same way but make sure to stay really close to your zombie as auras have a really low radius at low levels. Zombie damage should go up. Then reset the map and do it again but with Generosity linked to Purity of Elements. Damage should go up again.

If Purity of Elements improved the damage of your minions, you know the offence of Commander of Darkness node is working. If you want to check the defence of the node, just raise a minion, bring up the Tooltip and select the minion skill that you'll be looking at, click on the defence tab, and watch the resists as you turn on an aura (like Hatred) that doesn't improve resists.

All that aside though, thanks for the thanks! I hope you're enjoying the build. Thanks for the thorough post.

Well, I had some time while waiting for map sellers to respond and finally tested this with a single zombie from a level 1 Raise Zombie gem with nothing linked to it. I had to give up my Rime Sentinels to try this, so I hope you appreciate it. I decided to test with no auras running, then Generosity plus Purity of Elements, then remove the Generosity support. start with no auras running. First, I tried the single zombie against enemies at The Coast in Act I, but my passive tree "minion damage" nodes let him one shot everything. Okay, I'm not respeccing my tree just to test this! Next, I tried The Crossroads in Act II, same problem. How about The Marketplace in Act 3? Statues right next to the Waypoint that I can quickly respawn, right? No good, my zombie gets slaughtered by the archer statues so I can't test reliably. How about The City of Sarn then? Lots of Undying Outcast enemies in packs that I can kite to check Attack damage. Success! My zombie tends to take off half the health of an Undying Outcast every time! Now I activate the Generosity supported Purity of Elements, hmm no real damage increase with the basic attack or Slam. Okay, now I'll turn off the aura, unsocket Generosity Support and then re-apply the aura. Aha! My zombie goes from removing around half the health of an Undying Outcast to around 4/5 of it's health.

Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to keep the zombie from using Slam, likely due to the 100% Cooldown Recovery Speed from Fleshbinder, but it's still notable results. Oh, and before anyone starts screaming, "Pics or it didn't happen," I'll do you one better.

Sorry about your Spectres. It was only a couple leagues ago that Spectres became persistent through logins. You used to have to re-summon them every time you logged in. I also tested it out the node for about an hour and it seemed to work properly for me. But GGG keeps a close eye on all bug reports (even if they don't respond to all of them). So if an ascendancy node isn't working properly, or it's description needs to be more clear, they'll take it seriously for sure.

Thanks for the video and all the effort!

"

Doktaduck wrote:

Hi "Wrecker_of_Days"

Thanks for the guide, I've used it (mostly) up to level 75 now in my first League season.

I have a question around the use of Hatred and the mace Earendel's Embrace Grinning Fetish.

So Hatred adds cold damage to the Skeletons, and EE allows for a 50% damage buff due to me using Fire damage, but if I'm using (yes I am) the fetish, it grants Avatar of Fire to my Skeletons, which means 50% of their damage is converted to fire damage and they do no other type of damage (which due to EE +25% resistance to fire) means the skeleton damage is crippled severely.

Am I correct in this line of thinking. And therefore should I change my damage (Purifying Flame and Consecrated Path) to Lightning? As the Minions are doing Phys/Cold/Fire...

Or change Hatred to Anger meaning Minions are Phys/Fire only and I can do Cold or Lightning.

Consecrated Path can change to maybe Cyclone or Charged Dash for the Melee
and
Purifying Flame to Cold Snap (for Chilled ground) or shock Nova (more dmg)

Obviously I could also just change my weapon I suppose..

Would appreciate thoughts.

Hey Doktaduck,

I'm glad you're liking the build! Welcome to the game :). I hope you stick around! It's such a fun game once things start clicking, which they certainly seem to be for you. You are correct in your thinking :).

The best items to pick are the ones you REALLY want to use. So to accomodate Fetish, yes, you'll want to only cast lightning damage yourself (only your character, not your minions, proc EE). Charged Dash is great for this build. If you go back to the build history, you'll see that it used to be the main melee attack for quite some time. The hard thing about getting rid of Consecrated Path and Purifying Flame is that you're getting rid of Consecrated Ground for your Zombies. But consecrated ground only comes from fire skills so not much you can do there. You could replace PF with either Ball Lightning so that enemies are "always" getting hit with lightning...or maybe Desecrate so that your offering always has corpses to consume. Don't go Cold Snap, that's cold damage. Shock Nova isn't bad, but I think it has a small portion of its AoE that doesn't hit enemies. You'd have to check the wiki to see if that still exists.

You could switch to Anger if you wanted, but Hatred just does so much more damage for zombies. Anger adds flat damage while Hatred converts physical damage. With some builds, Anger is by far the best, but with this build, Hatred is about 3x stronger. That being said, Anger will still boost Minion damage lots, so nothing wrong with picking the skills you want instead of "min/maxing".

Great post! Let us know what you do. And thanks for the thanks.

"

Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

Just announced:

"Summoners are one of the most popular playstyles in Action RPGs. In Path of Exile: Blight we have significantly revamped many Summoner mechanics and the Witch's Necromancer Ascendancy Class. ... ."

Well, there's 3.8! Sweet.

I guess it remains to be seen if the buff is permanent, or the dreaded 1 to 2 League temporary sort (followed by a crushing nerf). I imagine that the price of all things Necro may take a hike - gee, if only someone had a great Necro build that didn't need anything special to work .....

I hope we are not going to herded into using wands.

I was reading those notes and given there is no mention of a huge cyclone nerf (yet) I would expect necro stuff to still remain reasonable ( then again I am a new player so maybe I am being naive lol)

I have enjoyed each of Wreckers builds (max block cyclone has been my fav by far) I did play this necro and will probably do so again in the next league too

The one change I made that I did enjoy was adding Summon Phantasm from level 1 as those babies hit fast and decimate mobs so I had Phantasms, zombies, skeletons and frost sentinels with pretty abysmal gear and still ripping through a lot of content, so hopefully the coming changes will push this even further up DPS wise :)

"

Chunu0327 wrote:

looking forward to updates on this build with the new necro rework!!!

Hey Chunu0327 (This is the 3.7 thread.),

Thanks! I'm really excited and nervous. I hope 3.8 doesn't make this build 100% different. Changing the Ascendancy is very welcome but, obviously, this build greatly revolves around it. We'll see! I'm excited for 3.8 (I love every patch).

Thanks again!

"

walkjohn55 wrote:

"

Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

Just announced:

"Summoners are one of the most popular playstyles in Action RPGs. In Path of Exile: Blight we have significantly revamped many Summoner mechanics and the Witch's Necromancer Ascendancy Class. ... ."

Well, there's 3.8! Sweet.

I guess it remains to be seen if the buff is permanent, or the dreaded 1 to 2 League temporary sort (followed by a crushing nerf). I imagine that the price of all things Necro may take a hike - gee, if only someone had a great Necro build that didn't need anything special to work .....

I hope we are not going to herded into using wands.

Ha ha. Ya. I hope you find that Necro build you're looking for...;).

It sounds like a re-work instead of a nerf or buff. But hopefully, it starts off balanced. The scary thing about re-works are the balance changes that come afterwards. We'll see. I'm excited about that minion that buffs other minions and gets buffed from other minions. They showed lots of zombies in the promos so I'm really curious. Maybe some DoT defence? Maybe a scarecrow skin? Just as long as Zombies don't get a duration...I HATE WAITING!

"

0nyX wrote:

I was reading those notes and given there is no mention of a huge cyclone nerf (yet) I would expect necro stuff to still remain reasonable ( then again I am a new player so maybe I am being naive lol)

I have enjoyed each of Wreckers builds (max block cyclone has been my fav by far) I did play this necro and will probably do so again in the next league too

The one change I made that I did enjoy was adding Summon Phantasm from level 1 as those babies hit fast and decimate mobs so I had Phantasms, zombies, skeletons and frost sentinels with pretty abysmal gear and still ripping through a lot of content, so hopefully the coming changes will push this even further up DPS wise :)

:) Thanks. I'm glad you like them.

Re-work...I wonder if the gems all stay the same and they just changed a few background things? Or if the gems, tree, and Ascenandcy changed too. This is too much. Someone just needs to freeze me, then unthaw me for the patch notes release.

Welp, hopefully, I can still release the guide fast enough with all the changes that are going to be made. I have to make sure not to rush. I hate making changes mid-league.

Thanks again :).