Cold ANIMATE WEAPON Summoner | League-Start & Leveling Guide

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solidghost wrote:

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HeartlessLize wrote:

Any reason you don't go impale like you would skellies or Sentinels?

The DPS from an elemental conversion is about 2x-3x higher.

Would this be compensated by higher enemy elemental resists compared to physical?

Resists heavily favor the elemental conversion- we can penetrate resistances with

1. exposure (-10% or -25%)
2. EE (-50%)
3. a curse (-?%)

so even Shaper-tier bosses will be negative resists against hits.

For physical, minions have no access to "reduced physical damage reduction against your hits" on the tree, so no way to break through armor. Vulnerability curse is okay? But lacking access to EE or exposure is big loss. The new high armor rating for bosses in 3.9 was a big nerf to phys minions.

Comparing Shaper DPS, I see Physical as 148k (including Impale) where a Fire conversion has 398k Shaper DPS. And that doesn't include exposure.

You can look at the POB listed and verify this for yourself- both the elemental and phys versions are there to compare.

Hi buddy! Good stuff here, thanks for some ideas. I was thinking about a few things, let me know what you think :)

Setup:

1. generosity + hatred

2. moon sorrow: 48% blind, 10% cast speed, makes lighting warp tickle harder
(proc EE)
(look for sources of consecrated ground)
(look for sources to proc arcane surge)
lightning warp + spellslinger + bladefall?
main/off-hand: strong convoking wand with trigger sockets spell on skill

3. 6L chest: SRS + Spellslinger + Animate Weapons + Minion damage + 5th + 6th slots as: icebite, awakened added cold damage, onslaught, multistrike, feeding frenzy, deathmark, empower, ele focus,... not sure haven't PoB'd it yet. probably shav wrappings low-life so i can run more auras

4. vigilant strike with jewel somewhere?

5. devouring diadem vs flesh offering

6. curses: enfeeble, frostbite

7. boots enchant: ??
helm enchant: Summon Raging Spirit has 30% increased Duration
glove enchant: animate weapon (war), clone (reflection), icy skull (grave)

8. ammy: Tavukai or Aul's with free Envy

9. help with cooldowns:
Harbinger of Time: Flow Untethered
The Stampede (boots)

10. triad grip: 4G: desecrate, haste, hatred, arctic armor

11. utility: (if i have the sockets basis)
summon skitterbots + bonechill + infernal legion
meatshield support + zombies? skellies? carrion golem? spectres?
animate guardian + elemental army + minion life
convocation

12. Aspect of Avian

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Rntchusospecial wrote:

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I'd suggest doing a POB to see how much damage you give up by trying to automate with Spellslinger - it's not going to add wand damage to the minions. Also, have you estimated how much mana you'll be reserving?

Without Skitterbots - Bonechill, fire conversion is better than cold for AW. And, AW and SRS scale differently, with AW benefiting a ton more from flat added damage, so I doubt that having both is optimal.

You have a lot going on there, you'll be surprised how quickly the gem slots go once you begin trying to socket everything in. Have to make some sacrifices...

I'm doing the same sorta build as you, but I believe scaling the levels of Animate Weapon will be the way to go. So I'm going the +2 gem level necro ascendancy, +1 from amulet, Empower, +3 in helm, +1 from Wand, and whatever else I can get to boost the levels. In addition, I'm also using the triad grips, but using 100% converted to fire, along with scorching ray, combustion on bladefall, dual curse flammability and elemental weakness. My animate guardian is also using an eye of malice, so that shaper's resistances after EE and all my curses and scorching ray get applied, his res goes from 50% to -120% or so against fire. I'm also using Victario's charity with necromantic aegis for the frenzy and power charges, and Victario's Influence for hatred, vaal haste, and precision. The Mother's embrace belt would also work somewhat well with Animate weapon if you get alot of the gain #% phys as extra "something" damage. The crit chance of my AW after all the buffs is good enough to make diamond flask viable, so I'll go ahead and get kingmaker on my animate guardian for the +50% crit multi, fortify, and all that. The onslaught flask would be good, too. Here's my pob. https://pastebin.com/AaPXQC27

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NinjaClam1 wrote:

I'm doing the same sorta build as you, but I believe scaling the levels of Animate Weapon will be the way to go. So I'm going the +2 gem level necro ascendancy, +1 from amulet, Empower, +3 in helm, +1 from Wand, and whatever else I can get to boost the levels. In addition, I'm also using the triad grips, but using 100% converted to fire, along with scorching ray, combustion on bladefall, dual curse flammability and elemental weakness. My animate guardian is also using an eye of malice, so that shaper's resistances after EE and all my curses and scorching ray get applied, his res goes from 50% to -120% or so against fire. I'm also using Victario's charity with necromantic aegis for the frenzy and power charges, and Victario's Influence for hatred, vaal haste, and precision. The Mother's embrace belt would also work somewhat well with Animate weapon if you get alot of the gain #% phys as extra "something" damage. The crit chance of my AW after all the buffs is good enough to make diamond flask viable, so I'll go ahead and get kingmaker on my animate guardian for the +50% crit multi, fortify, and all that. The onslaught flask would be good, too. Here's my pob. https://pastebin.com/AaPXQC27

It's odd, at least in current version, that AW scales very badly with added gem levels. Maybe that changes in 3.10. Empower is surprisingly weak as a support currently.

Anyway, very interesting build, the Victario armor is not something I had considered heavily but it definitely lets you do a lot with auras!

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HeartlessLize wrote:

Any reason you don't go impale like you would skellies or Sentinels?

The DPS from an elemental conversion is about 2x-3x higher.

It's not the case, if you remove added cold damage from the link (in a case the base added damage from the buff is high enough), a physical build with the new body armor is very close to the cold build, if not better (but you are even more socket starved despite the now-free gloves sockets)

Example with very close stuff:
Physical:
https://pastebin.com/nhWC94Ej

Vs Cold:
https://pastebin.com/Ye3Rakw5

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Keyen wrote:

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HeartlessLize wrote:

Any reason you don't go impale like you would skellies or Sentinels?

The DPS from an elemental conversion is about 2x-3x higher.

It's not the case, if you remove added cold damage from the link (in a case the base added damage from the buff is high enough), a physical build with the new body armor is very close to the cold build, if not better (but you are even more socket starved despite the now-free gloves sockets)

Example with very close stuff:
Physical:
https://pastebin.com/nhWC94Ej

Vs Cold:
https://pastebin.com/Ye3Rakw5

Fair enough. As an aside, you'd probably want to run something other than Spirit Offering with physical, as Brutality prevents that from boosting damage at all.

More key point, I wouldn't feel very confident relying on DPS boost from Maim with Flesh and Stone, since the radius on that is tiny, and most of the time we would probably rather be on sand stance for the defensive boost.

Also, I don't think POB includes effect of armor, which for high level monsters is very substantial. I played with some phys-based spells in 3.9 and it was like hitting a brick wall around T14 maps due to armor.

In short, even if you can get a POB number where phys looks similar to ele conversion, practically elemental will be stronger

Actually, armor is really not a problem.

Lvl 83 mobs have like 25000 armor.
The average damage is 65000. Meaning that on average, the damage is reduced by:
25000/(25000+(10*65000))=0.03 = 3%.

Even 50K armor amounts to 7% reduction.

(Which is ignored from impale damage with the support, and that you can ignore overall with an awakened brutality).

But the point about flesh and stone is true.

Ps: I'm not running spirit offering...?

Oops, my mistake. Bone Offering. Never mind that part!

I was just comparing curses, and Punishment appears better than Vulnerability for that build. Interesting (if not really practical, as we don't want stuff to hit our minions).

Hey, like others I've been theorycrafting a bunch over the past few days in PoB with animate weapons. Like you, I settled on an elemental approach because the added damage multiplier on AW is so insane.

PoB:

Damage is about 500k shaper dps per animate weapon. The dps could be pushed higher with Triad Grip, carrion golem, etc. I went with a lowlife setup, which has about 7.6k es, not counting the automated spirit offering casts from Poets Pen.

A couple reasons for the choices I made:

- Not using Triad Grip: Triad Grip represents about a 3% damage increase, not worth it over decent es gloves. Carrion golem is replaced with stone golem for the same reason, only provides 3% damage increase.
- Poets Pen: Automating Spirit Offering, BF, and Desecrate will give about 1.5k es/second from attacking with frenzy alone. The build also has about 1k es regen. Could also go Wicked Ward.
- Low life: Since I decided to go with spirit offering, an ES based build made sense. The way I built AW benefits massively from the buffed Wrath, Anger.
- No Spellslinger/automated AW casts: Like you said, you lose a damage gem. AW has over a minute duration anyway.

Animate guardian has ele weakness curse on hit gloves and Kingmaker. Spectres will be 2x frenzy apes, 1x power charge ape, 1x ruins hellion.

The build is extremely socket starved, which is honestly the main issue. I have to use two unsets (I think convocation is mandatory for any build with aniamte guardian). The other issue is that Frenzy only has an aps of 5, which is more than enough for animating purposes, but if it were higher the ES recovery from spirit offering would be higher.

When the new AW gem rolls out, impale/Triad Grip might be more useful due to the higher added damage bonuses.

For map clearing, Melee Splash would be subbed in for EDWA, and maybe Unleash would be used as well. Damage either way is more than enough.

Any tips?