[3.21] Cold Conversion Summoner | Build guides for all budgets | (Ghazzy Zoomancer)
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Deadandlivin, Wow glad to see your guide new formatting and mid-budget expansion!
I'm blown away by your plans on low-budget version and currency farming for newer players like myself! When those parts will be finished I feel like this will be my all-around PoE guide :D That said, may I please ask you to help me better understand a pair of things: 1) No desecrate on trigger wand. Is this fine? From what I learned so far you don't need desecrate/offering in boss fights because of carrion golems insande single target DPS, and on maps you have plenty of dead bodies to trigger offering. But maybe desecrate is needed in more budget approaches? 2) GMP Support. When I'm seeing Kay's guide, she has a neat "shotgun effect" drawing of Volley Support on SO
Spoiler
 "While you may be quite right, my personal experience is that after I took out life nodes in quite tanky Kay's Pure Spectre Build and put them in damage nodes inm some accordance with this build (I use budget 1L helm with SO and 6 link torso AG/Zomnbies) going from 6k life to 3k my actual survivability improved. I'm in no way advanced player who can give credible input so it's only my personal experience. |
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Nice build!!
I've done something similar, but less optimised (I don't think I'll take it further this league) - and less glass cannon. I've opted for Elementalist - free phys resist from chaos golem. Add 5 endurance charges with an enduring composure small cluster, flask and some from boots and it's around 65% flat before armour. Free ele ailment immunity and ele aegis from ascendency. At the expense of damage of course. Syndicate operatives effectively get a x3 more multiplier from carrion golem's buff due to pseudo-shotgun though, which is significant with elementalist buff scaling effect, and makes up for the loss of damage from necro ascendency. Additional exposure effect from frost bomb also helps make up the difference. Interestingly, changing to Elementalist ascendency (Liege, Elemancer, Bastion, Mastermind) on your PoB does this: - -18.9% carrion dps but you go from 3 active carrions to 4 (if you use chaos + stone golem too) = +8% carrion dps - +7.2% (!) SO dps, due to insane carrion golem buff scaling - +24% flat phys damage reduction due to chaos golem if you can fit it - 2.5k hp elemental shield refreshing every 4 sec I'm not sure I see any significant downside in your build actually. A small portion of the damage can be more conditional I guess given the -25% cold res extra from exposure isn't always applied. You also lose bone armor (extra phys res + ele aegis should be better) Last edited by satirever#1494 on Apr 5, 2021, 9:06:26 AM
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" LMP and Volley function (as far as we all know) the same on SOs. Similarly, Greater Volley and GMP do too. GMP/GV have the same "shotgun effect" as Volley does - personally I find it even more consistent since there's more projectiles and more chance they overlap three times. |
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" Yeah, I want to help the little guy aswell. We've all been there and I know how much struggle it can be to actually get the ball rolling. I myself was stuck in the Chaos Orb recipe trench when I began playing this game and amassed an impressive amount of 5 exalted orbs running pure spectres + melee skeletons :D To answer your questions: I personally feel having desecrate in our link setup is a waste. First of, it disallows us to run Blade Vortex trigger which is a central point to the playstyle. As mentioned in the guide, the playstyle is designed to just be running 24/7 and never cast a single ability. Most other spectre builds use Storm brand and have to stand still and cast it every 2-3 second which slows down the gameplay alot. And as you said, we don't need Desecrate at all to have 100% uptime on flesh offering while mapping. Mobs are dying all the time and corpses are flying to left and right. You will always have this buff up. For most map bosses the duration of Flesh Offering is enough to have the buff up for them aswell. You won't be having Flesh Offering for pure single target bosses though but it's kinda whatever. If you REALLY need more damage you could do a gem swap for bosses: Swap Frost Bomb for desecrate and swap Convocation for Frost Bomb. Now you will have all damage modifiers for all bosses. Doing this you're putting your minions at risk since you can't convocate them out of dangerous things like the Sirus Meteor et.c. All in all, I personally find desecrate in weapon a waste. I always keep a desecrate gem on me in case I lose my spectres somehow. The thing about Syndicate Operatives shotgunning being such a special thing is because most other mechanics in the game does NOT shotgun. Usually you pick GMP to increase clear at the cost of single target. For SOs you actually gain insane amounts of clear and insane amounts of single target form GMP alone. GMP is broken SO because it's both the best single target and the best AoE gem we can use. With other spectres, say Redemption Sentries which were the king spectres before - They did not shotgun. That means that when we used GMP on them(Which we did for clear) and they shot a boss target with their 6 projectiles, only 1 of them did damage. These builds usually swapped GMP for something like Predetor support to boost the single target. For builds that don't shotgun, GMP is a massive DPS loss. Not only do you lose the ~50% more damage another gem would grant. The gem itself makes you deal ~25% less damage which in total is a 75% dps loss. For SO, lets assume 4/6 projectiles hit the target and our SO has a base dps of 1000 dps for simplicity. If you run Predetor it's a 50% dps increase meaning our spectres do 1500 dps. If we run GMP with 4 projectiles hitting the dps per projectile is 1000*0,75 = 750 dps since GMP reduces damage done by 25%. But we hit the boss with ~4 projectiles which nets a total of 3000 dps. This means GMP increases our total damage by 200% while Predetor only increases it by 50%. I hope this explains the power of GMP. That being said, it's impossible to know how many projectiles actually hit a boss when we convocate our minions on top of it. It can be anything from 1-6 because the projectiles behave extremely weird. Doesn't really matter though, still oneshot everything :D |
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" Awesome to hear! Historically I've actually been running Elementalist aswell and I will probably recommend running Elementalist as a league starter. I'll need to do some testing once I'm finished with the medium budget version. I actually ran as an elementalist for the entirety of Harvest and Heist League and about 60% of Ritual. There's a couple reasons why I swapped for a Necromancer: - Losing the Chaos Golem free'd up a socket slot which is huge. If I incorporate Chaos Golem again(Which I had before) I'll have to put feeding frenzy back on my spectres again which is a big loss to the spectre dps. - Minion survivability: When running as an Elementalist my AG only had ~50k health which is a very hairy situation. I lost my AG twice as an Elementalist unfortunately. Both times was because my computer lagged out in 100% deli and I couldn't convoke my minions out of insane Beyondmonster stacks. The lack of +2 levels and additional life modifiers that the necromancer ascendency provides also meant my spectres were dying at times. The worst part were the Zombies too, they died like flies and were pretty much unuseable in the build. Commander of Darkness also provides 30% to all Elemental resistance to all of our Minions. This is extremely important to the Zombies and our spectres to make sure they're resistance capped majority of the time. You are correct though. Actually, just swapping ascendency is a dps increase, assuming we don't touch my links. I might actually revisit Elementalist again to see what I can do with it. The biggest benefits are definitely the survivability perks with running Elementalist. The 100% Ailment Immunity, juiced Stone Golem regen buff and the Chaos Golem phys dmg buff are massive. Especially early game. Elemental Aegis is also superior to Bone Armor. The problem with Bone Armor is that it only goes off cooldown once the shield wears off. The Bone Armor Shield has a buff duration of 4 seconds and a cooldown of 3 seconds. That means it only has a ~60% uptime compared to the Elementalist shield which has a 100% uptime making it always ready for big elemental hits. My minmaxed version solves most of these things though. I run Freeze immunity on my boots, ignite on my flask. Headhunter also provides 3 Endurance Charges and 90% phys damage reduction majority of the time. That's why I can run the hardest maps in the game with 4.5k health and zero defensive layers :-) |
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" You are correct, the "style" or orientation of how projectiles are supposed to shoot has no effect on SOs. The only thing that matters is the AMOUNT of projectiles. How it works is that any support gem that adds 4 additional projectiles, meaning both volley and GMP has the exact same effect on SOs. These gems won't affect how the projectiles are shooting, they'll behave the exact same way. The thing about SOs is that as we add additional projectiles to our build, the spread gets bigger and bigger. The projectiles add around our SO in a 360 degree fashion. I experimented using both Greater Volley and Awakened GMP on a single operative and he actually shoots projectiles in ALL directions around him, even behind himself. From my testing I can say that the projectiles are fairly consistent. The spread seems to look something like this. 3 Projectiles (LMP and Lesser Volley): Covers about 70 degrees 5 projectiles (GMP and Greater Volley): Covers about 120 degrees 6 Projectiles (Awakened GMP): Covers about 160 degrees 10 Projectiles (Awakened GMP + Greater Volley): Covers 360 degrees.  Here you can see how the projectiles behave when running 10 projectiles. This picture illustrates about how the projectiles behave. (Keep in mind that they shoot way more projectiles due to the triggers) But it shows the spread pretty accurately unless my eyes are wrong.  Conclusion: Awakened GMP is the best gem we can use because followed by GMP/Greater Volley followed by LMP and Lesser Volley. Each projectiles hit for less but we're able to actually convocate our minions directly on top of a boss. If the boss is big with a huge model pretty much all projectiles will hit. This is very easy to notice early on when mapping. The SOs are at range and the boss's HP moves slowly. Then you convocate and the boss evaporates. |
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" Thanks for the response! I forgot about the minion survivability issues. Actually, with 5 spectres + 2 skitterbots + AG + greater harbinger of time I'm at 9 minions so I just ignore zombies. My AG is in a hungry loop precisely for what you described. My SOs also run anom FF to fit it as well as for QoL and leech. |
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" My understanding from testing in previous leagues is that SOs do not "truly" shotgun (ie if you have GMP with 6 total projectiles only one can hit each enemy). The shotgun comes from that each attack triggers three daggers, each of which can hit any enemy (and each which produces 6 projectiles with GMP) . GMP should just make it easier for all three to hit the same enemy since the three are triggered in a volley-esque pattern by default. It sounds like you're suggesting that they can now "truly" shotgun? |
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To be completely honest I'm not 100% sure. The problem with SOs is that it's extremely hard to test them and it's very hard to see their projectiles aswell.
The spell they cast, Secret police Dagger, basically shoots 3 projectiles clumped up goether. This spell behaves exactly like volley does. If you remove your GMP you'll see what I mean. They simply shoot 3 projectiles for 50% base damage next to eachother in a straight line. People seem to be under the impression that Secret Police Dagger shoots it's 3 projectiles in a cone. This is incorrect, all 3 projectiles travel in a straight line close to eachother. This makes it extremely easy for all 3 projectiles to hit the same target. We wouldn't need GMP or Volley to make sure 3 projectiles always are hitting the enemy. For this reason I've always been assuming that the GMP shotgun is a true shotgun since you actually can observe how their DPS doubles, tripples, even quadruples et.c. As soon as you convocate your spectres ontop of a big enemy. If I stand on max range with my spectres the spread of their projectiles is too big and they will only hit the target with 1 Police Dagger cast (3 projectiles) and you can really sense how their damage is subpar then. Only once you position them correctly will they oneshot big targets. Why I thought most people didn't consider GMP on SOs a "true" shotgun was because the spread of their projectiles is too big. With awakened GMP their projectiles will shoot at close to a 180 degree angle. This makes it practically impossible to consistently hit a target with all projectiles. From my testing and observation though, proper positining atleast seems to allow you to consistently hit a target with ~3-4 projectiles. The spell Secret Police Dagger itself also seems to be extremely inconsistent. Not all projectiles are triggering the two other projectiles. If a SO shoots 6 projectiles we would assume that would amount to a total of 18 projectiles. In reality only ~3-4 of the original projectiles seem to spawn additional from the spell. If you watch closely you will often see single daggers being thrown not accompanied by 2 additional projectiles. (You can watch my GIF and see that on the projectiles being cast behind the SO towards my Healthbar/Expbar) All in all, I don't actually know because I haven't been the one doing the testing. I always thought the spectre community was under the impression that GMP allowed for the SO to "truly" shotgun, just that it was impractical and hard to do because the projectiles are too spread. |
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Appreciate your answer. It does seem from most testing that SOs do the most damage with agmp/gmp/gv, but they seem very hard to test.
Last edited by satirever#1494 on Apr 5, 2021, 6:58:25 PM
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