3.8 New Queens Escape + Baron - super fast physical skeletons + zombies

3.8 Generic Build - https://pastebin.com/eNyDrEdN

Old Trees


3.4 build tree - Standard build - https://pastebin.com/s7iQUgw2

Tn_Sylar MoM version: https://pastebin.com/M5PG4mcw

3.5 Abyssal summoner guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2253282
Uses soulwrest and phantasms instead of zombies. dodge instead of life regen. More DPS and no need for a 6 link.

3.4 Fun/Meme Build Guides
The Drunken Moonwalker Occultist Projectiles: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2228787

Lazy Totem SRS Tank: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2202060

Super Speedy SRS and Zombies: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2219721

Kitavas thirst SRS, with 'where the hell am I' flame dashes: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2200389

- Melee skeletons and zombies dealing pure physical damage with high damage single hits.

-This means that there are no reductions to damage from monster elemental resists. It also means the reductions to damage when facing large bosses is minimal. And finally, the way armour works (rapidly diminishing returns) in this game means that high physical damage hits are not reduced much, even by high armour.

- Our pursuit of high single minion hits mean we do not really need traditional DPS, and in fact our best support gems are not things like attack speed or multistrike. Even though they give better DPS, they reduce the average damage of each hit.

- Unlike hatred builds, you do not need to be close to your minions to provide an aura. Almost all your damage remains even though you are safely running away from the enemy.

- Minion speed means that the damage is applied faster. You can project your damage further from yourself, and your clearspeed is improved.

-The net result of all this is that even though other builds might have higher tooltip damage, this build has excellent effective damage, and you need not worry about facing 95% of map mods or boss types.

- You should always run your maps unidentified if possible for an extra 30% item quantity. Map mods you need to worry about are:
* reduced physical damage taken or players cursed with temporal chains (reduces clearspeed)
* physical reflect (your zombies may die and you'll need to summon skeletons more often)
* No mana or life regen (You'll need to pop a life or mana flask occasionally)
* Players are cursed with elemental weakness or players have elemental equilibrium (your resists might get lowered to below 75% which increases your chance of dying)

**On Minion mechanics: No minion skill can match a spell or attack for timing your damage. What I mean is, if you attack, you click and the damage happens, the monsters are dust. For minions, you move first, then you click, the minions appear, then they move, then the monsters go splat. The timing of your damage always has a delay (even with spectres or golems, which still have to follow you, move, then cast.). Because of this delay, summoners need better than average defenses, but can deal tremendous damage safely after this initial risky period. Here's how we deal with this situation:

- Kiting is easy. Since this build requires so few button pushes, any lengthy fights, or fights where you don't know wtf is going on, require a really simple playstyle: run away. If you have managed to get some skellies down, they will do the work. If you can run in circles nearby, the zombies will join in. Even though I personally play this build in the facetanking style and don't die, the safer way is always to kite.

- High life. In my opinion, far superior to any ES or MOM option, because you get full value out of your flasks, it's easier to keep track of your health status in a busy screen, and it makes better use out of any strength you stack for a build that prefers The Baron as a helmet.

- Phase run gives us movement speed, we can't be blocked, and monsters will lose interest in attacking/casting at you. For Quality of Life, this means we can spend time picking up items, move faster through maps and facetank most things. It also means if we hit that crazy mofo that fills the screen with death, just phase run past/around it. Your minions will catch up and destroy it, or this gives you time to plant a decoy totem and some skellies next to it.

- Decoy totem in voideye. This is optional, but gives you great specialist defenses. It makes opening sketchy chests much safer, provides a great meatshield, often redirects that insane boss's damage, and is great for QOL, because it can allow you to pick up items safely while your minions deal their damage. It can also help with annoying master missions like Vorici's 'open the chest' foolishness. The extra 5 levels from voideye gives the totem much better life stats, which makes the high cast time worthwhile. Additionally, taunted monsters will deal 10% less damage to you and your minions. At end game, casting this will make your clearpseed suffer, so most players will drop this skill in favour of a ring with raw stats.

- Purity of elements, commander of darkness ascendency node, and lots of resists from the tree. This makes it super easy to cap your resists while leveling, and gives you a huge range of item options, meaning you won't have to search for the right item to cap your resists, you can use a lot of cheap uniques, and if you find it, you have a lot of scope for helpful utility stuff like chaos resist on rings, belts, jewels.

- Purity of elements and commander of darkness also gives your minions high resists, keeping them alive to deal damage, and meaning a lot less micro managing, especially for a summoner who has a lot of minions active.

- Lots of minions active means a huge meatshield around you, drawing aggro, taunting the enemy, blinding them and blocking their movement towards you.

- Enfeeble and blasphemy. This is just delightful. Everything around you will find it harder to hit, deal less crit, and less damage from all sources to you, your minions and your party. This works wonders with your high life regen.

- Temporal chains? This is a really good option, and will reduce monster DPS, and make kiting easier. Enfeeble is still first choice because it will reduce DPS and reduce the size of the hit you receive, making it easier to deal with this games insane oneshot potential.

* Dual curse is definitely an option. You can use doedres damning ring while still keeping resists easily capped, or you can get your second curse limit via whispers of doom from the tree. You can apply the curse in the CWDT setup, forgoing the increased duration on immortal call and phase run. The second curse will be either temporal chains or vulnerability. Any attempt to introduce a second curse will require a bit of tweaking, and will reduce your base stats for life a little.

- High life regen (700+): great for all damage over time effects. Partially reduces your penalty for having low chaos resistance, and does wonders for the speed of your lab runs. For my uber runs, I don't have to worry about most traps - by the time you get hit again, you have regened the life from the first hit. I don't worry about burning ground. Even if I get lost while hitting the switches on burning ground, a single flask drink gets your health going back the right way.

1 - Commander of Darkness - for nice early resists
2 - mindless aggression - more minion speed!
3 - unnatural strength - more minion damage and life
4 - Bone barrier - sweet defences for you and minions

My choices

Weapon 2H: Queen's escape. Love that minion movement speed. This is as close to a mandatory unique that this build has.


Helmet: The Baron. Gives minions extra damage and life via your strength. The + 2 helps the survival of your spectres, and Animate guardian.


Armour: Belly of the beast. Nice life, a bit of resist, decent armour and buff to your life flasks.


Boots: Alberons warpath. Buff to strength, some armour, moderate movespeed, extra skellie.

Gloves: Meginoords Vise. Life regen, strength and armour


Belt: Anything you like.

Rings: any unset ring and Voideye - the only thing that makes decoy totem worthwhile. Unset ring keeps your purity of elements away from mana multipliers

Amulet: Astramentis - covers all stat requirements, nice boost to strength


Other options

Flasks

Vaal Summon Skeleton (in Weapon) Brutality > Minion Damage > Melee Splash > Melee Physical Damage > Maim

* For boss fights swap melee splash with ruthless or multistrike, but really this is optional, it only shaves a short time off already fast fights.

* If you manage a 6 link, I recommend minion speed. While this does not give maximum tooltip damage, it keeps your effective damage high, because they will start hitting the enemy sooner, will be harder for fast enemies to kite, and will switch targets faster.

* Why not ruthless? You will rarely get 3 hits on anything, and it is not in line with our quest for 'effective damage'. That being said, I love the ruthless stun for defenses, and I love the stun animation, so I run with this gem in a lot of the time! It really is just up to your preference.

* Why not multistrike? It is still great for bosses, I just prefer the 'hinder' part of maim for defence, and see the earlier explanation of why a larger hit is better than more hits of lower damage due to how armour works.

Raise Zombie (In chest) Minion Life > Brutality > Minion Damage > Melee Physical Damage

* If you manage a 6 link, solid options would be minion speed, empower, fortify, faster attacks, ruthless.

Purity of Elements in an unset ring

Enfeeble with Blasphemy + Desecrate and Summon stone golem (in boots or glve)

CWDT with incresed duration, phase run, immortal call (in boots or glove)

Animate Guardian + Raise Spectre + Minion Life + blood magic (in helmet)

***the blood magic gem is for the carnage and host chieftans who have a really low mana pool. With blood magic they spam mass frenzy and mass empower a lot more frequently.

Decoy totem *optional* Set in a voideye ring for preference.

If you are new to summoner mechanics, don't worry, Animate Guardian is definitely worth getting used to. I suggest:

Weapon 2H: Dying Breath - increases the effect of curses, and provides a damage aura
Chest: Ambu's charge - For life regen and endurance charges for the guardian. Any life rolled chest is fine too.
Boots: Victario's flight boots for movement speed aura
Helmet: Leer cast for damage buff
Gloves: Meginoords Vise for a bit of armour and life regen
Gloves: Southbound for a bit of life and cold damage

This thing should be sitting on high health with immense life regen, high resists and armour. Unsummon this for Shaper and Elder.

Alternate setup for AG: Giving more life regen to your party via consecrated ground:
Weapon: Singularity for extra slow enemies
Shield: Sentari's answer for occasional extra curse and to proc more consecrated ground
Chest: Zahndethus Cassock for consecrated ground on block
Helmet: Leer cast
Gloves: Meginoords Vise
Boots: Victarios flight

For DPS, I don't think anything can beat 2 X violent dead and the rest to dust jewels.

For strength, Use efficient training and brawn jewels

However, I think this build does enough damage without them, and for the reasons outlined in the defenses section, I lean toward utility jewels, rather than dps. Another consideration is that the drop rate of decent jewels has plummeted. As a result, there are a huge range of jewel mods that you can, and should consider.
Some of the one's I get most excited about are:
Minion Damage, Minion Additional physical damage, Minion Life, Minion speed, Life, Minion chance to taunt, Minion chance to blind, Minion chance to dodge, Minion chance to block, strength, resists, avoid ailments, minion life regen.

The gist is that boss killing speed is not really an issue with the build, so why not make things more pleasant by blinding more, taunting more, making the minions go faster, or live longer, using cheaper jewels, and buffing your own defences?

Soul of Solaris gives the best mix of defences
Soul of Lunaris is good also if you plan on hanging back and kiting projectiles

Soul of Garukhan is the best minor god, for a bit of move speed and evasion.

Gloves - 'of the grave' is best, but not worth too much effort
Boots - 'Life and mana regen after being hit' is my favourite, but any defensive option is good
Helmet - 'reduced purity of elements mana reservation' would be my favourite, i'd then add in an arctic armour in the desecrate slot. Good luck rolling something decent though, or even finding a baron to buy with any useful mod. Overall though, aim for any minion style enchant on the baron helm.

For spectres my favourite combo is 2 X carnage chieftan and 1 X host chieftan in the helmet. These spectres give your zombies and skellies the best stats via frenzy and power charges. With minion life and our defences, they should stay alive for days.

To raise these:
For Host chieftans (Power Charges), go to the Riverways in Act 6.
For Carnage Chieftans (Frenzy Charges), go to the Riverways in Act 2.

Raise one of each. Now go your hideout and open the highest level map you can. Enter the map and cast your high level desecrate. Raise the corpse you want with raise spectre, using the A key to help targeting. It may take many casts, but eventually you will get 2 carnage chieftans and one host chieftan.

If all this is too much trouble, the host chieftan does not add too much dps, so just raise the carnage chieftans and use your 3rd spectre for anything else you find.

Blood magic should be enough, but if you love charges, you could skip AG and go increased area of effect or increased duration for almost 100% uptime of charges on you and minions. The frenzy charges help minions go faster, do more damage, as well as increasing the duration of your phase run.

Other options:

* these would replace the 4 link setup in the helmet with situational support gems for a new source of damage and utility effects *

I have tried undying evangelist, but am already facetanking everything except nasty bosses, so didn't notice a difference to defence. Still, I think this build best suits defensive spectres, so I'd rate these second best option.

Kitava's heralds are wonderful meatshields and will apply bleed if you want to go that road. They also give good interactions for positioning/taunting/meatshielding/applying maim if they use their leapslam: They will get to mobs before even your fast zombies at times.

Sandworn slaves from the vastri desert are also great meatshields, move fast, and can apply blind/taunt easily if you have the right abyssal jewels. These are great for breach mobs I found.

You can also free up 2 jewel slots and some mana by using a curse spectre, but I have not tested this much. I tried a trapping/temp chains cursing option for a while, but since you are one shotting most mobs, this has no noticable effect.

I have also used undying ravagers for their bladefall spell. This does physical damage, so works well with your baron helmet and iron will. If you are aiming for 1000 strength, and don't value minion speed, try replacing the queen's escape with doon cuebyari for a 4 link aoe damage spectre that can apply mass maim in your off hand.

For critical spectres, you can try a soul wick jewel and keep raising what you can find in that level, or combine with unearth to raise skeletal bowmen. I have tried this, but not much because it adds a lot of button pushes..

Another good choice is merveil's blessed and/or frost heralds for applying mass chill, which I consider a wonderful defensive mechanic.

And finally, knitted horrors. They can't be desecrated, but are good tanks, apply puncture for decent single target damage, and are ranged for long range bleed/maim/blind/taunt.

I am a firm believer in leveling with the skills you want at the endgame. I found leveling with skellies quite pleasant, so will recommend the same to you, even though other options (like SRS) might be more efficient if you are in a rush.

Levelling targets
*help with crafting here:(https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Vendor_recipe_system)



Leveling Ascendencies


Leveling Item Options



Bandits

Kill all

Level 91 With 5 links and crappy gear
Capped resists
5.8K life
33% physical damage reduction
Enfeeble Curse Aura
900K life regen
11 x fast skeletons with 62K damage melee splash for clearing and 82K single target damage for bosses (about 900K shaper dps)
12 X fast zombies with lots of life regen, high resists, 18K life, 17K melee damage, and 42K low cooldown slams (about 500K shaper dps)

Level 93 With 6 link queens escape and better gear
Capped resists
7K life
33% physical damage reduction
Enfeeble Curse Aura
1000 Life regen
11 x fast skeletons with 92K damage melee splash for clearing and 125K single target damage for bosses (about 1.3 million shaper dps)
12 X fast zombies with lots of life regen, high resists, 18K life, 17K melee damage, and 42K low cooldown slams (about 500K shaper dps)
Aspect of the spider for slows and extra 15% total damage.
Estimated 2 million + shaper dps with all minions hitting the same target

The build is viable for all map mods and game content.

Very few button pushes required and lots of options for build costs, ranging from super cheap to moderately expensive.

While not a specialist lab farming build, it is excellent for farming uber lab. You can run to atziri without paying attention, set your skellies down and zoom in circles while they kill him. End chamber takes about 5-10 seconds.

The expensive version for the build would be a 6 link queens decree, and a 6 link chest, say about 8 exalt each. These are not necessary, but fun to work towards.

You can easily switch the focus from tankiness to damage output. Vulnerability for enfeeble, and to dust jewels can dramatically change your DPS without the need to change any items or gems.

Suitable for SSF and Hardcore: All your damage is dealt while you are not around and your defenses are well-rounded.

Options for playstyle range from aggressive to defensive.

The basic playstyle is really simple:
1 - walk forward
2 - see anything, press summon skeleton
3 - fear anything, press decoy totem then phase run. Mash flasks if you panic. Run away to think about why you were scared.
4 - realise you are nicely tanky, and your skellies killed whatever it was. Collect loot.

The facetanking playstyle:
1 - cast phase run and pop quicksilver flask, run right into mobs. Zombies join you real soon.
2 - standing in the midst of mobs, bosses and mean beasties, summon skellies, collect items, open chests.
3 - flask or decoy totem if health drops

The Hardcore playstyle:
1 - skellies ahead of you. If they move, there are monsters there, so follow up with more skellies and a decoy totem.
2 - move forward after the carnage

Party playstyle:

Since you are a damage dealer, tank, provide meatshields, taunty totems, and even a damage reduction curse, you are a great party member. I play party style as the lead. You run in, cast some skellies and a totem, and run on. Your friends get most of the loot (you're ahead by the time it drops), but map completion time is excellent.

Here is Apex of Sacrifice: https://youtu.be/DxZBDW7I_lk
Here is a T12 map run: https://youtu.be/D1642Rto4wQ
T14 map run (with 6 link Queen's escape and aspect of the spider): https://youtu.be/YbuY3t5w5VY
T15 sunken city map run https://youtu.be/auswUCKxqJs
Red Elder by : https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Binbiniqegabenik
https://youtu.be/EXEbjVjTYvA

Q: I can't get enough Dexterity for Phase run


Q: I see Decoy totem in the guide at some times, but not at others


Q: My zombies are dying


Q: My spectres are dying


Q: A lot of players are talking about getting 1000 strength. Do I need this?


Q: Why do we not take the big minion damage wheel near the templar?


Q: My 5 or six link gem colours are different to the guide. Do I really need to try to roll for colours?


Q: What about convocation?


Q: Can I use an offering skill?


Q: I'm underwhelmed with the damage, what's the deal?