Lyends Anime Wep League Starter! - [20M+ Shaper DPS][5K Hp][10M+ For 100C][Tanky Boi]

➤ Cheap starter & somewhat SSF friendly
➤ Easy boss kills - Let your weapon army do the work!
➤ Tanky boi! - 5.2k Hp 77% Phys Res 78% Max Res
➤ Low APM! (I have BAD wrists) 3 Buttons - Convocation, Phase Run & Animate Wep
➤ Slow clear w/ no Melee Splash
➤ Have to resummon weps every 90 sec
➤ Not a 1k+ Delve build

Path of Building is a wonderful tool created to simulate PoE in a controlled environment. It allows us to simulate what a characters stats look like under different gear/passives/gems ect. I HIGHLY recommend anyone who is getting into PoE to atleast check it out!

You can find the link to download it here: Link!

I recommend getting the fork as it has more accurate calculations that this build uses, your results may vary without the fork but it works too!

(Updated 3/14)
As for the build itself here it is! - https://pastebin.com/VnLR5hRd

Inside you can find:

➤ A post story (Lvl 70+) endgame cold gem setup
➤ A story (Lvl 1-70) impale gem setup
➤ 4 Sets of gear!
• 2 Sets for Animate guardian for a cheap price point and a unkillable expensive price point
• 2 Sets of your own gear! A low budget variant and a high budget variant!

If you skip reading the rest of the guide and jump straight into the build with a PoB link don't blame me for any issues. I encourage you read the guide if you experience any difficulties!

Here we will cover all of the interactions / mechanics of this build!

Animate Weapon Generation

First off we must ask a question, what is an anime weapon exactly? Its a figment of our imagination based on what we cling on to the most and desir...

Anime Weapons are pets that can be summoned from a Dropped Weapon or a Blade from the Bladefall skill. The pet inherits all of the weapons stats for the duration (or gains stats equal to about a Glass Shank for Bladefall) then the weapon is DESTROYED when the pet either dies or times out.

Due to weapon drops being infrequent & not available on bosses we opt to use Bladefall to generate our weapons. In 3.10, Bladefall now creates inert blades that can be used for the purpose of animation. What that means is all we have to do is cast Bladefall at any time and BOOM we have ourselves animatable weapons!

In the beginning you will have to manually cast Bladefall & Animate Weapon but as you get towards Midgame you can enchant a wand with "Triggers a Socketed Spell when you Use a Skill" and put Bladefall inside. This will cause you to auto Bladefall when you cast other skills and should provide a consistent stream of new weapons.

You can also opt-in to linking Unleash Support to your Animate Weapon as a 6th link which will cause your skill to collect charges. These charges can all be consumed at once to trigger the spell once per charge. With this you can do 4 casts of Animate Weapon at once greatly increasing the Quality of Life but reducing your damage drastically.

Lategame the helmet enchant "24% chance to create an additional Animate Weapon copy" can be obtained to aid in weapon generation at no loss!

Cold Damage

Once you reach Maps and buy a Triad Grip with 4 Green sockets (or earlier if budget permits) you can swap to a full cold build. This allows you to benefit from the amazing properties of Cold damage!

Chill/Freeze/Shatter

Once you have swapped to cold damage you can access Chill, Freeze, and Shatter!

Chill - Chill is a debuff that reduces the Animation Speed of an enemy.

This means that they:
• Attack slower
• Move slower
• Cast slower

Convenient right? Chill gives us inherit built in survivability by making everything around us slower. It is applied by the Chill aura around Skitterbots & through Cold damage further amplified by Hypothermia linked to Animate Weapon.

Freeze - Freeze is another debuff that COMPLETELY stops a mob from doing something (even bosses if you hit hard enough!) based on how much damage the hit that applied it did. This is another lovely defence mechanic that has another underlying benefit - Shatter!

Shatter - Shatter has to be the single best mechanic in the game (ask any cold build player!) Those pesky porcupines that explode on death? No spikes if they got shattered! Other annoying death mechanics? They don't trigger if a mob was shattered!

Shatter refers to a mob dying while it is frozen (if a hit 1 shots a mob but it would have applied a freeze it counts!) This is super handy in a lot of situations and can really be underappreciated.

Summon Skitterbots

Skitterbots are 2 friendly robots that help us on our journey to find Anime Babes.. I mean kill things! One Skitterbot is the Freezy one and the other is the Shocky one. Normally this is a miner skill that helps them detonate and rearm mines faster. We don't care for that and are using the other built in feature that they have, free auras!

The Freezy One - The freezing Skitterbot walks around and emits a chill aura passively protecting us!

The Shocky One - The shocking Skitterbot does a similar job emitting a shocking aura which gives us 20% extra dmg against anything he's near!

On top of this we link Skitterbots with Bonechill causing anythinG the Skitterbots chill to take extra Cold damage from our attacks. This just means for a little bit of extra mana cost we get more free dmg! Yay!

Raise Spectre

Spectres are ghosts of monsters that we captured to aid us! They inherit the abilities of the monster we captured, giving us some REALLY OP buffs.

For our build we use:
• 1 Carnage Chieftain (Free Frenzy Charges)
• 1 Host Chieftain (Free Power Charges)
• 2 Undying Evangelists (Free Proximity Shields)
OR
• 2 Frost Sentinels (Amazing AoE Clear)

There's LOTS of Spectres and with this patch adding in 350 new ones there's a lot of variety! You can make a build just around DPS oriented Spectres but for our build we are mostly interested in utility ones!

If you would like more info on where to get said Spectres & some alternatives visit the Spectre section below!

Animate Guardian

Anime Guardian is the protector of the babes... I mean the maine man himself, the ultimate buff bot, the tankiest of chads. This man can take so many lasers to the face without flinching once, he's OP!

Animate Guardian is a spell thats innate and doesn't do anything on its own. You can give him gear in the Head, Chest, Glove, Boot, & Weapon slots. This gear is PERMANENTLY DESTROYED when he equips it meaning you CANNOT get it back. Worst yet if he somehow dies its also PERMANENTLY LOST and you would have to give him new ones. Because of this we usually outfit him with lots of tank stats so he never dies.

WARNING: NOTHING can make an Animated Guardian tanky enough to go past 1-1.5k depth in Delve. I recommend if you want to go deeper, make a second delve build or unsummon the Guardian while delving.

With all of that said you might ask yourself, why do we even use him???? Well, we can end up making him super tanky while equipping him with gear that provides bonuses to all allies around him. This can turn him into a super aura bot well worth the investment and risk!

If you would like more info on gearing up your Animated Guardian visit the Animated Guardian section below!

If you made it this far, I love you <3. Gear and their effects is covered in their own section further down!

Leveling 1 - 70

This build incorporates some respecs around ~level 50, I would advise checking to make sure your tree is accurate if you want to follow this guide exactly.

You can choose to level with your favorite tactic but this is what I will be doing this season.

Damage:
Summon Raging Spirit - Infernal Legion - Minion Speed - Minion Damage OR
Summon Skelleton - Minion Speed - Minion Damage - Feeding Frenzy

Id recommend using either SRS or Summon Skelly until you unlock Multistrike in Act 4 as Animate Weapon is weak until then.

Animate Weapon - Melee Splash - Multistrike - Impale

Summon Carrion Golem - Feeding Frenzy

Auras:
War Banner

Pride

Flesh and Stone - Maim

Weapon Generation:
Blade Fall - Spell Cascade

Utility:
Animate Guardian - Raise Spectre - Blood Magic - Elemental Army
Guardian socketed to gain xp & Carnage + Host Chieftain

Phase Run

Vaal Haste (Try to do Vaal side areas or buy normal Haste(s) and corrupt them with a Vaal Orb.

Flesh Offering

Convocation

Movement:
Frostblink then swap to
Flame Dash / Dash

Flasks:
Life Flask
Life Flask
Granite Flask
Quicksilver Flask
Quicksilver Flask or Mana Flask if you have mana issues


Bandits:
Kill Kraityn - Kill Oak - Kill Alira

Ascendency:
Mistress of Sacrifice
Mindless Aggression
Unnatural Strength
Commander of Darkness

Level 10 Passives
Level 20 Passives
Level 30 Passives
Level 40 Passives
Level 50 Passives
Level 60 Passives
Level 70 Passives
Level 80 Passives
Level 90 Passives

Passives

Level 90 Tree

This is the level 90 tree, the last few points can be spent as you'd wish or can be put into Cluster Jewels.

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Ascendancy

Mistress of Sacrifice: Mistress of Sacrifice gives us a huge bump in duration which makes it so we don't have to summon our weapons as often! It also allows Flesh Offering to affect us giving us a big movement speed buff, handy for finishing the story faster. Get this first if you feel like you have enough damage.

Mindless Aggression: Mindless Aggression gives us a good chunk of extra damage and some minion movement speed making leveling a bit faster. Get this second or first if you need more damage over Mistress of Sacrifice.

Unnatural Strength: Minion gems scale REALLY well off of extra levels and the +2 extra from this grants us a massive spike in damage. Get this third or second if you want more damage over Mistress of Sacrifice.

Commander of Darkness: Commander of Darkness gives us a bit of resistances which aren't needed until Maps and a bit of extra damage for each aura we have. Nothing to glamorous and it can be taken last.

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Pantheon:

(Major) Soul of Lunaris: Soul of Lunaris gives a nice bit of extra defence if we are close to logs of mobs. On top of this it gives us chain damage immunity which is important as a minion build. You wouldn't want an arrow to hit your pets then bounce to you right?

(Minor) Soul of Abberath: Personally my favorite one, fire patch immunity + some movement speed while on them. Very good for Delving.

(Minor) Soul of Shakari: Another good choice as it offers poison immunity and some chaos damage reduction.

(Minor) Soul of Garukhan: More movement speed if you haven't been hit recently. Not always up but nice to have if you only want to go super fast.

Get any support gem in its Awakened variant where available!

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Animate Weapon

Animate Weapon - Added Cold Damage - Hypothermia - Multistrike - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Minion Damage

This is our main 6 link setup and where all of the damage in the build comes from!

Animate Weapon: The bread and butter of the build. Scales beautifully on any added damage we feed it and smacks everything as hard as it can! Try to get a Level 21 version of it as fast as you can.

Added Cold Damage: Animate Weapon scales AMAZINGLY well off of any added damage as 1.) They attack very quickly and 2.) Theres 14 swords. These 2 together make it a very potent damage multiplier.

Hypothermia: This makes our Animated Weapons able to Chill and Freeze enemies giving us another defensive layer. It also greatly increases their dmg against anything chilled.

Multistrike: Makes all of their auto attacks happen 3 times, each time doing more damage. If there's multiple enemies in range it will pick a random target every time adding to AoE or strike the same target 3 times if there's nothing else.

Elemental Damage with Attacks: Just a simple damage amplifier.

Minion Damage: Another simple damage amplifier.

Alternatives:

There are 2 alternatives to Minion Damage.

Unleash: Unleash makes Animate Weapon build up charges. When you use the skill it will use up all charges but cast that skill once per charge used. This allows us to spawn multiple copies at once adding to Quality of Life. The downside is we do lose a decent amount of damage doing so. Use this if you have enough damage to clear maps easily!

Minion Speed: Minion Speed does slightly less damage then Minion Damage but adds a large amount of movement speed to your Animated Weapons. This is useful for clearing anything and recommended to use for everything but bosses.

There is 1 alternative to Elemental Damage with Attacks.

Melee Splash: Melee Splash adds a large amount of AoE to each of your weapons swings which on top of Multistrike adds for a significant amount of clear speed. I'd recommend using this and swapping to Elemental Damage with Attacks for bosses if you need more damage.

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Auras

Hatred - Generosity AND Summon Skitterbots - Bonechill

Hatred: Hatred adds a large amount of cold damage to Animated Weapon's attacks making it a very very good damage increase.

Generosity: This makes hatred not affect you and makes the effect on your pets significantly stronger. This is IMPORTANT as you will be using Bladefall procs with a bit of added fire or lightning damage to attacks to cause it to trigger either fire or lightning Elemental Equilibrium shredding 50% of an enemies cold resistance. If we benefited from Hatred it would also deal cold damage which would instead increase a mob's cold resistance.

Summon Skitterbots: Skitterbots add in some additional defence through the chill aura slowing everything down and damage through the shocking aura giving a nice damage amplifier to Animate Weapon.

Bonechill: Bonechill is a support that causes any chills from supported spells to also cause the enemy to take more damage. When linked to Skitterbots not only does the shocking aura increase damage but now the chilling aura does too.

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Additional Support Summons (These should be put into your helmet)

Animate Guardian - Raise Spectre - Blood Magic - Elemental Army

Animate Guardian: The tanky boi aura bot! If you want an in-depth explanation of him check out the Animated Guardian sections in: Build Mechanics & Gear: Animated Guardian.

Raise Spectre: The dream team, they always got your back, the best supports NA! If you want an in-depth explanation of them check out the Raise Spectre sections in: Build Mechanics & Gear: Raise Spectres.

Blood Magic - It is here to make your Spectres spam cast their abilities without them going OOM.

Elemental Army - Since Hatred is giving all of our pets extra cold damage, Elemental Army is causing them to inflict Cold Exposure onto any enemies they hit reducing their resistance by 10%. It also increases their Maximum Resistances making your Animated Guardian even tankier!

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Trigger Spells (These should be put into your wand)

Flesh Offering, Desecrate, Bladefall

Flesh Offering: Flesh Offering is a massive buff to both damage and movement speed for your pets. Due to Mistress of Sacrifice you benefit from 75% of the buff too! This goes into a wand with the crafted modifier "Triggers a Socketed Spell when you Use a Skill" and will automatically be cast as you use other spells!

Desecrate: Desecrate is there to generate corpses for Flesh Offering to consume. This is here as a way to trigger Flesh Offering while fighting a boss.

Bladefall: Bladefall is here to create weapons for you to animate. When triggered Bladefall creates 50% less blades.

What I recommend with Bladefall is a playstyle that goes as such:

1.) If you are using Unleash, then cast Animate Weapon once every time Bladefall triggeres. This should make it so you always have maximum weapons out / rotate old ones.

2.) If you do not have Unleash, then cast Animated Weapon 2-3 times every time Bladefall is triggered. Your weapons last for 100+ seconds and casting new ones on every trigger will refresh old ones and ensure you have a consistent supply of new weapons.

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Misc Skills

The following 4 should go in your gloves as they need to be 4 Green and this is the best use for those sockets.

Phase Run, Precision, Vaal Haste, Portal

Phase Run: Phase Run gives us a bit of movement speed and lets us pass through enemies as long as we don't do anything else during its effect. The second we use another skill the movement speed and phasing goes away. This can be used as a nice extra bit of mobility and can be spammed on cooldown.

Precision: Precision is an aura that gives us extra dps through Commander of Darkness and a tiny bit through the accuracy it provides to our weapons. This should be kept at level 1.

Vaal Haste: Vaal Haste is here for another burst of movement speed every once in a while. We don't have enough mana left over to use the aura Haste and thus we opt to use the buff provided by Vaal Haste instead.

Portal: This adds Portal as a skill and works exactly like Portal Scrolls. I highly prefer running this in all of my builds but you can choose to not use it if you prefer using scrolls.


The following should go wherever there is extra space. You will need an Unset Ring to for everything.

Summon Carrion Golem - Feeding Frenzy, Flame Dash, Convocation

Summon Carrion Golem: Carrion Golem provides a HUGE damage increase to the rest of our pets and is an essential part of our damage. He should be tanky enough to live on his own but might sometimes needs to be resummoned.

Feeding Frenzy: Feeding Frenzy is here to make Carrion Golem aggressive and actively pursue enemies and to proc the buff Feeding Frenzy. This buff gives ALL of our pets more movement speed and attack speed making it another very useful buff.

Flame Dash: Flame Dash is my preferred movement skill of choice but if you like another one feel free to use whatever you like!

Convocation: Convocation allows us to resummon all of our pets to us at an instant on a very low cooldown. It also applies a 1.75% of max HP regen on them taking care of healing most damage they take. It is very useful for making your pets focus on a target you want them to by going near it and using the skill.

Flasks are pretty straight forward, we want a mix of utility and defencive flasks that compliment our defencive layers.

Rumi's Concoction

Rumi's Concoction is a super nice and somewhat cheap flask that provides bucket loads of armour as well as some block chance while active. Helps us stay alive against physical damage.

Basalt Flask

A basalt flask is another nice compliment to our physical damage reduction. The "15% additional Physical Damage Reduction" stacks on top of all of our armour making us ignore another nice chunk of hits.

Quartz Flask

A quartz flask gives us another defencive layer with a chance to dodge anything that is thrown at us. It also provides phasing making it very convenient to run through mobs while clearing quickly.

Health Flask

For a health flask you have 2 options:

1.) A normal divine life flask this has the benefit of being able to put another suffix on it which can add more utility.

2.) Blood of the Karui gives alot of regen and a full heal at the end of the effect. I prefer this one as you can very easily spam it and heal multiple health bars in times a high damage intake.

Quicksilver Flask

Self explanatory, a quicksilver flask allows us to go zoom, zoom and is a staple in every build!

3.10 Has added 350 new spectres and if any of them stand out to me I will add them here!

Spectres can have a wide variety of use cases in loads of summoner builds. Here we will discuss what Spectres are good for this build.

With our Raise Spectre skill we can get a total of 4 Spectres. This is achieved by having a Level 21 gem raised to Level 25 giving us a third spectre. The fourth comes from the Death Attunement anoint.

Mandatory:

Carnage Chieftain: These can be found in Act 2 - The Old Fields. Carnage Chieftains have an ability called Mass Frenzy that gives all nearby allies frenzy charges. With the addition of Blood Magic to them they can spam this giving you and all of the Animate Weapons free infinite charges.

Host Chieftain: These can be found in Act 7 - The Ashen Fields. Host Chieftains are identical to Carnage Chieftains except they do Mass Power. This ability gives power charges instead of frenzy charges to everything.

Optional:

There are 2 main options for the last remaining Spectre slot(s).

DPS - Frost Sentinel: These can be found in Act 8 - The Lunaris Temple. Sentinels are really nice for AoE clearing as they have a very long range AoE Cold projectile. On their own late game they could easily clear maps if you choose to pick 3-4 of these and drop chieftains.

Defence - Undying Evangelist: These can be found in Act 3 - The Sceptre of God. Evangelists have the ability to put a temporary Proximity Shield around them stopping any damage from outside the bubble. Having 1 or 2 of these around can protect you and your army!

Here we will talk about how to gear up your Animated Guardian.

First, to give him gear you must drop it on the ground and use the spell while your cursor is over the item. You will then see it appear on your Animated Guardian.

You can give him gear in the Head, Chest, Glove, Boot, & Weapon slots. This gear is PERMANENTLY DESTROYED when he equips it meaning you CANNOT get it back. Worst yet if he somehow dies its also PERMANENTLY LOST and you would have to give him new ones. Because of this we usually outfit him with lots of tank stats so he never dies.

WARNING: NOTHING can make an Animated Guardian tanky enough to go past 1-1.5k depth in Delve. I recommend if you want to go deeper, make a second delve build or unsummon the Guardian while delving.

With that being said, let's talk about how to make him an unkillable aurabot!

We have 2 options for setups and I recommend you have at least one FULL set of what I will list here, you can upgrade them later by dropping the new items and using the skill. You will not get your old items back though.

3/13 - Finished Animate Guardian, Raise Spectre & Gems section.
3/15 - Added flasks.