What are the best items to put on Animate Guardian?

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Flat life on guardians wasteful?

Kinda is, his base is what, 8-10k? Another 300-400 life from gear isn't much of a difference, that's 5% more or soemthing, you'd get better gain from just Southbound than a full set of rares with high life rolls.

Are you sure that's his "base"? I was under the impression that the 8k as listed for level 20 on poedb was his "total life when summoned from a level 20 gem with no additional modifiers"? And if so, the 8k already takes the 76% increased life at level 20 into account....

Based on historical patch notes and the values for base life we were given a couple years ago, I'm not sure how people determined it had 8k base life before the 76% increased modifier (which, I must state again, will apply to the life modifiers on gear regardless of whether the monster has 5k or 8k base life).

Edit: right, minions generally get tooltip life amounts, just not tooltip damage amounts? So what does the tooltip life say for an animate guardian at level 20? divide that by 1.76 to get its base life....

If these things were stealth-patched without my knowledge then I am interested. But I was only aware of the 2.0 50% health buff.

And like, really, the most important thing to remember here is that summoners, that actually use animate guardian for an animated guardian to buff their zombies and stuff, will have minion life passives. Those minion life passives will apply to all flat life bonuses you give your guardian but will only stack additively with other life bonuses. Two minion life passives are equivalent to a Southbound. Four are equivalent to a belly of the beast. But if you have +224% minion life from passives as a zombie-based necromancer and are using an animate guardian, kaom's heart (non-legacy) will give 2000 life. (from +300% total increased life). Even if I'm totally wrong about the base life that's still much more than a Southbound and almost as much as a Belly.

(of course, if I _am_ wrong about the base life, that means Belly is still better if you're going for pure animate guardian indestructibility. But if I'm right and the base life at level 20 is 4620, then kaom's is amazing for dedicated necromancers).

Yeah, I'm sure. I remember minion life gem giving him some 5k extra life in a +2 helm on one of my summoners. That would mean his base is around 10k.

Then I wonder which patches gave this stealth buff to animate guardian since rory originally made this spreadsheet

I think it was the a4 release, he got a big life buff to keep up with golems.

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raics wrote:

I think it was the a4 release, he got a big life buff to keep up with golems.

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Animate_Guardian

But act 4 was 2.0.... Those are the only patch notes that _weren't_ stealth.

I'm pretty sure Rory originally made the spreadsheet around 1.0? And maaaaybe updated it around 1.15? So if you think 2.0 was the last animated guardian buff, which was only a 50% survivability buff, there must've been an additional buff in between 1.0 and 2.0....

Makes sense, I've been using the skill a lot since the introduction, and I remember it was utter crap at first. Then it was usable for a time until they made it real tanky in 2.0. Unfortunately, can't remember when exactly did it go from crap to decent and the spreadsheet would suggest there was another buffing step somewhere.

If I really had to guess I'd put my finger on forsaken masters expansion.

Thanks for the tips everyone.