Plaguemancer || Beacon of Corruption Degen || EZ Red Maps || Golems?!?!

Shouldn't have any damage problems on a 5L. I was farming reds and atziri on a 5L.

I can let you know my stats next time I am on.

Yeah honestly for clearing maps I would run Spectre - Minion Damage - Void Manipulation - Increased AOE - Rapid Decay - Item Rarity. The concentrated effect is emphatically not necessary for the vast majority of bossfights and almost all of map clearing - where tough rares can often be controlled and withered by just your totem. Watching other builds clear guardians the damage isn't lacking - they're just REALLY tough, and I'm having difficulty maintaining my sustain in the 10 minute fight. No necro relishes the thought of being locked in a room that long with a boss, and right now my zombies fall short on value per corpse - I can keep resummoning but I'm literally running out of corpses the boss clears so fast.

Take the Hydra fight - on most mods it feels like concentrated effect would hurt more than help because the extra aoe helps you spread clouds to actually hurt her while she runs around willy nilly. Conc works way better against stable fights where zombies can actually help lock down the boss (look at the crema video, and with effort this is possible vs chim and mino for a decent amount of time).

Earlier I considered posting my tree. For the record my minions are 313/83, this is what I've settled on at 90 (I use a deafening rage on belt for the +STR)



I'm actually curious how well Kartik's Life build is faring against the guardians and the shaper. If he's still having difficulty getting 16s to drop on ESC I could lend him some.

I'll try rapid decay. Could you post your gear?

And yeah, I agree on conc. On a lot of more difficult bosses, they move around too much and inc is a lot better

Sure: I posted my early gear a bit further in the thread but I can post it again.



One comment I can make about the gear you posted that you can find open prefix gloves for CI (since you only *really* need just one T1 % or flat roll to make good ES on glove) and craft 15% damage from catarina. I also prefer the minion damage corruption over the +1 curse, mostly for budget and to lower my reliance on curses (with the current hexproof breaker being a life chest it's somewhat annoying rerolling hexproofs on SC). In HC YMMV and you're much less likely to drop your chains/enfeeble to save a chaos.

Be aware that I also dropped Soul Weaver to run commander of darkness. This is a non trivial damage for QoL change to scare up the extra cast speed (3 aura CoD is 15% faster cast) to make dropping echo feel better (because kartik is absolutely right about wanting it if you are not stacking tons of cast speed). As we've discussed, this is definitely a "how do you want to play this" choice and there are merits to both ascendancies.

Yeah I completely forgot about the minion craft. I'm having resist troubles right now because I need to recraft my chest/belt eventually. I'm tempted to go commander of darkness for being ele weak capped with ease and the additional cast speed, but self-bone offering is so tempting :(

Do your zombies actually last through boss fights, or do you find them dying early on? I know mine don't exactly have the most support...

my zombies last through most boss fights.. usually the ones they don't last through have some pretty crazy mods buffing the bosses up to crazy status.

Some people have mentioned Desecrate cooldown being a limitation. If you can manage to fit the links...somehow...you can use Desecrate - Trap - Cluster Traps/Multiple Traps to get a lot of corpses out for one Desecrate charge

Ya it can be limiting sometimes but it's not as bad as you would think. Its best to use enemy corpses to your advantage and especially if you can target the larger hp corpses. (bigger is generally better).

Sometimes though mobs are just spread out like jerks and desecrate runs out of stacks. It isn't bad enough to warrant any extra links though I feel.

This build idea is pretty nice. Doing one by myself right now because the concept is so interesting.

Since it was stated that passive tree AoE-Nodes (increased AoE & damage) won't work on the minion cloud I'm assuming that it's the same case with degen & chaos nodes aswell? It is pretty obvious but the chaos damage increase in the beacon of corruption node is kinda misleading.

EDIT: Also what about witch fire brew's DoT increase (probably not)?

Another question that I have: When you put the spectre setup in a staff and swap weapons the cloud will appear. That's for sure. But will it still benefit from all the support gems (it seems so I would say)?

It scales just like a spectre build would. Support gems and minion modifiers are the only thing that affect it.