I dont know if i'm just blind or something, but i can't seem to see ascendancy setup anywhere?
I think I include all the ascendancy points you have for each leveling skill tree but I would do mistress of sacrifice -> commander of darkness -> spirit eater and remaining 2 points as you see fit
As a long-time summoner fan I've decided to start the next league with a Zombie build because of the newly added changes that affect Zombies (biggest change is their range improvement which will improve their AI, ergo clearspeed, significantly).
If Zombies aren't your thing but you still like summons, I recommend my previous 2.5 build thread for all things Golems, which includes discussion and suggestions for league starters as well (I started breach league with a golemancer and it worked well!)
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Now, onto the main show. Raise Zombie has traditionally mostly been used as a meatshield because they lack the clearspeed and honestly the AI to kill things effectively.
There are three variations when it comes to defense that are feasible; Lowlife (most expensive but usually very strong due to natural synergy with Necromancer ascendancy Commander of Darkness), Chaos Innoculation (highest effective health but less auras / blasphemy curses) or Life. With the ES variants you need to invest into anti stun and probably anti freeze or you'll have a bad time. With the life variant you can also use mind over matter and eldritch battery to reserve most, if not all, your mana while keeping ES as a secondary defense.
Skill tree
Spoiler
In Legacy league I am playing the life variant due to the new Zombie helmet. I am stacking strength and am aiming to get a total of 7 big Zombies, currently I have 6.
The enlighten is not required but it can allow you to recast Zombies without turning of an aura. With the following links:
Raise Zombie
Minion Damage
Inc AoE/Conc Effect
Empower
Melee Physical
Poison
Zombie costs 167 mana per cast
More testing on supper gems will be required but having up to 200 mana unreserved would do very good for recastability.
Why those auras? Discipline is just more health for you, a nobrainer. Haste helps them reach their targets faster and gives you a quality of life increase as well. The biggest threat to Zombies has always been high degen damage and the more they can regen each second the better, that's why we use vitality as our third aura. This also works well in conjunction with all the regen we will get for Zealot's Oath.
Zombies will do enough damage with the flasks and the Umbilicus belt.
Since we'll use a lot more auras we'll be more starved for gem sockets, so we will have to make due with some compromising optimisations.
The two blasphemy curses will be Temporal Chains and either Enfeeble or Vulnerability, depending on if you want more damage or more survivability. Dealer's choice.
It's also possible to remove the blasphemy and use a Curse on Hit setup instead. This allows us to run one more big aura which would in this case be Hatred.
Aura reservations:
No nodes, we use haste + vitality or purity of elements, depending on resists. Going to try to get a level 1 clarity as well for extra aura bonus from Necromancer ascendancy.
Current Gear: (lvl 91+ legacy league)
Spoiler
Jewels:
2x Violent dead - 1 between witch and shadow, 1 at scion start
2x efficient training - 1 at top of witch, 1 between witch and templar.
3+ brawn - all other jewel slots
Gear choices
Lowlife version
Spoiler
The idea behind lowlife is to scale your and your minions (this includes partymembers) damage via auras. The more auras you have, the better due to the necromancer node Commander of Darkness
The following items will be suggested for a lowlife build:
For your helmet / glove slots I would suggest something with high energy shield and stacks you lack such as dexterity, strength, resists. If possible you can craft minion damage on gloves
CI version
Spoiler
Similar to lowlife however the big difference being where you give up auras you gain a load of more energy shield
The rest should be similar. You also have the option of using a fairly cheap but great chest called Skin of the Loyal. This allows you to scale minion levels to great ends with Empower and still being a decent ES chest, as long as your other energy shield sources are decent
Life version
Spoiler
This build looks way different altogether. You won't have as many auras as the lowlife version but you'll have the greatest number of Zombies among all the builds due to the new strength scaling. Due to strength being so high (I am aiming 1500+) there's no point not utilising life. It is possible to go hybrid and use shaper's touch gloves and geofri's sanctuary chest;
but I am not sure yet that's the route I want to take. Mainly because while they scale with strength, they don't provide any. Chest piece is also a great place to get +1 zombie enchant.
Some of the uniques are mandatory:
While the rest are pretty good and in some cases hard to replace;
For my current gear look at the life section, I will keep it updated
Gem links
Spoiler
Chest:
Order of importance: (Note, before you have a 5 or 6 link you might as well run Zombies in your helmet as a 4 link, since the +2 gem levels helps immensely, especially while leveling)
Chest:
Raise Zombie - Minion Damage- Melee Physical Damage
4th link: Before mon'tregul Melee Splash, after Mon'tregul poison
5th link: Here's the tricky part as more testing is still needed. There are several candidates; Faster Attacks, Multistrike, Increased Area of Effect/Concentrated effect, Minion Speed, Added Fire
6th link: Empower level 3 or greater, ideally 4.
Currently my links are Raise Zombie, Minion Damage, Melee Physical Damage, Poison, Empower, Increased Area of Effect (Concentrated effect for bosses)
2 link spectres:
Raise Spectre - Blood Magic. We use Carnage Chieftains found in "The Old Fields" in act 2 and they are just there to constantly buff Frenzy to us and our Zombies. Previously the build used Evangelists and Slashed Miscreations but their damage falls of lategame
I like vaal summon skeletons due to the added safety while in a breach for example. I use them all the time while mapping and recommend anyone to give them a shot, a great fire and forget skill.
4 link auras:
Haste, Purity of Elements, Vitality. Later on when I can afford a level 4 enlighten I will most likely run hatred + haste instead, for now it's not really needed. Note that I switch between purity and vitality pretty frequently, as the build cannot run all three at the same time.
4 link Curse on hit - ball lightning - temporal chains - vulnerability.
Then I have a misc 3 sock with flame dash and summon stone golem and somewhere in the mix, desecrate.
I plan on getting good unset rings with +3 gems, which will probably be used for skills such as summon stone golem
We need to decide on offerings to use. Flesh Offering or Spirit Offering are more offensive, while Bone Offering is defensive. I usually run with Flesh but since Zombies deal physical damage, Spirit offering is an alright choice for them. It's extra good if you run lowlife as you'll heal yourself every time you use it as well.
There's some other abilities we always use which include Convocation, Desecrate - general summoner quality of life. If possible to fit in a cast when damage taken / immortal call is helpful.
If you play ES and have a decent amount of aura effectiveness I recommend running vaal haste/disc with increased duration as well.
Strategy - leveling, lategame, playtips
Spoiler
Leveling:
Spoiler
When you're starting you'll want to be life based. As soon as you can afford it, I recommend getting the helmet "The Baron" which can be used from level 26 and put in your zombie there. If you want to level with summon raging spirits, you can add those there instead as the gem levels help a ton.
First 25 or so levels, your tree should look like this
Around level 50 your Zombies will be strong enough to clear things fairly quickly, so you can drop your damage spells (I used firestorm) if you no longer want to use it. Remember to get a ball lightning curse on hit setup going so you can keep directing them.
At this point your tree should look something like this:
Once you have access to the violent dead jewels, make sure you slot one at the scion start with life reg nodes and one between witch and shadow. The jewels does not need to have 40 int allocated in radius, there just needs to be 40 int in radius. These slots work.
The other two jewel slots should be used with the jewel "Efficient training" which adds flat strength and converts intelligence to strength.
All future jewel slots should be the "Brawn" jewel which adds up to 6% increased strength while reducing intelligence (which we will have too much of any way)
Once you reach this spot just decide upon what type of build you want to go for but my recommendation at this time is the life and strength based version
Lategame:
Spoiler
Working on it! Up to tier 8 yet so can't comment on actual hard content yet
What's most important late-game though is to optimise. Get your gems to level 20 (Zombie to 21 ideally), try to get an empower gem, an enlighten gem for auras etc. Raise zombie is a spell after all and spells scale really well with gem levels, so make sure you get it to 20 as soon as you can, ideally it can be worth buying a high level one as it makes life way easier.
Playtips:
Spoiler
Your minions will go where you direct them via other skills. Every summoner who has tried to raise spectres with desecrate knows the Zombie horde will rush to where you desecrate. This is true for all skills, and it's our best way to direct the minions towards where we want them to attack.
Convocation should be used often, both aggressively and defensively. Since this build utilised melee focused minions, and minion AI is dumb as dirt, prepare to be on the frontline a lot. Charge ahead and convocate to make zombies start appear and whacking things. Due to the nature of convocation and the long cooldown, if you can get the cooldown reduction enchant on your helmet it's going be super good.
Positioning overall is key as a summoner. You need to stand in such a way that your minions are attacking and you can avoid mechanics. Atziri is a great place to practise (you'll die a lot if you don't know how to do the fight). If you run around too much and too far, your minions will come to "defend" you, so you need to balance running with making sure they're attacking what they are suppose to.
Note: This is not possible without a greatwolf talisman with +2 Zombies. I happen to have a one of a kind in Standard that was used to make this video:
Maybe I am blind, but could you say me your ES pool for your low life Shavronne's style build? The max I reach is 6,7k and feels pretty squishy and I would be interested how you link your gems effectively for low life? And how much strength you reach?
Last edited by Ondrugs on May 20, 2017, 11:07:32 PM
If I were to go lowlife I would not try to stack strengt at all and would just go for highest ES pieces I could find. Less zombies but no unnecessary strength stacking either.
You could try using Shaper's Touch with lowlife if you have enough strength though, they should give pretty good ES
I came back after a long iatus (so long my char name was stolen), tried to find a more recent build for my summoner, and this is exatctly how i love to play her, zombies as main spell (ever since Cast on Death snapshot madness, and a pity i didnt get to see this before i didnt use my free respec.
Few questions:
I didn't even knew of the baron helmet, do you or anybody know its price on standard? I must try!
I remenber reaching 300+ strength on my witch. How much do you have/think is enough for the helmet to actually matter, if you are not planing on getting the 1000+ bonus?
About montregul, i've tested before and back then, having the full zombie nr, provided the most dps (i have no idea how faithfull the calculations made before are at the present day, the baron wasn't even a thing, and my motegruls was still 2000 hp version).
i have a 5 link vismortis 2b2r2g, as i play hybrid life/es, with so much strenght (considering a 1000+ str build) will it be better to go pure life, and drop the chest minion modifiers?
I am still not sure about the 1000 str route, i like runing my 4 auras (2 of wich on life)+ artic armour, but ill drop the alphas for the baron. so im not sure how i'll change my aura nodes.
Hear this words but once and they will echo in your nightmares forever!
Last edited by Nyktasha on May 28, 2017, 9:11:07 AM
I came back after a long iatus (so long my char name was stolen), tried to find a more recent build for my summoner, and this is exatctly how i love to play her, zombies as main spell (ever since Cast on Death snapshot madness, and a pity i didnt get to see this before i didnt use my free respec.
Few questions:
I didn't even knew of the baron helmet, do you or anybody know its price on standard? I must try!
I remenber reaching 300+ strength on my witch. How much do you have/think is enough for the helmet to actually matter, if you are not planing on getting the 1000+ bonus?
About montregul, i've tested before and back then, having the full zombie nr, provided the most dps (i have no idea how faithfull the calculations made before are at the present day, the baron wasn't even a thing, and my motegruls was still 2000 hp version).
i have a 5 link vismortis 2b2r2g, as i play hybrid life/es, with so much strenght (considering a 1000+ str build) will it be better to go pure life, and drop the chest minion modifiers?
I am still not sure about the 1000 str route, i like runing my 4 auras (2 of wich on life)+ artic armour, but ill drop the alphas for the baron. so im not sure how i'll change my aura nodes.
go to poe.trade, pick your league and search for the baron. You should find one for less than 1 chaos.
If you go Zombies I definitely recommend 1000+ strength, it's a lot of fun!
I have few questions considering Necro build in upcoming 3.0 beta.
1) What your thoughts about playing as scion ascendant using Necro + Guardian, also thoughts about how to use new MOM in summoner builds. (srs)
2) Im really wishing to play pure zombies build with montreguls and necro boots, thinking to get some pure Armour chest with high life, armour, what do you think about it? Im honestly like life regen and higher HP pool instead of hybrid (and no regen vs degen). (any advice and thoughts about it)
Last edited by PlayArcher on May 30, 2017, 5:54:37 AM
