Salty's Experimental Crit summoner Sandbox (shaper viable)

Just as a Disclaimer , this is not intended to be a comprehensive build guide. this simply an experiment on how far i can take the concept of crit minions.

Anyway On to the meat and potatoes

So for the longest time actual crit summoners are kind of a meme level joke. afterall there is no minion crit stat , no minion crit multi stat. no way to really get high enough crit rate to make the effort notable. Not only that but .. minions ... dont usually need crit. Regularly there are build guides in which the minions do millions of dps. be it poison meta or just .. raw power from things like AW srs or specters.


However I feel those areas are pretty well explored. plus 3.0 has brought new possibilities I would like to share with everyone which frankly weren't around even a year ago.

So to start we need to solve a ton of issues

1. we need a source of crit chance which is reliable
2. we need to take accuracy out of the equation because low accuracy is death to crit
3. we need enough crit multi to justify the investment .. or find a gem which has a low barrier to overcome (more on this point later).


1 is pretty obvious.. power charges on minions are awesome. 600% crit is chunky good fun. But how to get them

could we use

yes we could but it has a problem. the first is that it is not consistent. for clearing maybe but for bosses .. not at all on kill effects in the gran scheme of things are pretty shit unless you can poop out a breach on whim (you can but.. it is not practical most of the time).


plus using it means you cant use other shield options..


there is also

cool on paper .. but suffers a similar issue to charity. inconsistency it would be one thing if we could get more than one use out of the things .. but we cant. not always. and not in boss fights.


But there is another solution: which is the one i chose to use

It is pretty common knowledge now that there exists a certain ape monster from acts 2 and 7 which grant frenzy charges to allies in an aoe.

slotting in blood magic makes said ape spam this ability.

But 3.0 actually added a power charge version of this ape. you can get both from act 7 ashen fields and it really spams charges.

this spectre is so efficient that only one is needed for 100% uptime of power charges on permanent minions.




So that is 600% crit chance... most minions have around 5% crit chance (35% crit in total) 35% hardly seems useful doesn't it?

this is where the critical strikes gem comes in


using this brings us to around 700% crit on a 6.9 base or 55% crit chance. now we are talking. but frankly even that is not enough because of problem 3

crit multi on minions is pretty much limited to the crit multi gem. That plus the implicit multi is all we get for crit multi. This means we need a very high crit chance to make that low crit multi worth anything.

thus we need to fall back on one specific item interaction

this makes our minion crits lucky. translating to about an 80% crit chance doing casual math means that with an 80% crit chance we have a crit multi about equal to 90% more damage.. comparable to two extra more multi gems.



Here is an issue though, umbilicus restricts this concept to two minions , specters .. and zombies. And we need to consider if 90% multi is even worth the effort for those two.

for specters.. I would argue no. not only because well .. you need the charge monkey (thus reducing your damage spectre count by 1) but because specters actually have a ton of good more gems. many actually have over 5 more multi options.. crit on them is redundant.

This leaves zombies.. zombies as it turns out ... dont actually have that many good gems

minion damage is good , melee physical is good , empower is good... but nothing else

multi strike hurts their already bad clear speed
conc effect is not a good option because even with violent dead zombies dont spam the slams
ruthlessness and brutality could work but one has consistency issues while the other cuts out things like hatred.. which,.. yeah no no to that stupid gem.

thus zombies actually are a good candidate for going crit.

But since we are doing zombies .. we need to worry about accuracy.. which means either an accuracy gem (no) or


Armed with this conclusion i went and built a character on standard.

here is what i came up with:



Ill expand this as i go, feel free to ask questions for why i made the choices i did.

Just for note .. yes this build uses legacy gear , the es value is probably around 8 - 9k es, you could very much achieve this value with the current es gear available in harbinger .. you would need to use a 3 prefix es chest instead of 2 prefix with a + zombie master mod and you could use es minion damage jewels to help make up for the loss of the elreon es mods on rings. so it is possible .. but not practical

As for what this build can do .. about 1 minute guardian fights are possible (not chimera obviously)
(its actually about 10 seconds or less for some guardians... it really depends on how many transition phases there are and if the guardian decides to run around)

Update:

So I ended up dropping:

for:

There are a few reasons for this.

This first has to do with zombie movespeed limitations it is a fact of life that zombies are way too slow for their own good. There is not point to zipping around fast if your dps cant do the same after all.

Thus the added charge speed of bright beak is redundant.
More over it turns out the extra attack speed one gets from commander of darkness is actually pretty notable even with just 3 auras. It plus a few attack/cast hybrid nodes and some fleshy offering actually made the no attack speed montre free surprisingly ok.

something that was decidedly not the case when i did a baron version of this build.

Another thing i started doing was switching out minion damage for minion speed during clears. the damage the montre zombies pull is enough to one shot trash either way.. thus there is no reason not to use minion speed in this case.

This puts their ms around 20% (quality) +30% (flesh) + 50% (minion speed gem) + 70% (quick silver flask) its pretty decent at this point. I thought i would miss queen's escape alot more than i currently do.

plus even with minion speed the zombies were chunking t11 bosses in seconds anyway (one actually took 25% off of wasteland voll in one hit) which is really weird to look at


And you can never have enough hp on zombies so 33k hp is pretty solid for them.



Just as a note .. stay away from indoor maps with a ton of small pathways .. whatever ggg did to the minion ai recently has made them mentally incapable of those tile sets..

not that anyone should have those maps either way.. but it is really really noticeable. (sometimes i wish zombies had a leap slam T_T)

I kinda have to put the test on hiatus until spectres get sorted. the sad fact of life is that while frenzy monkeys are difficult to find in maps (there are .. quite a few variants of this ape that dont have frenzy generation at all)

I have never seen the power charge ape in maps.



That being said i do have some more thoughts on this. I must say i am very thankful for the pantheon system.


It is probably already apparent but my build is not using a form of stun immunity .. despite being a ci build . the sad fact of life is that es gear no longer provides the kind of effective hp to make dead gear slots like chayula workable .. i can only have so many and i already have 3 .. umbilicus , aegis and ofc bones of ullr.


Thus it makes sense to use the brine king for this .. which is all well because i clearly cant make enough room to exploit the regen trick arakaali has.

The brine king makes more sense too because i cant afford a freeze immunity source either.



For shits and giggles i went ahead and tried a increased life chimera.. the spectres being level 53 and all .. only made it about half way before i had to go back to act 7 to resummon them. but it was funny watching the zombies insta pop the adds with satisfying mixes of shatters and pops from montre explosions.



The real dangers of the fight were of course the smoke phases since I pretty much have only the block from bone offering and my meager 8k es buffer to find the prick before i go pop.


but it was deathless.


The zombies hit ridiculously hard when a crit lands


I really do hope GGG reverts some of the es changes

https://pastebin.com/7z1k2iFS

I decided to throw my build concept into pob to see how doable it would be on harbinger... turns out .... its not as terrifying as i thought but i would say .. stay in softcore.... you will probably find getting a good chest difficult. I tried to keep most things reasonable

that being said apparently this can have 1.2 - about 2 million shaper dps. which is not all that bad for some zombies

Bookmarked.

Good news the zombie crit build is shaper viable, the zombie face tanked the shaper beam long enough to force transitions and i only needed to re-summon 1 zombie due to bullet hell phase bs.

which would have been an issue since zombies cost 4 times more than my unreserve mana. but then i remembered that vaal clarity exists

so when ever a bullet hell phase killed a zombie i would pop 16 seconds of vaal clarity and re summon all of them to full hp

got the idea from watching ghazzys dominating blow character.

honestly i may drop vaal haste for a second vaal clarity just for that utility.


and ofc the one time i test shaper on std it drops


FML ehh?

I also spaced out my flask uses , i pretty much insta popped the mini bosses and even the weird shade shaper minion boss thing with the frost attacks was zombie face tankable with minimal flask usage.

So i had full flasks for phases 2 and 3. and 2 vaal skills cooking

i needed nothing but flasks for the first phase and probably did not even need them.

So a few extra things I have decided after killing shaper:

I am considering dropping animate guardian out right. (i took the gem out for the shaper fight) The reason for this is that while the zombies could face tank the shaper.. there were still phases of the fight where they could die. they had 32000 hp 1700 hp per second of regen and 3000hp sec for leech. that is ridiculously tanky.

The guardian has around 27k hp , similar regen .. no leech... which means he would fall over like an election sign in a hurricane and frankly 33% damage and some curse effectiveness simply isnt worth the investment if shaper can delete him.



Following that logic i am also considering dropping the dual curse setup. We have arrived at a point in the game where curses are more or less worthless vs bosses and unnecessary vs everything else. There is no real use to having a damage curse if your zombies overkill trash mobs 20 times over after all.

that being said assassins mark still pulls weight vs mobs simply because it bumps the crit chance from 80 -90 for more consistent crits and allows for a secondary source of power charges during clears

So there is a tangible use there.



If I do this change it would result in a net gain of 3 passive points and 2 gem slots i can use to boost other skills.

the three passives could be used either for more es (if i can find some i haven't already taken es is basically life now for passive pressure ) take the only okish flask nodes (they arent nearly as good for the build as people think since i use a few fixed stat flasks) or i could invest in the duration bubble .. boosting the quality of life for all my vaal skills and offerings.



It is a shame but curses really do feel superfluous in this meta


I am not sure what i will use to replace the two gems. I was thinking of using rallying cry or a decoy totem for one slot but one would draw needless attention to me and the other is fairly redundant when you roll with a stone golem.

a third vaal skill is out of the question as it would be too clunky.

So I did Drop the guardian. Even with good items ( a belly of the beast , south bound level 21 gem etc) The guardian simply could not handle protracted engagements like the zombies and specters could. Realistically speaking the guardian is a novel mechanic that simply is not practical.

I ended up dropping him for a vaal discipline. And by that i mean I moved flesh offering off of the increased duration slot with vaal haste and into my ring (where the guardian was)

Thus i have about 7.5 second vaal disciplines. I am curious as to why Vaal discipline is so soul heavy for such a short duration and minuscule effect compared to its former self. It is effectively the es equivalent of a heavily restricted life flask.


I kept the curses if for no other reason than clear was smoother with them and slotting in an srs in a 4l in a build with mana issues .. doesn't seem all that intelligent , plus their dps contribution was actually kind of .. underwhelming when i crunched the numbers

perhaps i would be better with skeletons... but they are really brittle.



I may consider looking into making a spectre focused crit build. However i feel that will depend entirely on if and how GGG buffs ci and es in general.

because even with legacy gear and pretty much every reasonable es node taken on the tree i was only hitting around 8.5k es.

this is with a 700 es chest. losing 300+ es by equipping a vismortis is a loss of about 2000 es.

this rather massive hp discrepancy means i would need to either

Drop NA for a very high es shield
Abandon umbilicus in favor of a crystal belt
give up ci and go hybrid with some sort of chaos blocking item (esh mirror probably)
Or possibly even drop a damage gem.. for ...power charge on crit which just sounds stupid.

even with this sacrifice i would probably also need to create more es on the tree by using liberal amounts of energy from within and get as close to 400+% es as possible.