[3.1 HC] Poet's Pen - The Ultimate Summoner! SRS / Zombies / Skeletons / Spectres!

hey there, nice build but i have a question.
i got the ring and wanted to ask if GMP really works with the solar guards and how do u swap slower projectiles in the ring for bosses?

have a nice day and merry x-mas

I really like this build, but I'm feeling very squishy. Abyss stuff and elder guardians just wreck me. So any suggestions are welcome:

https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/kriegshetzer/characters/vrill

This is exactly the way I leveled my spectre character (since I try to fit the poets pens into each leveling build :D ).

Thoughts on Animate Weapon vs Skeletons?
Or even spectres with the reduced lifetime jewel for spectres?
Or an Offering into the skele pen for clearing (if you take spirit eater)

I will try guardians and elders as soon as I level to 95, but until now I'm not feeling squishy at all. Feel free to check my character!
I followed the idea of this build, I leveled until 93 with dual poet but having two jewels occupied by skeleton threshold jewels hurts, so I removed one poet's pen, switching in victario shield, and I get a nice boost to life and clear speed by using jewels with life / minion movement speed / minion attack cast speed if killed recently.
At the same time, I believe OP made an error suggesting to put spectre on the ring: we would be stuck with spell echo. Plus, I think spectres are the most important thing in a summoner build, so I switched spectres on a nice elder/shaper helmet with built-int minion damage support, to get a 5L on spectres (spectres, minion damage, spell echo, lmp/slower proj, elemental focus). Using flame sentinel so far.
Then I've put zombies on hungry loop ring.
Then I managed to put grace(I got a nice watcher eye jewel for it) discipline and purity of elements.
Finally I realized that I do not need kinetic blast, and I switched to frenzy, to get way more attack speed. as 6 socket I've put life gain on hit, but it is not necessary at all, I rarely feel its influence.
AND I'm using spirit offering for getting life to ES bonus. I'm sitting at 5.2k life / 3.7k ES without spirit offering,reaching 5k ES with it.
An awesome upgrade would be a +30 minion movement speed ring, but I need a lot of dex and other stats on the single rare ring available so it will be difficult to obtain.
Anyway, my clear speed is okey, I do not think it is an insane clear speed build but it is okey. I'm shining against bosses, especially when there are other monsters around: my minions get +27% attack/cast speed if they have killed something, a lot of physical damage added as extra fire/phys damage, plus vaal haste, I'm wrecking bosses using a fast clear type of spectre :)
and I do not feel myself squishy at all, actually I die only by my faults. And I have still to fix the flasks, not using rumi atm but I should.

Trying this build now. Should I grab the gem for skeleton mages and shove that into my tree?

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At the same time, I believe OP made an error suggesting to put spectre on the ring: we would be stuck with spell echo. Plus, I think spectres are the most important thing in a summoner build, so I switched spectres on a nice elder/shaper helmet with built-int minion damage support, to get a 5L on spectres

the only issue i have is with not being able to switch out gmp, but having spell echo isnt an issue: just desecrate and use raise zombie on everything but the spectre, then there are no other corpses to raise

the hungry loop is a 5l, so unless you get gear with 6l i´m still better off just using a hungry loop (also your helmet only has a lvl 16 support)

an idea i just got is to get a 4l+gmp support and put frenzy in there, freeing up your 6l vis mortis

BTW, using frenzy/victarios is a genius idea, gonna try that out

also, why didnt you put minion speed in your hungry loop?

Dear OP,

Any chance you will update this soon ? I find this build very appealing, but I feel like it's not getting a lot of attention.

I'm doing this build, so far I reached act 5 extremely fast and had the most fun while doing so in a long time. I don't even get hit honestly. Will update once I'm at a higher level, this is my gear right now:


Bosses just melt away. The clear speed with my current 4L is still very high, I'm looking to upgrade to a 5L or 6L soon though. First time playing a Summoner and this build is making it a LOT of fun.

For leveling you can probably put an offering into the skeleton pen. Always having Flesh Offering active is probably a bigger overall DPS boost than the Minion Damage support.

Why LMP instead of GMP? also since you have mage skeles for aoe clear wouldnt it be better to use another gem instead of melee splash for SRS, so SRS would do more single target dmg?