[3.4]Soulwrest in Peace - A Dirt Cheap Summon Phantasms Build - Shaper Down w/ Video

Welcome to my super awesome build guide. All you need is Soulwrest to make our enemies... wrest in peace.
https://youtu.be/8X_Ot0k4XJc

This will be extremely cheap to play every league. Just level with SRS, buy yourself a Soulwrest for 1C and GG.

Basic gameplay: Start of map, drop your desecrates and Flesh Offering to summon your minions. Consecrated Path your way through the map, Flesh Offering and Convocation as necessary. Watch the map melt. For bosses swap out GMP for Slower Proj (or Fast Proj in some cases, eg Phoenix), use Smite for DPS increase, use Consecrated Path to increase our Regen.

I've found this build only really struggles when our Minions have to take a bunch of damage. You can see in my Shaper kill he wipes out my minions a few times. Luckily, it doesn't take too long to resummon them, just means you need to be paying attention to your minion count.

This build has great clear, can do pretty much any Map Mods, No Regen is a struggle but doable if you play smart.

SKILL TREE
Spoiler
This is my PoB for this character.
https://pastebin.com/U1WZhgfY

I chose the best things I thought were available. The tree could probably use a bit of tweaking, but that's what I have so far.

AVATAR OF FIRE AND WHY I AM USING IT
AoF is so that Smite (which does Lightning damage normally) is converted to Fire. We want to be using Smite since it further increases our Minion's DPS, but we don't want it to trigger EE on lightning damage, because that will reduce our Minion damage. So with AoF, every attack we, the player, use is now converted entirely to Fire damage, Smite now procs EE on Fire damage, making our enemies weak to Lightning/Cold, which is good for our Minions since we are converting Half our Minion's damage to Lightning and also running Hatred/Grip which gives us a ton of Cold damage. Hopefully that helps explain what is happening.

GEAR & GEM STUFF
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SOUL WREST
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Yup. We use it. Flat Damage roll is the only thing that matters on it.



NO 6-LINK REQUIRED! YAY!
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Whatever you want to wear.

I suggest something with Life and Resistances on it. Upgrade to Belly once it's cheap enough to 6-socket yourself. No need to 6-link, just need the 4-link and 2-link on it. EZ Game. Loreweave is a pretty solid option, but stretches our resistances more. Might be worth it for 80% max Resistances, though.



HELMET
Spoiler
BONE HELMET - we have no good enchantments.

Important stats:
+# to level of Socketed Minion Gems
Life
Resistances

Crafting is pretty easy with Delve right now. Just pop a Bound Fossil and a Pristine Fossil in a resonator and slam that Bone Helmet for some delicious stats.

I've made 3-4 really good ones and sold them this league. I've just kept this one because it's been fine for me.



GLOVES
Spoiler
Anything really. A rare glove with Resistances and Life is sufficient.

Upgrade to Grip of the Council for more damage, but not necessary. I'm scaling elemental damage so all the elemental damage I can get is A+. Corrupt with Elemental Weakness on Hit if you are feeling saucy.



BOOTS
Spoiler
Bubonic Trail is where it's at, my dudes. But again, Rare Boots are just as good. Almost like all we need is Soulwrest to be OP.

Gives another Abyssal Socket. Summons our Minions for us as we are running through a map. Very nice.



JEWELRY
Spoiler
Defensive Rare Amulet is what you want. Marble with Life/Res on it is great. There's a lot of great stuff to get here. You can get a Dex amulet with a Dex suffix to help with our Dex problems, and frees up a Jewel slot if you get enough Dex here. Fear crafting for more movement speed is fine, but not necessary. Movement speed doesn't do a whole lot for our minions.

I'm just running Sidhebreath at the moment.

Unset Ring for slotting Clarity into it. Necessary to get our resistance buff from being Necro. All you need on it is Life and Resistances, so it's super cheap to get.

I'm using Dream Fragments because I hate being chilled and frozen, but if you run a Heat flask, that should be enough to get you through most everything, and you can throw another rare ring here.

Darkness Enthroned because Abyss Jewels are sweet.



JEWELS
Spoiler
1 Careful Planning to Fix Dexterity if you don't have enough Dex on our rare slots.

Abyssals I think are best in slot for the flat physical damage, but regular Jewels are just as good, just tend to be spendier since you need two prefixes for it to be good and that's harder to hit on regular Jewels than Abyssals.

Important Abyssal Stats:
+Life
+Flat Physical

Important Regular Jewel Stats:
+%Life
+%Minion Damage

Other Goodies:
Resistances (YES PLS)
Minion Damage if a Minion Skill has been used recently
Faster Minion Casting

Flat Cold/Lightning are probably not too far behind Flat Physical, so don't discount those as replacements if you find a good jewel with our other goodies on it.



FLASKS
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Defensive flasks are the choice here. Anything that makes us more tanky as we are running through a map. Warding/Staunching/etc. My flasks are just what they are because I'm lazy and haven't chosen anything else to really put there. I mean, I have a Heat flask when I don't even need it, so that should tell you something.


GEMS
Spoiler
Soul Wrest
GMP + ELE FOCUS + MINION DAMAGE + PHYS TO LIGHT + FASTER CASTING + PHANTASM ON KILL

Switch GMP with Slower Proj for bosses. Faster Projectiles is probably helpful for certain bosses that do a lot of close range damage (eg Phoenix), but I haven't found it really necessary myself.

Alternatively, you could swap Faster Casting with Controlled Destruction.


Chest
4-Link
CULLING + FORTIFY + SMITE + CONSECRATED PATH

Smite gives our minions sweet DPS increases.

Consecrated Path drops Consecrated Grounds which increases our life regen. Very nice.

2-Link
DESECRATE + SPELL CASCADE
Gives us lots of corpses to work with.


Helmet
SPECTRE + MINION LIFE + BLOOD MAGIC + CONVOCATION

I use Carnage Chieftains Spectres for the Frenzies. Gotta cast fast. Blood magic is because Chieftains have low mana pool, so BM let's them BM all over enemies.

You can also use 1 Carnage and 1 Host. Host is good for getting your Minion's some crit chance. If you do choose to use a Host Chieftain, make sure not to use Controlled Destruction so you can make use of that Crit Chance. Maybe put Increased Critical Strikes for more Crit Strike Chance or even Increased Critical Strike Damage. You can also swap out Ele Focus with Hypothermia if you go this route because if you are Critting, it should at least trigger Chill, I believe. This is just speculation, though, and will require actual testing, which I may do eventually, but I'm pretty happy with my current setup, just spitballing here.

Carnage Chieftains can be found in Act 2, Host can be found in Act 7.


Gloves
CWDT + IC + ID + FO

Pretty standard defensive setup.


Boots
HATRED + GENEROSITY + WRATH

DPS for our little guys.

VIDEOS
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Shaper: https://streamable.com/y5t7l

I'm not the best at the game, so please excuse my crap playing, like how I missed the boss standing behind the tree. Yeah. Pro play here.

RANDOM SPIEL
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I've enjoyed playing this, hopefully you will, too, if you choose to. I'm not the best at explaining, but hopefully this was understandable to a point and I will try my best to discuss if anyone is interested in doing so. I just felt like building around this staff because it seemed cool and did the best I could. It's also the first time I've completely built something from the ground up and successfully done stuff with it. So that's nice. Usually I just use build guides and call it good.
Last edited by thegrocerygod on Sep 16, 2018, 5:04:28 PM
Last bumped on Dec 23, 2018, 7:14:22 AM
Does summon phantasm on kill work with phantasms summoned from corpses? It worded as non-phantasm minion so it should not in theory.
IGN: rooteniy
By attaching the Summon Phantasm on Kill support it increases our Maximum Phantasm count to 20. I'm unsure if this is an intended interaction or not.

With
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Without
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Yes AFAIK every Summon Phantasm on kill incrases max by 10, great build btw i might try it soon
What are your spectres of choice?

Edit: ah Frenzy Apes found the answer.
Last edited by Biscuiit on Sep 11, 2018, 11:32:10 AM
Nice, I'm running about the same thing. I was running added fire and controled destruction, but I might want to try your set up instead. It's rather hard to see what is best since PoB doesn't support these minions. Do you find the clear speed to be pretty good without faster proj?

I should pick up a second staff since I dislike gem swapping.

Do you run two Carnage Chieftains, or one with the power charges?

Either way, excellent job, and now I know it's shaper viable if you put in the work.
Last edited by JoeODanger on Sep 11, 2018, 12:12:25 PM
I've been running Carnage on both Spectres for now, but I've been considering running a Power Charge Chieftain to see how that goes. I've noticed with just one Carnage, it doesn't keep our minions at 3 Frenzy, but it may just be because I'm using Flesh Offering too often and it resummons our dudes.

I have a second staff I'll be slotting my GMP setup in because I feel much the same.

And yeah, if you attach the Summon Phantasm on Kill Support to an actual skill, you can change it to look at the minions. But they seem to be marked as a Melee Attacking Minion, because in PoB things like Melee Physical and Elemental Damage with Attacks show damage increases on the Phantasms, but Projectile and Spell supports seem to do nothing. But using that, I was able to kind of "estimate" what the damage might look like. No idea how accurate it may or may not be, though, so that's a bummer. But for now, I think it's the best we have where that's concerned (if what PoB has is even accurate on that Minion).
Last edited by thegrocerygod on Sep 11, 2018, 12:30:36 PM

Looks like a very nice bvuild, Gona try it.
I have some questions, is slower projectile more damage over faster projectiles? Spell echo works on phantasms?

Ty
Cool idea for a build. I've noticed that Dominating Blow also triggers this skill, meaning there's a synergy to build around it and Dominating Blow. I'm currently running a Herald of Purity + DB build but wanted to try more minion spam so I bought a Soulwrest. It works with DB, which means you can summon a ton of minions and the duration buffs which help DB also apply to the Summon Phantasm.
Is taste of hate necessary for conversion or you just got it for the defensive part?
Got soulwrest today and this build looks juicy, but I dont htink I can afford taste

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