Natho's HP/IIQ/IIR Summoner Build for Solo Endgame Maps Updated

I guess your style is a bit different than mine.

My strategy is based on flame sentinel and some other good mobs like fireball queen, so I got the double curse(flammability+ele weakness), and elemental equilibrium( me myself just use a lv1 chain+GMP cold spell, either arctic breath of ice spear, lv1 for the mana save).
The good thing about my build is that it's very gear independent, I seek tri Res on my mainhand, and tri Res+HP on the archon kite shield(the weapon+shield easily gives me more than 80 all res).

Since I really care about my spectre, my play style is like this: front line stand the zombies, then it's me in the middle, and spectre at the back. Skeleton on call to take bullet from sideway for spectre. Therefore I take small pierce/burning ground damage at times, so energy shield doesn't work well on me, which makes me get Eldrich Battery. So I don't need mana on my gear, easily 3000+ mana pool, which brings it back to the gear independent subject.

Downside is that the scaling isn't well. Thus my build was to aim for mid-level maps. I don't think any minion can take lv77 map's piety's lightning ball.


Contrastively thinking, if you pick arc or other spells as your main damage source, I think you can spec those minion damage point(about 10) out into character damage node or others such as HP. I think, if flame sentinel's dps score is 10, most of the range mobs you pick are at most 3, which makes those minion damage point kind of a waste. Zombie's damage is also bad, one flame sentinel can easily outDPS 8 zombies.
Just make sure your zombie gets the highest HP and no damage gem, so you don't even need culling strike for your own spell. In this way I believe you are actually maximizing your scalability. And in fact this build could be better than a normal witch build in everyway.

So your gems could be:

Head(+2 minion level)zombie + minion life + minion move speed + anything(maybe faster casting, since in more projectile mod map or other dangerous case, you need to resummon zombie fast to give you more dps time)

Chest: 5L ~ 6L, with main spell + rarity + quantity + xx + xx + xx
glove + boots: auras

weapon+shield: one with totem/curse and one with skeleton+ life? I try not to put minion gems in weapon and shield, so that I can sometimes swap weapon in instance to change gem or cast portal.
About spectres? I don't even think you'll need them..

Also I suggest spec out of minion instability because you aren't getting all the gem bonus from zombie explosion, and it basically removes 33% of your front warriors' life.

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fdguoj wrote:

@Make1kiLL thanks a lot for your kindly reply.

For me spec is a plus. I just pick some ranged mobs as spec.

And I use arc as a finish hit only with culling strike and IQ/IR gems. So the main dps still comes from minions. For the minion instability, in some dangerous situation, I have to stand far behind and let the minions explode to destroy mobs or bosses, such as Piety in Level 71 map Temple. I will try to do w/o it and see how it goes^^

For 0 regen affix on maps, I usually will roll the map again if I got a rare map with it. Since it is quite time consuming.

If you count on your melee minion(ske/zombie) as your main dps output, then probably you do need minion instability... I just feel that melee minion's damage is so low compare to flame sentinel.

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Make1kiLL wrote:

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fdguoj wrote:

@Make1kiLL thanks a lot for your kindly reply.

For me spec is a plus. I just pick some ranged mobs as spec.

And I use arc as a finish hit only with culling strike and IQ/IR gems. So the main dps still comes from minions. For the minion instability, in some dangerous situation, I have to stand far behind and let the minions explode to destroy mobs or bosses, such as Piety in Level 71 map Temple. I will try to do w/o it and see how it goes^^

For 0 regen affix on maps, I usually will roll the map again if I got a rare map with it. Since it is quite time consuming.

If you count on your melee minion(ske/zombie) as your main dps output, then probably you do need minion instability... I just feel that melee minion's damage is so low compare to flame sentinel.

How is that?I play ele ranger as well. But I still did not find that DPS of minions is low, especially how fast they can KO the map bosses.

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fdguoj wrote:

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Make1kiLL wrote:

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fdguoj wrote:

@Make1kiLL thanks a lot for your kindly reply.

For me spec is a plus. I just pick some ranged mobs as spec.

And I use arc as a finish hit only with culling strike and IQ/IR gems. So the main dps still comes from minions. For the minion instability, in some dangerous situation, I have to stand far behind and let the minions explode to destroy mobs or bosses, such as Piety in Level 71 map Temple. I will try to do w/o it and see how it goes^^

For 0 regen affix on maps, I usually will roll the map again if I got a rare map with it. Since it is quite time consuming.

If you count on your melee minion(ske/zombie) as your main dps output, then probably you do need minion instability... I just feel that melee minion's damage is so low compare to flame sentinel.

How is that?I play ele ranger as well. But I still did not find that DPS of minions is low, especially how fast they can KO the map bosses.

Well. Relatively speaking, zombie's dps is far lower than special spectre like flame sentinel.

Everytime when I die or just login, I go to solaris temple 2/3 to find flame sentinel. Without the first flame sentinel, it takes forever for zombie+skeleton to kill mobs. Once I got the first flame sentinel, it trashes all mobs in this lv62 area. Note that I didn't spec a lot of minion damage node, but this is just an idea of comparison between flame sentinel and zombies.

I see you don't use the minion boots. I tried to use the quanity unique boots once and felt that 2 flame sentinel is far more worse than 3, while 3 felt almost nothing different than 4 when I was having queen's decree. For flame sentinel I currently use 5L: spectre+rarity+quantity+LMP+minion damage(minion damage gives 70% so I think these 15% damage node are kinda marginal defected).

Well you can actually go try to get 3 flame sentinel with only LMP and minion damage, and see the damage output. The hard part of my play style is to learn how to protect my flame sentinel in different situations, which could be frustrated but part of the fun.

why LMP instead of GMP for your sentinels ?

The best multiple projectile gem would be chain for Flame Sentinels.

Since flame sentinels already shoot LMP and fork, every forked fireball will also chain with fireball giving those a chance to bounce multiple times on a single target. Chain also makes it so the fireballs hit 100% of the time. Chain also hits further off screen.

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mattc3303 wrote:

The best multiple projectile gem would be chain for Flame Sentinels.

Since flame sentinels already shoot LMP and fork, every forked fireball will also chain with fireball giving those a chance to bounce multiple times on a single target. Chain also makes it so the fireballs hit 100% of the time. Chain also hits further off screen.

7

I'll try chain instead of GMP. Cheers m8.

arc must stay lv1 for mana manegement?

I tried chain a couple of times, but I feel that the fireball cover width isn't too wide for aoe scenario, and I don't know how does chain work with the fork that comes with flame sentinel itself.

The reason that I prefer LMP is that flame sentinel shoots fireball 1/2/3 at times so with LMP its 3/4/5. and GMP's damage effectiveness is 0.5 instead of 0.7 of LMP. Note that I didn't spec a lot of minion damage node, and when facing flame rolling guy and multi-hand chick, I feel that I need to nuke them down as quickly as possible..

But if you have only one green socket, any of the three makes sense. It's a personal taste. When I had two green socket I used LMP + pierce... Personally I felt that my passives works well with LMP.