How are people and minions surviving?

Wall of Projectiles usually is a sign dir those pesky 2 feeted Porcupines.

Getting offscreened by some nasty beam or Explosion sounds like redeemer mobs.
Al Hezims chaos/poison damage snakes can also be dangerous in regards of offscreening.

Minions obstruct your vision, thats one of their downsides, coupled with the eyebleeding particle effects from everything and everyone, you're literally blind about whats happening next to you most of the time ... Compared to a non-minion build.

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I was just taking a look at your build while sipping coffee and thought about how I would approach your build concept and here is my take:
https://pastebin.com/4YYeVtqd

Looks exciting, thanks for sharing. The only two of these ideas that were on my radar (but out of my price range) was annointing & buying a blessed rebirth jewel, which I knew would solve minions surviving for 4 seconds. I had no idea chill synergised with wither/poison!

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- Swapped SRS out and Vaal Skellies in. Skellies are pure phys allowing for a much easier poison scaling, their added dmg effective is way higher and thats how you already scale a lot so why not abuse it and also because From Dusk and Skeletal Atrophy.

Yes, skellies are better, especially on PoB. However, I wanted to compare the SRS extra attack speed and movespeed (the extra attack speed makes up a little bit for the crap added damage effectiveness of SRS). It stacks wither more reliably (why do you say this is not important for this build?), so the profane bloom hits harder. I was actually really pleased that SRS even got close to the skellies for damage so I kept them. I also liked the idea of using the bees animation for a poison themed build! And the poison archers are just cute, with their ridiculously bad AI...

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- Automated cursing with Arcanist Brand allowing easy ranged cursing and maximizing mobility. Dont underestimate mobility as a defensive layer, especially for builds like this. Bane might work too, you might want to check out which one you like better.

curses without casting anything, even a brand, is worth too much for me personally, so blasphemy, and it's crazy investment required and short range must stay, even if it is totally useless a lot of the time!

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- Feeding Frenzy (!) for the Carrion Golem. He can die all the time, thats fine. Hes is just a living dps buff you want to have active. Why didnt you run Feeding Frenzy? This is a must have for all minion builds. You want the extra move speed for minions as well as attack speed. And its basically free.

I do have the carrion golem and stone golem applying frenzy - agreed, it is an easy and delicious buff.

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grimlock9999 wrote:

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I was just taking a look at your build while sipping coffee and thought about how I would approach your build concept and here is my take:
https://pastebin.com/4YYeVtqd

Looks exciting, thanks for sharing. The only two of these ideas that were on my radar (but out of my price range) was annointing & buying a blessed rebirth jewel, which I knew would solve minions surviving for 4 seconds. I had no idea chill synergised with wither/poison!

You should be able to craft one yourself fairly easily as long as you have an ilvl 68 minion dmg cluster with 4-5 points max. About 15-20 Pristine Fossils or harvest life rerolls should land at least once a Blessed Rebirth and you just roll with whatver other mod happens to be there.
Life from Death should be about 6-8 Pristines on an ilvl50 jewel and bout 4-5 Pristines on a 8-9 point large minion dmg should land a Renewal with whatever.
Dont use jewels with higher ilvls, it will increase the pool of available mods and therfore increase the crafting costs or harvest rerolls needed.
This is the bare minimum "Im poor" version. Then get the same jewels again and this time you go for better mod combos, which might require higher ilvl. Check craft of exile for stuff like that.

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grimlock9999 wrote:

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- Swapped SRS out and Vaal Skellies in. Skellies are pure phys allowing for a much easier poison scaling, their added dmg effective is way higher and thats how you already scale a lot so why not abuse it and also because From Dusk and Skeletal Atrophy.

Yes, skellies are better, especially on PoB. However, I wanted to compare the SRS extra attack speed and movespeed (the extra attack speed makes up a little bit for the crap added damage effectiveness of SRS). It stacks wither more reliably (why do you say this is not important for this build?), so the profane bloom hits harder. I was actually really pleased that SRS even got close to the skellies for damage so I kept them. I also liked the idea of using the bees animation for a poison themed build! And the poison archers are just cute, with their ridiculously bad AI...

One major reason is the Skeletal Atrophy notable allowing to drop the withering touch gem and swap in another for more dmg. Thats why skellies overall are better but SRS will be faster at clearing stuff for sure.
Maybe try Predator support for the skellie archers so you can control the target they are shooting at.

Edit: Atrophy allows to drop withering touch for multistrike, meaning we are looking at 3x10% compared to 1x25% to apply wither. I do realize Atrophy isnt as good as the support gem however multistrike will apply 3x more poison stacks. Not to mention it massively scales the initial hit as well which withering touch doesnt do. So Multistrike plus Atrophy wins easily I think.

Additionally you are spending 3 points to buff unleash, allowing you to spawn more minions initially and then occasionally 1 more minion per cast for the investment of 3 points and 1 support gem slot.
However this doesnt get you anywhere near your maximum minion count, just about half way. So you will have to stand there and pump out minions - thats mechanically weak and dangerous.
Compared to skellies being able to spawn 7/9 in one go for the investment of one jewel plus 1-2 travelpoints to get the jewel slot. Resulting in you casting skellies twice per 4sec to spawn them all and replace almost all losses instantly whereas its much harder to replace all SRS if all of them get wiped. So its way more efficient and with unleash gone another dmg support slot opens up.
It should overall be less clicking, higher sustained dmg output, faster poison ramp up and more survivability in the end.
Also Id like to point out: If you are not forced to constantly spam SRS, casting Bane or Arcanist Brand every now and then isnt nearly as bad at seems.

Edit2: Its worth mentioning that summoning minions over max count will result in the oldest minions removal which counts as death.
Meaning if you summon skellies once per 2 seconds, you will delete 7 older skellies which still were in their immortal phase therfore cant have died yet resuling in 28% life recovered per 2s benefitting the golem and spectres.
Another important point to note is that you would be replacing all of your skellies inside the 4s immortality phase, if you keep casting it once every 2s resulting in perma immortal skellies and thus maximum dmg output all the time no matter what. Thats plenty time left to move and cast buffs/debuffs every now and then.
I dont see how you could guarantee a 100% uptime of 20 SRS with the laughable investment of a jewel. If you can only guarantee about 6 immortal SRS at any given time, then you are also looking at a massive dmg output restriction in every situation that would wipe your SRS straight after the immortality phase runs out.

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grimlock9999 wrote:

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- Automated cursing with Arcanist Brand allowing easy ranged cursing and maximizing mobility. Dont underestimate mobility as a defensive layer, especially for builds like this. Bane might work too, you might want to check out which one you like better.

curses without casting anything, even a brand, is worth too much for me personally, so blasphemy, and it's crazy investment required and short range must stay, even if it is totally useless a lot of the time!

I guess I cant do much about that and Blasphemy it is then ^^
Still Id suggest to swap Devouring Diadem in. The less mana reserved modifier is pretty neat plus EB & MoM should help you out in the survival department.
You would just have to run an actual Blasphemy gem but it should still be better.

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grimlock9999 wrote:

It stacks wither more reliably (why do you say this is not important for this build?)

Wither is good and it does help but I was talking about jewel mods and on ghastly eyes something like "%chance to wither on spell hit" can roll but wouldnt work for this build.