[2.2] The Healer, Updated for ascendancy!

Hello everyone, this is my first attempt at writing a build guide, so if you have any comments or suggestions i would highly appreciate your feedback.

Since the beginning of my "gaming career", I've played almost exclusively ARPGs, and in almost every game I tried, there was a healing ability/skill. Though in PoE, you have potions, vaal discipline, regeneration, gluttony of elements, life gain on hits/block/etc but there is no skill to heal your allies without another interaction. This ended in 2.0 with the introduction of jewels.

How do I heal allies?
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This item says you grant your allies 2% of your maximum life on death. Using it yourself would be extremely suboptimal for that purpose, since with 10k life, you'd give them about 200 hp. Though by using the necromantic aegis keystone, all your mininons gain that ability. Though by doing that, it becomes 2% of THEIR maximum life that they'll give you when they die. SO by taking all the minion health nodes on the tree, and by using enough Army of bones unique jewels
to reach 99% (100% will mean the skeletons dont spawn and dont heal you), your skeletons will heal you when they die, which should be either instantly or 0,2 seconds after you spawn them.


How efficient is it really?
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Heal-focused
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Note that i do not have a level 4 empower, which would increased my healing capabilities by a likable margin.

Still with this setup, my skeletons are lvl 25 and heal 672 hp every cast ( so 1344 with spell echo). With vaal haste on, i reach over 5 casts per second to heal myself at an effective rate of almost 3.5k hp per second, self buffed.



My gear right now
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Heal focused
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Gear breakdown
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Weapon
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I am currently using a cast speed wand with a bit of mana and mana regen. These are litterally the only reasons why i'm wearing this one. You should also not that this is a very cheap alternative and a Pagan wand would be a way better base.



Helmet
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The best helmet right now for this build is any helmet with the following enchant: Summon 1 additional Skeleton Warrior with Summon Skeletons . If you happen to have it on a rare helmet then you can try to craft it as you like but you can also take a unique helm with that enchant on it.



Shield
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Well this is kind of a no brainer since this shield enables the sole purpose of this build, which is healing

It also gives minions attack speed, life, area of effect (pretty useful if you want evangelists spectres). The minus resistances is pretty big to overcome, which is why i am using the minion and totem elemental resistances gem with the minion gem i socket in my 5/6L


Gloves
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Here, your best bet is to go with rare gloves that have life, resists and a prefix slot open so you can craft minion life on them, like this one for instance.



Boots
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I am using rare boots with life, movement speed, resists, and in my case dexterity, which honestly is a waste because i only need 1 additionnal dexterity point and these boots give me 27. In short, these boots arent very good.




Jewelry
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Here all my items are rare (and not very good) and should grant life and resistances. The additionnal mods you should look for are stats (mainly strength and dexterity as you get plenty of intelligence from tree)





Body armor
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I am currently using a corrupted tabula rasa with the desirable vaal implicit +1 to level of socketed gems, the goto 6L for every time you want to test something. IF you happen to have a 6L chest with the same corruption then go ahead and use it!




Gems and links
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Basic Solo
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3S(3L,links are not required): Clarity, Desecrate, haste
3L: Vaal summon skeletons - Minion life - Spell echo
4L: Curse on hit- Curse 1- Curse 2- Arc/Ball lightning
4L: Raise zombies- melee physical damage- multistrike/minion damage (depends on what socket colors you can get) - melee splash/minion life/minion and totem elemental resistances
4L: Summon skeletons - Spell echo - Faster casting - minion life
6L: Raise Spectre - minion damage - faster casting - spell echo - minion and totem elemental resistances - Chain/LMP/GMP/added lightning/added cold/added chaos/elemental penetration (The 6th link really is up to the choice of spectres you make and your personal preferences. Also the choice of support gems can be made to improve either pack clearing or boss killing speed.






Heal focused
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The heal focused build was made with the intention of maximising the possible amount of healing i could make out of summoning skeletons. I still used minions because it is the best way for me to still deal damage due to the reasonnable amount of minion damage you get from tree, jewels and gear. The reason why I'm stating this is that in the case where someone would want to follow/adapt this build to hardcore or even to use it in a party, i would drop the spectres links.

3S(links dont really matter):Clarity - Haste - Desecrate
3L: Vaal summon skeletons - Minion life - Spell echo
4L: Raise Zombies ->to deal damage: Melee phys - Minion damage - Multristrike/Melee splash
->to tank damage: Minion life - fortify - Minion and totem elemental resistance
4L: Raise spectre: Minion damage - Spell echo - Faster casting
4S/3L & 1S: Arc/Ball lightning - Curse on hit- Curse of choice
Corpse/flash offering
6L: Summon skeletons - Minion life - Spell echo - Faster casting - Empower - Culling strike(WITH QUALITY)/Blood magic/Reduced mana

I have not tested yet the effects of linking the increased area of effect gem to skeletons to see if it actually increases the area in which it gives life on death.






Screenshots
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Old screenshots
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Level 24 summon skeletons tooltip
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Level 24 summon skeletons cast speed with vaal haste (self buffed)
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Level 22 Chaos Golem gem with 20/20 minion life
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Level 22 Summon skeletons with 20/20 minion life
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Level 20 Raise zombie with 11/0 minion life
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Level 20 Raise zombie with 11/0 minion life and mon'tregul's grasp sceptre
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Videos
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Solo tropical island runhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oZr_4_suJs
Quick demo of how healing with skeletons affect your hphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8ZgWuv8g80&feature=youtu.be

Build Video for the optimised healing spec! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8ZFkT7J83E



Coming soon


Tree


Curses
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As of 2.2, i decided to drop the curse on hit setup for many reasons : easier item management, more time spent healing, beacon of corruption helping more damage-wise than curses, etc. If you still want to read about the possibilities though, heres the old unedited section i dedicated to curses
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I am currently using a curse on hit setup with arc, elemental weakness and vulnerability.
Arc chains and auto-aims but i might replace it with ball lightning, though i have to admit both are strong options.
As for the curse choices i will divide them into 2 categories

-Offensive curses
-Vulnerability : Boosts the zombies' damage
-Elemental Weakness: Boosts the spectres' damage
You can also use each element's curse to further boost the damage of your spectres at the expense of your zombies'

-Defensive curses
-Temporal chains: One of my favorites, it greatly helps agaisnt slow hitting monsters because it gives you time to manually avoid them
-Enfeeble: Very good in critical chance/multi maps as it reduces both of those modifiers, accuracy ( which lowers critical strike chance again because of the accuracy check) and also reduces the raw damage of monsters.
-Warlord's mark: Usually a very good defensive gem, i find little use for it as i already am healing my minions so they do not really need the additional life leech
Last edited by Death_invoquer on May 27, 2016, 6:22:30 PM
Last bumped on May 27, 2016, 6:24:22 PM
Reserved for possible future updates
why don't you pick up minion instability? With minion instability you can both deal a fair amount of dmg AND heal the group, right?
"
Meraxas wrote:
why don't you pick up minion instability? With minion instability you can both deal a fair amount of dmg AND heal the group, right?


Minion Instability's wording starts like this "when reduced to low life". Unfortunately for us, this means we'd have to damage them for 66% of their life (so about 4k dmg) during their duration so that they would also explode and heal us :/

I did test it and it did not work ( i had hopes )
Because to do damage Minion Instability needs the minion to be on lowlife, on his skeleton it probably doesn't do a all because they dont last long enough.
"
"
Meraxas wrote:
why don't you pick up minion instability? With minion instability you can both deal a fair amount of dmg AND heal the group, right?


Minion Instability's wording starts like this "when reduced to low life". Unfortunately for us, this means we'd have to damage them for 66% of their life (so about 4k dmg) during their duration so that they would also explode and heal us :/

I did test it and it did not work ( i had hopes )


Did they change that recently? I thought there was a build based around that a few months back, or am i mistaken (i probably am...)?
double post, sorry!!
Last edited by Meraxas on Nov 2, 2015, 2:44:49 PM
"
Meraxas wrote:
"
"
Meraxas wrote:
why don't you pick up minion instability? With minion instability you can both deal a fair amount of dmg AND heal the group, right?


Minion Instability's wording starts like this "when reduced to low life". Unfortunately for us, this means we'd have to damage them for 66% of their life (so about 4k dmg) during their duration so that they would also explode and heal us :/

I did test it and it did not work ( i had hopes )


Did they change that recently? I thought there was a build based around that a few months back, or am i mistaken (i probably am...)?


The build you might be referring to was featured in build of the week. The difference is that the character that was then featured was wearing heartbound loop, which infliced him physical damage on minion death, which then triggered cast when damage taken summon skeletons, which dealt damage that triggered spells and minions and so on.

Edit: I'm not a huge summoner player so I do not know if it has been changed recently.
Last edited by Death_invoquer on Nov 2, 2015, 2:53:29 PM
Update: I uploaded 2 videos of the build, hope you enjoy them!

If you don't, please let me know why :)
Did a similar :

Tree


Using Curropted Energy jewel and Heartbound Loop
Last edited by Kikoyou on Nov 2, 2015, 5:33:41 PM

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