[2.4] Occultist Summoner - You will never want to play Necro again!

Are you sure you are raising your spectres in merciless and with a high level desecrate? If you are struggling with elemental equilibrium + elemental weakness in white/yellow maps the only thing I can think of is that your spectres are way lower level than they should be. You can get flame sentinels from merciless eternal lab (level 68 corpses) with a level 70 desecrate (requires 90 dex to use). I've made this mistake myself a few times, raising spectres from cruel or normal on accident, so it's the first thing I suspect to be the issue.

Otherwise, spectres are really straightforward, they're a copy and paste of the monster corpse you raise. There's really no way I can think of that they would do less damage than my build assuming you have all the minion damage nodes on the tree and are using the right combination of EE + curses.

Also, of note, if you are using elemental equilibrium, your bow and a ring have fire damage which will increase monster fire resist (+25 once matched with the -resist of cold). This shouldn't lower your damage to a point where the build really becomes slow and suffers horribly in low level maps, but it is something to think about, you will do more damage speccing out of elemental equilibrium until you can get rid of the fire damage on your gear.

Hi again, I ripped on lvl 72 because I couldn't find my anti-burn flask. Already re-rolled and going strong again but now I've been wondering why you put vitality with Zombies and Guardian. They can't use the aura and you are not using it either. Why have it at all? Wouldn't fortify a better option instead?

Edit: sorry my bad, vitality is not in your helmet but my question remains, why have it if you are not using it?

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Starbuckz42 wrote:

Hi again, I ripped on lvl 72 because I couldn't find my anti-burn flask. Already re-rolled and going strong again but now I've been wondering why you put vitality with Zombies and Guardian. They can't use the aura and you are not using it either. Why have it at all? Wouldn't fortify a better option instead?

Edit: sorry my bad, vitality is not in your helmet but my question remains, why have it if you are not using it?

What do you mean? I have Zealot's Oath so it does help me, and I'm not sure what you mean about zombies/AG not being able to use it. As far as I know it certainly affects minions and that's the main reason for using it.

Sorry my wording was horrible. I thought you had vitality socketed into your helmet so your zombies and guardian would cast the aura, which is not possible of course. Then I saw you have vitality in your boots but I couldn't see you actively using it in your videos, it wasn't "turned on". That's why I was confused but maybe I was just looking at a time in your video when you didn't have it up for some reason.

Edit: In your Dark Forest video you have it up from the start, I saw that now. Sorry, for the mess^^

It's a very interesting combo of my favorite builds: summoner and occultist ascendancy, good job fitting in Soul Strike to make the character immortal.
Did you do any math to compare the dps of a necro LL auramancer with 4l spectres and yours?
I currently have a LL one with Vic body, it is dirt cheap (not even a single 5l required) and safe with my choice of AW and SRS.
So willing to try your build...

I did the tests, sadly the spectres do almost no damage.
I took the spectres from eternal lab on this and my necrobot.
Used the same auras - anger, wrath and discipline.
3 spectres on 5l do way less damage than 2 spectres on 2link (gmp)
Yes, gem levels are 19, but still.
And that's only 3 auras, while i can run way more on a necrobot. and no curses. And not even the spectre ascendancy points.
Yes, survivability is better, yes, much easier lab on occultist.
I believe necrobot is the best summoner possible as of 2.4 patch. Also cheap as dirt, you only pay for the skill gems.

technically speaking the best summoner period right now is one that can leverage umbilicus imortis

depending on your set up it can be akin to adding 2 - 4 extra links to what ever your primary minion is. (zombie or spectre)


Hell i am using it with a zombie build right now.. same links . same amount of minion damage. just changed from hybrid summoner to ci umbilicus and i went from a 2 minute minotaur fight to a 5 second minotaur fight.

its not subtle in the least.

and to the credit of occultist.. it would make a very good template for an umbilicus build. if you can get around the fact that you lose 30 - 50% of your minions base damage by not going necro.

it would certainly be more durable. plus no god damn craptastic doedres damning for tri curse anymore .. always yay.

means you can slot in a pariah

Just Dloaded the game this past weekend and as a D3 player I gotta admit this game is pretty neat. That being said I'm totally lost - I'm trying to play Witch build and started working towards the Necro build- lvl 9 - currently.. I don't understand the skill trees at all but I'm going toward the Occultist Dominion tree atm...Enjoyed reading your build as I only play HC I'm giving it a try...

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akavangop wrote:

It's a very interesting combo of my favorite builds: summoner and occultist ascendancy, good job fitting in Soul Strike to make the character immortal.
Did you do any math to compare the dps of a necro LL auramancer with 4l spectres and yours?
I currently have a LL one with Vic body, it is dirt cheap (not even a single 5l required) and safe with my choice of AW and SRS.
So willing to try your build...

Aurabot can probably do more DPS, but survivability will decrease massively. Considering this build has the DPS for Shaper, I don't see why you would want even more, everything below tier 16 melts in seconds already. The biggest thing stopping you from clearing the hardest content in the game is keeping your spectres alive and keeping yourself alive, not doing damage.

That said, I'm not much of a fan of aurabot summoner because you still want curses, you still want zombies, you still want convocation/offering/some movement skill, there just aren't enough gem sockets for all of this.

Also, do note that aurabot summoners are better the lower level the spectres are, as their auras have more of an impact.

@chipmunk
Immortalis is extremely tempting, but the inability to cleanse burn/bleed/freeze from yourself is just not something I would be willing to do on hardcore. It's insane risk vs insane reward for sure. I could see swapping it in just for bosses like t16, that would probably work, but that would also make the price of the build a lot heftier.

well freeze is only a major issue on strong boxes and maybe haast. however the fun thing about imortis is that it has no stats so you can technically take it out use a heat flask and put it back in.


bleed and ignite are really only an issue when you face uber atziri and maybe phoenix




to be honest the more i play summoner the less value i see in the convocation desecrate offering setup .. they simply take up too many slots.

i actually drop convocation if i am running a map with an open layout.


immortalis can have its drawbacks marginalized with large amounts of es regen and vaal discipline in a pinch.