Pure Zombie Necromancer build?

New ideas from DoT changes from 3.0

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ok i'm gonna open another thing:

maybe you noticed that there will be significant changes to bleeding/poison with 3.0 (or 3.0 beta)
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the most important is that we have no double dipping BUT have the base skill/attack damage scaled for DoT damage like poison and bleeding.
Zombies have insanely high base damage and therefore the concept of "poison zombies" may be better than before. additionally, GGG will introduce a "chance to bleed" gem so we can have Poison+Bleed from zombies. imo, this is could explode the damage of the zombies, as bleeding dmg is even tripled for standing enemies (from 10% to 30%) for 3.0

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We'll be introducing other support gems to further enhance Bleeding as well, so Bloodlust won't be the only support that applies specifically to Bleeding effects.

maybe one could build fully around bleeding zombies now and pick United in Dream to provide extra poison (as a minor dmg source). for clearing it will be nice to have many zombies (i.e. use queen's escape or such) but for focused boss builds it will be OK to have only a minimum number of zombies because bleed can't stack (let's say mon'treguls grasp+united in dream).

comments? i'm very excited :D

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1837427/page/12/#p14459549



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airparisderjesus wrote:

Hi guys,

there are no guides for pure zombies summoners out there. Can some experienced summoner person tell me why? What are the limitations of zombies and what how could one fix the problems?


I'm a guy who does only uber atziri / shaper runs in a league so i really wonder if zombies can reach this level.
the way to go is at the moment only via poison hits by zombies as far as i can imagine. i mean lvl 20 zombies deal 619–1547 physical damage per hit at lvl 20, that's actually a good basis and you can have many of them.

united in dream and mon'tregul's grasp (or Scourge) sounds good to me, we get the free poison and 100% inc phys dmg (or 70% inc double dipping dmg). thing with grasp is the bonus defensives, but as im not experienced with summoners i don't know how important that is

and how high is the zombie's slam attack damage? as the new threshold jewel will lower the cooldown it might become relevant, or is it just 100% of the basic attack?

minions can gain charges and do crit, could assassin be an option for zombie summoning due to high crit and PC generation?

hmmm

because i dont feel like writing it? making good guides is a massive pain in the testicles as is and most people want videos and shit as proof of concept .. fuck that noise i am not learning editing for a one off. ( well maybe been slow for gaming recently )

i have the sneaking suspicion that if no other changes happen to zombies those threshold jewels will be useless

minions do gain charges sure but not from assassin. they are separate entities and thus the methods you can use to get charges on them are .. less prevalent


define pure? because pure anything sounds like wasted potential. even for a zombie build i would still use spectres.. they would however be spectres that have some sort of gimmiky ability that buffs the zombies

Grasp is truly woeful as an actual item, it used to be ok as it'd help buffer their resists but now it just halves your number of zombies for a small damage increase (that works out as a decrease because you do 50% less by default by having less zombies)

Poison zombies are pretty epic though with united in dream, I usually run poison zombies + bleed spectres on my necro in a league as a reliable farmer and this one was even better as I got to save the support gem on the zombies.

Zombie + empower + bloodlust + melee phys + minion damage + faster attacks is what I used i think, with knitted horrors providing the bleed required for bloodlust.

As to zombie centered builds the issue is very simple, it takes some fantastic gear to sufficiently toughen zombies to the state they won't die and limits your offering use to the block related one not the additional damage you'd rather be using, i've personally not found a work-around for this though you can find shaper viable summoners around but they mostly rely on the spectres i don't think i've seen a successful zombie based summoner clearing the endgame content.

The new treshholds gonna be great for general mapping and easier content (looking forward to using them) but still won't help them with the hardest content, the only thing i've found that helps with that is block, as much block as you can get on all your pets.

But really the reason they aren't used as a core build is because SRS and Animate weapon are just better, more damage, easier to use and control (in the case of srs), some people like myself use them anyway because they enjoy the idea and the playstyle but i'm under no illusions that going animate weapon this season would have been vastly superior.

indeed one can view zombie builds as hipster builds rather than competitive builds . (which is also why one might not see it as worth the effort to write a serious guide for them)

i have made guardian viable zombie builds .. but not shaper viable. the fact of the matter is ggg havent really given summoners the proper tools for dealing with massive quantities of degen so the 3rd stage of shaper with the rediculous aoe spam of vortex is pretty much impossible for zombies .


the only reason why you see spectres and golems doing that content is because spectres can be ranged minions and therefore can atleast be convoed to an area with no vortexes

and golems can be elementalist and be immune to elemental damage

they are exploiting loopholes that zombies as melee simply cant exploit. doing the math i found i would need something like 4000k+ life regen persecond on minions for zombies to properly handle shaper and that is with stacking a shitload of defensive buffs .

Well. Zombies are throwaway minions that can be resummoned all the time, unlike golems and specters. So I wouldn't expect them to be super survivable. But the degens in Shaper fight are punitive indeed. Generosity Purity auras and Necro Aegis can help bump their max resists to respectable levels. And they can leech a really good life/sec amount thanks to their big life pool. But all this generally isn't worth the trouble - unless you really want to do a zombie kill.

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Zed_ wrote:

Well. Zombies are throwaway minions that can be resummoned all the timel.

that is the fundamental issue with the gem . we are no longer at a point where that kind of attribute is desirable.


wasting time needing to resummon your dps only really works on builds designed around rapidly resummoning all the time such as the case with skeletons animate weapon and srs. losing one or even all of those doesnt matter so much because you have the mana and cast speed built in to your build to easily and more importantly quickly replace them.


zombies on the other hand are a replaceable minion.. that you dont actually want to have to replace. they arent like srs or skeletons where replacing them is expected and quick .. you have to have a corpse for them which means desecrate and unlike skeletons or srs you cant summon 4 entities every second . at best you have 1 every second and a half. and if you have no corpses .. well then you are fucked

so if you fight something that wipes your zombies .. resummoning up to 11 of them at 1 per second is just horrible.

it is pretty clear zombies are something you replace between fights .. not mid fight and that flat out is not viable.

This is why the only really good build that use zombies either

A. dont care about them and use them as distractions and supplemental dps that they can afford to do with out

or

B. invest so much into their durability that they are mostly immortal and dont need to worry about recasting.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

zombies on the other hand are a replaceable minion.. that you dont actually want to have to replace. they arent like srs or skeletons where replacing them is expected and quick .. you have to have a corpse for them which means desecrate and unlike skeletons or srs you cant summon 4 entities every second . at best you have 1 every second and a half. and if you have no corpses .. well then you are fucked

I thought you could still do Desecrate Cluster Traps to summon more than enough corpses? Though the Raise Zombie mana cost and cast time is pretty bad to begin with. I agree with you zombies are really not worth the trouble.

@saltychipmunk

sorry most of your arguments rely on comparing zombies to other stuff like SRS.
when you have few (and not 11) very hard hitting zombies it's not necessary to perma re-cast tons of them, also when they're a bit tanky (let's say we don't fight shaper here who destroys them every second)

also corpses is not a problem, as stated by Zed, same mechanics work with detonate dead.

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so far as i have read the bottleneck here is the survivability of the zombies. if i can raise their damage high enough, with right focusing, shouldn't their survivability be minor important?

im thinking of these animate weapon builds, where some guys enter a map, all the weapons are around the boss and almost insta-poison-kill them to death. damage wise: isn't something similar possible with poison zombies?

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at the moment the best alternative to me looks like golems, because golems being immune to elemental damage sounds very very good! maybe a chaos golem poisoner? i think i've seen something like this. some1 got a reference?

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airparisderjesus wrote:

@saltychipmunk

sorry most of your arguments rely on comparing zombies to other stuff like SRS.
when you have few (and not 11) very hard hitting zombies it's not necessary to perma re-cast tons of them, also when they're a bit tanky (let's say we don't fight shaper here who destroys them every second)

well ,then you completely miss read my posts. not about recasting tons of them . it is about recasting at all. the very act of recasting even a hand full of zombies is too cumbersome to be viable in the current meta.

and no we are not ignoring shaper because in point of fact shaper is why they arent viable as a complete build.

you dont just sweep glaring flaws under the rug.

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also corpses is not a problem, as stated by Zed, same mechanics work with detonate dead.

it is less about getting the corpses and more about all the time you must waste with the extra steps. and the extra slots you waste on it.

as i said before between fights sure. piece of cake. trying doing it mid fight. Try replacing say half of your zombies mid tul or mid guardian fight.

for srs builds and skeletons builds you can probably get to full cap in about about 4 seconds and that is with 20 srs and 20+ skeletons.


just 10 zombies recasting from nothing requires 10 corpses which is 2 3 casts of desecrate which i bet you dont have linked to faster casting echo or anything else because seriously who the hell has room for 2 linking desecrate of all things. so that will waste 2 - 4+ seconds of time . then you need to recast the zombies but since zombies are not really built for being recast there is a very very very VERY small chance that your build actually has the mana to properly recast them without waiting in-between casts. you probably will be mana gated so to recast 10 of them it might take you up to 20+ seconds not counting any pauses you must do because your significantly longer cast time allows more chances from the boss to hit you in the face.

so in point of fact the reason why i compare zombies to srs and other builds is to specifically highlight just how terrible they are at replacing losses

losing just 3 zombies is several times more cumbersome than losing 20 srs or 30 skeletons .. that is a problem
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so far as i have read the bottleneck here is the survivability of the zombies. if i can raise their damage high enough, with right focusing, shouldn't their survivability be minor important?

i am beginning to suspect that you have not done guardian+ level of content with a summoner have you?

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im thinking of these animate weapon builds, where some guys enter a map, all the weapons are around the boss and almost insta-poison-kill them to death. damage wise: isn't something similar possible with poison zombies?

that only works because of how baddly balanced all the mechanics in a AW build are . you cant expect 10 - 11 zombies to equal 80 - 250 animate weapons all double dipping with poison added chaos and wither. zombies are pure physical AW are actually almost pure chaos so they implicitly do more damage

just to put this in perspective there were damage figures that put top end poison AW builds around 20 million dps due to how many of them you can stack up.

the best figures i have seen for zombies is 3 million dps

the two are not comparable .. infact in terms of raw dps potential no summoner compares to poison AW.

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at the moment the best alternative to me looks like golems, because golems being immune to elemental damage sounds very very good! maybe a chaos golem poisoner? i think i've seen something like this. some1 got a reference?

also hilariously exploity and i guarantee will be nerfed to the ground . also i believe it only effects elemental golems so stone and chaos golems get the mega shaft.

i thought with

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Can some experienced summoner person tell me why?

it's clear i have no experiences, in fact i've never played a summoner in poe. i have decent knowledge of the game and endgame boss mechanics so i thought one could transfer this knowledge to build a novel thing like "pure zombie summoner"

but before trying i wanted to hear some opinions and i thank you for your effort

sux they die so easy