[2.6] Theorycrafting Beacon of Curruption

Here's the idea in a nutshell. Math will follow.

Cast While Channeling Summon Skeletons with Beacon of Corruption.


How it works:

Level 20 summon skeletons gem gives skeletons 1897 life.
Beacon of Corruption creates a cloud on skeleton death/expiration/resummon that does 10% of max life per second. It also grants 20% increased chaos damage.
All support gems attached to the summon skeletons gem affect the cloud damage.
Once you build up to your maximum number of skeletons (likely no higher than 6-8, since we avoid those +1 skeletons keystones when it makes sense) each time CWC Skeletons replaces 2 skeletons, they each leave a cloud dealing 455.28 dps with just the chaos damage bonus from Beacon of Corruption.

Giving increased minion life with skill tree (around 110% with just a few points) and with items (can get to around another 100% or more) the damage increases to 1365.84 dps.

Increased minion damage and chaos damage and minion life and duration gems/skills all benefit this cloud damage.


The real multiplier is that the clouds last for about 10 seconds. Which means that, since we replace 6 skeletons per second with CWC, that's 60 cloud effects at once. This can be more with increased duration gems/passives. With just minion life increases and beacon of corruption, that's 81950.4 dps.

Throwing this up with a CWC Wither or something seems like it could have some serious potential, especially with how strong chaos damage is these days. The problem comes with clearing because you would need your skeletons to die/resummon before any damage is done.



Has anyone experimented with this?

Clouds don't stack sadly. It's a ground effect like burning ground. So the best option is to use golems and spectres. But golems have limit to their hp. And spectres HP scales from basic HP of mobs, so any mods from map, party won't benefit your DPS. In other words this build struggles against fat mobs/bosses and useless in party(in 6-man party mobs get 300% HP increase I think? other builds usually overkill in solo, so even in party they have enough dps, but your DPS only scales up to 1-man party).

There were 2 other builds with Minion Instability node. One proced it using LowLife and Mirror Arrow. Another proced it by using Umbilicus Immortalis and Coruscating Elixir. First build is decent for general purpose clearing and bossing, second is rather a gimmicky option for killing bosses.

Overall I don't see any build based solely on suiciding minions as a good build when you have other options. I don't know for sure, but maybe it's somewhat viable to use one of these builds for fast bossing with weapon switching.