Help for Minion Damage Calc

I'm pretty new to the nitty-gritty of PoE's values. I'm a long time casual player and now starting to dive in to some specifics of a summoner build.

Right now I'm trying to understand what loot I've found is going to help upping the dmg on my minions (as of now Zombies and SRS). So I'm swapping between two wands and comparing the dps in the character screen...and get confused.

1.)
So for some reason my zombies show almost double the dps with this wand...


...compared to tis...


Is this due to the "to cold damage of spells"? Does spell dmg add to the dmg of zombies? If so, how does "+6-10 damage to spells" translate to a dmg increase from 10-30 to 20-50?

2.)
Also, I've just allocated a "+ minion dmg" node on the passive tree while having the character screen open to see the dmg jump for my zombies, but nothing happened. Is there a logical reason +% minion dmg doesn't show in the character screen?

EDIT:
3.)
Swapping in and out minion damage gems doesn't affect the dps value in the character screen neither. Does this somehow makes sense?

Appreciate your insights - cheers!

minion skills have two components

the spell portion and the minion itself


the tool tip only reflects the spell portion and the spell portion is simply the act of summoning the minion.

the 6-10 cold is being added to this cast and then is being scaled by the 40% spell damage on that wand + any other sources of spell damage.

but since the act of casting a minion spell does NO damage this can be seen as a pointless waste

there are no tool tips for the actual minions



the second portion of the skill is the resulting minion. This minion is not a spell it is an entity separate from the cast and therefore separate from you the player and most of the traditional scalers you would use.

minion skill are only scaled by gems linked to them and passive stats / item affixes which explicitly say "minion" or "minions"

So far this makes sense and I appreciate your detailed answer!

Since you're saying there is no actual minion tooltip, is the damage indicator of the zombie spell in the character screen the damage it would deal if it were a damaging spell? So it's basically useless?

Use path of building tool to calculate minion stats - and take those stats with a grain of salt.

PoB is a very very good tool, but its not always correct. Still way better than the ingame tooltip :D


As a general guideline: If a node on the passive tree or a skillgem or anything else in the game doesnt say "Minion", it doesnt work for minions. Thats true for like 99% of all cases.

Both of your wands do not effect your zombies dmg.
If you were using SRS (Raging Spirits) as well and you would craft a "+1 lvl to socketed fire gems", then SRS would get a free bonus lvl and a dmg boost, because the skillgem has the "fire" tag.

If you want to boost your Zombies that way, you have to craft a "+1 minion" helmet.

Its pretty easy to do. Just pick up a white or blue 4 linked helmet with the right socket colors and follow the instructions in the spoiler


Feel free to ask, if you got questions :)

Good luck exile

Thank you for your help!!

I've peeked into PoB before for a specific summoner build, but it's a huge scary ass wall of text '^^

Kind of, yes.

Try to import your build using the tool and than change your tree, gear, skillgems and to compare dmg numbers. As I said, you cant trust those numbers and take them for granted.
But its still a very good and useful indicator of what could be useful.