3.4 Delve League Templar Guardian Dominating Blow & ZOMBROS Summoner

Have you ever found that you are always alone in the world of Wraeclast? Ever desired the loving embrace of someone else? Every wanted to make friends with the map rather than clearing it? Well I have the build for you! Try our patented ZOMBROS, with complementary Friend Making Spell!

UPDATES FOR 3.9!
https://pastebin.com/JziaJ0Hg
Due to the reduction in +X zombies on the tree, we loose a zombie and some other generic minion stats. However with some different pathing we can still achieve 5 zombies with repsectable dps. See pastebin for changes!


Introduction
Hello, welcome to my build guide for my Dominating Blow Guardian for 3.4 Delve League. This guide will cover mechanics, gearing, leveling, and mapping for this character.

Mechanics
Spoiler


Dominating Blow
Spoiler

The core of this build, dominating blow is a very fun skill to use. You can summon up to a maximum of 13 normal, 3 magic, and 1 rare Sentinel of Dominance. Magic and Rare mobs keep any mods on them, excluding nemesis and bloodlines mods (or the equivalent). This can be very powerful when you get some of the rare monster buff auras which can stack with our own.



Tree and Gear
Spoiler

This build take advantage of several gear based and tree based mechanics. The most significant of these mechanics is a keystone called Elemental Equilibrium, along with another keystone called Avatar of Fire. When you hit an enemy while using elemental equilibrium, a buff/debuff will be applied to the enemy. This increases their resistance of the element they were hit with by 25% ad reduces the other 2 elemental resistances by a whopping 50%! In combination with Avatar of Fire (which converts 50% of your physical, cold, and lighting damage to fire damage and prevents you from doing non-fire damage), mean you will always be hitting enemies with only fire damage, leaving the enemies with -50% cold and lighting resistance.
The significance of this effect, is that your minions do not trigger Elemental Equilibrium, leaving the enemies with reduced lighting and cold resistance for our other effect. Finally we use resolute techniques to ensure we always hit with our skills. And since we don't care about our own damage the loss of critical hits doesn't apply.


Bandit
+2 passive points from Eramir by killing all the bandit lords. The other bonuses arent anywhere near as good for us.

Hatred & Grip of the Council
Spoiler
Hatred grants an aura that gives you and allies a percentage of your physical damage as cold damage. Grip of the council grants the same effect, just for your minions at a smaller value. These are half of the reason this build uses elemental equilibrium.



Wrath & Smite
Spoiler
Wrath grants an aura that gives you and allies a large amount of flat lighting damage to spells and attack, though we will only be utilizing the attack portion. Smite grants a short duration buff to your character white has a comparable effect, granting flat lighting damage. Even though Smite converts 50% of your physical damage as lighting, Avatar of Fire prevents you from messing up Elemental Equilibrium.



Montregul's Grasp
Spoiler

Montregul's Grasp is a very powerful unique when used properly, but weak when used incorrectly. In this build we use our zombies to begin the dominating blow chain, and restart it if it breaks down. This weapon turns our zombies into ZOMBROS. With well over 15 thousand life, and a quite absurd amount of damage these guys can easily one shot red tier map packs of monsters. Also the 90% more zombie physical damage multiplies insanely well with Hatred and Grip of the Council. 30% Zombie resistances doesn't hurt either.



Necromantic Aegis
Spoiler

The keystone near the scion start, Necromantic Aegis, causes our equipped shield to apply to our minions instead of us. Our shield of choice is Victario's Charity, giving our minions some life, lighting and chaos resistance, and the main reason for picking this shield. If you didn't already know, charges are insanely powerful on minions, and even witht he small chance of getting those charges, with almost 20 minions you will have near constant uptime of full frenzy and power charges for not just your minions but yourself as well



Victario's Influence
Spoiler

Victario's Influence is very powerful for minion builds that don't care about their own damage. Level 30 generosity grants a massive amount of aura effect, boosting our already powerful auras even further. +1 Socketed gems and aura effect from this chest boost it again, and the 30% reduced reservation of socketed gems means we have enough reduced reservation to be able to reserve Hatred, Wrath, Haste, and a blasphemy curse setup. In this case we picked elemental weakness since we do considerable amounts of 2 types of damage.



Ascendancy
Spoiler

GUARDIAN



Radiant Crusade: Damage damage and more damage.


Unwavering Crusade: Damage, the massively important minion accuracy stat so your minions hit consistently, intimidate on hit for reduced damage to you to the summoner and other minions, and life regeneration when you hit with a minion skill.


Time of Need: Life flask over 1 second ever 5 seconds yes please. Removing ailments and less effect of curses on your is very nice as well.


Harmony of Purpose: On hit charge gen to make some occasional endurance charges, share your infinite frenzy and power charges with party members (not your minions as well unfortunately), and enemies cannot gain charges while near you which is massive as well since charges are very powerful on enemies as well.

Unfortunately this build does not run Herald of Purity, due to how the mechanics of the build work, you the summoner will almost never kill and enemy, or even hit a boss often enough to make the reservation worth it over the curse, so we loose out on most of Radiant Crusade. But while leveling the Herald still works very well.


Pantheon
Spoiler

Major: Lunaris pantheon with the "Avoid projectiles that have chained" augment from capturing the boss of t11 lair map. This is extremely powerful for summoners.

Minor: Personal preference, I chose Gruthkul for 1% phys mitigation for each time you have been hit, and augment it with it's upgrade. I chose this for general defensiveness since the playstyle requires you to be up and active near the front of your horde. Upgrade is gained from capturing the t6 Cemetary Boss




Gem Links
Spoiler

Note: Gem levels here are not what to aim for. They are just the gem levels I had when writing this guide.

Dominating Blow: Any 4l


ZOMBROS: in a +X Minion Gems Helmet


Auras: In Victario's Charity


Shield Charge


Utility 1: You do want a Desecrate either in a utility link or offhand in case your zombies die.


Utility 2: Convocation will summon your minions to your position and grant life regen. Increased duration increases the duration fo the life regen, and the Vaal Summon Skeletons which is amazing for bossing.




My Gear
Spoiler


+3 Minion gems is amazing, also 50% phys as lighting is essentially another hatred for the zombies we socket into the hat. Cost me about 1ex to craft. Bone helmet since 40% generic minion damage is better than a 40% damage enchant on dominating blow or zombies.


Makes our Zombies ZOMBROS. The build will end up with 3 or 4 zombies, depending on whether you get a +1 zombies amulet on an elder base. Also this scepter is very cheap


Already talked about this shield earlier, get it. It is good.


Mini Hatred for Minions. It is relatively cheap a few weeks into league.


Put your auras here and your blasphemy curse setup. Does not need to be a 5 link, a 2 link is what you need for the setup. I just got lucky.


+1 Zombie, Life, Resistence. This build is hungry for dex for Haste, which is a sizable buff to our minions. Bought for 80c


Life, Resistance. Strength is nice for a little extra life. About 60c


Life resistance, Dexterity. Dex for the Same reason as the amulet. About 50c


Life, Resistence. Optimally you would get movement speed on your boots but these are good enough for me. Bought for 25c


Life Resistences. I had been running a leather belt, but I upgraded to a Stygian since I rolled some good Abyssal Jewels. Bought for 70c


Violent Dead threshold jewel for zombies gives generic minion damage, zombie slam damage and slam cooldown bringing the slam cooldown to 1.2 seconds.


Minion stats and life. Blind on hit is good, taunt keep enemies focused on your minions rather than you, and minion damage if you have used a minion skill recently is all the time. Rolled these myself.


Life flask and defensive flasks, along with a quicksilver to go faster.


Leveling
Spoiler


BIS Till you get a +1 zombie amulet. All the stats are good

Wait to get the Avatar of Fire/Elemental Equilibrium combo till you have enough points to get both at the same time and are not killing with Dominating Blow as often.

Don't get Necromantic Aegis till you have and can equip our Victario's Charity Shield

Starting to level pick up smite, summon phatasm on kill, raise zombie and Herald of Purity early on. grab and start leveling various support gems you will be using later on. Get multiples. Other than that feel free to experiment with links.

In act 3 when you get access to dominating blow, feel free to swap over whenever you fee like starting. Swap summon phantasm on kill over to there with a minion damage support and have fun!

Passive tree wise work towards Spiritual Aid, grab Spiritual Command along the way. Then go down to Resolute Technique for your first keystone. Pick up life as you see fit, aim for the Constitution wheel by scion, as wel as skill duration and the minion damage wheel. From there head for Heart and SOul in the witch start and work down to Leadership for some aura effect and reservation to start super-buffing your minions. Pick up the 2 jewel sockets once you get the violent dead jewels. From there fill out the rest of the tree, prioritizing life. If you can maintain 300 life per act you are doing well. Eg at act 5 you have 1500 life.

For your ascendancy choices, start with the 2 crusade node in normal and cruel lab, then pick u p time of need in merciless. The last points from Eternal Lab are not needed, so pick Harmony of Purpose up last.


Gearing Up
Spoiler

Stat Priority:
Life
Resistances
Dexterity and other stats required to level gems and wear gear.

Unique Affixes:
+1 Zombies bumps us up to 4 zombies once we have taken all the additional max zombies on the tree that we planned to take.
+X Minion gems for our zombies is incredibly powerful.
50% Phys as Lighting for Socketed Gems. Comes from the Corrupted Essence of Insanity use on a helmet. Uses this and try to get minion gem and life. Mine doesn't have one because I have enough life elsewhere that I decided to not keep going after spending about an ex in crafting it.


Mapping
Spoiler

Overall very smooth. Shieldcharge, Dom Blow, Smite, Shield Charge, Convocation is the general cycle of button pressing.

Map Mods to Avoid
Both types of reflect, this will shred your minions, leaving you with nothing.
No Regen, we rely solely on regen.

Mods to Be Happy For (aka free quantity/rarity)
Curses dont apply to your minions and you have a swarm of buddies around you to keep monsters off you.

AVOID CRYSTAL ORE. The boss is hard enough without your minions not being able to target the right boss to finish the fight.

This build only started to struggle against rippy t13 maps. Normal t13 maps went just fine and I will be continuing to push further into the atlas.


Path of Building
Spoiler

https://pastebin.com/ZYHpyBAx
For those of you that like this, and for the tree.


Ending
Well I hope you enjoyed this guide. Feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below. The character this guide was built from is named ArmyOfWrath in Delve SC trade league. They are level 88 as of writing this guide and I plan to get to at least 95.

Credits
MMPrisM - Helped refine the endgame gear choices and tree as well as provided a ludicrous amount of maps to test this build against. Also helped with the formatting of this build guide! A True ZOMBRO
Froshambo - Helpful Guy
Octavian0 - Helped refine the inital version of this build and is a wonderful streamer that has kept me hyped in PoE and keeping with this build.

UPDATE 10/28/2018
Swapped to Enfeeble Curse, Make the build more survivable since we have more than enough damage without Elemental Weakness.
Swapped from charges to block for the same reason
Got new Boots and Chest. 5l was not needed.
Also qualitied many of my gems so levels are a bit off atm.
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Last edited by Vulmar1 on Dec 15, 2019, 12:02:25 PM
Last bumped on Oct 15, 2018, 11:17:50 PM
Reserving first spot on good build guide
Reserved
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Finally a Domination Blow build that actually works.
TYVM for your work, I'm shredding throught maps in a very fashionable way.
Got some question please, expecially regarding last 2 ascendancy points.
I am in doubt if choose Bastion of Hope (+50 block every 5s and stun immunity + other defenses) or Harmony of Purpose (charges on hit). I know that with our gear and passives we share charges with minions, but we already do that with power and frenzy, so the question is:
is really worth for just the endurance charges to give away the huge defensive bonus of Bastion of Hope?
F.
Another question if I may.
We are running haste in Victario's Influence, which means that all our minions benefit from it, but we don't.
I don't have yet a 5L Victario's Influence, so I'm asking if we could run this setup:
Victario's Influence 5L: Wrath+Hatred+Blasphemy supp.+Curse+ENLIGHTEN lvl 3
In another 1L wherever we have one (NOT in Victario's): Haste.
If we can get there with the reservation (I've made some maths and we should, but I can be mistaken), us AND our minions could benefit from haste.
TYVM!
F.
Hey sorry it took me a while to reply, life has been busy. Im so glad someone found my guide and enjoyed it.

Ascendancy Points: The last 2 are really up to you, in my opinion, 10% block and spell block with occasional 50% block isn't very good. Overall it is up to you, i haven't done too much testing.

The 5l is completely optional, you only need a 2l for the curse. I've actually swapped to enfeeble as my curse as well since I've been pushing into guardians and lower delves.

If you have been playing the build, im sure you have noticed that (at least my playstyle) im often in front of my minions with shield charge way more than you really want to be as a minion build. But if you don't feel that your aps is fast enough you can make any changes you want :D.

Also ive made some upgrades to the build as well so take a look at my profile if you want. Going to be making some updates to the guide with new gear and choices as well.
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