3.9 Autocast skeletons - a small addition to other guides

Yo, just wanted to share something Ive been playing around with recently and may be of interest to some of the many necros not using skeletons as their main skill.

Basically you take a shaped weapon with 2-3 socket stats on it with an open suffix, add the trigger on cast stat + skeles and 2 more gems. This gives you a 5-6 link skeleton casted every ~4 seconds as u do stuff.

Example weapon:


There are two caveats:
- 4 second CD on the trigger: skeletons have 20 second CD, so you should stay maxed out.
- Skeletons lag behind: if you run through the map at speed you will mostly only have 4-8 of them. During any longer encounter where you actually need the damage you will have them maxed out though.

(Just cycloning away doesnt activate it, but normally you also use movement skills, convocation, whatever.)

So this is great because:
- its cheap additional firepower. You can pick up these weapons for a few C right now
- it requires no additional action, just different gear
- if you are using a strength stacking or aura heavy build, these new minions will still hit terribly hard, even if only 5l
- this allows for high potential with cheap gear. no need for 20 ex crafted weapon
- adds optional 5-6 link vaal skeletons to your repertoire

Aye, you loose the 6 link in ur hand, but you can still use 6 link spectres or zombies in ur armour. You can make up for most lost stats with ur offhand, and the rest of the losses shouold be more than made up for by 10 5-6 link skeles. If you are using a 6l crafted weapon, this may be subpar for u ofc.

I havent minmaxed anything, in fact my build right now is a mess because I changed so many things. Yet with 5 link zombies and 5l skeles I can do T16 maps and maxed out metamorphs much faster than I could with just 6 link zombies.

So whether this is really endgame worthy or just useful/fun for budget players still needs testing.

How to find these weapons:
1. Open pathofexile.com trade feature
2. Add count field with all the potential gems u could want (search for "are supported by"). Count to 2 or 3 depending on what ur after.
3. Add an "and" field with empty suffix. You could also look for crafter suffixes and try around annuling stuff off, but thats a little bit more complex.

Potentially real good weapon here:


Finding one with three really good gems will be challenging. So while above weapon will be a 6L, its sixth link (chance to bleed) is pretty subpar. The +1 level is a lot of damage though.

As for the three links: typically skeleton, empower and feeding frenzy will be the best choice, but only putting this here in case u r clueless.

For offhand the most important stats are minion movement speed, minion attack speed and minion damage. Once again, there may be better options, just the base idea inc ase you dont know. Shields will be suboptimal.

You could also use this to put out some 6l golems or to keep making zombies too.

Happy hunting

For reference, I am mostly following this build myself: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2642810