Description

Rather than go pure minions or pure bow, this build seeks to take advantage of what benefits both. (Work in progress)

Suggested Leagues: Standard

Passive Skills

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• Raid the shadow/ranger nodes first, then grab all the mana reduction you can so you can run 3 auras with some mana left over when you can equip Alpha\'s Howl
• Skill duration helps srs, skeletons, animated weapons so it is key to this build. Next take increased life/evasion to up your sirvivability or extra crit chance to increase your DPS

Gems

Chest: Your bread and butter skill. Most of the supports boost both your barrage AND the raging spirits it summons

Barrage
Faster Attacks
Added Chaos Damage
Increased Critical Strikes
Cast On Critical Strike
Summon Raging Spirit

Auras: Auras boost both your attacks and your summoned weapons, raging spirits, zombies, skeletons, and golem

Anger
Haste
Wrath
Enlighten

Gloves/Boots: (Not listed: Summon Ice Golem)

Minion Life
Minion and Totem Elemental Resistance
Raise Zombie

Gloves/Boots: (Not listed: Blink and Mirror Arrow)

Vaal Summon Skeletons
Increased Duration

Null\'s Inclination:

Animate Weapon
Increased Duration
Minion Damage
Flesh Offering
Minion Speed
Summon Skeletons

Bandits

Help Kraityn in Normal Difficulty - Rewards +8% to All Resistances
Help Kraityn in Cruel Difficulty - Rewards +6% to Attack Speed
Kill all the bandits in Merciless Difficulty - Rewards 1 Passive Skill Point

Gear

Recommended Gear
Head: Alpha's Howl
Weapon: Null's Inclination
Quiver: High crit chance quiver
Chest: Queen of the Forest
Gloves: Crafted gloves with 15% minion damage, attack speed, and resist
Rings: -8 mana cost rings with resists/life/crit chance
belt: Resist/life belt
Boots: resist/life boots
Amulet: Ungil's Harmony

Guide

Note that this is a work in progress. I don't consider a build done until I'm running high level maps with it. I wanted a place to keep my thoughts together until then. That and someone found my build interesting enough to warrant posting.

Null's Inclination is an interesting weapon, but poses challenges to take full advantage of it. You need to land the killing blow to cast it's linked minion gems. This means that it only triggers when a fight is winding down anyway so linking SRS to it is underwhelming. It also means a heavy minion focused build will have trouble landing last hits due to the minions taking them all, which also makes such builds underwhelming.

Lets do something else then, a minion archer that seeks out skills and abilities that will boost minions and his arrows. Yay synergy! So...
Boost arrows = good
Boost minions = good
Boost arrows and minions = best!

Boosting arrows and minions:
Auras, no brainer here. Auras boost your bow attacks and your minions. I'm currently running Hatred and Haste. The former for DPS and chill and the latter for DPS and more crits per second to trigger CoC. Eventually I'll like to get Wrath worked in for even more DPS and shock.
Barrage + Cast on Crit + Raging Spirits. Barrage is a good choice for triggering CoC, I sub in split arrow just for the wide coverage in some zones, but I like barrage better for it's machine gun like attacks and single target focus. The real synergy comes in from the fact that all the support gems boosting barrage: faster attacks, improve critical, added chaos damage, apply to the raging spirits as well. Faster attacks and improved critical boost the amount of times CoC triggers for even more synergy! Yay!

I've just reached the point where I can equip Null's Inclination. It's nice to have. Before I would have to manually find and cast animate weapon which became tedious. Now it does so on the fly. Unlike most "Cast on ____" mechanics I can still manually cast animate weapon if it fails to trigger or if I find weapons in a chest. Currently I have summon zombies linked in there as well just because they're squishy at the moment. Hopefully they'll get more survivable later as I grab more passives.

So far the build is fun but inconsistent. I've reached 15 or so summon raging spirits, which is about par for my minion master spamming them on spell echo, but sometimes it hardly triggers at all. The same applies to animate weapons. Either you have like 15 swarming the screen or no weapons are dropping.

Eventually I'd like to have Windripper on my weapon swap along with some increased item rarity/item quality gems linked in to an attack to use to finish off bosses. It's high base crit should trigger CoC like mad as well.

This is still a work in progress. I'll update it as I improve upon it, and let you know how well it holds up at the end game.

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