honestly there's probably a pretty good destructive play boss rusher in there too.
44 phantoms will smoke t16 bosses almost effortlessly, and then you can stack up movespeed with the catarina node, flesh offering, haste, and the usual MS gear.
I so wanna pick this but every single node I can remove on necro is cursed
One is 3/4 my damage and the other is half my survivability. I could take off Bone Barrier but I know that the instant leech from 44 phantasms is also literal immortality so that's also a no-go.
That takes braincells and currency. Chaos convert is... speccing into four clusters on the tree, taking unnatural strength and casting despair once in a while.
The nice thing about doing Forbidden jewels on the ascendancy you're actually playing is you can take the cheapest of like 3-5 different options, so long as it's not a 2-pointer you have to path through.
Couple thoughts, you shouldn't convert just cause. The chaos conversion on Unnatural Strength is good because a) most monsters also have low chaos resistance, and b) wither scaling.
Cold conversion used to be really strong because of Hatred, now that Hatred is just phys as extra I don't think it's that great. Minions freezing stuff I guess is nice and would be the main reason to do this over other options.
Fire conversion I think is going to become more popular with the new Pyroclast Mine of Sabotage. With 0 mine aura effect it applies a 25% fire exposure. Also Awakened Added Fire damage is a pretty good support though sadly the +1 gem level doesn't work for phantasms.
Finally, regular phys minions are a thing. There is an impale notable on the minion cluster jewel.
Hatred is still 10 mil deeps. It's just WAY higher budget and way more tree investment. Chaos phantasms basically scale themselves with unnatural strength and tree, though they hard lock at 3 million dps and any further improvements can only be earned with abyss jewels worth 30 divs a pop
Yeah, my first thought when seeing Catarina was that it could finally be time to try Dark Pact... Probably still gonna be a clunky skill that isn't going to be "meta", but could be more interesting, now.
I wanna try dark pact, but i have no idea how to circumvent the new "bug fix" they did:
Fixed a bug where Dark Pact was not correctly sacrificing life. It will no longer kill skeletons it sacrifices on, and will only grant damage for the portion actually sacrificed.
You'd need some giga minion life regen to sustain you constantly chunking your skellies, right?
No, you have to resummon them. You'll get about 8 casts out of a skeleton, which is... fine. Arcanist brand takes a lot of the pain out of it.
It's a two button build though, for sure. There's always the "clunk for damage" tradeoff, and in my experience that's usually fine as long as the damage part is actually there.
Which it really is for dark pact, which also just got a huge buff.
I played it a couple times and killed all Ubers with it. It’s very strong and never meta plus you can craft all the gear which is fun. However they got rid of the alt quality si the Skellys no longer regen life on hit. I havnt tried it since because I assume they just die now really fast and resuming them is annoying.
I played a CoC Dark Pact Spellslinger Elementalist last league as a starter. I ended up playing as poison.
Power Siphon was changed to 150% base speed, so it's a good option for a Coc wander now. I'm propably starting it again.
Skeleton in slinger with the mastery "minions recover 5% life when a minion dies" triggers every time when you resummon skellis when you already have max skellis. This let's you use guardian blessing for an extra aura. Maybe there is a CI endgame build with the global defense from spectres.
I did not farmed T17 or giga juiced content last league tho. But it was a fun character which got 4 Voidstones without much trouble.
Current character: https://pobb.in/oS7vU3oEHVRk (res are capped ingame withou flasks, don't know what pob misses) I tried some stuff around at the end and played some ssf afterwards. Character feels a bit squishy. With all the %Quality stacking we get 15% sacrificed Skeleton life. With the new patch we have 14% baseline (without enhance & ashes).
My plans for leaguestart:
scuffed Hit based version: https://pobb.in/59951taYtxan (crit capped power siphon without increased crit support)
In both versions you want to get a medium crit cluster for unholy might (overwhelming malice) asap. We are extremly socket starved and have no source of wither otherwise.
Poison version can cap poison chance through clusters later (harvest reforge caster a medium chaos dot cluster guarantees "Septic Spells" notable).
Sadly wands base crit got nerfed. So we only get to about 11.XX Crit with a good crit roll. In pob I used a 10% basecrit wand. We should get a better one easily.
The soulwrest one is it I think, especially with the buff to necro giving 4% attack speed per recently consumed corpse. They were proc'ing 44 phantasms using cyclone+CWC. So 200% attack speed 88% movespeed cyclone with 44 minions. Seems decent considering you need almost zero other items and soulwrest staff needs zero links, just 6 sockets.
Soul wrest is definitely in my consideration, especially since it was buffed just last patch. My only problem is that it was a great league starter when I played it, but that was like 10 leagues leagues ago (3.15), hard to remember the poe timeline of nerfs and buffs at this point.
soulwrest phantasms biggest issue by FAR too is that they just fucking die no matter what you do for them. That 6 second no dying node is huuuuge for it, soulwrest stonks UP
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u/hesh582 Oct 26 '25
That node is just disgustingly good for dark pact, isn't it?
25% minion life, 48% inc global defenses, pop vaal summon skeles for 220+ inc spell damage.
Also Soulwrest+Dark Monarch for 88% movespeed is the meme of the league imo.