[3.28] Herald of Agony (HoA) CI build | Uber Boss Killer | great clear 200m DPS

Intro:

Hi everyone,

I want to show you my Herald of Agony (HoA) Necromancer that carried me through the Mirage league. It's a finnicky minion build but as soon as the demands of the build are met (poison chance, hits per second, resource management) the build performs exceedingly well. It outpaces most minion builds at the same level of investment and later on is only rivalled by ultra-high budget life stacking AG of Smiting and minion builds that use Doryani's Prototype.

Basics:

Herald of Agony is a skill with a base reservation of 25% mana and summons a unique minion, the Agony Crawler, when you build up Virulence by poisoning enemies. The Crawler doesn’t have a duration and instead stays active as long as you have at least 1 Virulence. The reservation of the skill is scaled by linked support gems and needs to be managed via increased reservation efficiency or fixing the reservation via (Foulborn) The Coming Calamity.

The skill has a Maximum of 40 stacks which can be increased via gem quality and the medium cluster notable Pure Agony. Virulence scales the damage of the Agony Crawler by adding physical damage, increasing physical damage dealt and attack speed. With a decent setup it takes 1-2s to ramp up to maximum dps against single enemies but in maps it’s much faster depending on the density of the map.

Virulence has a base duration of 533ms with each successive stack having a slightly shorter duration up to a minimum of 33ms. In order to at least sustain the number of Virulence stacks the build thus has to inflict at least 30 poisons per second but more are needed in order to scale Virulence beyond 30 stacks. To inflict as many poisons per second you need to use a skill that generates a lot of hits while also scaling poison chance. You get 20% chance to poison from the skill which can also be scaled by Herald buff effect from certain sources like Discord Artisan or the Keystone Lone Messenger. The rest has to be acquired from various sources like items, support gems, tattoos or notables.

In terms of skills there are two mainline approaches: Attack based setups with Lancing Steel of Spraying or caster setups with Cyclone, Cast while Channeling and Ball Lightning of Orbiting for example. The attack based setup requires accuracy or Resolute Technique and a certain amount of attack speed to feel decent. The caster setup has a range of issues that are much harder to adress like hits per second, Withered generation and mana recovery. Mana gain on spell hit only exists on shaper influenced rings whereas the corresponding attack modifier is much more common and can easily be introduced with a small cluster jewel that features Improvisor.

Since the Agony Crawler has 40% phys to chaos damage conversion most versions of HoA focus on chaos damage so the build also needs a reliable source of Withered stacks since the minion cannot inflict enough itself. Whereas attack based setups can simply use Withering Touch the caster setup has to rely on awkward solutions like Sins Rebirth, Overwhelming Malice or Ritual of Shadows which forces you to use a specific timeless jewel. The caster setup is overall much harder to put together and even more finnicky to optimize so I’m not recommending it.

You can further increase the number of poisons inflicted by using the Golden Rule. This reflects poison back to you which effectively doubles the number of poisons inflicted as long as you are affected by fewer than 100 poison stacks. Even later on when you quickly reach 100 poison stacks the Golden Rule is still useful because it reduces the amount of time it takes to reach maximum virulence. The jewel also grants 1% chaos resistance per poison which reduces the amount of chaos resistance needed early on.

However even with capped chaos resistance the poison damage eats into your recovery so it’s advisable to find a way to negate the damage completely. The only way to do that in the low budget is by using items with the modifier Unaffected by Poison which negates the damage while still allowing you to get poisoned. This is an exceedingly rare modifier and the simplest way of introducing it is with the Maw of Conquest which also has other useful modifiers like life, es and damage recoup.

The Agony Crawler has two melee and two ranged attacks but mostly uses Tailspike which is a ranged attack with 4 additional Projectiles. The minion can be scaled significantly with additional maximum Virulence and +levels (which scale the bonuses from Virulence) as well as poison chance in the beginning or crit mods later on.

Class/Ascendancy:

You want to play HoA on the Necromancer so you can grab Unnatural Strength, Mindless Aggression, Mistress of Sacrifice and Bone Barrier for increased damage, 100% phys to chaos conversion, utility minion&player survivability, skill effect duration, offerings applying to the player as well as minions leeching life to the player.

You can use the Forbbiden Jewels to allocate either Unnatural Strength, Mistress of Sacrifice or Bone Barrier so you can allocate Bitter Heresy (Lycia's Bloodline) from the medium budget and onwards.

Bitter Heresy converts Consecrated Ground into Profane Ground which applies Chaotic Might to allies and Malediction to enemies in addition to the baseline 100% increased critical strike chance and 10% increased curse effect. It is created via Bottled Faith and by hitting enemies with LSoS due to Zealotry from the Perfect Pain Artist.

Bandits & Pantheon:

Kill all bandits for the passive points.

Use Soul of Lunaris for movement speed, dmg reduction and projectile avoidance as well as Soul of Tukohama for phys dmg reduction and regen while stationary.

Leveling:

The skill gem can be accessed from the beginning of act 2 but I personally don’t recommend leveling with it. The gem heavily scales with levels but requires a lot of dexterity which is difficult to get on the Necromancer early on. It’s also hard to inflict enough poisons per second given the various constraints while leveling. Both attack and spell based approaches struggle with poison chance and hits per second since the aforementioned transfigured gem are not available from the get go. The reservation of the skill is another issue in the beginning and will make it difficult to fit defensive skills like Determination and Tempest Shield.

In general it’s much simpler to level with Absolution since it’s available from the end of act 1 and guarantees a smooth leveling experience. I left the passive tree progression and the skill guide for the campaign in the low budget PoB.

You can transition to HoA once you’ve allocated Resolute Technique and have acquired LSoS, the Golden Rule, Maw of Conquest as well as The Coming Calamity.









Miscellaneous:

Crafting guides for some of the items and additional HoA Necromancer content can be found in the description of the video guide.

Enjoy!