[3.9] Null's Inclination Aurabot Summoner

So with full buffs enabled with frenzy charges using the hungry loop setup, a normal gemini claw AW deals roughly 430k DPS haha..

230k dps on shaper/guardian so looking at 11.5 mil DPS for 50 AW on a single boss...

I gotta do some work now but I'll play around with a phys version of the build... I tried it in the past and it was horrible on POB, but with the new impale mechanic, the results might be a little better this time around..

I would definitely use champion though if I was going to do a phys impale version. Master of metal + inspirational is way too good considering that impale has no cap and you could potentially grant yourself 100% chance to impale, stack a ton of impales on a single target and result in insane phys gains... Presuming you do something like 100 impales which is totally realistic considering rain of arrows @ 100% + minions attacking, you'd increase minion dmg by 400-800 phys lol, if you include poison on top of that, the damage might actually scale pretty well.... Unfortunately it's very hard to model in POB so I'll have to take an educated guess later when I have some time.

I had a ton of fun with this build both in Delve and Betrayal. I wish I had thought about the Mirror Arrow setup sooner! I spent way too much time carrying/dropping white weapons before doing bosses :P I haven't decided if I'll play this build again on the next league, but I'm pretty confident it can work just fine, even as a league starter.

Herald of Purity and Phantasms made the beginning of maps a bit easier, especially when I got ambushed by the Intervention syndicate. Also, Phantasm support turned Rain of Arrows into a Minion ability, so I could trigger my abyss jewels whenever I attacked. I haven't tried using spectres to deal damage, it sounds quite interesting!

And yeah, Culling Strike also work for your phantasms, but they won't kill enemies because the Speaker's Wreath denies them from doing that.

About hit chance, I didn't felt the need to get accuracy or even RT. Rain of Arrows has so much spread and overlap that I was getting killing blows very often.

I can't see another way to get an Animate Guardian without a hungry loop, and adding yet another unique would make gearing the remaining pieces kinda expensive because it would require near perfect stats to cap resists and have a decent amount of maximum life.

If you need another gem slot, Phase run is a minor convenience that can be dropped. Also, Clarity can be dropped because the banner is already providing us the aura to trigger Commander of Darkness. About War and Dread banner, I recommend the Dread Banner because of its defensive capabilities. AOE Fortify and % less chance to hit (similar to Blind) are great tools, whereas War Banner gives our minions more damage that they don't really need.

Although I love the idea of doing an impale-based version of this build, the very nature of impale limits its maximum possible stacks to 5 (7 if Champion with Master of Metal from impales *you* inflict). Even if we and our minions had 100% chance to impale, every hit dealt would cause 1 stack and consume 1 impale stack from every impale on the target. Even if the target received 1000 impaling hits, the 5th hit would deplete the 1st impale, the 6th hit would deplete the 2nd and so on (assuming the first hit also consumes 1 impale stack). Scaling physical damage on minions is very hard (other than impale, abyss jewels might be the only source), whereas elemental damage can be scaled from abyss jewels, auras, elemental equilibrium, curses and a bunch of support gems. I do think physical can work, but will require a lot of adjustments!

About champion, he's great for this build. My one and only concern about him is the duration nodes we'd lose. Necromancer's AW lasts 104 seconds, while Champion's would last 75 seconds, which is a quite significant difference. With the new master missions, some maps became longer to finish, especially Alva: I always run out of weapons on the 3rd incursion. I haven't tried him, so I can't tell how it feels. However, he provides much more damage than Necro: Taunted enemies take 20% increased damage, Taunted enemies can't evade, so you could drop all those minion accuracy nodes for something else and equip a Tombfist to apply Intimidate for more damage (10% increased damage taken from attacks). If you're trying to pull huge numbers, physical or not, he might be the best option.

I was thinking of dropping clarity but the build I crafted is using 7 auras, and clarity is the only 1 that isn't in the victario's

Good point on the ROH becoming a minion skill, I wasn't aware that is how the support interacted with skills.

I'm actually thinking of cutting hatred, it grants the least damage out of all the auras as it is, and it was already announced that 3.6 would have a nerf to hatred and a buff to anger, so it's even less reason to use it now, this opens the door to running and EE build with fire/lightning.

This allows me to slot in blink arrow, and AG. Seems like it will work out.

Thanks for the input!

Yea as for leveling, I almost always recommend going SRS, skeletons/vaal skeletons, or spectres, the gameplay is just so much smoother.

With your first 2 ascendencies you could either get bone sculpter or soul weaver and respec out later, running 3 flame sentinel spectres with GMP/ele focus/minion dmg by act 4, usually switching to solar guards @ act 8 and farming or buying a tabula at A9 to throw in the extra 2 links (spell echo, controlled destruction).

The only annoying thing about spectres is that you have to desecrate new corpses refresh their level every few zones but otherwise the game play is just throwing decoy and running through everything.

Skeletons are absolutely broken atm in the game, literally eviserates all content to the point that it's just boring/trivial since you just pop vaal summon skeletons + convo and the boss is dead instantly with bone sculpter, so leveling is a breeze but the problem is that since this build isn't going skeles you're going to have to make some wonky tree paths to respec once you hit around 80ish and collect all the gear.

Agony crawler would be an interesting choice, something like RT/quill rain/herald of agony would be interesting, but I prob won't try it this league.

The problem I have with phantasms + purity is that they're not tanky early game, the AI is kinda meh, and phantasms are not that reliable to spawn/don't last long without duration nodes early in the game and so are bad for boss encounters. Just my 2 cents, but I'm the type of person that wants to speed through to maps so I usually take the path of least resistance and the current meta puts spectres/skeletons at the top IMO.

Thanks for the tips! Leveling this build prior to equipping Null's can be pretty much anything, even Storm Brand might work on its current state. I personally prefer to level my characters resembling the build I'm trying to achieve, even if its a bit suboptimal. I haven't tried leveling with skeletons yet. I did spectres a long time ago (before the change that made spectres persist after logout) and I remember them dying constantly. I did try with SRS once and I hated it: standing still summoning a bunch of minions on every monster pack I had to fight was painful.

Also I forgot to address something you asked about poison. I tried it once and it felt kinda awkward. Enemies that die from the poison won't trigger the bow, and poison applied by your minions bypass the Speaker's Wreath effect and kill them too. At the same time, using poison felt like the best solution to clear maps faster: poison an entire pack with Rain of Arrows and run away, your minions will do the rest. In short, if I managed to summon a lot of minions, it felt good. When I lost them or couldn't proc too many of them, it felt bad. I had to spam Rain of Arrows much more often to get procs before the poison killed the target. I think its worth testing it some more, maybe running Herald of Agony instead of Purity.

I decided to play something else on 3.6, but here are some things that got me excited:

Phantasms can now be summoned when hitting unique enemies. Now it can generate minions during boss fights

The new quiver (Maloney's Mechanism) is REALLY interesting! Those 3 sockets gives us a lot of possibilities, like:
- The space we needed to have an Animate Guardian
- Raise Zombies for additional minions
- Another Rain of Arrows setup, along with Curse on Hit to leverage the trigger effect and apply a curse of your choice


The downside for this build is the league mechanic itself. The Soul Nexus is in a separate instance (similar to delve), which means we can never gather our minions and get in there. It is now known yet if each "memory track" will drop loot during or after its finished. Also, we dont know if minions will stay alive if they stray into the "disintegrating blue stuff".

Based on these uncertainties, I think its too risky to league-start this build.

I'm still going to try out the build, and I noticed the instance difference but we will see how it plays.

My intention was to start the league as a blink/mirror arrow summoner with a tabula and lioneye's glare, or spectres, then make the swap later on once I collected my uniques.

I can also slot in SRS instead of AW to try to see if that might help a bit in terms of consistency, prob can drop speaker's wreath at that point.

I have about 5 different variations of this build using different items/minions I spent theory crafting over the past 2 weeks during my free time so there are plenty of options to go if the AW route doesn't work out.

I'm pretty annoyed that the only buff AW got was a mana cost reduction, and there was no supports/improvements for self-casting minions like SRS/AW. I'm pretty sure GGG wants AW/SRS to die in a fire with how resource heavy such builds can be on their servers.

Def noticed the socketed quiver, looks like a god-send but we will see. You're giving up quite a bit for those sockets. The final version I had of the build didn't require the sockets, but I did drop CWDT/IC so the quiver would allow me to add it back in.

Hope you have fun with whatever build you decide to do. I'm still on vacation, heading back into town today so excited to try out the league but I'm also skeptical about it since a lot of people are shitting on the mechanics of synthesis in reddit and these forums.

will this be updated for 3.7?

I might update it later this league. I decided to give it a try again and a lot of things changed.

Summon Phantasms no longer makes Rain of Arrows a minion skill, abyssal jewels nerfed, "passive" melee splash for all minions and a ton of new skill gems to try.

Are you going to update this for 3.7?