Guide: The Ultimate Pure CI Summoner (UP: 13.April 2013)

Introduction:
This guide will feature how to utilize a pure summoner at its best, it will contain step by step information and allow you to farm with ease at a very early lvl and all the way to endgame
Map farming.

Personally I have lvl'ed 4 witches and tested various builds. Freezing Pulse build is static, boring and requires alot of gear to be potent. Hybrid builds are decent but leaves you with a feeling of being incomplete, and finally a pure Summoner which i have concluded is the best one. I am now lvl 85 and faceroll everything in my path.
- It is not gear dependant to be successful and powerful
- It is without question one of the cheapest builds to purchase items for.
- It allows you to gimp your character in order to achieve high "Increased Item Quantity / Item Rarity", so called IIQ / IIR or MF.
- It's relaxing as all you do is curse / Loot items :)
- Best for Solo play (Small parties 1-3) at best. (If played in a 6man party, your purpose changes. You swap out LMP or Chain with your spectres with a culling strike so your personal MF is being utilized to last hit bosses and most rares. Additionally you find caster-like monsters in maps your currently doing for that purpose. Flame sentinels would kill the FPS in a huge party)
- This is a build for farmers, if you wanna see dps numbers beyond this world, this is not the build to go. You would be better of looking for a RF-FP guide or Ranger oriented build. That said, this build is not weak dps wise, but not as potent as other builds in that regard.

The Start-up CI Summoner
- Early game, focus on picking up additional zombie and minion HP / Damage nodes in your Talent tree. Your minions are relatively weak and you will be forced to spam casting raise zombie alot. But not to worry, you will grow strong and once you reach 35-40+ You can start farming zones 5-8 lvls ahead of you and you will lvl up fast!
- Chaos Innoculation should not be picked up before you've reached about 750-1500 ES minimum.
- Not having to worry about HP or Chaos resist on items - removing one of your greatest weaknesses while additionally making gear requirement lower and cheaper to purchase.
- Key Items: Bones of Ullr Silk Slippers, overall IIQ / IIR items.
- You will be running with 3 Spectres. People can argue all they want about having Midnight Bargain. For starters it leaves you incapable of having CI + Additional ES. It makes you alot more vulnerable to chaos dmg which is our greatest weakness and feels very good to become immune against. Gear requirement spikes and so does the price. All in all not worth it, nor needed. 3 Spectres is enough.
1-45 Talent Tree:
1-80 Talent Tree:
Links and Gems: My personal opinion


My CI gear build:


My Richmans 6-8 Auras gear build:


Minion specific details: (Good to know)
- Zombies: They are your wall and serve as protectors to your Spectres, they are fragile but become very HP strong eventually.

- Spectres: First useable at lvl 19 and rewarded through quest early act2 Normal. They start out very weak, but grow stronger the higher lvl your gem becomes.
Spectres are downscaled with zone level. So level 70 Spectre in a level 25 zone will be level 25. However a level 25 Spectre will still be level 25 in a level 50 zone.
The best Monsters to Raise as Spectres are:
1: Flame Sentinel (Resides in Solaris Temple Act3 and endgame Maps). These are the strongest monsters you can raise because they are Ranged, have high sustainability (Energy shield), fires 1-3 projectiles or 3-5 with LMP and additionally the fastest cast speed / attack speed of availible monsters as in delay between casts. They also have high mobility compared to their competitors.
2: Undying Incinerator - Ranged, high dmg output, but very fragile. Found in Crematorium Act 3 and endgame maps.
3: Voidbearer - Semi range / melee, more durable than incinerators and also have very high dmg output. Found in Docks Act3 or endgame maps
4: Tentacle Miscreation - Decent dmg, very fragile. Slightly unrelyable. Located in Lunaris Temple towards Piety and endgame maps.

- Skeletons: Optional, but only used Linked with a Spell Totem! Fragile, serve as additional wall in extreme situations.

Minions Weaknesses:
- Extreme AoE (Facing Incinerators / Cinder Elementals, can potentially destroy your entire army)
- Elemental dmg in general compared to physical dmg.
- Limited intelligence - They get stuck alot in Dungeon/Tunnel like areas, while additionally dont understand that "Fire below ur feet = Bad" often forcing you to pop a Quicksilver flask charge and run away to reset their position.


Very lategame richmans build:


Feel free to comment about the build below if you have any questions related to the guide or contact me ingame: Altariou - GL HF. :)

One thing am curious about. "life regen applies to energy shield instead of life"

with 1% life regen for ex

does this mean 1% of 1hp, if u have CI

or

1% of your max es

if its the first that would be terrible 1% of 1 is .01 life per sec, if its the latter than that is damn op since es can easily reach 9k

also "defenses from equiped shield"

What does that mean? is that just pertaining to armor/es/resists?

It considers your Max ES as your max life. As such 1% of 3000 ES will result in a 30 flat ES per second recovery.

With this build you can also make a few variations to get more %based life regen and get in total 200-300 ES regen per sec. Its not hard, although i've made a few changes lately because it suited me personally to get 1 additional aura up.

Defences from equipped shield refers to "Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield" in our case only Energy shield is affected. So a shield with 300 ES and a node that gives 20% Defences from equipped shield will make your shield have a hidden ES of 360.

Regardless, Rathpith Globe is without question the strongest shield for any witch. Spellblock outweight any additional ES by far. I have 38% block atm and 27% spell block. And if you feel vulnerable you can always get more as it is availible.

Just curious, why LMP over GMP?

I'm currently rolling with GMP and wondering what the difference would be.

1. Its well known that GMP has a wider spread than LMP.
2. The spectres used 90% of the time is Flame Sentinels. You frankly dont need more projectiles. They fire 3-5 with their passive "Augmented projectiles" combined with LMP
3. The Damage difference of GMP and LMP is also 20%!

Damn that's so op... are you sure it works that way? 9k es is way easier to get than 9k life.

Lets say we combine 1.5% from templar talent with 1.5% from vitality and he 2 golem blood nodes = 6%

6% of 9k = 540 es per sec, throw in ghost reaver for es stealing and u got some broken ass es regen. Combine with aegis aurora replenish es of 4% of armor whenever u block


Also ive done a lot of testing with support gems on spectre. Chain is byfar the best for flame senti

"

mattc3303 написал:

Damn that's so op... are you sure it works that way? 9k es is way easier to get than 9k life.

Lets say we combine 1.5% from templar talent with 1.5% from vitality and he 2 golem blood nodes = 6%

6% of 9k = 540 es per sec, throw in ghost reaver for es stealing and u got some broken ass es regen. Combine with aegis aurora replenish es of 4% of armor whenever u block


Also ive done a lot of testing with support gems on spectre. Chain is byfar the best for flame senti

Yes im positive, 100%.
As for Chain, yes its strong, but personally i prefer LMP and Faster projectiles above it. Quite frankly I cannot picture replacing em. Could ofcourse replace IIR or IIQ but that would defeat the purpose of farming.


Additionally a build that features what you're suggesting 9000+ ES, Ghost reaver, Aegis aurora will be hard because:
1: 9000 ES is achieveable obviously, however it will be hard to get if you want to optimalize from IIQ / IIR. I have 7200 ES atm and intentionally scrapped a few items that would bring me higher.
2. Ghost reaver means that you would have to deal dmg - my build is oriented around summons doing the dmg. I have zero dmg and zero life steal, and 5% lifesteal of any dmg I do would still be very little.
3. Aegis aurora, pointless because you will not have alot of Armour with a high ES build :D

actually i wasn't referring to your build in particular more about the concept of es regen.

just replace lmp for chain and faster proj for faster casting. You'll notice a huge jump in dps. (trust me on this your sentinels will shoot twice as fast and every 3 fireballs will fork into 6 balls that will each chain into 12 projectiles. those projectiles can bounce between the same targets multiple times. now multiply that by 3 sentinels total. There will be hundreds of projectiles a second I think i can get my spectres to shoot like 3-5 times a second with faster cast and haste

armor can be derived from granite flasks and molten shell.

Musings

If you go over the top you get this. It uses the exact same number of points, however it lets you get things in a different order. For me at least it also changes perception of the middle minion nodes, they are now on a leaf node of the tree and require 3 stat nodes to get close to them.

You can do something similar by taking the node next to Doom Cast. This gives a possible intermediary 87 point build.


I'd personally get rid of the 1%/15% shield block/defenses node.

Consider a 6L queens decree if u want to be op before getting crazy rich
It takes less than 100 fusing to craft it if ilvl 66+

For sentinels i am using GMP + conc effect
But next i will switch to culling strike + conc effect since I am missing some loot when the mobs die by zombies or by burning
And then i will try culling + chain but need to re colour my chest