[3.3 Incursion] High Damage Low Cost Minion WINstability. Build of the Week Submission

Intro:

This build focuses the Minion Instability node, that causes minions to explode when they reach low life, and scaling the damage from this explosion.

I've been able to confidently clear up to early red maps so far, with atlas progression being the bottleneck, not damage.

It's not exactly a fast clearing build but it's a good all rounder. Good damage and defense, and easily able to do almost any map mod you want. Personally I skip temp chains.

It's pretty good for a meme build.

Videos:

Atziri run: a little sketchy to start but the boss fights are fast, I fluffed the Trio, and it still worked out OK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EwWWHmkXc

A T11 promenade with beyond as a basic gameplay example:

https://youtu.be/ot9zgUSHNE8

Build:

We force skellies to reach low life and explode using this item:



It also allows minions to cover enemies in ash, meaning they take more fire damage, and grants your minions Avatar of Fire, which means they only deal fire damage.

We also use Necromantic Aegis to grant the benefits of our shield to the minions, and choose this shield to reduce their resistance to the damage:



We choose this over a second Earendel's because we want the Area of Effect and life to be passed to our minions. The life recovery is a nice defensive bonus for us also.

This is the core set of interactions for the build to work, everything else is about buffing the damage from this explosion as much as possible.

Scaling Damage:

Things like fire damage, elemental damage, spell damage and the like WILL NOT WORK. These buff YOUR spells, and your MINIONS are the ones doing the damage here. Unless something explicitly states "Minions Deal" or "Minions Have" it will not buff minion damage. At least not on the outgoing side.

On the incoming side however, debuffs such as curses will work, because you are lowering enemy resits which means any damage dealt from any source will gain the benefit. To this end we take Dark Pact with Curse on Hit Flammability, and Elemental Weakness supported with Blasphemy. This allows us to significantly strip the enemy resists. We then stack Elemental Equilibrium on top of this, for an additional 50% resit reduction. It is triggered favourably by using an abyss jewel with flat lightning to spells such as this:



As you can see, I socketed mine in a Stygian Vise to save passive tree sockets.

The main skill, Summon Skeletons, is socketed in a Bone Helmet with a +3 to Level of Minion Gems roll and the following links:



Spell Echo is mandatory in my opinion, more on why later.

The explosion's damage is based on a percentage of the skeleton's life, so minion life is an obvious choice.

Minion damage scales the damage from the explosion, and acts as a more multiplier on minion life in this case. If we take the base life as the base damage, scaling this with increased minion life will increase the damage. Scaling minion damage will increase the damage based on the result of the minion life increases, making it kind of a more multiplier.

Adding levels to summon skeletons increases their base life, and scaling this with over-levelled minion life and damage has obvious benefits.

The +3 roll can only occur on item level 86 helms, which are pretty rare but surprisingly cheap. I bought mine for a chaos and alteration spammed it until the +3 roll happened then auged and regalled the resits. I found 2 ex and slammed the item but you can see what happened there.

The absolute best in slot item would be an Elder Bone Helmet, with socketed gems are supported by lvl 20 Minion Life and lvl 20 Minion damage. Elder helms are so good because you can stack additional scaling on top of the minion scaling. I haven't done the math, but I think even with the lost 3 levels, stacking elemental focus in the links would be a huge upgrade in damage, and would still leave a socket open for Increased Area of Effect or similar. These helms aren't cheap though.

Now, why do I think Spell Echo is mandatory? This is to do with how many skeletons we create. Using a From Dust jewel and the Necromancer's Bone Scuplptor ascendancy passive, we raise 4 additional skeletons per cast for a total of 5 with a 1 second cooldown. Using Spell Echo means we spaff out 10 skellies with one press. If we make our skeleton cap 10, we always get our full amount out. Getting additional skeletons on top of this is not really worth it.

We get the following sources of additional skeletons:
2 from Bone Sculptor in Ascendancy
1 from Lord of the Dead passive notable
1 from Puppet Master Passive notable
1 from Gravepact passive notable

Other notes:

My tree basically aims to get Minion Instability, Necromantic Aegis, a decent bunch of life, and hit all the minion life and damage nodes.
I use a Lightning Coil for extra defense, and rares in every other slot.
During the levelling process I rushed Minion Instability and Necromantic Aegis, then took all the Minion Life and Damage nodes I could, along with life nodes.
I used Raise Zombie linked with Summon Phantasm on Kill, then Vaal Summon Skeletons as soon as I could. The levelling process was basically a zoo of minions up until level 45 when I could equip the shield, and had my From Dust jewel.

I also used Added Lightning in with Dark Pact to proc Elemental Equilibrium, up until I found a Stygian Vise.

Path of Building pastebin link:
https://pastebin.com/bBFxZkkk

Character: ExplodeMeBones
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/BadPixel/characters

Tree:

https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAABAMDAAQHBLMGSQj0DeIQlxNsFm8W8xcvGFYabBzcHaoi9CSqJjwo-iqYLOIvnTLRNZI26TpYOuE8LUGHRARFR0WdRnFHhUiOSOdJT0mxS1dMs03jU1JUrlXGVdZfKmTnZrpodGjyakNqrGvbbAttGW-edFV9GH3SgKSCx4MJg1-DzIPbhTKFYI8aj0aTJ5ctmK2a4Juhna6hL6IAplemrKcIqsSsmLB3tAy3PriTvKq86r6Kv5fAZsDjyT3K08y80B_Tj9P718_YvdkL2V7aYtrd34rhiONq6-7sg-yK74jv6_Af8bPyRffX-Tf56PqA-tL-Cv5J_o8=?accountName=BadPixel&characterName=ExplodeMeBones

so basicaly this https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2151982