The Frigid Matron: 4x Ice Golems, 1.6 mil shaper DPS and Insane Defenses!!

Hello everyone,

My name is WalkwithWolves and I have been playing POE since Essence League. In Delve league some new developments recaptured my interest in making a minion build, namely:

1) New passive skill tree changes for minions
2) the new golem amulet, Primordial Chain
3) The new minion accuracy gloves, command of the Pit.

I always loved minions, and felt now was the time to give them a try. And boy am I glad I did!

I present to you:

The Frigid Matron, an ice golemancer with a massive ES pool and incredible mapping and bossing clearspeed.

Ice golems have much higher damage scaling than flame golems (or any golem for that matter), due to having very high physical damage and the ability to scale elemental damage off of that phys through Grip of the Council gloves and hatred. Additionally the ice golems dont lag you nearly as bad as flame golems, and their movespeed-based cyclone attack makes them even faster at clearing in my opinion!

PROS
☑ Insane Defenses (9K es, INSANELY STRONG temporal chains aura, phase run, blind and taunt from golems)

☑ Incredible Mapping Versatility (very fast, good clearspeed, can run all map mods except phys reflect)

☑ Immune to Chaos DMG! (we are CI)

☑ BIS chestpiece is very cheap! (under 3 exalt for the 6 link!)

☑ Near 1.6 mil combined shaper dps (400k shaper dps per golem!)



☑ Incredible gear scaling

☑ Excellent damage mitigation (CI, as well as basalt / granite flasks with a huge ES pool)

☑ Nearly immortal minions (golems over 50k hp with insane regen)

☑ Only need one skill for bossing and mapping (no gem swaps!)

☑ Very fast movespeed! (219% movespeed with buffs up!)

CONS
1) Expensive to max out (needs lvl 4 enlighten to run all auras, crafting minion speed jewelry isn't the easiest)

2) Very socket starved (no real open slots to put utility items in)

3) Golem AI can be wonky at times

4) Golem jewels could be expensive in leaguestart.

We pick occultist over (insert other golemancer version here) for several main reasons:

1) Better Defense than Necro, Elementalist, or Guardian.

Our Occultist version has an insane EHP total when built correctly, which to me is very important. Occultist gets a lot of flat ES from the ascendency, and on top of that the Occultist massively buffs our Temporal chains curse to the point of making enemy monsters almost unable to move :)

Necro and Elementalist will for sure do more damage, but if you're almost oneshotting everything do we really need more damage?

2) This character significantly outperforms all other Golem ascendencies in terms of mapping.

Ice golems have much higher damage scaling than flame golems, and their aggressive cyclone-based attack lets them zoom through maps at lightspeed.

On top of that the clearspeed itself is better on Occultist, due to the profane bloom explosions. This ascendency node acts like a free Inpulsa explosion, detonating cursed enemies corpses' for 25% of their maximum life as chaos damage to surrounding targets. This helps eliminate porcupines and other on-death monsters effects, but more importantly helps clearspeed significantly.

Lastly the Occultist version is near immortal in maps due to Vile Bastion. We regen around 30% of our total es per second ON TOP of the normal regen we get, meaning if we clear quickly we are damn near immortal.

T11 Primordial Pool (mapping example)
https://youtu.be/PIpKY2v_Dwo

Shaper Run (my PC is quite bad, and by phase 3 it began badly overheating due to playing poe and recording at same time :(. in phase 3 bad lag at end crashed my PC, but first 2 phase was realistic for how build does him under normal conditions)
https://youtu.be/gURlOFK0XRw

Minotaur Run (notice how I use convocation to force the golems to need to cyclone back into Minotaur, this is a good way to fight tougher targets)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2gmqQ9Jgxw&feature=youtu.be

This build stacks energy shield from intelligence and flat es, so these are the two most important general properties for our character. Minion movespeed on jewelry will make a huge difference.

SHIELD




Simply go for the highest es shield you can get, and remember that Int is important as well! 10 Int is 2% maximum es, so grabbing Int can be a good way to try and grab a better shield on a smaller budget.

You can craft a shield like this by using perfect fossils on a titanium spirit shield base to get near 30% quality, and then use dense fossils to try and get a high es shield. This one took me less than 100 fossils or so, thank you GGG for dense fossils :)


BOOTS



High es boots with Int and resistances are ideal, so aim for the highest es and int / res / movespeed your budget allows. If you can't spend as much you can wear Sin Treks, which offer tons of es / int but no resistances.

I also opted to push for a +1 spectre affix (made from a bound fossil) on my boots to allow me to run a third spectre, which in my case is a Heretical Guardian. He gives a proximity shield which blocks incoming projectiles, but is by no means necessary. Feel free to drop it on a budget.

You can craft a boots like this by using perfect fossils on ilvl 86 sorcerer boots to get near 30% quality, and then use dense + bound fossils to try and get high es roll with a +1 spectre affix.

RINGS & AMULET



For rings you'll want to use unset rings as we need the sockets for convocation and portal (if you're lazy like me). Try to craft these with bound fossils to get minion movement speed, these are incredible boosts to clearspeed for our ice golems as it lets them cyclone into packs much faster.

We need a lot of strength and dex in this build, so a Citrine amulet base can be great.

Many people will tell you to use Primordial Chain, but this amulet is not worth it from my testing. We lose out on spectres, so even though we have more golems they also have far less life and do far less damage. It's not worth sacrificing the loss of golem and our life, nor losing the frenzy and power charges / debuffs from animate guardian in my opinion.

BELT



I run with a stygian vise, to take advantage of a minion jewel to give my golems taunt and blind on hit along with a good es roll:



A shaped belt with "increased energy shield recovery rate," is another good option, but is very expensive.

Aside from that aim for high resistances and ES. You can also use shrieking / deafening essence of spite on a belt to force an int roll, which is a very handy way to get some amazing results from crafting belts.

HELMET



A high es, res and int helmet is best in slot. There are plenty of good helmet enchantments you can use as well, namely:

Convocation cooldown
Discipline or Hatred mana reservation
Ice golem damage
Animate Guardian resistance
Temporal Chains curse effect (Best possible enchant, but also very expensive).

You can craft a helmet like this by using perfect fossils on a ilvl 84 hubris circlet base to get near 30% quality, and then use dense fossils to try and get a high es helm. Feel free to also use fossils that have more cold / fire modifiers, to help force a good resist roll. Cold is likely ideal, as it has a chance to also roll "nearby enemies take #% increased cold damage," which will be nice for our golems.

WEAPON


Clayshaper is pretty much required, since it adds another golem (essentially another 400k shaper dps). Look for one with high minion life.

GLOVES


Ironically grip of the council are BIS gloves for the build. I initially thought command of the pit would outperform them, but according to POB they do not.

These gloves give us cold res as well as a lot of extra cold damage for our golems, which is great. Ideally you'll get ones with +1 level of socketed gems, so we can put our blasphemy temp chains in here to make them substantially stronger.


CHEST


There's several options here.

Skin of the loyal will give a ton of damage and good defense. Another option is an Incandescent Heart, which will give us more elemental damage mitigation due to being CI but less damage than our Skin of the loyal. A high es vaal regalia could also be nice, but will be extremely hard to get 4 red 1 blue 1 green colors on.

FLASKS



The flask setup is fairly flexible for our character. I run the above flasks to help give me armor, phys mitigation, bleed immunity, freeze immunity. You can mix and match them however you like, but make sure you get bleed / freeze immunity somewhere!

JEWELS


This build requires one Primordial Might jewel to make our golems aggressive. Without it we'll need to "direct," our golems to attack, which is annoying. This makes them homing rockets that zoom around and kill on their own.

Anima Stone lets us have two additional golems, and is also required. You can make it by selling a primordial might, harmony and eminence to the vendor.

Primordial Harmonies are the final keys to the build, and when you begin to stack them heavily (5-6+) they begin to make our golems both immortal and insanely fast. Each one gives our golem 2% life regen and reduced cooldown of golem skills, meaning they can cyclone and heal faster. Nice!

A single Primordial eminence can also be good, I also use it to get immunity to corrupting blood as an implicit.

https://pastebin.com/BYM9kn2j
This is the skill tree at lvl 94. I would recommend not switching to this build until at least level 85+, as we do really need that many skill points to make the character feel smooth (mostly for jewel slots for the Primordial Harmonies).


You'll notice the phys reduction is set to -10, because our Animate Guardian has a delve helmet that causes nearby enemies to take 10% increased physical damage. The power / frenzy charges are coming from our chieftain spectres, so we'll have those up for bosses!

For Bandits: Kill all.

6L CHEST
MINION DAMAGE - SUMMON ICE GOLEM - MELEE PHYSICAL DAMAGE - MULTISTRIKE - EMPOWER (LEVEL 4) - MAIM

GLOVES (CURSE SETUP)
BLASPHEMY (LVL 4) [/SPAN] - TEMPORAL CHAINS - ENHANCE (LVL 4) - PHASE RUN

BOOTS (SPECTRES AND ANIMATE GUARDIAN)
MINION LIFE SUPPORT - RAISE SPECTRE -BLOOD MAGIC - ANIMATE GUARDIAN

SHIELD (IMMORTAL CALL SETUP)
VAAL DISCIPLINE -IMMORTAL CALL (LVL 5) - CAST WHEN DAMAGE TAKEN (LVL 3)

HELMET (UTILITY SETUP
STORM BURST - CAST WHEN CHANNELING - SPIRIT OFFERING - - DESECRATE

WEAPON
ENLIGHTEN (LVL 4) - GENEROUSITY - HATRED