Falling Zombies Arcanist Brand Saboteur

I've received many questions about how this build does what it does. First: This build has been developed by myself and a few others over the past few leagues since falling zombies were introduced. Here are some links of other people's work on this build: https://youtu.be/NLU1TBdc9dw https://youtu.be/ohTcfGZB1QI https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3460389 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MamkI1uDRrA Most of the previous iterations of the build were simply theories. Zizaran himself even teased running this as a leaguestarter back when Falling Zombies was released, but there wasn't much of the tech needed to make it survivable. I ran an EB variant of this build when it was first released, but it was so resource hungry and getting to 100% reduced cost of skills was extremely difficult to do. "How are you running Eldritch Battery and still having mana problems?" This changed in 3.26 with some of the changes to betrayal crafting. This version of the build is how to build it from leaguestart (if you're feeling brave enough) However, that can be tricky as mana costs mentioned later won't easily get down to 0 until maps if in SSF or leagestarting. DPS on the build is a little janky to calculate in PoB... from what I've seen running it, it's about 10mil DPS (plus or minus a few million). Some things to note with this build: Damage Scaling: Spell and skill damage do nothing for you. All of your damage comes from minion damage. Because of this, you suffer none of the downsides from Arcanist brand, triggerbots, etc... The other portion of your damage scaling comes from cooldown rates on your brand recall. Because of this, Honourhome is the best in socket for your helmet. Even the base Honourhome (+2 to socketed gems), which you can generally get a max roll for a couple chaos. Keep in mind, a +4 Honourhome (+2 Corrupted implicit from Glimpse of Chaos, corrupted into Honourhome at a crazy low chance) will cost you 100-200div due to how you get the item. Honestly, it's not really worth the price, but if you really want to push the build to its limits, that's one of the ways to do it. Changing socket colors on a corrupted item is super easy compared to this cost as well, so don't worry too much about socket colors Combine Honourhome with Enhance and Empower supports (base gems are sufficient for nearly everything) and you can boost the levels and quality of Automation and Brand Recall to absurd levels. Ashes of the Stars is also vital for gem level and quality scaling. Use Impale. This is a full phys build with high damage per hit (est 100k) and a LOT of hits per second (28+). Also, Attack speed doesn't matter for these zombies. They *are* affected by action speed. You won't need action speed unless you find a way to consistently bottleneck yourself at the active minion limit, which I haven't been able to do yet. Pulverise Support will give you enough area to shotgun single targets and clear large groups at the same time. Another part of the build that helps clear groups is the explosion from Mon'tregul's Grasp. Resource Cost: This build is EXTREMELY mana hungry. Some people have used mines instead of Arcanist Brand, but that requires a lot more upkeep than I prefer, and it still requires a lot of mana, even if it's in the form of reservation. To overcome mana usage issues, you simply need to reduce all mana costs to 0. Problem solved. This is MUCH easier and cheaper to do than ever before. Militant Faith with reduced mana cost is vital for this. The other modifiers on it are fairly negligible. I like Power of Purpose from Avarius as we're not using mana on anything, so I can convert it into armour. Honourhome also comes with a neat 10-20% reduced mana cost of skills. Max rolls on this are crazy easy to get as this is a very common item normally Fairly early, once you have access to betrayal crafting options (these come from maps), you will want to put the "Non-Channeling Skills have -# to Total Mana Cost" prefix onto your ring(s). This build will be quite mana hungry until you get that crafting available. Trigger Layers: Because this uses triggerbots, every layer of triggers before the zombies fall doubles the number of zombies. I was EASILY hitting the active minion cap of 100 zombies with this. 1st layer: Arcanist Brand triggers 7x Raise Zombie of Falling 2x each (14) 2nd layer: Brand Recall triggers Arcanist Brand 2x (28) 3rd layer: Automation triggers Brand Recall 2x (allegedly 56... but I have seen plenty of evidence that it only triggers once because of the cooldown on Brand Recall) This gets you a number at either 28 or 56 zombies per .75 seconds Either way, Runegrafts sort of get around this: Runegraft of Time has 20% chance to NOT use a cooldown use. If you're lucky enough, you'll regularly hit 100+ zombies falling within a 1 second period of time. I've noticed the triggers consistently correlate to an average of about 40 zombies per second. Leveling: Any method to level the build works, but if you're going to start this like I do, you'll want to focus on getting skill costs down first. Any other scaling can come later. The base damage from levels on Raise Zombie of Falling is big enough that you'll be hitting sufficiently hard for any pre-maps content. Militant Faith and Honourhome are your required uniques pre-maps. The MF will be the most expensive early cost for this, and you'll likely spend a handful of chaos for the minimum requirements. Nodes to reach first: Dreamer (including the Mana Mastery node for 10% reduced mana costs), Tireless, and Righteous Decree. Item Costs: The basics of this build only cost a few chaos to a couple div. (you'll generally get to t15-16 maps only spending a couple div at most). When you get into late game scaling, you'll want to grab items like: Ynda's Stand (10-40div), Ashes of the Stars (1-20div), Impossible Escape (a few div as well for the right one), to get block nodes on the bottom of the tree. Blood Magic IE is ideal, but Versatile Combatant is much less expensive and works effectively as well. You can also just annoint As the Mountain for a much lower cost.