So we all know good old SRS. You have 20 of the little buggers, they swarm around headbanging things and living out their short blissful lives. Sometimes they even go out with a bang, and the sound of 20 skulls exploding multiple times a second is the good old SRS Popcorn.

But what if the explosions were bigger? MUCH bigger?

(tl;dr: 3.8 million current damage per SRS pop, could get up to 22mill under absurd conditions; pob: https://pobb.in/cbfIzDyAq6eS, clips: mapping: https://clips.twitch.tv/CreativeCarefulIguanaOneHand-4_1QBnh-2MpoanV-, harvest: https://streamable.com/710ej3 and drox: https://streamable.com/yrmajp)

Well, Crucible trees have this beauty of a mod:

Maximum number of Summoned Raging Spirits is 3

Maximum number of Summoned Phantasms is 3

Summoned Raging Spirits have Diamond Shrine and Massive Shrine Buffs

Summoned Phantasms have Diamond Shrine and Massive Shrine Buffs

I saw this during spoilers and knew I'd have to try it, since SRS was going to be my leaguestarter. But first, I had to learn about the explosions.

• Minion Instability base functionality

It scales only two ways: minion life, and minion damage mods. (There is a third way, which is added minion damage, but considering that flat MI damage is on the order of thousands, adding anything less than several hundred is irrelevant).

It also has 0% base crit. This seems like it'll be a problem.

• Diamond and Massive Shrine functionality

Massive shrine boosts life and area each by 40%. Considering MI scales off life, this is very useful. Considering I want to make the SRS pops as large as possible, this is doubly useful.

Diamond shrine is simple; it says 'All hits are critical strikes'. Not increased crit, just straight up all crits. This does in fact solve the 'MI base crit chance is 0%' problem.

Brilliant. So now with this one crucible node, I'll be getting SRS explosions that can critically strike. This is very imporant since it adds another scaling method for damage; minion critical strike multiplier.

• Scaling

So here are the main ways I've found to scale damage with SRS nukes:

• Minion life - relatively easy.

• Minion damage - also relatively easy.

• Minion critical multiplier - hard.

• SRS cast rate and lifetime - hard. This one specifically is tricky. With an SRS limit of 3, it's easy to run into the 'cast replace' problem; it's easy to see if your SRS don't lose life over time but you have the MI node. If you keep casting SRS, you'll always have 3, and new ones will replace old ones, but replace != die. So in this case, we need the SRS to die in the time it takes for us to summon 3 SRS total.

• Curses/increased damage taken on target/auras - easy ish.

Minion life

Plenty of sources for this;

• Levels - this scales so well with levels. You'd want +2 on the wand, +1 on the shield, and as much as you can get on the body. I think the best you could possibly get is an Infernal Mantle, which gives +3 to fire gems, with two +2 corruption implicits, for a total of +7. That one piece alone would almost double the explosion's damage. (It also however has a massive downside of 100% increased spell damage taken at low mana, i.e. always, and has no life...). You could also get +2 on helmet, but Mark of the Red Covenant is BiS for this, with 240% increased SRS damage and giving them fire splash for free, helping a bit with the clear.

• Tree nodes - the normal tree nodes, but also an Elegant Hubris jewel which has the Axiom Warden notable, giving each minion 80% increased life. I managed to get one with 4 of those. As a bonus, the jewel also has the Slum Lord notable, giving 80% increased minion damage; this isn't as effective as Axiom Warden though. Also there's a minion defence mastery, as well as Bone Barrier from Necromancer ascendancy.

• Weapon - both shield and wand can roll minion life. And crucible trees can have minion life on them too, at the cost of minion life recovery, which is actually a double-good stat; that means if the SRS have any life regen (e.g. if I'm running Vitality) they will have less of it, therefore die faster.

• Skill gem - Increased Minion Life support.

Minion damage

• Tree nodes - normal sources of increased minion damage, as well as the Slum Lord notable from the timeless jewel.

• Weapon - same as for life scaling really, it's easy to roll inc minion damage on these, and there's tons of depth 1 crucible tree nodes that give some value of %inc minion damage.

• Skill gem - not the Minion Damage Support directly, but related ones like fire penetration support.

Minion crit strike multi

• Tree nodes - there are 3 pathetically small nodes for minion crit multi on the tree; 20% each. I don't even bother taking them in my current build. That's it. There's a cluster notable with even less. What there is, however, is a Grand Spectrum jewel that gives 10% per jewel, so I have three of those for 90% total.

• Skill gem - Increased Critical Damage support is huge.

• Weapon - it's possible to roll minion crit multi on minion bases, and again Crucible trees come in clutch; there's a node that lowers minion crit chance in exchange for huge multi values. I have 100% multi on my wand tree, and if you got a two-hander you'd be able to get 160%.

• Severed in Sleep - this technically could give a bunch of multi on withered targets, but it's also not great for this build. It doesn't give gem levels, and for this SRS variant the Envy aura does nothing.

Cast speed/SRS death rate

This is the hard part. You want the SRS to die ASAP so you can hold down right click and spam cast them endlessly, causing an explosion each time. If you give your minions as little resistances as possible, they'll die faster. So we don't take Commander of Darkness on the Necro ascendancy tree, and we're not allowed to use Bone Rings (unless they don't have the +res implicit). Even then, to make them die ASAP, I ended up using both the Tavukai amulet (20% of max life as chaos per second) and Infernal Legion support (40% of max life as fire damage per second). My SRS have 40% fire res and 7% chaos res, so they die in 0.40 seconds. My cast time is 0.42s, so I can happily spam them and get an explosion every time.

To achieve this I actually had to avoid taking cast speed on the tree and on gear; I got a low-rolled Anathema ring for this purpose. If I got a Fortress Covenant I'd be able to get more cast speed and hence increase DPS, but they're expensive and I'm not sure where to fit one on my tree. There are also Crucible tree nodes that increase a minion's damage taken in exchange for attack/cast speed, which would be ideal.

Curses/increased damage taken/auras

The usual thing here; maximise curses on the enemy. Here I'm using 3 (but effectively 4): Flammability, Punishment (for extra damage taken on low life) and Elemental Weakness. And Signal Prey on top of that; in terms of buttons to press it acts like a curse. I have 2/4 of these linked to Arcanist Brand for now. This is why I take the Anathema ring, to bring up my curse limit. Oh and skitterbots! Good old shock effect.

• Results

Ok, enough theory; here's my PoB: https://pobb.in/cbfIzDyAq6eS. The crit stuff is hard-coded into the Config tab to make it work.

And here's some clips of me taking it for a spin in a t16 Harvest garden (it basically nukes the whole plot in one go) and a t16 Drox kill:

https://streamable.com/710ej3 - Harvest

https://streamable.com/yrmajp - Drox

https://clips.twitch.tv/CreativeCarefulIguanaOneHand-4_1QBnh-2MpoanV- - general mapping clip

At current PoB calculations, each minion pops for a massive 3.8 million damage (and at a cast time of 0.42s, that's 9mill DPS). And that's with SRS only at effective level 22. If I gave up all pretenses of sanity (and defence), and made the following changes;

• swapped shield for another wand with more damage mods
• had +2 level to gems on both wands
• somehow found and wore a +7 gem level Infernal Mantle
• removed Infernal Legion support and replaced it with Awakened Elemental Focus support

...then I'd reach 22 million damage on the pops. Or 15.2mill per pop (36mill DPS) if I wanted to keep the Infernal Legion and spam-cast them. But I'd also die as soon as a mob sneezed in my direction.

Of course, there's still lots for me to do. A non-exhaustive list;

• Defenses; I have... just enough EHP to do t16s without dying too often, but have a massive chaos res hole.
• Abyss jewels and Darkness Enthroned; the belt is Replica Siegebreaker which helps with clear, but a DE with high effect and minion jewels that have '% increased damage if used a minion skill recently' and minion life would actually make a meaningful increase
• Awakened jewels
• Fortress Covenant for faster dying and therefore faster casting
• Other minions; I'm just using zombies right now to make the target ignited. However they die often and are a bit annoying to resummon constantly. I'm also not sure which spectres or animate guardian setup might be good for this.
• Clear speed; I could use Ignite Proliferation; this does do a good job at igniting given the massive hits. But it takes away from the Big Number. I'd prefer larger AoE, but minion AoE is extremely difficult; I have Plaguebringer to get 30% increased if I've consumed a corpse recently, and 40% from Massive Shrine, and another 30% from a Minion Offence mastery, but there are very few other sources. There is a Crucible tree node...

I'm also by no means a build expert; this is why I've not called this a build guide, merely an experiment. I'd really like to hear from you if there's anything I've missed or could do better (especially defense wise, for spectres or animate guardian!)

This is also, finally, a pretty fun build. It's basically 'sentient Fireball', where you send a glowing thing into a pack, and 1.2 seconds later it POPs and wow, no more pack. It's even more satisfying against bosses, where most of them die within a few seconds, taking only two/three skull pops to die.

Finally, I do stream occasionally and am currently running this build, so if you want to see it in action, I'm at twitch.tv/kapectas.