PoB with notes for my SSFHC pure (kuduku) spectres league starter, in case anyone is interested.

This has been one of my favourite league starts ever. I forgot how smooth perm minions are to play, and the Kuduku spectres shock nova is basically screen wide with the 30% minion AoE mastery. There's obviously a ton of improvements and gear upgrades to make, this is just a rough SSF friendly week one target. Spectres are Spirit of Fortune, found from the pink vendor in the league mechanic. You can farm the spectre corpses in a10 desecrated chambers. In-fact, it's easier to do so since you can keep resetting the zone, perfect spectres are much more common in campaign, and the corpse pool at the vendor is less diluted by all the corpses with level restrictions. I used slave drivers for levelling and when I needed to re-farm corpses. They scale with all the same support gems so you don't need to change anything about the build. You can use them from act 5 but you might need to path towards Indomitable Army or Grave Intentions a bit early because their life pool sucks. (you want to be heading right for EB anyway, I left Tireless, Devotion and all the block nodes for last). I have absolutely no idea how much damage this build does since the spectres aren't in PoB yet. Also, they use three different spells (lightning warp, shock nova and spark) which makes it hard to calculate the true dps even once they're in PoB. What I can tell you is that damage felt totally fine running 8-mod vaaled reds for completion and farming essences/expedition in low yellows. I found an early 6-link but otherwise had crap gear (no +gem levels). Non-Uber bosses are probably fine, but visual clarity for bossing is awful since the spectres throw sparks everywhere and flashbang you constantly with screenwide shock novas. You're probably not going to see any boss mechanics under all that. My plan is to keep using this build for mapping and copy Ben's Penance Brand character for bossing. In terms of corpse tiers you want at least one Perfect Spirit of Fortune and the rest can be any tier. All 3 tiers have all the damaging spells, the normal and perfect ones just gain additional Wrath and lucky damage auras. Unwavering Crusade also gives a Wrath aura, however the spectre's one is significantly stronger (even at gem level 20, and it scales from there), so it should overwrite the Guardian one. (The Wrath aura was bugged, but has been hotfixed, before it was likely a dps increase to run three imperfect spectres but this shouldn't be the case now). (I've seen reports that the lucky damage aura is bugged and doesn't apply to spells. If that's the case then you don't need a perfect spectre, just a normal one will do. I'm running a perfect just incase, since even if it's bugged it won't lower your DPS). If you are running a spectre chest or have enough gem levels for a 4th or 5th spectre, it might be a DPS increase to run one of the other spectres for another offensive aura (would need 33% more for 4th or 25% more for 5th) There isn't that many options without scaling minion crit though, and a lot of the other spectres have 200% life or less which will make them much harder to keep alive in juicy content. If I can be fucked running Delve or get lucky with wands/helms/amulets, I'm planning on just running a 4th Spirit of Fortune. I try and play deathless as much as possible, so this build is tailored towards SSFHC. The PoB gear assumes fairly realistic rolls from SSF essence and Rog gearing, which makes the tree points and gear affixes fairly tight if you want to hit 75/75 block, capped suppression, and capped chaos res. If you're playing SC trade and have access to gear with t1 dex rolls, t1 suppression etc then it's way easier and you can probably cut out a bunch of stuff and scale damage instead. You might be able to get away with speccing out of one of the minion defence wheels. I've erred on the side of caution because re-farming the spectre corpses is fucking annoying and I don't want to risk it. I've already lost them twice to bugs. IMPORTANT: Absolutely make sure you unsocket spell echo AND flesh offering AND desecrate before you raise any spectres. If you make a mistake, you're screwed. You technically don't need to unsocket desecrate, but if you leave it in your trigger wand, it will go off when you raise the first spectre and put a bunch of corpses on top of your 2nd and 3rd ones, which increases the risk of a mistake. Remember that if, for example, you raise the wrong corpse 3rd, you just lost 3 spectres, because you need to cycle through again to get rid of the one you just raised. EXTRA IMPORTANT: If you run convocate on left click then it's CRUCIAL that you unsocket at least flesh offering immediately if you accidentally unsummon your spectres. If you take a single step away from your stash/crafting bench without realising, then your convocate will trigger flesh offering and blow up the corpses. On trade league this probably doesn't matter much since Spriits of Fortune are still cheap (and you only need 1 perfect, the imperfect ones are probably 1c). But on SSF it's soul crushing. It only takes probably 30-60 minutes on average to re-farm a set of 3 spectres in a10 desecrated chambers, which doesn't sound too bad, but it's all instance resetting which is probably my least favourite thing in the entire game. If you're wondering why the PoB only has 70% block and 90% suppression, it's because you want to get the rest from primalist charms (you can't socket them in PoB yet). You also definitely want the Onslaught with 5 nearby allies charm, and minion ele resistances (you can run a bone ring instead, but amethyst or vermillion bases are probably more valuable than a single charm affix). That leaves 2 free charm affixes, which you can do pretty much anything you want with. Minion builds have less good options than other builds since a lot of the affixes are based on your own damage or your own hits. There are some good generic options though such as flask effect, flask charges, juggernaut's unstoppable etc. I think the charms also stack so you could get an extra suppression or block roll to help alleviate gear affixes. In SSF most likely you'll just be grabbing whatever you can find. Onslaught is probably priority #1. I've noticed when farming expedition nukes that sometimes it takes a few seconds for the totems to sort of punch through and start cleaning them up. I suspect this is because they're busy casting spark instead of shock nova and the sparks aren't getting through the enemies at the front. If you're farming dense content it might be worth considering pierce support. I haven't experimented with this yet though.