So a while ago I posted about SRS nukes. Some great ideas came from that, including several people who pointed out the probably-superior version using Qotra's Replicator shield (i.e. SRS only die on hit). There's already been a video about that version though, so I had to think of an alternate angle.

(tl;dr: turned SRS into hand grenades, playstyle is rough and minions still die like crazy. damage is ok but seems not as good as ~12mill theory dps would predict. pob: https://pobb.in/Oavby5QMHDBN, mapping: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801249877, racecourse boss: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801249878)

Hmm... I've been summoning the minions manually. What if I could... not? I tried Spell Totem, but all it really did was extend the casting range (which admittedly was useful when my minions were dying in 0.4 seconds and only moving away negligible amounts, making me a melee build), but... underwhelming. I considered CwC/CoC, but that costs two supports; the triggering skill (probably Cyclone) as well as the triggering support. Ok, what about traps? Hmm... trap support is only one support, and it has no triggered spell damage penalty! Ok, seems legit, let's go on a journey...

Over the last few days I've discovered things about traps;

• The listed trap throwing time (on the wiki, and the PoB built in one) of 0.6s is... wrong? At least it was wrong in my case, and I examined video of trap throwing literally frame by frame to prove that it was taking 0.5 seconds without any trap throw rate and 0.4s with 25% increased trap throw rate... but that's a tangent. (video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801257292, another where I throw 25% inc throw rate and count 24 frames of 60: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801260653). I dunno if I have any other secret trap throw speed modifiers, but as a necromancer it doesn't seem likely... and the only things I had were Trap support and Sunblast.
• I discovered that it takes between 2 and 5 frames between a trap triggering (jumping up from the ground) and spawning a minion, adding up to 0.08s of time to how long an SRS lives (and the number of frames has changed day to day... annoyingly).
• I'm relatively sure that the Cluster Traps support nerfs supported minion damage, even though PoB doesn't think so (but I'm not sure, again hard to say without a training dummy ingame).
• I found out that there's no reductions to trap duration outside the Sunblast unique belt, and that's where the journey goes next.

Sunblast is fun. It's a free Cluster Support with built in fire resistances. Unfortunately... it also means mobs don't trigger traps, instead they wait for a flat period of time (just over 1 second), so basically it turned my SRS into hand grenades with a ~1.6 second timer. I wanted to throw traps constantly without overwriting SRS, so with a trap throw time of 0.49 seconds (even lvl1 trap socketed in Dialla's Malefaction will get 2% inc throw speed) means my SRS have to die that quickly, minus the aforementioned trap trigger time of 0.08s.

So how do we make the SRS wanna die young? Similar to my last post, but with more advanced tech.

• Maligaro's Lens is still great, but it's not enough. I was lucky enough to acquire one with -20 fire res, which makes Infernal Legion do more damage.
• Quality on Infernal Legion; best way to do this is with a Dialla's Malefaction, which also happens to insanely boost SRS levels (currently have achieved lvl31 for nearly 100k SRS life)
• Fortress Covenant; had to take 3 nodes for 60% increased damage to reliably pop 3 SRS before the next traps sprung, spawning the next wave.
• Tavukai; would provide even faster pops, but for my build I really needed life and res and stats, so I dropped it for a normal amulet. If we included it I could drop one or two Fortress Covenant nodes, depending on the chaos res roll, so it's a choice; what's more valuable, the amulet slot or tree points?

I did the build, and here's my expectations vs reality;

• Maligaro's Lens heals me for ~2900every half second or so as my 97k life minions die and heal for 1% of their life, three at a time. That's my entire health pool in less than a second, as long as I'm ABT (Always Be Throwin').
• The Minion Defence node 'Recover 5% of life on minion death' will keep my supporting minions alive, namely zombies, stone golem and eventually an Animate Guardian.
• The damage will be nuts; according to my pob, I can get each SRS to pop for about 2mill, and there'll be 3 in each wave, and at least two waves of traps per second.

...and now reality;

• Maligaro's Lens has a short heal range; I tested it and it's about the range of a Singularity sceptre effect radius. That's... not bad, but especially when you're throwing stuff that takes 1.6 seconds to pop, you've probably run past it already. Also, a lot of mobs can kill you in 0.5 second windows; I may heal for a lot when the SRS die, but it's recovery not regen, so it helps not a bit when porcupines blow up and shred me.
• My minions still died. Funnily enough, giving them all an average of 0 resistances (not +0... literally 0) and literal 60% increased damage taken is not conducive to them having a long and healthy lifestyle. They survived a few maps, but then got into some shenanigans somewhere and just vanished.
• The damage... wasn't as nuts as I'd hoped. Maybe it was the relatively small SRS pops not overlapping (since they die in 0.4s or so, they really don't have much time to move towards a target), maybe it was something else, but I was expecting to chunk big targets in no time, since in theory, hey, it's 12mill dps right?
• The playstyle was... something to adjust to. Throwing literal grenades is rough in a game like poe where you want stuff to die before you run close to it, at least when you're as fragile as I am (I haven't picked up the bloodnotch + immutable combo yet; dang prices). I'm somewhat positive that if I practised, it would become better and I'd learn to deal with it, and if I got the broken stun life recovery combo jewels then I'd survive more too.

Anyway, it has been a real fun experiment, but ultimately I'm not sure if this is a fully viable build right now. If anyone's got ideas to try to improve this, I'd love to hear them.

PoB: https://pobb.in/Oavby5QMHDBN

mapping: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801249877

racecourse boss: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1801249878

And finally, I occasionally stream at twitch.tv/kapectas where you might see this build, or possibly another, in my neverending attempts to either one-tap or freeze all the bosses in every map ever.