Showcasing Moon Dancer spectre in T17 - Back to Basics

https://pobb.in/-aTZyyAgUKFJ (no molten shell on)

No clue about the dps (can't really rely on a correct assumption for the overlaps and the weird AI of Moon Dancer)... (in the video rares have +5 extra modifier thanks to the map mods so it can make them a bit tanky) I cleared a 282% more life Ziggurath earlier not particularly fast but enough for me! Did a couple ubers with it, Shaper and Cortex for now (need a bit of frags for the other ones)

Preface

This is not a cheap build and probably unoptimised (I make my own builds and I'm not quite confident in making Necromancer's one, also first time using Aegis). I mainly made this post to show that Moon Dancer can still be used in end game and show a different way to scale damage on minions (or anything really).

I use mageblood and multiple expensive pieces of gear (don't really know the full price of it all I built it over time while farming on another character). It doesn't need mageblood to work, a bit before I used an hunter stygian with % life and still managed good defense with an impossible escape to Imbalanced Guard (3% max res and some armour). But if you want to beat T17 without too much problem sadly mageblood helps tremendously.

The main gist

I tried to find some permanent spectres able to survive T17 and ubers other than the obvious crushclaw/deadly tarantula. I also decided to go in a different way concerning damage scaling of the spectres, this is why I mixed minion level and pyroclastic mines level into the build.

• Minion level to make sure they would be able to survive with some other help (fleshcrafter chaos res and some points in the tree mainly + necromancer ascendancy) with current gear our raise spectre reach lvl 28 (nothing crazy but it's what I could spare while scaling the damage)
• Pyroclastic mines of sabotage + stacking aura effect to give heavy flat fire to every hits (lvl 31 reaching 3k3-5k flat added fire).

Moon Dancer fits perfectly into that idea as they provide good clear and great single target, probably not even needed to switch Faster Proj to Slower Proj (as I have to cast convocation on cooldown to trigger "minion damage if recently cast a minion skill" they lose a bit of damage by teleporting on me if I don't stand right on top of the boss). One of the rare spectres still able to shotgun. They also can take a beating, they seem to synergize greatly with Fleshcrafter (innate faster ES recharge delay according to poedb). But if you want to play with Moon Dancer you need a great pc... I can fall to 50 fps sometimes and that's with a 4090.

More on the Moon Dancer

These spectres are from Arohongui's allflame, they use a spell that trigger (spell echo doesn't work) non stop sending projectile everywhere. Their base damage is decent to start using them early but it fall off fast in red maps without external help.

Probably able to make a decent build while stacking abyss jewels or guardians aura, or other sources of flat damage (Covenant, despair + envy poison shenanigans maybe). Pyroclastic mines works great too as we have more than enough radius on their aura (3.8m and for 1 points in aura mastery you could make it 4.1m but I didn't find it usefull for now) and alright duration on them (10+ sec, not sure exacly)

Sadly these spectres have a terrible downside, you cannot stop them from spamming their projectiles even in your hideout (or others...). I often remove Greater Volley while I'm planning to stay a bit in my HO. It helps not going mad. Also they are really hard on your pc, my rig is on the top end so it's manageable, thankfully we are somewhat tanky and don't need to aim much.

I heard that they scaled with minion movement speed. Honestly I can't tell, I have haste and vaal haste also invested in some movement speed rings but I can't say if that's true.

They are quite tanky in this setup, I cleared all T17 with them mostly never dying (Abomination boss can be dangerous for them with bad mods, our spectres don't have much time to recover their ES in this fight so if the mods make the boss takes longer it can be annoying)

Bonus - Interesting spectres with fast hitting attacks / spell

Apart from Moon Dancer I tried a ton of different spectres and found some promising ones

• Baranite Preacher, old spectre that some people may still use. They spam ball lightning with lots of hits per seconds. Sadly they are quite squishy in the content I tried them in.
• Wild Homunculus, They inspired me to make this build. Thanks to Doominated on YouTube for showing them in multiple videos. They use an enrage mechanic when they reach 75% life giving them a cloud around them hitting around 8+ times a second (hard to be sure, I tried with a friend and 100% chance to poison, it was around 21 stack for the 2 second poison duration but they also melee so not only their aoe). Good survivability sadly they have terrible clear spead and you need to manually reduce their life each maps (Guardian Blessing or umbilicus immortalis + Coruscating Elixir) it gets tedious really fast.
• Necrotic Bones, new spectre with a mortar that has a great covering but sadly from my tests the single target is mediocre (low amount of overlap even with minion mastery aoe + awakened aoe) they also are a pain for my eyes (bright purple explosion, don't ask me why but the moon dancer don't cause any problem for me).
• Slashing Miscreations, an old one, they cast blade vortex with a maximum of 5 blades. Honestly I love them but they seems bugged, they crash every single map I tried to bring them in... (deleting all portals to that map and disconnecting me without lag or anything). If it wasn't for that I would probably play a lot with them. Decent clear speed, good single target and I like the fact that they are some old forgotten spectres.
• Bloodblessed Conqueror, Vaal Legion spectre they have a difficult to describe square tornado aoe with a 12sec CD and a spamable mortar attack. They are cool, but mediocre overall (and make the screen a mess)

I have a lot more but would take too long to describe them all... Like Fire Frenzy and Charged Colossus (firestorm and lightning storm respectively), Lightning Protector (Golem construct with a static ball lightning on a 5s cd), ... But overall the one mentionned before are the most promising I tried. There is also Grotesque Maw I saw in another Doominated's video that use a really fast melee attack but I didn't want to adjust the build to get enough accuracy and also they are too fragile.