[3.17-3.18]My Dominating Blow Staff Guardian League Starter

How to level: ========== After killing Hillock, buy a Raise Zombie gem from Nessa, take Smite as your reward for killing Hillock, and buy a shield or a second Driftwood Sceptre from Tarkleigh. In the past I would have recommended using a Driftwood Maul, but Act 1 is so dangerous now that it is better to get some block chance. Add gems from the various act sections in the Items tab of PoB as you go. After reaching the Cavern of Wrath waypoint near the end of Act 1 go back to town and take Absolution as your quest reward. Absolution is going to be your main skill until switching to Dominating Blow. Prioritize summoning your Absolution minions, and supplement them by attacking with Smite (which gives you a temporary aura that makes your minions do extra lightning damage). Pick up and use any gear upgrades along the way, then start looking for a usable Staff starting around Act 7 as this is about when we will start putting passive points into Staff passives. Be sure to buy any relevant gems (or take them as quest rewards) along the way, I am only mentioning the most important gems in this section but every gem adds a lot to this build. In Act 2 go to the right/East path first, and at the crossroads go North-West to the Chamber of Sins. Once you rescue Helena you can take Herald of Purity as a quest reward from Greust. This is your biggest power spike until switching to Dominating Blow later and you should feel very strong at this point. You can switch to Dominating Blow as soon as you get it in Act 3, but it might start out a bit weak (especially noticable against Dominus) so I recommend sticking to Absolution for now. Make sure you grab the Dominating Blow gem right away after killing Gravicius so you can start leveling it. It should be fine to switch to Dominating Blow right at the start of Act 4, but you may choose to wait until Act 6 when you have access to all of the gems for the build. In Act 7 before you reach the Ashen Fields you should make sure you have a Raise Spectre gem ready, as raising a Carnage Chieftain spectre here will add a very noticeable amount of damage to your build and help you clear the game faster. While leveling you will not have enough Mana reservation available for all of the auras listed in the skill section. Just use whichever ones you have the gem slots for. This build clears story content very easily, but may struggle against Dominus as that is right when we can switch over to Dominating Blow but before the build is really online. I recommend prioritizing Vitality aura early on as not only will it keep you alive but your Zombies and Holy Relics as well, and re-summoning them gets annoying quickly. I also recommend waiting until after Dominus to switch to Dominating Blow; just use Absolution until then and you can switch as soon as you enter The Aqueduct in Act 4. When ascending take your ascendancy nodes in this order: Radiant Crusade > Unwavering Crusade > Bastion of Hope > Time of Need. In Hardcode you may choose to save Unwavering Crusade for last so you can take the defensive nodes earlier. We do not take Harmony of Purpose because minions do not count as party members so we cannot share Charges with them. The order for Bastion of Hope and Time of Need can be swapped, but I prefer getting the stun immunity from Bastion of Hope before worrying about the curse near-immunity from Time of Need. Combining Time of Need with a single 20% "Reduced Effect of Curses on you" passive node or gear craft (or the 50% reduced curse effectiveness from Consecrated Ground) gives us 100% reduced effect of curses on us, meaning we never need to worry about things like Elemental Weakness maps. I am not sure how curse effect reduction interacts with Silence, but Silence only stops us from casting utility skills like Convocation, Desecrate, Flesh Offering, and Rallying Cry, so it doesn't really matter. Try to grab a Convocation gem as early as you can while leveling (normally this will be in Act 6 unless you do the library in Act 3) as it will improve the feel of the build dramatically. You can bind Convocation to your left-click and it will cast automatically as you move around whenever it is off cooldown. Also grab Dread Banner as early as you can (and if you can get your hands on Impale Support early that's even better). For some reason Impale adds an insane amount of damage to minions while leveling. I don't know the math behind it, but in my testing it out-performs any other support gem during the story acts by a lot. How to play Dominating Blow: ======================= Dominating Blow summons minions if an enemy that was hit by Dominating Blow recently dies, and has a chance to summon a minion on hit against bosses. Even with a relatively weak weapon you should have no trouble killing normal enemies to spawn your initial set of minions, and from there it just plays like most other minion builds except you will need to attack to refresh your minions. If you find a lone rare monster with no fodder for you to spawn minions nearby and you have no minions spawned already then you may struggle with it and should just keep moving until you find some normal monsters to use. This build runs a number of utility skills that do not need to be linked to anything, but you will not have enough room to run them all without Unset Rings, and you will need very good Unset Rings to justify using them. Until you have such Unset Rings, prioritize the utility skills in this order: Dread Banner > Convocation > Desecrate + Flesh Offering (don't use one of these two without the other) > Rallying Cry. I recommend keeping the following gems in your inventory just to swap when needed: Desecrate, Frost Bomb, Brutality Support/Melee Splash Support. Desecrate is used to spawn corpses to re-summon your Spectres, you will need to do this once in a while when your Spectres inevitably die. Swap out the Faster Attacks gem from your Leap Slam setup when needed to use this. Patch 3.17 added an amazing quality of life change in that Desecrate will remember your Spectres and sometimes spawn them as corpses automatically. This means you no longer need to create a separate "Spectre bank" character or track down your Spectre monsters whenever your Spectres die. Frost Bomb is used to deal with enemies that have insane levels of life regen such as Maven witnessed endgame bosses. Swap out your Convocation gem for this when needed. Brutality/Melee Splash is simply a choice between damage or clear speed. Use Melee Splash Support normally, and swap it out for Brutality Support when dealing with endgame bosses. Against bosses is the only time we will use Desecrate and Flesh Offering (other than using Desecrate to summon Spectres). Focus on summoning your minions first by attacking with Dominating Blow, then once your army is summoned cast Desecrate once then Flesh Offering once. We run a lot of buffs so it may be difficult to track the buff timer on Flesh Offering, but it will normally last about 9 seconds (unless there were a lot of extra corpses nearby). Your main focus should be keeping your army maintained, and just stop to cast Desecrate and Flesh Offering when needed to refresh the buff. Also until you have a ring (or corrupted gloves) with Vulnerability on hit, you should be running a self-cast Vulnerability (just replace Rallying Cry for now). It doesn't need to be linked to anything, and you will only need to cast it on bosses and tanky rare monsters. Some notes on gear and gems: ========================= The gear in the "Mirror tier" item set is theory-crafted nearly perfect gear that is completely unrealistic to ever obtain, but gives an idea of what modifiers you should be looking for on gear and what the potential top end stats of the build are. The gear in the "Realistic Gear (Scourge)" item set is my actual gear from Scourge league. This was my secondary character in Scourge league and I did not invest a lot of currency so it should be possible to get at least this level of gear or better. (Note that jewels do not update when changing item sets in PoB, so look at the Unused "Gale Song" jewel in the item list for an example of what I used on budget gear. The theorycrafted abyss jewels add a ton of damage though and you should aim for something similar to them.) The gear in the "Realistic Gear (Archnemesis Week 2)" item set is my actual current gear as I am writing this guide. This was my league starter for this league and I have all of this gear at the end of the second week of the league. I do play a lot, but I have a full-time job outside of this game, so this level of gear progression should be very manageable even for more casual players over the course of a league. This build uses a LOT of alternate quality gems, and most of them add something significant to the build. They may be expensive early on, but aim to purchase them as quickly as you can. This should be the main focus of your spare currency until later in the league since it will be difficult to purchase our gear early on (unless Dominating Blow somehow becomes meta suddenly). If you know how to craft, it is normally significantly easier and cheaper to craft most of the gear for this build rather than purchasing it (mainly using fossils and Harvest crafts). This build will be a little bit starved for Dex and Int without gear. Either use the +30 nodes on the tree (Expertise and Ancestral Knowledge) or use the jewels which convert nearby Strength nodes into other attributes (Brute Force Solution and Fluid Motion) until you have high end gear. You may want to consider using a higher DPS weapon and sacrificing some of the defensive/utility mods on the example staff. Higher DPS will make it easier to spawn your first set of minions and will increase the effectiveness of Rallying Cry. In very high end content (juiced Delirious Maps) you will likely need to use a Writhing Jar to spawn your initial set of minions. You may need to unsummon your Carrion Golem first as it tends to kill the summoned worms very fast. Rotting Legion is a possible alternative to Sporeguard, it provides less damage but more survivability against Elemental Damage (and is usually cheaper than Sporeguard). If using Rotting Legion, then remove Meat Shield from the body armor gem setup and add Raise Zombie. It is almost certainly possible to craft a better rare body armour than Sporeguard, but Sporeguard is just a convenient package that gives a lot of things we want (and an extra Anoint) You may want to consider using Elemental Army to give your Animated Guardian and Spectres some extra resistances, but you will lose a considerable amount of damage if removing Maim or Feeding Frenzy (and I believe Minion Life gives more total survivability than Elemental Army) The Death Attunement anointment is only really taken for +1 Spectre, but if Demon Harpies get patched out then we only really need the base 2 Spectres from the Raise Spectre gem (Carnage Chieftain and Host Chieftain for Frenzy and Power Charges respectively), so in that case we can anoint something else instead (Decay Ward and Indomitable Army are good options). You may also consider using Arena Master spectres from Drox maps as your third spectre, they have a powerful AoE attack speed buff. Having 3 Spectres, a Golem, and an Animated Guardian gives us 5 permanent minions which ensures we always have Onslaught. This isn't necessary but it is nice quality of life. I was able to pick up my Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame jewels for a total of 60 Chaos in the 2nd week of Archnemesis league. Technically there are better jewels than this, but not for anywhere near this low of an investment. We are stationary while attacking so we get the Consecrated Ground from Sanctuary, and this gives us all of: Regenerate 5% of life per second for us and our minions (HUGE for Animate Guardian), Enemies take 15% increased damage (this is similar to a "More damage" multiplier), and 50% reduced effect of curses on us while stationary (we can unspec a passive point for this, though you might want to keep it so you maintain 100% reduced curse effect while moving) For Labyrinth Helmet Enchantments there are several viable options, though I actually don't recommend any of the Dominating Blow enchants as they don't really affect bosses. Some of the better viable options in rough order of power are: Flesh Offering Attack Speed (only if you have enough gem slots to use Flesh Offering + Desecrate) Carrion Golem Buff Effect Dread Banner Aura Effect Vulnerability Curse Effect Flesh Offering Duration (only if you have enough gem slots to use Flesh Offering + Desecrate) Pride Reservation Efficiency Summon Skitterbots Reservation Efficiency Determination Reservation Efficiency Animate Guardian Elemental Resistances Raise Spectre Elemental Resistances Dominating Blow Sentinel of Dominance Duration Convocation Cooldown Recovery Molten Shell Buff Effect Molten Shell Duration Convocation Buff Effect Leap Slam Attack Speed (you would be surprised how much better the game feels with a faster Leap Slam) Rallying Cry Buff Effect On the bright side this means when you run the Labyrinth there are a lot of potentially usable enchantments you could land on. Q&A: ==== Why so much attack speed when it doesn't scale our damage? Dominating Blow feels kind of awful on bosses without a lot of attack speed. The faster you attack the faster you spawn minions on bosses, and you may need to replace your minions frequently on some bosses What is this build good at? Most content except for high Sirus and Veritania, but other bosses are very easy. This build doesn't use Headhunter very well either so may fall off in high end juiced farming like 100% Delirious maps and 5-way Legions. Consider unsummoning your Animated Guardian before fighting Sirus, Shaper, Al-Hezmin, Eradicator, Multi-projectile Baran, or high level Harvest encounters as all of these can be dangerous to your investment in the Animated Guardian's gear. What does this build suck at? Veritania. Until GGG fixes her sitting inside the storm (probably never), but if you have enough DPS she is still manageable. The new Elderslayers invitation is very difficult but I cleared it on the 2nd weekend of Archnemesis League. Shaper and Uber Elder when Maven-witnessed can also cause problems if Maven decides to duplicate them but again they are manageable. In any fight where you are having trouble keeping your minions up, consider swapping out Impale Support for Faster Attacks Support. On paper this is a DPS loss, but in practice you do a lot more damage when you actually have minions alive to deal damage, and the faster you attack the more chances to spawn a minion you get against bosses. UPDATE: Veritania's AI is kind of fixed, the fight isn't too bad now. Why Granite Flask over Basalt when Basalt gives more armour? Because Basalt taunts. Our minions taunting is a significant defensive layer and isn't worth undoing for a tiny amount of extra armour. Worth noting however that Rallying Cry also taunts, so if you are able to run Rallying Cry, then consider running a Basalt Flask instead of Granite. Why 14x Dominating Blow in calculations? Because we summon 14 normal minions (9 from the base gem, +2 from Phantasmal quality +3 more from the extra 30% quality from Ashes of the Stars). The "14x Dominating Blow/Sentinel of Dominance" line is our minion damage and what should actually be looked at for DPS calculations. The "14x Dominating Blow/Default Attack" line is incorrectly multiplying our own attack by 14 and should just be ignored (this is why there is a "93% less damage" custom modifier in the Configuration tab). I only count the normal minions because those are the only ones that will be available against most bosses.