Using Animate Guardian (AG) of Smithing and Elemental Relic to deal damage... but how? By stacking a bunch of Minion Life, Aura Effect, and Fire Resistance
We'll be using the Formless Inferno (Helmet), which scales our minion’s life based on their fire resistance:
From Auras:
Since we're playing as a Paladin, focusing on Aura Effect and Link Skills, these auras will be greatly amplified:
From Flasks
With Field Medicine (Ascendancy Node), we can stack even more Fire Resistance when using flasks, which also applies to our linked target:
Now that we have stacked a ton of Fire Resistance, it’s time to make our AG deal damage by turning it into an armor stacking:
This build was inspired by this post from a few months ago. I also made a paint build post for this concept, and thanks to the top comment we see the problem..
You see our AG is decently tanky now and dealing some DPS, but there’s a problem—the Elemental Valiance (Ascendancy Node) summons an Elemental Relic that provides an Elemental DPS aura.
Why is this a problem?
Because Link Skills are bad for non-permanent minions—they only last 8-20 seconds, and if you accidentally link again, you might connect to the Relic instead. Since relics explode upon death, you could die within 4-7 seconds when their timer runs out.
So do we remove that ascendancy node? Nope! That wouldn’t be fun.
Instead, we turn the relic explosions into a source of damage. Since we’ve stacked so much Minion Life through Fire Resistance, we take advantage of the Elemental Relic’s explosion, which deals 100% of their max life as damage.
We use:
The key here is Blood Magic, which reserves life instead of mana for auras. When relics cast their auras, they automatically reserve 50% of their life, making them low life and instantly explode upon being summoned.
Now, every time our AG hits a rare/unique enemies, it has a chance to summon a relic (thankfully, relics appear at the location of the one who triggers). The relic then explodes, dealing a total of 133% of minion life as elemental damage (33% as fire damage and 100% as the element of that relic).
We no longer have to worry about manually linking to our AG—though sometimes, if I spam the link skill, I still accidentally connect to a relic and instantly die... (but you can see the relic icon—just don’t press the link skill if you see them.) lol.
Defensive Layers
Determination aura - gives a lot of armor.
Purity of Element aura - gives immunity to elemental ailments.
Flask Effects - with Field Medicine, flasks have 40% increased effect.
Tides of Time (Belt) - for flask uptime and grants 25% increased effect.
The Traitor keystone - for another flask uptime
Spell Suppression - currently at 77% with Lucky Mastery (can go higher with tree adjustments and tatoos).
Melding of the Flesh jewel - for the additional max elemental resistances, since we already have a lot of Max Fire Resistance.
Watchstone jewel - +chaos resist when affected by purity of elements and additonal physical reduction
Some few considerations:
This isn't a serious build yet since it's too squishy—just another silly variation of a minion Paladin build.
My attempt at mapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uLd0L_Xxs
I even died for some reason, probably because I was still target linked to that stupid relic. LMAO
Here's my initial plan in PoB: https://pobb.in/Bq9KIn__AtwP
That’s it for now! Hopefully someday GGG buffed the QOL of link skills for minions 😊
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