Hello everyone,

I made a post a while before the league started with my first ever personally made build that actually seemed promising. You can find the post here. And in case you're wondering, ZSkele isn't a typo. I just used that for when I was saving bits and pieces for the video and whatnot and figured it sounded nice enough for a "build name".

Unfortunately my league start was disrupted more than I'd hoped so I took everything very slowly. I am still not up to full atlas completion or all my watchstones etc. The situation is doubly bad because I've fallen in love with the Trial of the Ancestors mechanic and I've just spammed it over and over and over....

I have deviated from my original plans quite drastically though. Made the build better, learned about some cool new stuff and some incredible Trial of the Ancients specific setups which have lead to very large improvements to my build. So without further ado, let's dive into it.

~=¤Showcase¤==========~

Here is a video of the build in action

There's a regular alch and go T16 map clear, a couple of bosses and a showcase of what a normal round of the tournament looks like for the build. The map showcase and Minotaur were done at 94, the rest at 95. Map showcase could probably have been better if I waited to 95, but I recorded it already and I'd forgotten I had swapped out of the 30% AoE minion mastery so I was lacking quite a bit of clear potential.

~=¤The PoB¤==========~

https://pobb.in/z0vB3atzn-pv

The cost of everything put together is somewhere around 12 to 14 Divines spent. Some stuff may be a bit more pricey now than they were when I got them, a lot of this league specific stuff and the new amulet etc. have been very volatile throughout. And then there's a timeless jewel that's really hard to gauge, I got mine for 1 Divine. Every single rare item is crafted manually so prices are really hard to estimate if you were to purchase equivalent items.

Quick checkpoints before we delve further:

I am level 95 with 39.2m sDPS according to PoB. With flasks up I have 22.7k armour and 10.2k evasion, 119.2k Effective Hit Pool with 11.2k phys and 21k+ ele max hit. Chaos res is still underway sitting at 17k max hit atm. Life is a low 3.7k but with 69/75 block passively, without offering, I'm feeling reasonably tanky nevertheless. I don't really die when mapping anymore.

Right off the bat, let's tackle some PoB checkbox use before anyone starts thinking I'm cheating.

1. Maata's Teaching base crit does not work by default so I'm adding it manually onto the item. If it works in an update after I've posted this, edit the scepter to remove the lines I added to make it work.
2. Two of my four spectres are disabled by default, and I only have one power and one frenzy charge enabled on my config. It's reasonable to expect 1 to be up most of the time on Skeletons, and they'll have permanent uptime once you reach max charges on my Zombies. The reality is I get a little bit more DPS overall, due to Demon Harpy and Arena Master adding buffs whenever they do their stuff etc. so I think having one of each charge is a reasonable compromise.
3. Fresh Meat is ticked, but the reality of the situation is that this baits the numbers by quite a lot. I've made an entire post about this, you can find it here. If you wish to be conservative with the DPS number, just chomp off 25% of the total DPS and it will be pretty accurate once I learn to play with the damn gem.
4. Brittle ground is ticked, but I would argue it's realistic to have near permanent uptime on bosses because I apply it manually by running over them. Of course, this doesn't always work as very clearly shown by my personal showcase video, but I was still getting used to playing with manually casted Skeletons as I played with Alberon's Warpath for permanent skeletons until I started taking showcase videos. I use Brittle Ground on all my minion builds and I can maintain a very high uptime on it against most bosses.
5. I have absolutely no clue why this PoB is trying to tell me I can't reserve everything. Even after disabling every single gem it's still trying to tell me I only have 71% unreserved mana. This is a PoB bug
6. Finally, I have Skeleton set to gem level 24??? Wtf?? Why are you cheating?? Well, the amulet does not work in PoB. PoB is telling me I have +6 levels to the gem (+2 Weapon, +1 Shield, +1 Helmet, +1 Tattoo and +1 Awakened Minion Damage) when in reality I have +9 levels to Skeletons, as you can see in the following screenshot taken in-game:

Whee level 30 gem!

So with all this in mind, I would probably estimate my DPS fluctuating between 20m and 50m, depending on whether I have Spectre buffs up or not, Brittle Ground, whether I'm doing well with timing my Fresh Meat refreshes and whatnot. A very large variance in DPS and it's extremely noticeable in game as well. Some bosses just get yeeted out of existence while others seem to take a significantly longer time to kill. The average is probably somewhere around 30m-ish.

~=¤The Evolution¤==========~

Overall, I am very impressed by both Zombies and Skeletons. My Zombies basically never died at all from like Act 6 all the way up to red maps to any normal stuff. Some Expedition encounters and some specific juiced up Eater of Worlds miscreation packs pew-pew-pew-ing them did kill them, but they were much more sturdy than I expected that early on. I think it made a huge difference that I did not use Minion Damage support at any point with them. Skeletons did die a lot. And I mean A LOT. But it was fine, I'd just spam spawn more whenever there was a pause with a rare or a boss and it ended up feeling pretty good nevertheless.

Until getting to the point I am now with my gear I was playing with both Zombies and Skeletons in a shared 6L, with Alberon's as I mentioned to keep Skeletons up permanently. It was a very smooth playstyle and felt great to clear maps with considering how bad all my stuff was at that point. I would gem swap Melee Splash and Brutality in my sockets, but I'd only really swap out of Splash for bigger bosses and for Trial of the Ancestors.

Getting block via The Red Nightmare has been awesome. I made a post about that prior to launch as well, you can find it here. It allows me to skip Bone Offering

So as I was clearly capable of mapping and doing all the stuff I wanted to in the game despite trash gear, I started looking into fancy tech and I stumbled upon something amazing. Supreme Ostentation keystone from a timeless jewel makes you ignore attribute requirements. This allows you to use tattoos in any way you please without having to balance out attributes. This is HUGE because it allows me to just keep all the suffixes on gear for whatever else I want while also allowing me to just throw out tattoos on everything. I've still not filled out my int passives with tattoos, but plan is I'll go crit immune and then probably stack max life. Or potentially just stack max life. Still figuring that out.

This timeless jewel also allows me to get some insanely strong passives on the tree. I get two Slum Lords for 3 points total, I get 10% life for one passive, I get 80% increased armour from two passives, with access to armour/ES mastery for phys taken as chaos. This jewel is insane, and while there are potentially better ones out there I'm not spam searching to find out, this one works fine for me.

With the timeless jewel I was able to very easily abuse the Red Nightmare with Fire Res tattoos, get some reservation efficiency on the tree and also two attack block tattoos too. I had to completely reroute my tree to make all this block and whatnot actually work while giving me room for all the crit nodes and it's taken quite a lot of planning to fit everything I need into the tree. I am very happy with how it's all turned out so far.

I did have a plan for a while where I fit in Pride on reservation instead of being on the blessing, and then had Haste on the blessing instead. This is very tight on gear requirements however, so I didn't want to bother. It also kind of needs me to drop Maata's Teaching because I can't fit all the gems needed with Arcanist Brand in the mix. I will continue to look into that path in the future, however.

And on that topic.....

~=¤The Future¤==========~

There's still a lot of room for growth here. Missing a lot of alt quality gems, missing a lot of potential corrupts (Maata's can reach 10.5% crit!!!) and whatnot. There's jewels to get, there's items to craft, the tree will likely be revamped eventually again. I want to fit in a large cluster jewel somehow..

The unfortunate reality of the build in it's current state is that it's extremely clunky to play. I am actively, and I mean A C T I V E L Y, using 8 keybinds. EIGHT. I have Shield Charge and Frostblink, I have Convocation, Divine Blessing, Arcanist Brand, Predator target mark, Vaal Summon Skeletons and then of course manually summoning the normal Skeletons.. It's definitely not for everyone. But I'm enjoying it nevertheless! However, I do think this Fresh Meat nonsense has to go. The damage it offers is kinda ludicrous, but it makes the playstyle a whole lot worse. I am very likely going to swap back over to Alberon's eventually but I do want to give this a honest try before I do. I am also very likely going to shift over to a +2 wand way, way into the future much later in character progression. Maata's offers an enormous amount of power very easily, but not having a trigger craft feels really bad to play with. I don't think I can make a +2 wand compete with this one for a long while though. I might have to get a big minion helmet so I can swap over to that.

I am also very seriously considering changing this into cold conversion via Triad's Grip. There's a few bits of tech I have never seen anyone else play with when it comes to cold conversion minions and I plan on trying all of that out. But it's behind a huge investment and it's a lot of work to completely revamp the entire tree. I am almost certainly forced to swap to CI for that setup.

For more realistic things for the near future, I need to get a +2 helmet, I need to finish my Eldritch implicits and I probably need to re-craft every single rare item I have. Probably also ditch this Stygian Vise and go for a Darkness Enthroned as well. I'll also want to fit in a Stormshroud. And also, as seen on the map clear part of the video, this build isn't particularly amazing on clear just yet and a big reason for that is that my explode AG setup is still just Inpulsa's and relying on Skitterbots for Shock. Eventually I'll have infinitely chaining explosions via a Crusader chest combined with Anomalous Animate Guardian for huge AoE which will skyrocket the clear speed.

~=¤Closing Thoughts¤==========~

As I mentioned earlier, I've been very positively surprised by this build. I leveled this build up all the way from nothing basically running this the entire time. I swapped from SRS to Skeletons the moment I got access to Fresh Meat and suffered with how bad it was until around mid Act 3 where it picked up the pace and I can honestly say that melee Skeletons in the campaign are AMAZING. Just..don't try clearing the first two acts with Skeletons. It isn't worth it.

This build is my own creation and for the first time I can officially say a build I've made from the ground up ACTUALLY WORKS. Really proud of that achievement. Having played the game for over ten years at this point, it feels fantastic being actually able to make something myself for a change. I've always been following other people's builds and tinkering with them a bit at a time. But this build is all me!

If any of you fine folk have any questions or recommendations or whatever let me know!