A complete guide to Herald of Agony Necromancer for patch 3.26 - the king of mid-budget builds

Welcome to the notes section! Below you will find a guide + tips and tricks on what to prioritize during your character's journey. Each section corresponds to the equivalent loadout. If you're new to Path of Exile and you don't know why I haven't provided any gear reccomandation for the campaign before the ACT 5-10 sections, here is the tl; dr of what you need on your gear: - Life - Resistances - Attributes (if you're lacking some to use one of your gems) That's it. If you can find Minion damage affixes that's nice, but it's not mandatory at all. p.s the dps value associated with each section is the dps you should have once you have completed the gearing of that section, not the one that you should be going into that section with. It's also supposed to be the single-target, post ramp phase dps, so if you feel like that's cheating, remove roughly 30% to that number for the immediate damage to any random mob you'll encounter. PATCH 3.26 CHANGES Tl;dr: nothing. None of our items and skills have been really touched, besides losing a little bit of movement speed while channelling Cyclone, but that's not relevant at all. On the upside, the changes to Stone golem, and Chaos Golem make them both attractive options in a auto-casting Svalinn setup. We will also benefit greatly from mercenaries, as we can either sacrifice survivability to get much more damage if they can be relied on, or grant them all our auras, allowing us to run a very strong offensive mercenary. In short: it's another good day to be a Herald of Agony enjoyer. ACT 1 Begin with the usual Rolling magma + Flame wall combo. You can either continue with that until act 3 or swap to Summon Raging Spirit when they're available. I personally recommend the latter as it involves way less respeccing later on, however the former is stronger overall. Get your Vitality and Clarity auras for the free sustain. ACT 2 Continue with your Summon Raging Spirit setup and start looking for gear that has +X to dexterity as you will probably be missing that stat. You can now rock an extra aura. In the pob i've selected Haste for movement speed, but until you can get it, Precision is a nice dps boost too. Collect a weapon and an offhand with green sockets that you can equip in your second weapon set. ACT 3 After the library you can buy your Herald of Agony. DON'T swap immediately to it, as it scales pretty much exclusively off of levels and it's awful to use at level 1. You can equip it in your second weapon slot to level it as you go along. In my experience the skill starts feeling good to use after level 3-4. ACT 4 Complete your Herald of Agony swap by equipping gear that lets you run one of the poison setups. I've also added a storm brand setup to poison as its the most convenient way to start doing so - do bear in mind though that you'll want to eventually swap out of it, so only take it as a temporary fix Congratulations, the build is now online! There are now two ways to gear: either going Bow or Cyclone. For now there is not a clear winner between them: Bow has significantly less damage, but it's tankier and easier to gear initially. Cyclone has way more damage, but has the disadvantage of being melee. Bow can't run convocation unless you want to sacrifice a good chunk of dps, which makes the Herald of Agony A.I. extremely annoying in every map that has doors or corridors; Cyclone makes you slower (literally) and wants two transfigured gems to really get going, which is either expensive to get or time consuming to farm. My pick of choice is usually Bow for the convenience of being ranged during your early-game mapping, but try them out both and see which one you like best. I have done everything in my power to make them almost identical for as long as possible, so that you can transition from one to the other seamlessly. Do bear in mind that eventually, in the endgame, both will converge on a singular build which will run Cyclone. Endgame builds that expand on the Bow version are possible, but the gap in power between them and the Cyclone ones keeps growing as you keep investing, and so I ultimately consider them a worse option overall. ACT 5-10 (150k dps) We now begin setting up our first layers of defense and improving our build. I have not provided any flasks up to this point, not because I expect you to run 0 of them, but because by now you are probably not going to have them nicely rolled and automated as well, so I didn't want to simulate more tankyness than what you'll have. We will always run three elemental flasks and a life and mana one, dropping the latter two for a granite flask and Ruumi's Concotion, so plan accordingly. Fill up the tree in whatever order you prefer. The only points that should be gotten later are the followings: Resolute Technique: you don't need this until you've swapped to Cyclone/Bow, as your spells cannot be evaded anyway. Life and mana on hit: same as above, spells are not attacks (very important life lesson here). Holy Dominion: take this after act 5 if you're low on resistances. The items selected for the build don't have a massive amount of them, so if you've gotten lucky with your drops you might be able to skip this. If that's the case, simply get more life from the two small passives in the Written in blood wheel. Death attunement: don't get this until you have the money to buy your third spectre. We're using a Perfect Forest Warrior for extra survivability, so you can wait on this if you're poor. Any other defensive spectres will also work, so if you happen to drop one go for it, as we will be dropping the skill entirely as soon as possible. If you still want to take it, our temporary third spectre of choice is the Undying Evangelist for the occasional protection from projectiles. Also, until you've gotten your Lionseye's vision with 4 relevant sockets, you can just as well use any random chest with a 5 link and socket Pierce instead. This is actually slightly more dps as you can get Pierce to above level 15. Speaking of socketing your gear, for your Herald of Agony setup you don't need the exact combination of colors you'll find in the skill section. The only real requisite is that of your sockets, at least two of them are green and ideally no more than one is red. Two is still doable, and you will be running Damage on full life first and Brutality second. Do note that the latter effectively makes your Unnatural Strength ascendency and your Despair curse completely useless, but this is mostly fine as untill the endgame your wither stacks are not really a thing, and you can just use Vulnerability instead. For more support gem options, consult the CI-Swap section of these notes. MAPS (750k dps) As you progress into maps focus on your upgrades: 5 linking your chest, and crafting/buying your jewels. Getting your 4th ascendency is also a massive survivability boost for both Cyclone and Bow versions of this build. Get The Golden Rule as your second jewel - but be aware that as soon as you equip it, you'll want to run level 1 versions of all your direct damage skills, as the amount of self damage that your poisons will do will depend on it. By this point you should also have mostly fixed your flasks too. A couple of notes here specifically for the Bow version: We're swapping out weapons for a Widowhail setup. This is just to boost defenses and can usually cost quite a bit. So if you don't feel like you're dying, you can easily skip this and save your money. We're also running Storm Rain of the Conduit; historically this gem has either been free or absurdly expensive, depending on wether a viable Manaforged Arrows build is in the meta. If the latter is the case, just use the non-transfigured version or another Rain of Arrows instead. LATE MAPS (3.2m dps) This is probably the biggest pain point for the build, as we now face a dilemma: when do we stop investing in this version of the build and when do we start stockpiling resources to transition to Chaos Inoculation? There is no good answer here, and it will depend mostly on your taste. This pob will assume you invest the bare minimum: a 5 link chest and your clusters, so you might want to actually be stronger than shown here. Let's briefly list a bunch of cheap-ish ways you can do so: - getting your Herald of Agony to 21/20 - getting better jewels - getting curse on hit gloves with extra curses - getting your Empower - simply levelling up more. We're also divesting from a good chunk of our life pool here to invest in our clusters, so while your regen will still be insane, you might be exposed to more one-shots. On the upside, we're finally getting rid of both Raise Spectres and Animate Guardian, so we can't accidentally lose money by them dying. Please note that a LATE MAPS setup of the Bow build is not provided here, as I think that by this point you should probably have swapped to Cyclone already - however if you do want to keep investing in that version, you can just make the same kind of upgrades that the Cyclone version does: better gems, more jewels, levelling up your gems, etc. As a side note, an overlooked axis to scale dps is accuracy rating for your minions: it's not included in your jewels here as it's not easy to find, but it's pretty much always free dps if you can get it. We keep getting dps even after +1000 extra accuracy rating (and that's after we've included the +250 from the minion wheel too!) CI-SWAP (30m dps) We're big boys now. At this point the build is still relatively cheap to upgrade, with items never going over the 1-1.5 divines mark. Get jewels with more stats and resistances on them, and shift your points from the tree to the clusters as you gather them all. Remember that the +30 to strength and dextery nodes are always available to fix your attributes if needed. As you get more mana reservation you can start adding a second aura. You should be able to fully transition to ES once you have about 3k of it and Aegis Aurora (remember that a good chunk of it comes from our new weapon, The Dark Seer). This is because initially Aegis will be most of our ES sustain, gaining back 350 energy shield per block at this stage of the build. We will keep stacking more block chance as we further optimize, and more armor, making it better and better. Also, don't forget to respec your 4th ascendency, as we can't leech life when we don't have any! As you keep swapping setups, be mindful of the fact that in order to stack virulence, the hit that's causing it needs to do either chaos or physical damage; the Chance to Poison support gem automatically provided the latter, but since we don't use it anymore, we now require either Eber's Unification or the "+X added chaos damage" affix on your rings. If you don't have them only Cyclone will be able to poison, and your stacks will build incredibly slowly. We now have 2 separate "oh-shit" buttons: Vaal Molten Shell and Vaal Discipline, which we can start using. Be careful that while our sustain against small hits is already quite good, we still have a low max hit and we're still very susceptible to one-shots. We will work towards fixing this in the more expensive version of the build, however you can already start addressing this at this stage by giving up some of the clusters to get more of our defensive layers. You can give up two of them and still be above the 20m dps threshold, which should be absolutely enough dps already to do all content besides very juiced delirium or uber bosses, and this will free up 10 skill points to invest in more block chance, cap you suppression, get more energy shield, etc. Finally, let's discuss here potential upgrades that are not included in this section but that can be made at this point: some of these items might be way cheaper than expected, depending on demand from the meta and people's rng. If they are cheap you should definitely grab them for big potential boosts in power. - Skin of the lord This will be our final chest, and its price varies a lot based on which keystone it has and which color sockets. We are extremely flexible with our support gems, using a mix of all three colors and having a bunch of nearly identical dps options: Vile Toxins can be substituted for Damage on Full Life, Predator, Returning Projectiles. And before you buy the awakened versions,the same is true for all other support gems, expect for Empower, with minimal dps loss. So you might be able to find a Skin of the lord that has a combination of sockets and keystones that we can use but which are bad for most builds, and which will therefore make the item cheap. - The Adorned The Adorned used to be an absolutely bonkers jewel, and then it got hit with a 50% nerf bat, making it a niche option and, as a result, it's now (relatively) cheap. Regardless of how bad a 50% nerf is, when we're running potentially up to 9 abyssal jewels (7 from the clusters + 2 on the belt), getting a 90% buff on them means that this one individual jewel is adding 7 more by itself. This is, in technical terms, BIG - and as we only care for 2-3 affixes on them anyway, it comes with little downsides too. The real downside is that it requires a good bit of tinkering and selling and buying back jewels, but it's potentially massive both on the defensive as well as the offensive side, and it's an upgrade that can be kept in the later stages of the build too. - Awakened minion damage/ Awakened vicious projectiles Both of these gems offer massive dps upgrades as soon as they reach level 5 and start providing +1 levels to your Herald of Agony. Normally achieving this would require an ungodly amount of farming, or buying a very expensive pre-levelled version of them - however thanks to our amulet Ashes of the Stars and our Skin of the loyal chest, they get +2 to their levels, which means that we can reach that point on a botched corrupted level 3 gem, which usually goes for cheap. This also makes buying a level 1 version of the gems and levelling them yourself a viable early option. CI ENDGAME (53m dps) All our upgrades now go towards improving our defenses and scaling damage to ridiculous levels. Personally I don't feel like I'm ever needing more dps after the 30m mark, so I suggest you focus on the former first. There also now multiple configurations you can run: Mageblood/Cyclopian Vise; Svalinn instead of Aegis Aurora if you have enough ES recharge elsewhere; Melding of the Flesh. Basically any kind of defensive layering you can think of, we can make it work. We will upgrade our chest; find a rare helmet with +2 levels of minion gems and a nice mana reservation multiplier on an ES base. We will find better rolled and corrupted versions of our unique items with additional beneficial effects, and we will get our more expensive jewels, like Watcher's Eye. The setup shown here is what a 80-100 divines budget should get you. It's running extremely tight on attributes, but it's also deliberately not taking any in the helmet and boots slots, so you can supplement them with those. In the ultra lategame, our final upgrades are all about finding ever more expensive defensive layers, like getting to 90 maximum resistance with Mageblood, switching to a crit setup with Maata's Teachings to break the 100m dps barrier, and finding better Voices cluster jewels to free up more skill points to invest in more clusters, more defenses, and so on. Happy spinning and stinging everybody.