Minion Pact Blade Vortex Chieftain - 30m dps breach blaster

This build is still a work in progress, the PoB I am linking is an aspirational mid budget setup that I'm close to achieving.

PoB: https://pobb.in/0t9j9UTN-n-t

The new Minion Pact support causes skills supported by it to sacrifice a random minion, adding flat damage to the skill based on the life of the minion added. When I first saw this gem on poedb, I crunched some numbers based on Bodyswap of Sacrifice builds of the past and saw that it had flat damage potential competitive with energy blade and archmage. Since Minion Pact can't support orb or brand skills, Blade Vortex is the next easiest skill to use with it, because it doesn't need to be cast that frequently, enabling the use of fewer minions with extremely high life.

This build sacrifices Perfect Dark Marionettes, which revive themselves every 4 seconds automatically. We only need to cast Blade Vortex at most twice every 4 seconds, so with a high level spectre gem we can easily sustain Minion Pact's flat damage bonus 100% of the time for Blade Vortex.

3.28 brought an additional change that makes spectre level scaling much better after level 20. This makes Perfect Dark Marionettes generally the best minion type to sacrifice, beating out golems by a fair amount, although you can get usually get more golems. I boost the level of my raise spectre gem to 29 by using:

• Boots corrupted with +2 to minion gems and +1 to socketed gems
• +2 to minion skills helmet
• Level 3 empower
• Level 21 raise spectre gem

The way that this build scales % minion life is quite particular and not easy to replicate. Generally, there are 4 big sources of minion life I can think of:

1. Passives from tree
2. Passives from medium cluster jewels
3. Formless inferno + fire resistance on minions
4. Elegant Hubris timeless jewels with Axiom Warden

The most point efficient method is #4, using specific timeless jewels with multiple copies of the Axiom Warden notable (80% increased minion life). The jewel used in my build gets 3 such passives, which can all be obtained within the natural pathing of the build itself. This is almost the entirety of my minion life scaling - if you attempt to replicate this build, be ready to search for jewels other than this exact one, or use a different scaling vector (Formless Inferno is not bad). My Dark Marionettes end up with about 280k life, meaning my Minion Pact support adds ~9000 flat physical damage to whatever it supports.

With flat damage covered by Minion Pact, I chose a mid budget Chieftain shell to fill out the rest of my offenses and defenses. The combination of Foulborn Skin of the Loyal and Enmity's Embrace allows us to stack fire resistance, converting that into 200% fire penetration. We achieve 90% max elemental resistances using Purity of Fire, two jewels, and Ancestral Call. Dual wielding Nebulis then covers the % damage portion of our damage scaling. We take Avatar of Fire and convert all of our physical damage into fire damage, using Infernal Cry on bosses for an extra damage boost. These scaling methods both also scale our explosion damage (from Hinekora and Oriath's End) extremely hard, improving the clear speed aspect of the build (which BV usually struggles at).

Defenses are good but not amazing. We use 3 max effect warcries (enabled by Chieftain's Sione ascendancy passive): enduring cry, ancestral cry, and infernal cry. This gives us easy max resistance, endurance charges, and life regen. I chose to build 62/43 attack and spell block to help with mapping as well. Enfeeble is used against harder hitting mobs because there are no good offensive curses for this build.

Final note for people who look at the PoB: I have a Blade Vortex gem imbued with Culling Strike and a warcry gem imbued with More Duration. That's what the level 1 gems mean in the gems section.

This is my first attempt at a Minion Pact build, and I intend to make more variations on this idea. Going crit would probably allow us to hit 100m dps on blade vortex, with slightly worse defenses. The next build I want to make is a self cast version of this using a spammable self cast spell. By using a Hallowed Monarch to double spectre capacity and annointing +1 spectres, you can raise 8 dark marionettes every 4 seconds. With spell echo, this allows you to cast spells ordinarily so long as your cast rate is under 4 casts a second. This has a much higher damage ceiling than Blade Vortex, although I will likely play it on another ascendancy.