POB: https://pobb.in/MIBpOIGKjht5

Gameplay: https://youtu.be/7co6o3zZR2U

Content done - all ubers (though Sirus is sketchy), t17s, simulacrum ~~30~~ 15, etc.

Cons: the whole build revolves around AG, so if the AG dies the build is bricked. AG is pretty tanky though and has died in my experiments only two times, which I’ll describe in the end.

Pros: it is pretty tanky and chill, you can just stay nearby while your constructs conquer the world. Also DPS is somewhat decent.

Unpadded DPS - 16m (without punishment), padded DPS ~26m (padding is averaging damage with/without punishment and 10 pyroclast mines active). WIth padding and rare shield can be DoT-capped;

Before PoE 2 hits and we all need to start pressing buttons, I wanted to share my first very own build, where you don’t need to do it.

How it works

There are three main pieces:

• Chains of Command chest on yourself, which allows AG to create AW (animate weapons) on kill from its (AGs) main-hand weapon. It also gives AWs built-in splash, which makes mapping not miserable. So effectively, you can infinitely on-demand animate any weapon in the game that you want (e.g. unique or custom rare), here we will use:
• Pneumatic Dagger as a main-hand AG weapon. With pneumatic dagger both AG and AWs elemental damage can poison.
• Penance Mark ring (the hateful accuser) as a source of “on kill” procs for AG to create new weapons. It is really only needed on the bosses, during mapping there are enough procs to maintain the whole army.

When you enter the map/boss arena AG will start hitting either regular mobs or phantasms from the penance mark and start consecutively spawning AWs. AWs can also kill phantasms and spawn AWs, but in my experience most of the AWs are still spawned from AGs kills. 

Why is it good?

You can get a high amount of elemental damage on ghastly jewels, which will poison with a pneumatic dagger and result in a pretty good DPS. Additionally, a high amount of flat elemental damage can be achieved with the pyroclast mine of sabotage, I used it only on very tanky bosses.

Supplementary items, but  both are kinda mandatory:

• Anathema. Penance mark is essential for the bossing and since the main damage type is poison both Despair and Temporal Chains are also needed. So that’s at least a curse limit of 3. Anathema removes this problem and allows two add also Punishment and Enfeeble on top for both DPS and defense.
• Darkness enthroned. We need capped poison chance and since GGG for some reason removed poison chance suffix from daggers in 3.25, you can only now get it via Chance to poison support and ghastly jewels. If you have 100% rolled darkness enthroned, two jewels with 15% chance to poison and chance to poison support result in 100% chance to poison, which is convenient by itself, but not mandatory.

For AG I have also used:

• Replica Victario’s Charity to generate endurance/frenzy charges for everybody;
• Asenath’s Gentle Touch so you don’t need to socket Temporal Chains. It also helps with the clear while mapping, but any temporal chains corrupted gloves I guess would work;
• Hunter-influenced helmet with “Nearby enemies have -X% chaos resist”;

The rest of itemization is very arbitrary, but because there are a lot of uniques in the build, it is a tad hard to properly cap resistances, new Alira helps with it.

Defensive layers:

• 73/76% block (plus ES recover on block if you use Aegis Aurora);
• 36/62k armour with/without flasks;
• 4 endurance charges;
• 79/84/80 max res;
• elemental ailment-immune;
• Crit-immune;
• Curse-immune;
• Potentially immune to bleed (from ring implicit)/poison(via tattoos or jewel implicits, 67% avoidance in the pob). I didn’t feel that any of these was needed, but still an option.
• Temp chains/Enfeeble;
• Necro life leech, phys reduction from minions and taunt;

AG defensive layers:

• 35k HP;
• 75/75% block;
• 5.5k HP regen per second;
• 84% elemental max res;
• 2% life recovery on block (and 4% regen from Bone Offering);

Minor cons:

• There are some bosses where AWs really struggle to live. E.g. everything that uber shaper does melts them. This could be somewhat alleviated with medium minion life cluster and “Blessed Rebirth” notable. And since AWs have fixed gem levels, you can’t scale their life with +minion skill gems.
• On bosses with a lot of downtime in fight (like Catarina) AWs can despawn during transition phases. This can be partially alleviated with Enduring Bond passive wheel for minion duration.
• Doedre’s boulders in Abomination map taunt(?) AG and it doesn’t want to produce enough AWs, because it only hits boulders.

Honorable AG deaths:

• Blight encounter with Titanic Scarab of Legend and stacked blight scarabs for a lot of unique bosses and only a single lane. AG didn’t have very good gear back then and there were dozens of unique mobs. I think I have heard DD sounds, but not sure;
• T17 map with Sirus storms. Turns out Sirus storms disable regeneration and while I was sorting stuff in my inventory, my AG stayed in one of the storms and slowly burned down.

Early-game

To kick things off only mandatory items are needed. I have switched into it around lvl 74, completed the atlas and played all the way to 36 challenges and lvl 99.