I’m currently working on an Elementalist version of Carrion Golems that has become popular due to the high area damage. However, another variation is the Necromancer, which I’ve read is tankier. I did some research on how the two builds and differ and wanted to write my thoughts down.
The Elementalist version has a higher number of Golems available because of the Golemancer ascendancy. However, one thing I’ve noticed is that the other two ascendancies really don’t do much for this bulid since most Carrion Golem builds use Brutality to boost up the physical damage. That makes the elemental portion quite useless since you’re not really taking advantage of the elemental defenses and offenses. Also, the buffs provided by Carrion Golems really aren’t great compared to the other golem versions.
The Necromancer version is far more minion heavy, even though you get less golems overall. But the key piece to this build is the Commander of Darkness piece which scales attack/cast speed from your auras. Here, you use a lot of mana reservation reduction nodes like Charisma so that you can stack various auras.
Also, with Commander of Darkness, you get a nice perk of effectively discounting the Cruel resistance penalty and use that for pushing your resistances beyond 75%.
With the change of Vitality from a flat percentage mana reservation to a raw mana cost, Vitality becomes easier to fit into builds along with Clarity and Precious, which also uses raw mana cost. So you can keep these gems at lower levels and use a Prism Guardian to add higher costing auras to the build. Also, you add Purities and nodes like Influence to boost the buffs’ efficacy.
What happens is that you can get 90% elemental resistance along with a fair amount of regeneration from both Discipline and Vitality. Of course, you move your build into a low life, energy shield build and have Zealot’s Oath to increase your Energy Shield regeneration.
Because you don’t have as many golems compared to an Elementalist, you use a Clayshaper to add another golem to the mix. You could start off with two Clayshapers until you’re ready to switch to a Prism Guardian for leveling. Alternatively, a Cold Iron Point can be substituted for the Clayshaper to get a +3 to your golems and other minions that are tagged with physical.
Along with this, you will want to use an Elder Helmet with Minion Life and a +minion gem level support. Here, you can put Zombies, Specters and/or an Animate Guardian gem. Specters are an interesting choice because you can attempt to go for having 4 summoned specters that provide support for your minions. I’ve read good things where you can use Carnage Chieftains and Chieftain Hosts for the boost in Frenzy and Power Charges to really add damage to your minions.
With a good Elder Helmet, you could say do Raise Specters and Animate Guardian to get the bonuses from the support gem and life. Then with the two remaining sockets, add Elemental Army and Blood Magic support.
I imagine the Raise Zombies gem would probably go into the gloves section. I’ve seen some offensive setups with Multistrike, Melee Physical and Minion Damage or Maim to take advantage of Melee Physical. I think something like an Elder version with Chance to Bleed and Faster Attacks might be interesting additions. If not those, then swapping in a Culling Strike could be effective here too.
For Auras, you definitely want at minimal Pride and Dread Banner. Pride for the physical damage boost and Dread Banner to increase your impale effects for your carrion golems. I think Precision and Clarity are good starters too. From what I’ve read, keeping them low level is a good idea so that your mana reservation doesn’t get eaten up all at once.
Then you can pick up some good auras once you get your Prism Guardian. I imagine that Pride would be a natural choice to place there. I’ve seen Grace and one of the Purities. That leaves the last two Purities in a slot like Boots. I think Discipline could even go there if you can pick up some cluster jewels that have the ability to negate the cost of your purities. Grace is interesting to me since you get a nice boost in speed.
The last gems will probably be your typical Desecrate, Flesh Offering and Convocation. While you could take Mistress of Sacrifice, it got nerfed so I don’t feel this skill is really that effective for this build. Instead, Bone Barrier is the way to go since you’re going to be socket starved.
As with other low life builds, Presence of Chayula, Shavronne’s Wrappings and Sin Trek will be a good chunk of the defensive options outside of the Prism Guardian. I think you will probably need a Heavy belt though to boost up strength since a lot of the support gems will be very strength heavy.
The last pieces are rings. I’ve seen Vivinsect used in both ring slots for Auras. But they don’t have much in terms of good defensive bonuses and impose a penalty of 10% increased Mana Reservation. However, they would be good for aura gems like Discipline. Still, they might be difficult to obtain and are currently quite expensive. So I imagine a decent socketed ring could act as a reasonable substitute until the Vivinsect is obtained.
The thing about this build though is that you will have to transition from life to low life since the gear will be difficult and expensive to obtain. I think the first objective would be to obtain at least one Clayshaper in a new league and then putting some points into Mana Reservation Reduction nodes just to get a few auras running.
After that, your main pieces of gear would be Prism Guardian, followed by the three items for low life builds along with Primal Jewels. You could try to use a Primordial Chain but that prevents you from using non-golem minions. If you go that direction, you really are better off doing some other golem build as an elementalist.
The last pieces I feel are the two Vivinsect rings because of the high cost and the penalties needed to use them. Perhaps, the other thing would be getting Golden Oils to anoint Charisma.
So in effect, this build is like an aura stacking Ascendant or Guardian except that it’s more minion focused. I’m thinking of trying this on Standard from ground up since I have the bulk of the gear there. I do have a Necromancer that I could just pull in which would allow me to completely bypass the lower level leveling process and let me feel the general end game portion. But part of me also wants to level one from scratch.
I think the only real hassle is moving to low life. I think it is possible to get away with a life build and using the tree because of the changes to vitality. But my only real skepticism here is Cruel and Merciless lab. The main difference between this build and an elementalist version is that you won’t be using stone golems early on to get that extra boost in life regeneration. Instead, you’ll depend on Vitality. So I think it won’t matter for a while. Still, I have to play around with this to see how well it performs.
Overall, I like the concept of this build on paper. It seems that the damage can scale up nicely. Also, because it’s minion based, the leveling process shouldn’t be too difficult. I figure no matter what you’ll be forced to re-spec a portion of the tree at some point, but it really depends on where you are in the leveling process. The real question is how does it feel in practice?