[3.23] Black Cane Absolution Guardian - Selfcast "Minion" Mob Boss!

Hey all! My First Build Post™! This is a fun, silly, and cheap build that I've run a couple of times now, made even better with the Affliction league's Wildwood ascendancies and, most importantly, the introduction of transfigured gems.



Here's a quick trial vid of how it plays (it's only in a t4 map, that's the highest I have access to, please be nice):


-2:30 for the map itself, until that point it's wildwood
-2:45 for Incursion
-5:05 for boss fight

Disclaimer:
I always like to say that a Shekh (that's me) brand build has to meet 3 criteria:
1. Is it fun? Hell yeah it is
2. Is it cheap? Hell yeah it is (Black Cane is rarely >1c)
3. Is it not necessarily good? Hell yeah it isn't

So keep that in mind going forward! I've got a lot of time in this game, but I'm a largely casual player. I never plan my builds out beforehand, & neither plan nor expect to make it to level 85.

Pros:
-By far the fastest, most powerful & hilarious build I've done (my two main builds are Righteous Fire and, believe it or not, Lightning Warp)
-Cheap. The central item is rarely more than 1c
-Smooth power gain, since the central mechanic scales with you, up to a point
-Feel like God where you point you finger and just unexist anything in that space
-Downright silly amounts of recovery. In short, if you're not dying in one hit, you're just not dying

Cons:
-Guardian's not really optimal for the build now, but it's better than necro
-Dunno how far it can go. Last time I played this, pre-transfigured gems and building pure phys instead of full lightning, I got to mid-yellow maps before I hit a wall.
-I'm running out of slots for all my skills
-My setup here is not at all optimized. I'm a casual player. Give me a break uwu

Summary:
This is a "minion" character that mostly builds and plays like a selfcast damaging character. We're utilizing Absolution supported by Summon Phantasm Support alongside the unique scepter The Black Cane, which grants us stacking added physical damage to spells per phantasm. Simply put, we're using our minions as tools to buff our own offense and survivability to absurd heights.

Literally the only item required to make this work (greetings from The Budget Build Club) is The Black Cane Royal Scepter:


You'll notice that last line there, each summoned phantasm grants you Phantasmal Might. This is the central focus of the build: simply put, each Phantasm you have out grants you a stacking buff that adds flat physical damage to spells you cast yourself. According to the wiki, not only does the flat amount of damage increase per gem level, but your stack cap increases alongside your phantasm cap:
And remember that that's per phantasm, too.

Summon Phantasm Support has a neat interaction with Absolution in particular. The support summons a phantasm minion when we hit a rare or unique enemy or kill any other, or when minions from supported skills do these things. Absolution does both, which means that both us and our summoned Sentinels of Absolution summon phantasms (but no, each Sentinel doesn't get its own stack). So things ramp up very quickly: we do need to charge up, but it's a very short charge up time. Resting tooltip DPS on Absolution shows me right now (level 80, merciless labyrinth, just got to maps) at about 37k, but with all our friends around us it shows about 5x that.

Now let's take a look at Absolution itself, and specifically the new transfigured Absolution of Inspiration skill gem:


There's one very specific, very important line there, added in with the transfigured gem. In exchange for losing one max Sentinel of Absolution, the transfigured version gives us gives us that massive increases and reductions to Minion Damage also apply to this skill's damage at 200% of their value line (increasing by 2.5% per quality, for 250% at 20% quality). Across from Templar is the Spiritual Aid notable, which grants a similar effect with increases and reductions to Minion Damage also affect you. This means that with the basic gem, we're triple-dipping in any Minion Damage node or equipment modifier we grab. That means a max damage roll Black Cane gives our minions 60% increased damage while also giving us 180% increased damage on top of that, if my math is right (increasing to 210% if we 20% our Absolution). Combining that with the fact that Absolution already has 200% added damage effectiveness, doubling our flat total from our Phantasmal Might stacks...

Wow.

Passives:
We're running a Templar Guardian here, which has changed "at some point" since the last time I did this build, but it still works fine. Along with this we're taking the Warlock Wildwood Ascendancy, as it allows us some really fun wiggle room to play around in.

In short, we're prioritizing building life and life regen and minion damage first and foremost, with lightning, spell, elemental, and area damage otherwise. Usually I build this boy as pure physical damage since it's cool, but Absolution has a built-in 50% phys to lightning conversion on both ourselves and the summoned minions, so this time I'm going full lightning conversion (with the interesting side-effect that summoned phantasms inherit the conversion values of whoever summoned them: I myself only have the conversion from Physical to Lightning support, so my phantasms only get that 50%, while phantasms summoned from my Sentinels get the full 100%). More on that later.

We don't really have to worry about minion duration, since all of ours (except the carrion golem and Big Boy, see below) are the kind that refresh duration on use, and we don't really need minion life but if you've got the spare points, we do benefit from it. Minion accuracy thankfully isn't much needed: our main boys mostly cast spells, but if you want to push it more to a team effort, the minions from Herald of Purity, the carrion golem, and our Big Boy from our ascendancy all do melee attacks (again, see below).

From Guardian itself we're taking Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade, the former of which grants us a temporary Big Boy who has a super deep life pool, built-in RF, and sponges up some damage that would have gone to us:

and Unwavering Crusade after that, which grants us some servant boys that give us each of the elemental damage auras. After this I opted for Time of Need for the absolutely yoked periodic regen, and at uberlab I'll be taking the spell/attack block one. We can't go through the upper path of Guardian that grants armor and ES per mana reserved because...

...our first order of business is to take Sanguimancy from the Warlock tree, which is basically just Blood Magic but better:
Funny enough, this allows us to also take the regular Blood Magic keystone as essentially a free 10% More Life node. I'd originally wanted to take the cool ES-to-life notable, but that ended up not panning out so I went for Blood Hunt (granting the Ravenous skill, allowing us to consume a corpse for a permanent 15% more damage against and 15% less damage from monsters matching the corpse's category (eldritch, humanoid, beast, construct, etc)), and then, importantly, Affliction:

Remember our big boy from before, and our free three servant boys, and our two Sentinels of Absolution, and our ten (eleven if you +1 the support) Phantasms, and maybe even a Carrion Golem? Affliction isn't needed often, but when it is (and we also run Enduring Cry as an extra, flaskless oh-shit-button), it propels up into truly silly amounts of life regen if we get into a pinch,

especially if we can overlap it with our other periodic bursts.

Later on (read: when I get a five-link and the last 2 points for the Wildwood ascendancy), then we can further support Absolution with Lifetap for the 300% cost modifier to take full advantage of Cannibalized Faith, tacking on an extra splash of added phys damage.


Specifics:
So I mentioned I'm running the transfigured Absolution of Inspiring supported by Physical to Lightning support, and out of necessity it has Summon Phantasm on it too. Right now I have Faster Casting as my fourth link, but I'd like to swap that to something else (Innervate yields a higher net added flat lightning damage than the regular Added Lightning Damage support, but Concentrated Effect works nicely too - and at this point the regular Lightning Penetration might be a good idea too...)

We just have to keep in mind the tags:
-Selfcast Absolution inflicts area, spell, physical, and lightning damage.
-Sentinels of Absolution inflict area, minion, spell, physical, and lightning damage (as they also cast Absolution).
-Summoned Phantasms inflict projectile, spell, minion, and physical damage (since they cast a "physical projectile spell", although I've seen they're also capable of a basic melee attack, but I ignore that).
So there's some lost synergies there between area vs. projectile damage, but the rest all works out, and our phantasms are there for us anyway.

Along with that I'm running the classic Wave of Conviction-Hextouch-Conductivity setup, though a hilarious little idiosyncrasy I discovered is that while WoC inherently converts to Fire and Lightning, there's nothing in the wording that can prevent it from inflicting cold exposure instead (for instance, if you roll a Hatred servant boy from Unwavering Crusade, which grants a higher % physical damage to cold than WoC does to the other elements). I also took Elemental Overload, since if you're not building crit, you're building EO.

For auras I'm running Vitality and Herald of Purity, and a fun fact about Sanguimancy/Blood Magic is that it also allows us to run an aura on Eternal Blessing support for free, as it only deactivates skills that reserve mana. On EB I've got Zealotry, though I'm also side-leveling Determination in case I need more beefiness later. I also keep a Holy Flame Totem on hand (since its consecrated ground grants curse immunity!) but since Zealotry covers the consground I'm thinking of switching to Rejuvenation or Decoy Totem.

There's a Carrion Golem too, who grants a nice amount of added physical damage to other minions around him. Unfortunately since we're converting everything out the wazoo we can't go for the classic Maim/Impale setup on him, so I have mine with Feeding Frenzy instead.

And, uh, that's about it, I think. It's a quick, simple, fun, cheap, and silly build, and so far has been going quite smoothly. You can check out my still in-progress character over here, under ShekhAndTheShonkhs: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/laruf/characters

Thanks!

Hey! Nice of you to think of the Black Cane + Absolution of Inspiring synergy!!

I'm making the same core build myself, although with some very drastic changes. I've added you as a friend in game, so we can chat a bit about the build specifics and share thoughts! My IGN is HumanMinthara and I've been online a lot of the time these alst few days

As far as I know, the Spiritual Aid will grant the mod "Increases and Reductions to Minion Damage also affect you.

Then the Absolution of Inspiring causes that mod to function at 210%

Meaning it doesn't stack... It just ups the Spiritual Aid node from 100% to 200-250%

"

Delso3030 wrote:

As far as I know, the Spiritual Aid will grant the mod "Increases and Reductions to Minion Damage also affect you.

Then the Absolution of Inspiring causes that mod to function at 210%

Meaning it doesn't stack... It just ups the Spiritual Aid node from 100% to 200-250%

That is true, Spiritual Aid does nothing for this build as the Absolution of Inspiring substitutes that mod (with the better 250% version)

Spiritual Aid would apply to other skills tho

This is my first minion build. It is SOOOO much fun to play!

Whoops, I've been away a while! I hear y'all. Taking another look at the specific wording for those nodes, yeah, I can see that they wouldn't stack like I'd thought :)

But glad y'all enjoy! Like I said, it's small & simple & not necessarily good, but it's plenty fun. Carried me pretty smoothly into early reds before I fell away from the game for the league. And, honestly, I had a blast writing up the guide and explaining things even if there aren't many folks playing it (but I do see you who are!)

Thanks everyone <3

I was actually looking for a build from a 'casual' player as you self-described. I usually HATE leveling, and this is by far the most fun I've ever had playing the game. I love this gem/guide! Not sure why but it's like a bug zapper as I bzzt around having fun...thanks for your work :)