Leveling Minion Witch without Flame Wall / Raging Spirits

The Flame Wall / Raging Spirit combo is easy and strong and very effective, I just don't like it. When I play a Necromancer, I want the skellies and zombies and dark magic, bone, blood etc.

With that in mind, I wanted a more involved playstyle and I think I'm doing it, I'm just not very proficient with PoE as a game. So any ideas welcome.

To mitigate the damage loss from not using Flame Wall / Raging Spirits, we need as many minions as possible. For this reason, all the spirit goes to our minions. That means, no spirit persistant buff and also making a straight line for the Lord of Horrors passive. If you have access to a Lv15-20 armor piece with +Spirit, even better.

Another way to increase our overall damage is by attacking ourselves. The Contagion / Essence Drain combo takes us very far without any Chaos damage investment in the passive tree. Contagion can have Magnified Effect for spread and Essence Drain can have Blind for a bit of protection, I also slot Pierce to shoot multiple enemies at once. Bone Cage slotted with Pin and Spell Cascade is an awesome crowd control skill to immobilize enemies. During Act 1 and the Majority of Act 2 we're not taking any minion defensive passives, so immobilized enemies who don't attack are extra defence for the minions, and us.

Now at gem Lv5 we get access to zombies which I love and I absolutely wanted to use. They're quite slow so for now, slot them with Minion Instability and Brutality for some more damage in groups.

At gem lv7 we get access to Vulnerability which is a great curse but also, Profane Ritual. Now Profane Ritual doesn't see much use in Witch builds but here, we take advantage of its effect to generate Power Charges. We use our Power Charges to summon Zombies which normally require a corpse to summon. We can have up to 3 charges to summon 3 zombies but that's quite a slow process, so we slot Unleash and Profusion in Profane Ritual and we change Minion Instability on the Zombies to Perpetual Charge.

- Unleash: Any spells that we cast have their effects reoccured automatically. Using Profane Ritual now gets us more than 1 charge, most often it's 3 of them immediately.
- Profusion: Supported spells have a 50% chance to generate an additional charge. This means that we're now almost always getting 3.
- Perpetual Charge: 35% to not consume a charge. That 35% is quite generous actually, I've been able to summon 10 zombies off of 3 charges, all of them obviously empowered.

All this means that while clearing a map, you start each fight with empowered zombies. The charges have a 20 second cooldown, that + the duration of the zombies means you pretty much never run out.

I am currently in Act 2, this is my 5th playthrough so I know how it goes, but the main issue I haven't been able to solve is boss damage. The build is great for add clear, but bosses don't have corpses, so half the build is not being used. Where Flame Wall / Raging Spirits is a self-sustained combo, here I only rely on my Warriors and Arsonists to do damage. I'm looking to replace the Arsonists with Reavers as soon as I can.

I used demonform/minion combo (and still using it at lvl72 T4 mapping atm). but i do use firewall/raging spirit. you may able to switch your spells to something else. here is my setup synergy. the fire part may not what you look for. so you can skip to demon form part if you want. the main issue of complete rely on minions build early game is that your spirit is low. you can try to buy gear that give spirit but i felt that's just waste of currency for low level.

Early Game (Minions):

Support Spells:
- Firewall (fire damage plus synergy with raging spirits and skeleton sniper)
- raging spirits (it's also minions, so the +minion level benefit it)
- flamability

Minions
- Skeleton Warrior (Scepter also my meat shield)
- Skeleton Sniper (sniper's projectile that shoot via firewall gain the fire damage)
- Infernal Hound (another meat shield plus doing nice damage, and fire exposure gem)

Offensive spell
- Ember Fusillade (Scatter shot allow me to gain 2 charges at once. it significant shorten my charging)
- Detonate dead (don't even need to level up, as the spell do 20% enemy corpse life, the monster level scale this spell automatically)

This setup generally already good enough for most fights. my play style just firewall, curse, and dodge then detonate dead. against rare/boss i add some ember fusillade from far away

As you don't want fire spell, you can consider switch them up for lightning or chaos spell but i never dive into those area.

Early Game (Demon Form):

as my scepter which is my main spirit source will get disabled, so there is no minions beside infernal hound. my gears also try to get +life regen while keep my max hp low. basically temporary gain massive damage and nuke the boss, and once my demon flame a bit high i just switch back. by rotation is start fight with minions. and when my minions wiped, i go demon form. then switch back and repeat

Mid Game (the cruel stage):

Once you got higher level, and have access better support gem. your minions will start getting better. my skeleton warrior help do maim and stun build up, and you can now summon more snipers. i don't really remember any particular part i have problem with beside forgemaster where i need to up time my demon form as much as possible. without using it i don't do damage fast enough. but minions form i generally much safer when dealing with waves of enemy. get my skeletons destract enemy, kill them. and i blow up all the corpse on the floor.

also once you have unleash support gem available. you don't even need to charge your ember fusillade. as unleash + scatter shot automatically bring up 6 balls at once click.

a note regarding Zombie: it sound fun at first, i did give it a try. but it give too much downtime for summoning, the duration of zombie is a bit short, and i just found detonate dead so much more efficient. i may change my minds if there are support gem that allow to summon multiple zombie at once or persistent gem that auto summon. but at the current stage, i felt zombie is inefficient and tedious to use

another note regarding not using fire spell: infernalist's infernal hound natively have quite a good synergy with fire exposure, plus raging spirit is minions, so they all get good benefit from + minion level gear. which is a bit hard to replace