BalorMage's Poison Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer Gear Progression (PoE Necropolis)

Introduction

While the PoB shows you what gear we believe belongs in which budget, it might still be a bit unclear in what order we think you should prioritise what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritise when, and why. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the gear progression.

Campaign

During the campaign with this build, you will for the most part pick up items that have the links and colours you desire and hit them with an Orb of Alchemy or an Essence with an appropriate function to make them rare. You will be hoping for a resistance when doing this, and should you end up having an open suffix on the item the crafting bench will let you add on a second resistance roll or an attribute roll, depending on your current needs.
Keeping your resistances as high as possible, ensuring you have the attribute rolls and getting some life modifiers is all you need to worry about at this stage.

Low Budget

We are going to make the assumption that you have kept your resistances capped going into this budget, and will be working with that assumption. If you do not have capped resistances when hitting maps, you need to get that sorted as soon as possible.

Early gear

The first order of operations is going to be acquiring a Sixlink. To make it easier to keep your Energy Shield high enough to pay for the blessing, we recommend a 5 or 6L Corrupted rare of any ES variety or Hybrid ES variety.
Now that we have our chest piece sorted, we will be looking to pick up any Convoking Wand we find and hope it has an increased minion damage roll. We do not invest in this piece as we are looking to replace it, but it is somewhat important for early scaling regardless.
At this juncture, you should already be paying close attention to the price of Severed in Sleep and United in Dream. This item will not be mandatory at this stage, but it is the most impactful item change for the build and should be done as soon as possible. If it’s too expensive right now, we come back to it later but keep an eye on it. Live searches are your friend.
Note that the most important thing is to get our Level 25 Envy Aura. This comes from either sword, though because we don’t need wither chance at all we still want to upgrade to United in Dream when we can afford it

Here we grab some boots, gloves, amulet and rings with resistance rolls and dexterity rolls on them. The exact stats on what does not matter all that much, you just want a little bit more than you need and then move on with your life as all of these items will be replaced in time. Do not spend a lot of currency on these.

It is finally time to prioritise our old friend Darkness Enthroned. Minion builds like Ghastly Eye Jewel and this build is no exception.
Getting a very well-rolled belt, especially early on, is extremely expensive and not advised. Get a roll of 75% or so, and look to upgrade the belt later. The values above that simply aren’t worth their price early on, we can spend our currency better elsewhere.

Clusters

Minion builds like cluster jewels, and while we are not going to need a large cluster this early, we are going to need a medium. You should acquire a Medium Cluster Jewel with the base “minions have #% increased life” and 4 or 5 passives. Avoid 6 passives as they will waste your points.
You need to have the modifier “Blessed Rebirth”. Nothing else on this jewel matters, but you have to have this for mechanical reasons.

Ghastly eyes and poison chance and United in Dream.

At this point, there’s absolutely no putting off United in Dream any longer. We need it and what it provides at this point, for the free poison chance and the envy aura. It’s just quite simply too efficient to be passed up any longer.

With the hyperboost to Ghastly Eye Jewel secured in the form of our belt, we need to increase our poison chance As soon as we can. We will be looking for Ghastly Eye jewels with #% chance to poison. This is the only stat we need these jewels to have. Should you get additional things such as Maximum Life, Minions deal # to # additionalChaos damage, resistances or other useful stats here that are greatly appreciated. But remember, we are only looking for #% chance to poison and these jewels do not need to get crazy expensive.
At this point, we need to briefly go over poison chance math.

We are looking to reach 100% chance to poison. We have 40% from chance to poison support and we get 60% from the Sword, but we intend to drop Chance to Poison Support as fast as we can..
This means we need to get 40% from our ghastly eye jewels.. but this is where Darkness Enthroned comes in.
Assuming a roll of at least 75%, we can slot two jewels with 12% chance to poison in the belt. 12×1.75 = 21 per jewel. This comes out to 41%, and can cap us from the belt alone. As you get better jewels you want to end up with 1 15% in your belt and the remaining amount needed in jewels in the tree. Freeing up your other belt jewel for a juicy Raw Damage Jewel.

For those who prefer their math more visually, We have a graph.

Shield

With our offences reasonably solidified at this point, it is time to take care of our defences.
The primary defensive layer in this build is block. As block will not take care of every hit for us, we want to maximize its efficiency by making the blocking of most hits recover life for us. We do this through a modifier called “recover #% of life when you block.
You can purchase these for relatively cheap, or you can make your own following Ghazzy’s guide here: https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/crafting-basic-shields

You should also have found a Screaming Essence of Loathing or two. You will be hitting a helmet with one, or more, of these to get the 6% reservation efficiency mod on there. You’ll hope for the usual – Life/Resistances/Attributes/level of all minion skills. These are not absolutely required, take what you get, we’re keeping this cheap. This step could, and should, be performed earlier if you acquire the essences earlier.

Medium Budget

The first big thing we want to do in medium budget is get a covenant chest.
As soon as we can, we want a 5L Covenant to replace our corrupted chest piece. To a newer player, this may seem counter-intuitive, but we’re going down one link! Links are important! And this is indeed correct, but the Covenant’s level 29 added chaos damage support is better than any sixth link we could add through gems, so we’re still on a six-link. Just a stronger sixlink! This step will usually double your total damage dealt.
A six-link covenant is obviously better than a five-link, but it is also way, way more expensive and it is well worth transitioning into the five-link as early as possible.
It needs to be mentioned at this stage that if you can get a covenant, and you can four-link a covenant, it will STILL beat the corrupted sixlink. It is that powerful. We recommend you get a five link, but a four link is still better and can be used temporarily.

At this point, we should be adding a Large Cluster Jewel of the minion damage variety. The number of points is not the most important thing here, but we prefer 10-12. There are several modifiers we really like here. To list a few:

Call to the Slaughter
Minions have #% increased attack speed
Maximum life (for us, the player)
Resistances (for us, the player)

Any combination of these is good. Other notables? Good. You basically cannot go wrong with this.
Absolutely ideally we want a cluster with 35% increased effect, 3% increased attack and cast speed for minions and life, but this first of all requires an itemlevel 84 cluster jewel base and secondly is really, really expensive to purchase early on. You will not have this, you should not have this, but if you do by some miracle have it or lucky roll it in harvest: Use it. It is the high budget jewel, but there is no harm in slotting it in early if you get lucky.

Aegis Aurora

We’ve arrived at the promised land. Our build is dealing enough damage and should be defensive enough, that we can splurge a little on our shield. The end-all-be-all shield for this build is the old Hardcore Favourite Aegis Aurora. Since we are Eldritch Battery users, we are going to need to allocate Mind over Matter to make Aegis work. This might confuse you at first as it’s a weird interaction, but trust us. Aegis Aurora is a powerhouse and getting one with decent rolls is well worth its cost. Nearly no matter how high that is in any one league. This item’s price fluctuates and varies, but it is extremely powerful!

Bells and Whistles

- As with most minion builds, we will eventually want a +1 or a +2 all minion skills helmet. Ideally +2, but it’s usually too expensive for what it provides this build to be prioritised early on.
- Really solid Cluster with effect, attack speed, life, attributes, resistances or other juicy things.
- Sixlinked The Covenant
- High % Darkness Enthroned
- Really juicy Ghastly Eye jewels.
- Amanamu's Gaze This jewel super charges all poison minion builds and cannot be underestimated as one of the more expensive, and impactful, individual pieces in a build.

These can be acquired in virtually whatever order you see fit. They will all work, and will all provide you with a boost.
Fill them in when you can afford them and they feel appropriate