GhazzyTV's Chains Of Command Animate Weapon Necromancer Gear, Jewels & Flasks (PoE Keepers of the Flame)

Summary

Cap your Elemental Resistances and get the attributes your gems require to make sure you can use them all. Most pieces should be Rare with Life and, of course, any lacking attributes/resistances. Modifiers which increase the level of your Animate Guardian skill are most efficient, alongside those increasing minion damage across the board. The Gear for our Animate Guardian is also key, and this will be displayed below too.

My quick list recommended approach for this build would then be:

Item Slot	Item Name	Rarity
Head	Ancient Skull	Unique
Amulet	Perquil's Toe + Replenishing Remedies anointment	Rare
Chest	Chains of Command	Unique
Gloves	Life, then Res/Attributes as needed	Rare
Boots	Life and Movement Speed then Res/Attributes as needed	Rare
Belt	Darkness Enthroned	Unique
Rings	Life then Res/Attributes as needed	Rare
Weapon	Increased minion damage, Attack speed, and Trigger Socketed Spell craft	Rare
Shield	Recover on block shield – See Gear page for details	Rare

AG Gear:

Item Slot	Item Name	Rarity
Head	Mask of the Stitched Demon or Leer Cast	Unique – Mask should be acquired as soon as possible.
Chest	Zahndethus' Cassock or Gruthkul's Pelt	Unique	This is replaced by Doppelgänger Guise as soon a you have a mask.
Gloves	Gravebind	Unique
Weapon	Terminus Est	Paradoxica is a monumental upgrade and will enable shield below.
Shield	Victario's Charity	Unique

In higher budgets, we swap to a much better weapon. My recommendation here is to splurge on a Voidforge. If it is entirely out of price range, and Rakiata's Dance is cheap, you can use that instead.
Do keep in mind that Rakiata will want flat lightning jewels, not phys, so that will mean re-gearing jewels if you ever upgrade the weapon. As well as deleting a Rakiata for no gain.

Armour Pieces

This build is rather unique-heavy, and most of its rare pieces are mostly utilised for resistances. As such, it requires a rather low amount of crafting, and pieces can usually be acquired on the market.

Helmet

Ancient Skull the whispers buff is just too good to pass on. It provides us with some absolutely incredible buffs, and it’s usually quite cheap.
The important thing about this gear piece is to get the “minions have reduced maximum life” roll as low as possible, preferably all the way down to 20.
AW swords already have a horrible lifepool, and we do not want to drag it down further than we must. It also puts AG at risk to have this mod be too high-rolled.

Body Armour

This slot will always use Chains of Command, you only ever need to 6-socket this item, as all support gems socketed into it will affect the skills provided by it.

Gloves

Generic high life, movement speed with any Res/Attributes as needed.
Armour base preferred.

Essence crafting minion damage here is a cheap way to get damage.

Boots

Generic high life, movement speed with any Res/Attributes as needed.
Armour base preferred.

Belt

Darkness Enthroned with a 75% roll is your ideal candidate here. A higher roll is, of course, better. They tend to be way out of budget, however. If acquiring this belt proves difficult for you due to price, a rare with life/resistance will do until you can get this piece.

Accessories

Amulet

High Life, Resistances and Attributes as needed, and Replenishing Remedies anointment.

Perquil's Toe is my personal choice and recommendation here. It will make you slightly squishier, but it solves our biggest attribute problem (Dexterity) and has a massive damage modifier.

In higher budgets, we swap to Aul's Uprising Purity of Elements has no reservation.

The anoint you want is Replenishing Remedies.

In higher budgets, we change this twice. First to Ravenous Horde and later to Charisma.

Rings

Amethyst Ring

Bone Ring

Amethyst Ring

1. Life
2. Resistance
3. Chaos Resistance
4. Attributes, if you still need any.

Weapon

As our swords do not benefit from minion levels at all, this gives us some extra options that most builds cannot really make use of. Namely, that we can entirely skip + levels and still get the same damage boost.
All we get from +1 all is some defensive boosts and more life for AG, and from +1 minions, we only get more AG life. Both of these extra life sources for AG are big, don’t get me wrong, but not needing them is a massive bonus.

The stats we are primarily looking for here are:

• Minion damage – preferably 50%+
• Minion attack/cast speed – preferably 15%+
• Minion Critical strike chance – preferably 70%+. It is perfectly acceptable to get minion crit multi here instead if that is significantly cheaper
• Crafted 8-second trigger to keep our Bone offering active.

What this means is we search for these parameters, except the trigger. The trick here is to search for “empty suffix” and input a “1”. Then, you go to Misc options, find crafted, and set it to “no”. This way, only wands with those 3 mods, of those values or higher, with space for the trigger will appear. It will look like this.

Shield

We’ll be using a rare shield with the Shaper mod “recover #% of life when you block”. Ideally, we’ll have a base with a decent chunk of armour, but the market will unfortunately decide your options here.
You can make these yourself once you have a base, by following the link below.

Shield Crafting Guide.

In Higher budgets, I prefer to swap to Aegis Aurora. Crafted minion shield with life on block is also an option.

Jewels

We will be using mostly rare jewels in this build. A large cluster and a bunch of Ghastly Eye Jewels.
I will be going over the stat priorities for both.

Large Cluster

For this, the most important part is the cluster being a minion damage base. After that, it being an 8-pointer.
Nothing else really matters here. You slam this with an alch and take what you get. If it’s bad, you can scour it and alch it again once or twice.
Any stats you get here are a bonus. Should you get Vicious Bite or Call to the Slaughter, both of them are the jackpot, especially together. They are, however, not necessary as we will be upgrading this in medium budget. Don’t overspend here; it’s mostly used for jewel sockets and whichever bonuses you got along the way.

In Higher budgets, we swap to 35 3-Life clusters.

Small Cluster jewel

This is a rather simple jewel. We are looking for a 2-point block-based small cluster with the notable “Rote Reinforcement”. We’re using this jewel to generate endurance charges and boost our block, which will massively increase our physical mitigations.

Ghastly Eye Jewels

• Life – This stat is always good to have on jewels
• Flat physical – This is my primary recommendation as it’s flexible and will be usable in the higher budgets.
  ( Flat Chaos – DPS-wise for Low-Budget, it’s equal to phys, but it’s less flexible for later. If you can get higher values for cheaper, consider it if you want damage right now.

These are the three stats I would advise you look for, and as such, the stats on every jewel in the low budget. If you can find better jewels than I did, use better jewels than I did!

• Minions deal #% increased damage if you have used a minion skill recently. This stat is strong, very strong, but it’s also too universally good in every minion build, and as such, any jewel with this stat, life and flat values worth having will simply be too expensive. If you can snag a good one, snag it, but don’t look for them.

• Honourable mention goes to the #% to all elemental resistance modifier here. This is incredibly potent, especially in Darkness Enthroned and should you get some while rolling your jewels, it might very well be worth keeping.

Unique Jewel

Since we are ailment immune through Purity of Elements, we can utilise Replica Reckless Defence to round out our block. This is optional, and you can absolutely simply have 3-4% less block and run an extra Ghastly Eye.

Timeless Jewel

Brutal Restraint in the name of Balbala. This will give us the modifier “Traitor”, which helps sustain our flasks. It also helps to fix our Dexterity problems. Don’t worry about getting a fancy one, just get one.
Later on, we get a version that grants us 2x dex nodes on notables.

Flasks

Flask set-ups are almost always a matter of personal taste when it comes to what utility flasks to use. However, I will list the set-up I’ve been using for a smooth play experience. To find the available list of modifiers the flasks can have, check out these links: Utility Flasks, Life Flasks, Mana Flasks and lastly: Hybrid Flasks.

Slot	Flask	Description
1	Masochist or Flagellant Basalt Flask with #% increased armour.	Preferably 50%, but take what you get early on and upgrade later.
2	The Writhing Jar	This flask enables the build by spawning worms on the ground that is then killed by the Animate Guardian therefore summoning the animated weapons	Also serves as instant life and mana flask
3	Rumi's Concoction This Granite flask helps round out our block. The armour is nice too, get decent rolls on this, we are keeping it forever.
4	Masochist or Flagellant Basalt Flask with bleed and CB removal.	Suffix is up to you, I prefer bleed
5	The Writhing Jar	This flask enables the build by spawning worms on the ground that is then killed by the Animate Guardian therefore summoning the animated weapons	Also serves as instant life and mana flask

Once you acquire Balbala, cut the second The Writhing Jar.

For bosses you drop all flasks and run 4x The Writhing Jar.

For help crafting your non-Unique flasks, we recommend checking out our Flask Crafting Guide.

Whatever choices you make, prioritise your flasks! I can not possibly stress this enough. Skipping flasks is the number 1 new player mistake in PoE, have your flasks sorted before finishing yellow maps, preferably before even entering them.