GhazzyTV's Chains Of Command Animate Weapon Necromancer Gear, Jewels & Flasks (PoE Necropolis)

April 5th, 2024, 19:51

Summary – TL;DR

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	Life then Attributes/Res as needed + Replenishing Remedies anointment	Rare
Chest	Chains of Command	Unique
Gloves	Vixen's Entrapment	Rare
Boots	Life & 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

Animate Guardian Gear

Item Slot	Item Name	Rarity
Head	Mask of the Stitched Demonor Leer Cast	Unique – Mask should be acquired as soon as possible.
Chest	Gruthkul's Pelt	Unique	This is replaced by Doppelgänger Guise as soon a you have a mask.
Gloves	Gravebind	Unique
Weapon	Rebuke of the Vaal	Rakiata's Dance is a solid mid-budget option and high budget we go Voidforge
Shield	Victario's Charity OR better Replica Victario's Charity	Unique	Discarded once we go two-handed weapons

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 be occupied by 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

Vixen's Entrapment This is a relatively affordable way for us to both get a second curse and to apply to curses with one cast. Nothing really competes with these gloves.

Boots

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

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 & attributes as needed, and Replenishing Remedies anointment.

Making this slot carry your Attribute problems is a sound choice, as we have no extremely strong options to get here. A +1 all along with the attributes is very nice, but not needed.

The anoint you want is Replenishing Remedies.

Rings

Here we are either going with a combination of Amethyst Ring and Bone Ring or simply 2x Amethyst Ring. Due to our tree, we do not actually need bone ring resistances for the minions, and as such the bone ring is a purely offensive choice.
As this gives us the option, and the opportunity, to go double Amethyst that will be my primary recommendation to most players in higher budgets. In low budget, it will depend on how your damage actually feels to you. I prefer double amethyst in low budget as well.
Stat priority here is essentially:
- Life
- Resistance
- Chaos resistance
- Attributes if you still need any.
In that order.

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 exact same damage boost.
All we get from +1 all is some defensive boosts and more resistance along with 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 of that’s 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: https://www.pathofexile.com/trade/search/Ancestor/qX94BYXSg

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

Jewels

We will be using only 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.
Little else truly matters here. You slam this with an alch and take what you get. If it’s really, really bad you can scour it and alch it again once or twice.
Any stats you get here is a bonus. Should you get Vicious Bite or Raze and Pillage both of them are 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.

Ghastly Eye Jewels

Now these babies are something else. We have such a vast ocean of options here, as our damage sources are rather generic and all elemental, physical and chaos flat values are functional for us. Attack speed is as always solid too. That said, there are some budget considerations here, so I will attempt to outline a stat priority:
- Life – This stat is always good to have on jewels
- Flat elemental damage values – All of them work. Fire damage is typically the best because nobody else wants it. This means we can usually get some really high rolls, without paying very high prices. High effect, low price, exactly the way we want things in low budget.
- Minion attack and cast speed – hitting faster is always good. This stat is primo and should preferably be present on all jewels.
These are the three stats I would advise you look for, and as such, the stat on every jewel in low budget. If you can find better jewels than I did, use better jewels than I did!

- Flat physical – This stat is fine. If you can get some with high rolls for cheap, you can use them. Save them for swaps in medium budget, but they will underperform until the swap in weapons.
- Flat Chaos – While this stat is good, it’s too sought after by other builds that also want attack speed rolls and as such they tend to be insanely expensive. They are also useless to us in higher budgets. It warrants mention, but mostly in a cautionary capacity.
- 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.

Small jewel

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

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 & 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
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.	5	Masochist or Flagellant Quicksilver Flask of the skink, which is to say Bleeding and Corrupted Blood immune.

Feel free to swap the quicksilver for another flask base that you feel solves your issues better. You should also feel free to experiment with running only 1x Writhing Jar, but it will probably feel awkward.

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.

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