GhazzyTV's Dark Pact Elementalist Build Guide (PoE Keepers of the Flame 3.27)
Disclaimer!
This build comes with a very unique play style and is not for everyone. It’s a two-button rotation, but doesn’t have a clearly defined set interval.
This is the high budget for the build that’s used after obtaining gear and swapping off Necromancer. If you were looking for low/medium budget, check out the Dark Pact Necromancer version of the build
Introduction
With the introduction of Bloodlines in 3.27, we are once again bringing back 
Dark Pact. The Catarina node Umbral Army is perfect for Dark Pact. We’re changing to Elementalist to further scale global defences and make use of Elementalist’s ability to let chaos damage inflict ailments. Golems offer a host of offensive buffs in addition to the global defences that initially dragged us over here.
It needs to be mentioned that a lot of the gear in this build is expensive, which is why it’s highly recommended you progress through the previous two PoB’s first.
Build Overview
Pros
+ Unique Play Style – You will summon skeletons and then cast Dark Pact which is chaining between your skeletons and causing havoc. It has some pretty sweet visuals.
+ Reasonably Tanky – Sporting 90%+ Evasion, suppression cap, and 10k energy shield combined with Ghost Shrouds, we’re relatively sturdy.
Cons
– Unique Play Style – Due to the nature of this build’s playstyle, it is a build that not everyone will find enjoyable. We strongly recommend watching the gameplay video before starting this build.
– Expensive! Some of the gear can get pretty specific and crafting it costs a pretty penny.
Playstyle
The playstyle is based around summoning your skeletons on the field and then directly connecting them by casting Dark Pact, chaining between your skeletons and dealing massive amounts of damage.
Damage Scaling And Defensive Layers
At a base level, we’re an Evasion and Energy Shield build that utilizes Chaos Inoculation. This means we evade most attacks that come our way, we’re immune to chaos damage, and when we do get hit, Ghost Shrouds recovers a healthy chunk of Energy Shield to keep us safe.
Evasion and Energy Shield are both considered “defences”. As such, they can both be scaled by increased defence modifiers. The Stone Golem provides one such buff, which we scale through our ascendancy, and the Umbral ascendancy from Catarina provides another. Combined, they allow all of our gear pieces to give us an exponentially higher amount of stats.
Spell suppression layers on top to reduce the damage we take from spells by 40%. The build gains additional support through chilling and ignite. The former reduces enemy action speed, while the latter forces enemies to deal a larger portion of their physical damage as fire. In addition to all of this, we have leech.
To summarize, we evade the majority of the attacks that come our way. The few that go through are usually mitigated by Ghost Shrouds recovering Energy Shield to compensate; we take only 60% of the damage we should have from spells, and we’re leeching.
Damage Scaling
This is where Dark Pact gets a bit weird. It will sacrifice 14% of a skeleton’s maximum life and deal the corresponding amount of damage as chaos damage. This chains between the skeletons, meaning every cast is several small explosions around the skeletons.
We will want to scale several vectors to make the skill come together. The more life our skeletons have, the more base value they add to the spell. The faster we cast the spell, the more times it applies that damage, and the more times it will chain. We then make it crit and scale critical damage to make it very quickly turn things to dust.
This is where our three damage-related Golems come in; big modifiers to Cast Speed, Critical Strike Chance, and generic Damage in addition to AoE scaling. On top of that, one of them solves our mana regen problem.
There is just one caveat to this – the skeletons are torn to shreds by our own spell. With Dark Pact costing 14% of a Skeleton’s life, 100/14 = 7.14. This means each skeleton can be hit an absolute maximum of seven times before they stop being effective targets for Dark Pact. We cannot mitigate this in any meaningful way other than simply re-summoning the skeletons.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that you remember to summon new skeletons on a regular interval, or your DPS will plummet.
PoB And Passive Skill Tree
See the dedicated page for details.
Gearing
See the dedicated page for details.
Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheon Recommendations
You can read about the Ascendancy, Bandit choice, and Pantheon Power recommendations for this build on our dedicated page.
Questions?
To guarantee that our guides are tools you can utilize to enhance your experience in Path of Exile, you may have questions. Please join the PoE Vault Discord and they will attend to them as soon as possible.
Final Notes
It is very crucial in a game like Path of Exile that you play the game the way you enjoy playing it. With that said, if you’ve made any tweaks to the build compared to what we’re showing in this guide, it would be great if you shared it through our discord! It’s an effective way to show other approaches and it helps me grow as a build guide creator!
I hope you found the build guide useful and I wish you all many 
Divine Orb drops!
