GhazzyTV's Chains Of Command 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 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.
As you will have levelled through some other means, you will now be putting together the essentials to make the build work.

The first thing we do in Low-Budget is acquiring the pieces we need to get to Chains rolling as a build. As you are transitioning into chains, we focus first on the pieces that are usable with whichever build you started with.
First we grab any shield we can get, for defense. Then we acquire some wand, preferably a wand like the one described in gear progression or better. We focus on doing this first, as this will benefit the build you’re playing while still gathering pieces.
Assuming that you have acquired both Indomitable army and Grave Intentions on your tree at this point, we then grab our helmet Ancient Skull. This incredible buff with hyper charge whatever we are playing, making it farm better and faster.

Chains of Command

1. Rebuke of the Vaal – First priority is high attack speed roll, and then as high of every flat value as you can get. Preferably you get past the 1K dps mark.
2. Gruthkul's Pelt – This item is essential for keeping our AG alive
3. Gravebind These gloves makes sure AG gets kill credit for everything, which guarantees weapon spawns. The chaos res is also handy, but not vital.
4. Leer Cast This dirt cheap helmet will give us a solid damage boost early on, which is very welcome.
   For boots you basically grab anything you want, our scorch explode boots are too expensive this early on.

Finally we pick up our 2x The Writhing Jar flasks and we’re good to go. We’re finally playing Chains of Command.

Pick up a Citrine Amulet with as high dex, strength and life as you can get. Any additional stats on this item is pure upside, but you’re only looking for those three.

As we’re not exactly a tank, we’ll be looking to make our first character-spesific defensive upgrade now, in the form of the recovery block shield.
A newer player will most likely overpay for this, so I will once again paste the link to this items crafting guide below.

Recovery shield

Our second, also defensive, option is going to be a Rumi’s Concoction flask. We ideally want this to have as high % attack and spell block values as possible. If a compromise needs to be made due to price, skimp on the spellblock and focus heavily on attack block here.

We now grab our gloves, Vixen's Entrapment, to give ourself a second curse. This will skyrocket damage to rares and bosses.

Once we have done that, we acquire Darkness Enthroned. We need to belt for its jewel sockets, and its massive bonuses to the gems socketed in said sockets.
Ideally we are looking for a roll of 75% here, anything lower than that is a bit sad, and anything above that is pure gas. If a 72 is half the price of a 75, get the 72 and get a better belt later.

We now focus entirely on our Ghastly Eye jewels. If you want details on exactly what modifiers to look for, what to combine and what I would suggest, see this page

Gear

Having sloted every jewel we can on our tree, we now acquire a large cluster with 8 points to get access to another 2 jewel sockets. In here we stick, you guessed it, another 2 ghastly eye jewels.

This is likely the point at which you will have a feel for the build enough to decide if you want to use a Bone Ring to prop up your damage, or 2x Amethyst Ring to prop up chaos resistance and/or other resistances. My recommendation would be on the latter, as some half-decent Amethyst rings will stay with you long-term.

Along the way you will hopefully have picked up some decent resistance boots with movement speed, and those will do for a while.

This concludes low budget, let’s get into the much more fun bit.

Medium Progression

As some of the items, we’re looking to put on our Animate Guardian are a bit pricy, there are unfortunately a few somewhat expensive first things to do in Medium Budget. I understand it can be very tempting to spend all your money on a Voidforge and go to town with it, but it’s a risky manoeuvre as AG will become a bit less sturdy once he loses his shield. As such there are certain steps to be taken first, I highly suggest you follow this list religiously:
1- 21/20 Animate Guardian
2 – Mask of the Stitched Demon for the AG. This will cost us the 50% damage boost from leer cast, but the sword will make up for that multiple times over. We just want to make sure he does NOT die.
Both of these things HAVE to happen before you get the sword.
3: A consideration should be given to Doppelgänger Guise for its juicy 40% reduced physical and chaos damage mod. This chest piece might be expensive, it might not be. It is not possible to tell in advance. It will make AG a lot more sturdy, so if it’s not terribly expensive it warrants very serious consideration.

Having taken care of AG’s essential beefcake upgrades, we can now acquire our Voidforge and the real fun begins.

At this juncture, the market of Trade decides our next move. Set up a trade for a convoking wand that beats the one you acquired earlier in terms of pure numbers. If you’re rich and you can get a +1 all here, do so. If you cannot, it’s still not a big deal.
If such an item does not exist, put the wand on live search and make a new trade window. In this window, you will be looking for a ghastly eye jewel with the following modifiers:
Life
Flat Physical damage to minion attacks
Minion attack and cast speed

Preferably you get one ghastly eye jewel with these modifiers AND Taunt. If you cannot, lower your flat Phys roll requirements or drop it entirely. You absolutely will need to have a jewel with a taunt modifier on it.

Around this time is when our shield starts to fall horribly behind, and we should be looking to acquire a The Surrender. As high everything as possible, budget permitting. I’d suggest you try to get a decent armour roll and above 400 flat recovery. If you can get more, that is better.
Feel free to acquire this exactly whenever it suits you. If you can get a decent surrender early for cheap, go for it right then and there. All minion builds love levels, and surrender helps you get them.

With AG’s gear sorted, our Ghastly eyes sorted and hopefully a new wand acquired, it is now time for us to upgrade our cluster.
What we are looking for here, is an 11 or 12 passive medium cluster with an item level of 84.
We want this jewel to have 35% increased effect, and minions have 3% increased attack and cast speed.
It’s important that these values are 35 and 3, as 3×1.35 = 4.05 meaning we get 4% attack speed per point on the small nodes. This is the reason we, budget permitting, ideally want a 12 and due to budget often settle for an 11.
If you get other stats such as Attributes, resistances, life this is a HUGE win.
If finished clusters are too expensive on trade, you take your 11 passive (ilvl 84) and put it in the Horticrafting Bench. You then roll it with “reforge caster” or “reforge speed” until you get 35% and 3% together.

If you for some reason have not already sorted your flasks at this point, this is now your number 1 priority. See the gear page for details.

Finally, we spend some currency acquiring a higher % roll Darkness Enthroned and make sure to get our AG some Legacy of Fury boots so he can mini-explode and provide scorch for us.

High Budget

The first big purchase we make in the High budget, is an Uul-Netol's Vow.
This gear piece creates a bit of a puzzle for us in our overall gearing. I will attempt to explain what I mean by this.
As we have up until now relied heavily on our shit amulet for attribute fixing, those attributes need to be found somewhere else.
This places pressure on our other gear pieces and makes them expensive.
At the same time, the better modifiers we can get for resistances, both elemental and chaos, on our Uul-Netol, the less we need to have on our other gear.
Spending a bit more on the amulet, to ease up resistance pressures elsewhere can be a solid choice, and is what I would do here.

If this item is entirely out of reach atm, try to acquire a 35-3-life-attribute cluster as it solves this problem entirely and severely reduces how much stats the amulet needs to carry.

Other than that, not too many changes for us. 100% DE belt if possible, even juicer Ghastly eye jewels and Woke gems are what’s on the agenda now.
Awakened Minion damage is usually cheap and should be acquired first.
Divergent Multistrike is usually relatively cheap and should be acquired second.

Awakened Multistrike is huge but typically costs too much for most people. It is one of the strongest upgrades for most minion builds, and will usually continue to raise in price.

This concludes the entire gear progression for chains of command.
I hope you enjoyed the journey, and that you will enjoy the build. If you still have questions, please jump into the vault discord and ask away. The moderators there will help you.