BalorMage's Holy Relic Necromancer Build Guide (PoE Mirage 3.28)

March 8th, 2026, 20:36

Introduction

This is the most broken Minion build I have played in years. It has also miraculously survived somehow, and as such we have turned it into a league start guide. It’s my pleasure to bring you the guide in both video and written formats! The PoB covers everything from leveling to end game. There is no min-max version in the guide, but I plan to league start this build and bring you all of the juicy updates! Come play along with me on Twitch.

Build Overview

This section will go over the pros/cons of this minion build.

Pros

+ With this minion build, we have both full screen clear coverage as well as maximum single target in the same gem setup, with no swapping gems at any stages!

+ The damage is abnormally high, actually to the point it seems unbalanced for your level of investment.

+ While still being a poison build, we poison cap with very little investment, meaning a much larger portion of our damage is dealt by the hit and so is quite fast to come out.

+ One button playstyle. Just spray Lancing Steel of Spraying at everything which auto-targets and auto-triggers everything.

Cons

– Path of Building has no idea how much damage these minions do, and thus the PoBs are very misleading and show a much lower damage value than what we get in the game.

Playstyle

Because Holy Relics are permanent minions that can be made tanky enough to never die (even in Ubers and T17 content) we generally don’t need to worry about anything at all. Furthermore, since our chosen trigger skill is a spray-type attack that fires multiple projectiles which return, pierce all targets, and automatically aim at enemies within a wide cone in front of you, it’s incredibly easy to use. This skill plays almost exactly like a CoC Detonate Dead of Chaining build, or is quite similar to bows or wands, but with the benefits of being a very tanky minion build.

PoB, Passive Skill Tree and Gem Links

All my guides use Path of Building. We have a simple guide for you that shows how to import my build into Path of Building, you can find the guide here.

The League Start and End Game versions have all been rolled into one PoB, which can be found here: https://pobb.in/PkYi_wRa_1lq.

Make sure you check the different item-sets and skill-set in this PoB as it will help you navigate progressing the character from the start!

Damage Scaling and Defensive Layers

Damage scaling is mainly handled in two ways. The first is minions levels. This is a very good way to scale Damage up to Level 30 minions. The second (and most important way) Is with Cooldown Recovery of the minion. The only way to gain cooldown recovery that affects the minion is with the quality of the gem, and we must hit certain cooldown breakpoints.

Relic Breakpoints of Quality for Cooldown Reduction: 2, 14, 30, 52 (5 attacks per second), 82 (6 attacks per second), 128 (7.58 attacks per second)

The different ways we get more quality are:

- Quality on the Summon Holy Relic of Conviction itself (including the 23 corrupted outcome)
- Dialla's Malefaction in a green socket.
- Enhance Support
- Ashes of the Stars.
- Minions have 20% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate mastery.

Through experimentation the most worthwhile breakpoints are 52, 82 and 128. Aiming for 128 has become much easier after the addition of the minion cooldown mastery making it a worthwhile target.

This means that if we have 80 Cooldown Reduction, we might as well only have 52 as nothing else changes. If we can push to 82, suddenly way more damage.

Defensive layers in this build Block and Spell Block cap, along with a % life gain on block shield, The Surrender or Svalinn Svalinn.
As well as 10% reduced damage taken from the Necromancer Ascendancy Plague Bringer. We also have a lot of Life Gain On Hit from our own attack.

Gearing

A lot of our gear is Unique in the end game and the different options are shown in the PoB. Little gear is needed for the swap to Holy Relic of Conviction, here is what’s required.

Item Slot	Item Name	Rarity
Head	Geofri's Crest	Unique
Weapon	Fast attack speed one-handed sword with Minion Damage Essence and crafted Trigger Socketed spells.	Rare

We will also need two Gems:

Summon Holy Relic of Conviction with 10% quality (or higher, but at this stage higher does nothing).
Lancing Steel of Spraying – no quality required, but its extra projectiles so we want it eventually.
You also need to have the mastery for 20% increased minion Cooldown Recovery Rate.

Leveling Through the Campaign

Unfortunately, this build is not viable for leveling until we meet the minimum requirements above. We have opted to level using Absolution until we can either afford to buy the things we need, or farm them ourselves as Merciless Lab.

Before you are able to utilize minions for your leveling experience, you will need to make sure they function for actual clearing. This means giving them tools to use for hitting multiple targets. You are able to level with minions as early as Level 12, as that’s the restriction before you can get Absolution. The skills listed below are the ones that are preferred to use until I hit level 12.

As soon as we have extra links we should also set up a totem that will stay with us for a while.

For movement we will use Frostblink at level 4 and you can also add Shield Charge if you would like to.

Once you reach Level 12 you are able to purchase Absolution and Flesh Offering.

Once in act two you can buy Desecrate to help with your Flesh Offering uptime and replace Minion Damage Support with Living Lightning Support or Physical to Lightning Support if you have a friend that can give it to you.

Also in Act 2 we can add our auras Arctic Armour and Herald of Purity.
You can pick up Clarity Clarity in Act 1 to help sustain your mana early on.
In Act 3 we will replace Arctic Armour with Purity of Elements to make us safer.

From mid Act 4 when we unlock Spell Echo Support this leveling build really starts to kick off. Our totem links stay the same but we should have a 4-link by then and will use the following links.

Absolution
Spell Echo Support
Added Lightning Damage Support
Living Lightning Support or Physical to Lightning Support

We will use these links until we are ready to do the Holy Relic swap, you can pick up your Physical to Lightning Support in act 6 from Lily if you didn’t get it earlier.

Questions?

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Final Notes

As much as I love making build guides, I’m very new to writing written guides. So, if you see any mistakes or have any suggestions feel free to reach out to me through Discord or my Twitch Stream!

And remember, all guides no matter how good or bad, are just guides. If something in it doesn’t suit you, change it! Fun is more important than DPS.