Ritualist Zoomancer Endgame Build

Introduction

Have you ever wanted to tap into forbidden ritualistic magic to raise an army of undead Snipers to devastate your enemies from afar? This is the guide for you! A collaborative work by GhazzyTV and Lollash. If you have any questions or feedback to provide, please feel free to drop by our streams!

If you are looking for a guide to help you through the campaign, you should check out the leveling guides available here.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Build Mechanics

The Ritualist Zoomancer build leverages some unique strengths of the Ascendancy. First, it gives you access to a third Ring slot, which helps solve both early gearing issues related to attributes and resistances, and then later, it gives you access to more damage scaling. Second, it uses the locally available Movement Speed on the tree to enable using the Bones of Ullr unique boots to significantly increase the number of Skeletal Sniper Minions you can have active.

Defensively, the build uses Chaos Inoculation and a combination of Evasion and Energy Shield equipment to provide you with a reasonable Hit Pool and solid Avoidance. Ghost Dance further improves the effectiveness of both these defensive layers.

Skill Rotation

Map Clear Skill Rotation

When moving through maps, you will only need to cast 2 Skills consistently. You cast Pain Offering whenever you are in combat and it is off cooldown, and you will cast Voltaic Mark on any tough Rare or Unique enemies you encounter.

You can also choose to use your Despair curse during difficult encounters, and you also have access to the Ascendancy Skill Ritual Sacrifice. This can be used at any time to grant you a single random modifier that Rare monsters can have, or can be used on the corpse of a Rare monster to steal all of the modifiers that it had. This can be powerful, but has a long animation time and also is currently a little inconsistent, so it is more of a “Use it if you feel like” skill and isn’t required for the build to perform

Boss/League Mechanic Skill Rotation

Execute the steps below to optimize damage against bosses.

1. Cast Despair under the boss just before it becomes active
2. Cast Pain Offering
3. Cast Voltaic Mark
4. Maintain those 3 Skills by casting them again when they drop off or come off cooldown

Gameplay Tips

It is VERY IMPORTANT that you stay within Presence range of your minions when you need them to be dealing damage. Failing to do so will result in your minions doing up to 80% LESS damage. This may require you to fall back to the position they are attacking from, or to manually move them closer. Both of the following techniques can be used, but have drawbacks associated with them and should be used judiciously:

1. By Weapon Swapping to your off weapon set and back again (by double tapping ‘X’ as the default command on PC), you can effectively resummon your minions at your current location. This will result in a short delay before they begin attacking, and if any of your minions are dead can result in your entire army being unavailable for several seconds. You should only use this if your minions are stubbornly refusing to move up
2. By using the Control Minions button, default ` on PC, you can instruct your minions to mouse to your mouse cursors location. They will prioritize this completely, and as a result, will not be attacking during their movement.

Do your best to avoid ground-based degeneration effects. As a Chaos Inoculation build with fairly low recovery rates these can be lethal.

Video Guide

Skill and Support Gems

The Active Skills used in this build all fill a supportive role, either cursing the enemies to increase their damage taken or providing powerful buffs to your minions.

The following Support Gems are listed in order of socket priority for each Skill.

Skill Gem	Support 1	Support 2	Support 3	Support 4
Pain Offering	Ablation	Inspiration	Expanse	Danse Macabre (Only after you have 15+ Snipers)
Voltaic Mark	Single Out	—	—	—
Despair	Cursed Ground	Ritualistic Curse	Heightened Curse	—

Spirit Gems

As a Minion-focused build, you will want to acquire as much Spirit as possible. You will want to get a Terracotta Soldier spectre from the Lost City in the underground of Act 2. NOTE: There are multiple variants; you will specifically want the one that only costs 10 spirit; they are the clay soldiers that only come to life when you get close. We use one of these to boost the damage gained from Muster support on our primary damage minions. It may take a few attempts to find one.

Here is a list of the minions you will want to summon based on priorities:

• 1x Skeletal Storm Mage Shock Bot
• 1x Bind Spectre: Terracotta Soldier
• 1x Skeletal Cleric
• 1x Skeletal Reaver
• 1x Skeletal Frost Mage
• As Many Skeletal Snipers as you can summon
• 2x Skeletal Warrior (Free from Rattling Sceptre)

The following Support Gems are listed in order of socket priority for each Skill.
NOTE: For Pinnacle bosses, we recommend swapping Fork out for Lightning Infusion for more reliable shock application

Spirit Gem	Support 1	Support 2	Support 3	Support 4	Support 5
Skeletal Sniper	Muster	Feeding Frenzy	Martial Tempo	Chaos Mastery	Fork Lightning Infusion
Skeletal Cleric	Last Gasp	Ingenuity	Meat Shield	—	—
Skeletal Storm Mage	Conduction	Overcharge	Coursing Current	Blind	—
Skeletal Frost Mage	Cold Mastery	Cold Penetration	—	—	—
Skeletal Reaver	Physical Mastery	Minion Mastery	Culling Strike	Splinter	—
Spectre (Terracotta Soldier)	—	—	—	—	—
Ghost Dance	Fast Forward	—	—	—	—
Ritual Sacrifice	Persistence	Energy Barrier	—	—	—
Skeletal Warrior	Deathmarch	Sacrificial Lamb	—	—	—

Ascendancy

The Ritualist Ascendancy at first glance seems to provide quite limited power, but if you leverage it in clever ways, it provides some unique benefits. Unfurled Finger and Mystic Attunement combine to grant an extra Ring slot, and then significantly boost the power of your 3 rings and amulets. After that, you will take the Ritual Sacrifice related nodes, As the Whispers Ask and As the Whispers Demand, for some potential on-demand power, but mostly you take these nodes for the small passives that grant additional movement speed to help mitigate the penalty of wearing the Bones of Ullr unique Boots.

Here is a list of the ascendancy points you will take, and in which order. If you need some tips or tricks for Ascending, check out our Trial of the Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos guides.

1. Unfurled Finger
2. Mystic Attunement
3. As the Whispers Ask
4. As the Whispers Demand

Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Venom Draughts.

PLEASE NOTE: Currently, the Passive Tree tool does not allow assigning of passives that are not connected to the standard path, but are available due to the use of Unique jewels that bypass pathing. This build uses a From Nothing at Whispers of Doom to allocate 4 passive points. You can find these points in the POB later in the guide, or check the video guide for an explanation

Jewels

The beneficial affixes for Jewels are listed below, ranked in order of importance. As soon as you can afford it, the Prism of Belief Unique Jewel will always be the largest damage increase you can get in a single jewel slot, even at +1 level. Try to buy a +2 or +3 Prism of Belief for Skeletal Sniper Minions as soon as possible.

PLEASE NOTE: Currently, there is a bug relating to the Prism of Belief for Snipers. If you do look to buy one from the trade website and search for the modifier “Level of All Skeletal Sniper Minion Skills” you will see 2 different modifiers. One of them DOES NOT WORK. During our testing, we determined that the SECOND modifier listed did provide the bonus levels, but we cannot guarantee that this will be true for everyone. Until this bug is fixed, we highly recommend you only buy a +2 at most unless you are willing to gamble with your currency

When selecting your Rare Jewels, if you can manage to get a total of 17% “Minions have +X% to all Elemental Resistances” you will cap your Minions’ resistances at 83%, drastically improving their survivability

Prioritize Rare Jewels with 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes from the list below:

• Prefixes
  1. % increased Energy Shield
  2. Minions deal % increased Damage
• Suffixes
  1. Minions have % increased Attack and Cast Speed
  2. Minions have +8% to all Elemental Resistances
  3. % increased Mana Regeneration Rate

Venom Draughts, Titan Medallion, and Quest Rewards

Throughout the Campaign, you will be provided with some quest rewards where you are required to make a choice. Here are the optimal options for each:

• Titan Medallion 1 – 30% increased Charm Charges gained
• Venom Crypt 1 – 25% increaed Mana Regeneration rate
• Titan Medallion 2 – 30% increased Charm Charges gained
• Venom Crypt 2 – +5 to all Attributes

If you would like more information on the rewards you can earn while playing through the campaign, you can always check out our Campaign Difficulties and Permanent Stat Bonuses guide!

Path of Building

Path of Building is a fantastic community-made tool that lets you see how any change you make to your character’s skill tree, gear, or skill gems will impact you. If you haven’t used POB before, you can find a useful beginner’s guide here.

Included in the POB below are some cheaper variants of this build if you’d like to play it before you have a little currency to spend and are lower level. Check the notes section in the POB for more details.

Gear

Below, we’ve included a gear table with a guide on what affixes you should pursue. Many fields are empty or only have 1-2 affixes listed. This is due to the adaptive nature of gear in Path of Exile 2. While each of the listed affixes is very important, making sure you have the required attributes (Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence) as well as capping your Resistances are goals you must achieve for the build to function properly.

This build will be a Chaos Inoculation build, but you should not allocate the Keystone passive until AFTER you reach 3000+ Energy Shield.

Due to the use of the Unique Boots Bones of Ullr we must get Movement Speed from other sources. This means your Body Armour base MUST be a Falconer’s Jacket, as it has a 5% Movement Speed implicit. In addition, the Bones of Ullr have a few useful corruptions that can provide you with additional power if the price is right. Keep an eye out for:

• Undead Minions have *above* 20% reduced Reservation (can roll to 24%)
• Additional Movement Speed
• Additional Resistances

We are using a Rattling Sceptre in our main hand to give us a target for our Pain Offering, and our offhand is the Sunsplinter unique buckler introduced in 0.2.0. This unique provides between 1-3 additional levels to All Fire Skills. Before getting Sunsplinter, you will use Carrion Call, swapping only after you have allocated the Minion Resistance and Life nodes from the Level 90 tree.

Equipment Slot and Base Stats	Prefixes	Suffixes
Main Hand (Rattling Sceptre)	1. % increased Minion Damage 2. % increased Spirit	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills 2. +% increased Minion Attack Speed 3. +% increased Presence Area of Effect
Off Hand (Unique Sunsplinter)		1. +# to Level of all Fire Skills 2. +# to Level of all Lightning Skills
Helm (Energy Shield Base)	1. % increased Energy Shield 2. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills
Body (MUST be Falconer’s Jacket)	1. +# to Spirit 2. % increased Evasion and Energy Shield 3. +# to Evasion and Energy Shield	1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Gloves (Energy Shield Base)	1. % increased Energy Shield 2. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Boots (Unique Bones of Ullr)
Amulet (Solar preferred)	1. +# Spirit 2. % increased Energy Shield 3. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills
Rings (1x Unset Ring required) Use up to 2x Unique Evergrasping Rings as Resistances allow		1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Belt (Any Base)		1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes

Socketables

There are a multitude of socketable items (Runes, Soul Cores, Talismans) that can grant additional bonuses when socketed into your gear. You can add additional sockets (up to a maximum) to each gear piece by using Artificer’s Orbs. You should use these sockets to help fix resistances or attributes, or to boost the Evasion or Energy shield of your gear.

If possible, socketing Iron Runes into your Helm and Body Armour will provide the largest defensive bonus, so if you have the option to socket a required resistance or attribute rune into Gloves or Boots or your Shield, that is the more optimal choice.

With the introduction of sockets on Sceptres, you now have some added power available. It is recommended that you add a socket to your Sceptre and insert one or more of these Talismans

• Primate Talisman – Allies in your Presence deal 30% increased Damage
• Serpent Talisman – Allies in your Presence have 8% increased Attack Speed

Another notable Talisman is the Ox Talisman which can be socketed in your Boots to provide 20% increased Presence area. If you have resistances and Attributes covered this can help boost the area in which your Sceptre and other presence effects will be active

Flasks and Charms

Flask Affixes

• Life Flask – Chaos Inoculation means Life Flasks serve no purpose

• Mana Flask
  • % of Recovery applied Instantly
  • Gains X Charges per Second

Charms

Charms in order of priority:

1. Thawing Charm
2. Stone Charm
3. Dousing Charm

Changelog

May 5, 2025: Guide created for Path of Exile 2, Patch 0.2.0, Early Access.