The goal of the build was not only to be cold minions that machine gun down my enemies from far away but to also control and perma CC them into an Icy shards. Which meant I needed to innovate on other builds that came before me and come up with a better solution and synergy. This build gives your minions tons of Frostbite/Bleed stacks as well.
I’m also posting this here so maybe others can enjoy something different and perhaps add or innovate on it too. I feel like this build has a lot of wiggle room for personal play styles and think many will enjoy the Chaos bolt buffing minions instead of shade managment.
With that said it’s a sight watching a ranged Zoo of 11 archers, 5 Mages and Golem go to work machine gunning your foes down. You minions are able to hit upwards of 40 hits per second and then you can call in the zombies and parasites for more.
In the above planner the gear is barebones but only selected what I felt were mandatory legendaries and 1 LP mandatory affixes.
I did another play through with this necro and was the smoothest yet as your build is brought online at well lvl 5 for the most part. With Reach from the grave wand and Doublet armor. You can also set yourself up with some Aboreal rings for movement for yourself and minions.
I personally never liked the Dreadshade/infernal shade Necro builds. I find it a little too tideous, you sacrifice a lot and well… have less of a minion build. While with Archers it can be easier to clump them together. You still run the risk of minions not having buffs in spicy or dense Mono’s where you have to move/teleport. Also you lack freeze rate and are forced to use some subpar set item.
The solution is speccing into Chaos bolt and taking the node “The Gate” which will give your minions ailments in the tree when hit with Chaos bolts. These bolts don’t hurt our minions but just a quick tap of the skills they will all be splatters and receive the buff. Which gives them Frostbite to make their freezing potential amazing.
Then with the 100% Damned chance converted too bleed in the Chaos tree with the Doublet chest. I had no issues reaching 400+ stacks of bleeds on the dummy. I’m still early in my build process and farming out empowered blessings. However was very pleased that with 0 void res I was able to perma CC Rahyeh and defeat her easily to secure that void blessing.
With Lagon I can freeze his Tents but not him so for mitigation purposes just swapped out to low life for the fight. It hurt my minions damage but with terrible resist and his claw doing huge physical damage it was the best option till better survivability on your Necro.
Herot got perfma froze in place and never did his charge animation. We just kept him middle of the map and he went to his minions phases then came out and was frozen as he bled to death in ice.
As for stats I think this is where you can play around with Freeze rate, minion damage/health and other mods. I’m currently trying to stack some Int because it increases the freeze rate of cold Arrow by (6% per Int) Also Int just is many great stats for minions and you.
Next up I’d like to explore some minion CD recovery and start working on scaling their damage more as well as my mitigation. Granted if everything is frozen I’m not taking damage but there are Spire mono’s and random ranged attacks you don’t want to be 1 shot.
Anyways this has been a ton of fun and maybe someone will find it fun also as they are waiting for 1.1 or something new to try. Good luck.