Golemancer Build Guide (Fire)
Endgame LE Tools with recorded progression of skill & passive trees: Necromancer, Level 97 (LE Beta 0.9.0j) - Last Epoch Build Planner
super strict end-game farming loot-filter:
Golemancer uber strict.xml (4.2 KB)
Intro
Hello lovely people, Thyworm here with a build guide for Last Epoch patch 0.9. This is my Fire Golemancer build, using a special unique item to summon a bunch of golems. That item, Aaron’s Will, is required, and as such, this isn’t a starter or beginner build. You should respecc an existing necromancer build into this one instead. As such, I won’t talk much about levelling either. It’s a great build however, I’m level 96 and doing 250 corruption at the moment, which works pretty well. I built this as a typical necromancer summoner, so it’s a lazy, passive playstyle, although I will throughout the guide give some alternative routes as well you could take. This guide should have everything you need, it has timestamps and useful links in the description, and without further ado, let’s dive in.
Pros
Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Here are the pros
It’s a well-rounded character, able to do maps and bosses alike
It’s a lazy summoner playstyle, with your minions doing the work
It’s smooth in both levelling and end-game
Damage output of multiple golems is pretty OP
Multiple golems on screen looks and feels very satisfying, especially with all the changes done in 0.9
Cons
Then the cons
It’s a lazy summoner playstyle, with your minions doing the work, not everyone likes that
I have very good gear, but still, at around 250 corruption you start to notice you are becoming quite squishy
Uniques
Let’s start with the build requirements
There’s really only one requirement, and that’s that you need the Aaron’s Will unique chest piece, created by Aaron, from the YouTube channel Action RPG. I would say that Eterra’s Path on most summoners is just too good to pass up on. I also use Raven’s Rise and Logi’s Hunger, both excellent items, and this character has a ton of good gear, because I wanted to push this character a bit further than I normally do.
Build Philosophy
Then, the build philosophy
My build philosophy in general is just that I want to play fun builds. And in this case, just wanting to make Aaron’s Will work. Which isn’t too difficult, the item is quite powerful.
I’ll use this section to explain some fundamental build choices I made, and recognize also a few other routes you could take with this item.
Let’s first talk about how Aaron’s Will works. It allows you to summon 1 golem for every 4 skeletons you can summon. These are regular skeletons, by the way. Skeletal mages don’t count. If you are a necromancer and you use all the points available to you to increase the number of skeletons you can summon, you end up at 9 skeletons. That’s 2 additional golems. You can, in theory, get up to 12 skeletons, but I think it’s extremely difficult, because you need a double Hollow Finger unique ring, but also you need the affix on a chest that provides +1 skeleton. Only then are you at 12 skeletons, unless I’m completely missing an item here that provides another skeleton as well. As Aaron’s Will is your chest, you would need to find an Aarons Will with at least one legendary potential, and then make a legendary Aaron’s Will with +1 skeleton as an affix, which is close to impossible of course, because the base item is already extremely rare, and high level, so you’re not going to find many to begin with, and definitely not a lot with legendary potential. So I opted to use in total 3 golems for this build.
The summon golem skill tree has options to get more golems, but I’ll cover those once we get to the skills, and why I didn’t do that.
Then, I would say you have roughly 3 different versions of this build, in terms of archetypes. You can specc into a build that let’s these golems just behave like any other minion, and they rampage around, doing massive damage. I took that approach. Within that archetype, you have the option to choose any type of golem you want, and I went with Fire golems, dealing large AOE fire explosions and DoT damage. Great for clear, decent for bosses. I’m sure if you specc into Cold Damage instead, it would work too with an item like Frozen Eyes of Formosus, freezing enemies.
The second archetype is a much more active playstyle, where you hit your golems with spells, and as a result they retaliate with Bone Shatter. The main issue here is twofold, in my opinion. Aaron’s Will puts a 3 second cooldown on Bone Shatter, so you would need a ton of minion cooldown recovery for this build to feel good. Second of all, you need to target your golems to a specific location constantly, and keep spamming blood rip, and while there’s a guide for that on Maxroll that you can follow, I found that playstyle to be very clunky. It does superior damage for sure, and works great on bosses, because there targeting isn’t a thing. But while mapping, I personally found it tedious to play.
The third archetype is to turn these golems into a ward generator, because Aaron’s Will provide ward generation from the golems, when they are low health. As golems can get massive health pools, you could have massive ward from just this chest alone. You would get more golems in the summon golem tree, and use something else perhaps as your main damage skill.
Wish List
So, what do you need in terms of stats? Here’s the wish list.
In terms of defences, make sure to get res capped of course, and ideally get 100% crit avoidance. The blessings in the monolith can help a lot here too, as well as idols. Intelligence works well, scaling minions and providing ward retention. We do get some ward, but health is the main life resource. Mana and mana regen are nice, and some minion flat health and health does help. Remember that minions scale with your level too, so they do get stronger over time.
In terms of offence, we’re scaling minion modifiers and skill levels of minions. I’m also quite heavily leaning into minion crit chance and while it’s not 100%, you can definitely tell they crit often and hard.
Skill Specialization
Let’s look at the skill specialization and skills we’re using
I will not discuss each point invested, but instead focus on the most important nodes. You can see everything in the build planner yourself, including the order in which I levelled up the skills.
Summon Bone Golem
Our main skill. I have a whopping 28 points in this one. I already explained most of this in the build philosophy. I’m specifically not taking Twinned golems, because I feel the loss in damage doesn’t make up for the additional golem. Also, they are much smaller and less cool this way. Instead, I made fire golems, so the skill receives the points from Logi’s Hunger. You take anything but Bone Kindling, unless you want your golems to eat your skeletal mages. I tried that out, but found the mages by themselves are very useful at range, so I want to keep them alive. The movement speed from Amalgam of Rogues and Unnatural Speed is mandatory for mapping, because it’s basically translating to DPS. It’s also massive quality of life. I round it out with Amalgam of Mages, for 75% more spell damage, scaling the fire AOE hits even more.
Summon Skeleton
Up next, Summon Skeleton. It doesn’t matter how you specc this, the only thing that matters is that you get all the +1 skeleton nodes. There are 3 of those. This allows this skill alone to summon 6 skeletons, so that’s 1 additional golem. The other 2 skeletons come from the mastery toward necromancer, and the passive tree, just one point. That puts you at 8 skeletons, which is 2 additional golems.
Summon Skeletal Mage
Up next, Summon Skeletal Mage. We can get 5 of these. 2 by default, one here from the passive tree, one from the mastery towards necro, and the final 5th one from the passive tree. For this skill tree, go south to Celer Mortis, for crit, and then Grey Merchant, for crit multi, and then pyromancers plus inferno, making sure you only summon fire mages. We buff their speed a bit by making our way ultimately to grave passage, which is a new skill node that teleport you to the location you summon a mage. This makes summon mage my movement ability. Finally, if you have the points, dump them in flat spell damage, so Gravetide.
Summon Volatile Zombie
Then, Summon Volatile Zombie, which I’m autocasting. This is another fire minion and you could swap this with flame wraiths I guess, but I like these zombies. Forceful Commander deals with the cast time and mana cost. 2/2 Ravenous is great against tougher enemies, 60% more damage. Pull of the grave, next to that, is culling strike, or kill threshold, of no less than 16%. Very useful on bosses. Summon more zombies at once with Dreadful Horde. I found 3 to be the sweet spot. And then I’m also opting to spawn parasites and zombie death, using Vile Force. These really don’t do much, however, they count as minions, they attack pretty fast, and they shred armor. Which is a mechanic we use to scale more damage. Final points go into path of destruction, which is just quality of life, and Necromatic Fervor, for a bit of healing.
Dread Shade
Then, our final ability, Dread Shade. We use this to buff our army. It can be a bit finicky to apply, as we have tons of temporary minions, like the parasites I just mentioned, but okay. There is a great buff indicator in the lower end of the screen, indicating if the buff is up or not, to help you out. Normally, dread shade drains minion health, but we’re changing that. So path towards Lone Watcher, it makes minions take more damage, but doesn’t drain health. You are now limited to just 1 dread shade, but it lasts a long time. 4/4 spectral presence is mandatory, for the AOE. Dying coven increased attack and cast speed a lot. Grim Fate is another more multiplier to minion damage, very strong. I round it out with lingering doom, some flat damage, one point in wisdom of the dead, preserving mana, and 3/3 flesh harvest, mainly useful if minions are losing health. This tends to happen at bosses, increasing their damage with this node.
Passives
Time to look at the passives. I’ve recorded, link below, the progression of the passives, so you can see that for yourself in the planner. I’ll just pick out a few nodes that I want to highlight.
In the acolyte tree, I’m ultimately speccing into Mania of Mortality, because we have so many temporary low health minions dying, plus enemies die around us all the time as well. This is a decent source of ward, and while we’re not scaling much ward retention, it’s another 700-800 layer of ward on our 1,6k health pool. In the necromancer tree, for the same reasons, we take reclamation of souls, 5/5. Another mandatory node here is Aegisfall, providing 200% chance to shred armor on minion hit. As we have tons of minions, we are regularly at 200+ armor shred stacks on bosses, which is a decent more multiplier to damage, as it increases the damage bosses take. To add to that, and to add a bit of flavor to the build, I’ve added 3/3 Dark retribution, providing another 3 permanent minions, applying stacks. Effigies is a life saver, take that for sure. Tyrant’s legion, just the one point, is where our 8th skeleton comes from. We take as much as we can from the minion crit route at the top of the tree. And don’t forget to take the skeletal mage node as well.
Gear
Then, also very important, Gear
We went through the main gear piece, Aaron’s Will. This is a random drop, apparently quite rare, so ye…
Since we’re fire minions, Logi’s Hunger, dropping from the triple fire shaman at the spirits of fire timeline, provides +2 to fire minion skills. Pretty huge. The flat minion crit chance is also amazing. Ravens Rise, the gloves, another rare, random drop, provide minion movement speed, more minion levels and some resistances. Eterra’s Path is a common random drop, but still in my opinion hard to beat, when it comes to summoner builds, because minion movement speed is just so important. Minions can’t do damage before they reach their targets, after all. And golems are melee minions. The rest of my gear is very good in fact. For a weapon, I chose to go with minion spell damage, as the AOE fire ability from the golem is a spell, and mages use spells too, plus the zombies as well. You could also equip an Arekk’s Bones, for more armor shred. That could work too. Try to get more levels to summon bone golems on the helmet. A fleshbound tome with minion stats seems like a solid choice.
Idols
For idols, I have a mix here of possible candidates. Minion CDR is great, because it procs the fire AOE more often. Minion chance to mark for death is mandatory, it’s a huge damage boost. I then took a mix of increased damage and some more resistances.
Blessings
For blessings, I’m taking mostly resistance blessings, because I don’t want to deal with resistances. I did also pick up the minion damage blessing from the spirits of fire timeline.
Loot Filter
I normally create extensive loot filters, but this time I didn’t. You should already have a necromancer with fire minions, and then swap. I have a build I played in the multiplayer beta, with a guide and all, to fire minions. That has a decent loot filter, so I’ll link that. I will post my current loot filter, but there’s hardly anything on there, it is super strict, as you should have most of the gear already, after all. It shows some idols, some +level affixes, it shows that super rare+1 skeleton affix on chest, and then just uniques, sets and exalted items. Only exalted items for me would be an upgrade anyway.
Play Style
Here’s the build in action.
It’s honestly just a bunch of buffed minions stomping the content. I really enjoy the whole feel of commanding this powerful army, and while a regular fire minion armor shredding army was already quite powerful, these additional fire golems take it to the next level for sure. It’s a joy to play, you don’t have to do much at all, and the only thing you should worry about is occasionally applying the dread shade, but much more than that, especially at250+ corruption, just don’t get hit.
Levelling
I normally have a levelling section, but not today, as you should swap from an existing summoner to this.
Monolith
Let’s talk some Monolith modifiers
There aren’t any modifiers that are detrimental, although chill and slow can be detrimental to your sanity while playing this build. I would primarily pick modifiers that buff the defenses of the enemies, instead of their damage. Our army is more than strong enough, that’s not a problem at all. We are however still a little bit squishy, hence this advice.
I spent a good chunk of time on these guides, which is why I don’t release many of them. If you appreciate the effort, consider liking or subscribing, it really helps me out. Thanks for watching. See you soon, love you all, bye bye.
