Is Assembled Abomination truly that weak?

The one I got is a Ribbons of Blood with LP1. True, it is only a LP1 but the unique is a great upgrade for minion users. But I have to find first the right ring to merge into it and hope for good luck on the merge :slight_smile:

Yes Assemble Abomination is rarely used in a permanent Minion Necro. The thing is, permanent Minions are inherently problematic, because as soon as you have pushed the game difficulty far enough that bosses (then eventually trash) can kill your minions, you are in big trouble. Expendable Minions do not have this issue.

That is not to say permanent Minions are not viable, but you will need to invest a LOT into their sustain and health. This means they need to be leeching health themselves and will also need you to invest a LOT into the stat Minion Mealth. You can see this stat in your char sheet under Minions. You are going to need quite a bit over 1000% to push corruption into the hundreds.

Here’s a couple of Minion builds I have that I have taken to 500+ corruption that might give you ideas…

First one (by far the strongest of the two) is all ranged/cold damage Minions that uses the combo of Dread Shade + Lich’s Scorn catalyst to buff the Minion damage to crazy levels while huge investment in sustain and Minion Health (1365%) keeps them alive.

This is also a low health/high Ward build but you can ignore that if you lack the items. Just replace the Chest, Boots and Gloves I have here with whatever you have. You may also want to replace the amulet as Death Rattle took a serious nerf in 1.0 but I haven’t played this build for months.

And here is a more simple all Melee permanent minions I was just messing with to try out the Aaron’s Will chest unique. Nowhere near as strong as the first but easier to put together. I have 1492% Minion health here as melee Minions die a lot more often. You can drop Aaron’s Will and just have Skeletons, no big deal.

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I understand. I am not far enough to have this issue (I just started the level 62 monolith). And you know what? I am not surprised that permanent minions are harder to manage than on call minions.

BUT, with my start of carpian tunnel, if I want to not be in pain and not need of a surgery, when I play, I must make sure I do not click too much. So spammable builds for me are out of the window.

Which means I’ll play my permanent build for a while, try to clear the regular monoliths, unlock the empowered ones, see how far I can go and when I starts to be blocked, it will be time to play something else.

And I am fine with this reality :slight_smile:
I am playing for fun and not to rush the leaderboards. Fun >>>> Optimization

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It’s not a problem, and I respect your intent. I am simply saying be ready to focus hard on things to keep them alive like Minion Health. On the plus side, Minion builds in Last Epoch are absolutely top tier strong in general, you just need to figure out how to keep them alive or use expendables instead.

I know it may not be for you, but for anyone messing with Minions and hitting a point where they die all the time, it is very easy to respec any Minion Necro build over to a super-strong expendable Minion build like Flame Wraiths.

Here is Flame Wraiths build. One of the strongest builds currently in the game…

Feel free to ask me anything about Minion builds, I have quite a few Necros and pet-based Beastmasters at level 90+ and pushing fairly high corruption.

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Just found out Amalgam of the Primalists does not stack when you use twinning golems unfortunately.

This is my experience as well. Even with 1000+ dodge rate, 8% leech, 25 minion resist, 150 Regen, and 400% increased health my minions were getting one-shotted at 200+ corruption.

Is this in 1.0 or before? As some things changed and were rebalanced in 1.0.

I think the biggest take-away is you can run perm minions if you’d like but you will likely hit a wall as soon as you hit empowered mono’s. For me once I hit empowered I had to respec into a more expendable type of build to push past 100 corruption.

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Noted. I’ll see once I reach that point. I intend to run all monoliths at least once (to see the stories) before starting on empowered. So plenty of time :slight_smile:

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In both instances (Beta/Release) my minions were all getting wiped by rare mob AOE’s once I was at 150+ corruption. I started stacking minion dodge at that point and was able to get to 200 corruption but since then, frequently, my entire army gets wiped.

I think once you hit empowered monoliths you’ll begin running into trouble with melee minions. Minions do 0 damage when they are dead.

Archers are scaling their damage through Cold/Fire but mainly I’ve seen Cold Archers with Mages being carried by Dread Shade/Lich’s Scorn. I’m not familiar with Fire builds that aren’t Flame Wraiths.

There’s so much to teply to here and I don’t have time. But a few things:

My offline character can do around corrupted 200 with no problem using only melee physical minions (other than 4 archers). I plan to do the same build now but with rogues. The issues I have are with ME dying, not my minions dying!

Flame Wraiths were HEAVILY nerfed in 1.0. I think melee minions were buffed due to the new affixes on weapons being OP. I can’t really test it though as my legacy characters’ weapon affixes changed as well.

Blood Golems do NOT work with a low health build. A low health build is optimal for both survivability AND damage because Revenant OP. Therefore I don’t use golems at all. Abomination can have way more armor given to other minions withconly a 5 point passive investment. I think it’s worth. Then you can replace your golems with wraiths. There’s no reason not to run wraiths and it saddens me that you don’t.

The worst thing about melee builds is AOE but with enough life leech and minion health regen (a nice stat to get on a couple items), it’s fine. Minion health regen is more important than flat minion health! INT gives flat health too but also damage and ward retention so it’s just awesome.

I’m glad there are othrs out there now besides just me doing melee builds! I never have anyone to talk to about it.

I found an uber sword with +71 minion melee damage that I’m currently using, it’s better than my axe.

@OP: 99% of uniques aren’t worth legendaryinh at 1 LP…but ribbons of blood IS the exception!!! So kudos for realizing that and congrats on your drop. Wait until you get a VERY good ring with T4+ in all stats and stats you like, so you’ll be happy no matter the outcome. Maybe health and/or a resistance you need in the suffixes. Minion damage, health, or health regen, or INT in the prefixes. Don’t waste the opportunity!

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Don’t be afraid to try epowered monoliths. As long as nobody helps you skip some, there will be only 2 or 3 monoliths left that you haven’t done when you unlock empowered. May as well just do them first time empowered, IMO. It doesn’t hurt to try. MY melee permanent minion build does fine; why shouldn’t yours? Empowered gives better item drops. More likely to have LP and higher overall tiers on items.

How much flat minion regen do you have for your build? Switched over to Revenant and it’s been a lot of fun so thank you for that suggestion!

My minions are fine until I run into x3 Ice Giants / Profane Flesh (These are a nightmare since my WHOLE build is necrotic damage loll) / Snake Tornado B*#t@!ds. Going to just stack minion HP as my build having 100 flat regen + 1000+ dodge isn’t keep them alive against aoe attacks at 250 corruption.

No offence, but 200 corruption is nothing.

Oh? All I saw was…

  • Flame Wraith - The projectile they cast last 1.05 seconds (from 1.25) resulting in it traveling a shorter distance (can no longer off-screen as much).
  • Flame Wraiths now have 20% less cast speed

is there something else? The above alone is not going to make a huge difference given how strong the build was, and let’s face it, reduced range in their attack was absolutely needed. They could clear screens of enemies off-screen before you even knew those enemies existed.

@Chaustrologic I have around 200 minion health regen currently which is too high, it’s just that i happen to have 2 otherwise good pieces of gear that ended up with it. Half of that is probably fine. It’s important though to conider flat + % together becauelse not everyone is taking the % nodes in the passive tree.

@Ghostlight I’m sorry you think 200 isn’t that high. I haven’t played enough to go higher, but my minions never die.

But someone said melee permanent minion builds can’t do “hundreds of corruption”, and it scared OP into not even wanting to try empowered…with 0 corruption. I’m just letting OP know the buid will be fine for a while and not to fear empowered monoliths.

Edit: Yes those were the two nerfs I was referring to. I’ve just heard youtubers say it’s a big nerf.

I am playing Abomination and I am happy with it. It requires no items, starts slow - but improves significantly with skill levels and better gear.

I think the game is trying to tell me to switch to necrotic damage instead of physical.
In the Black Sun timeline, which I just started, the first Rare drops a unique two handed axe: Usurper’s Mandate.

It is not flat damage for minion but it still gives 27% necrotic penetration to minions and +2 to all acolyte minions skills (so for me, regular skeletons and bone golem).

I truly consider checking my trees to see how much of a change I would need to do to turn everything to necrotic :rofl:

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Either way it would be good for you to take away from the advice that a lot of people are telling you not just the braggart. A lot of people are letting you know that melee minions while “workable” there is a massive gap between that and range. Personally I have found if you really want perm minions go all flame or cold and get as much range types as you can, this will significantly help you clear. Archers, Mages, Wraiths. The other thing about all range is that allows them to cluster for your shade buff which is about 30-40% of your total damage. Pre 1.0 my necro was regularly doing 600 corruption and only having to dodge stuff while minions squished everything. If you end up with fire try and pick up a logi hunger for amulet, ravens rise for gloves, and the sinathia set. If you are really lucky you can get an ambitions of the erased with +skele mage level. This allows your minions to be incredibly tanky with the sin set as they ignore crits and have +25% all res, as well as giving you +25% all res as well. With those items it also ends up really cranking up your minion levels so you can end up getting quite a few extra nodes to help round them out. If you end up getting the advent of erased boots with some good stats this will further help both movement and minion attack speed as you can get permanent uptime on frenzy for your minions.

Last but not least if you are doing a build like this avoid anything that drops minion numbers like the plague as both the archmage and the dread phalanx have been proven to be a net loss on damage unless you are trying to use the gimmick for archmage.