Extending Balormage’s & Ghazzy’s PSRS build guide for T17/Uber end-game content

We’ll refer to Balormage & Ghazzy’s guide as “BG’s PSRS”.

If you’re not familiar with PSRS, I highly recommend going through the campaign alongside BG’s PSRS guide here before jumping into this: https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/balormage-summon-raging-spirits-necromancer-build-guide

The purpose of this extended guide is to show how to build beyond what is already discussed in their guide and address (understandably) overlooked details that makes this build more T17/Uber+ comfortable.

Our PSRS (Evening’s PSRS)

Our version of the PSRS is an end-game focused variant of BG’s PSRS. If you’re already invested into BG’s PSRS but have additional currency to fine-tune, this build can improve DPS by 30~50%, double EHP, and has improved QoL in many fronts.

The full build is estimated to be around 30~50 Divines. Though, improvements to the BG’s PSRS build can be incremental. For example, small investments such as Dual Clusters (10D+) or Thread of Hope (0.1D ~ 3D) can make a huge difference in the build without going deep into double-digit divines.

Key Pieces

These are our key equips

Category	Our PSRS
Helmet	+2 All Minion
Body Armour	The Covenant1
Gloves	+2 Socketed Minion
Boots	1 Abyssal Socket
Weapon	United in Dream2
Shield	Aegis Aurora3
Amulet	Aul’s Uprising (Envy)4
Belt	Darkness Enthroned 100%5
Flasks	Quicksilver, Basalt
Jewels 1 & 2	Void Beacon6 (Forbidden Flesh7, Flame8)
Jewels 3	Thread of Hope9 at Eternal Youth10
Jewels 4	Amanamu’s Gaze11
Jewels 5 & 6	Megalomaniac12
Jewels 7 & 8	Large Cluster Jewel
Jewels 9, 10, 11 & 12	Ghastly Eye Jewel13
Anoint	As the Mountain14
Spectre 1	Perfect Judgemental Spirit15
Spectre 2	Perfect Warlord16
Spectre 3	Hulking Miscreation17
Spectre 4	Perfect Guardian Turtle18
AG Helmet	Crown of the Tyrant (White Socket)19
AG Body Armour	Garb of the Ephemeral20
AG Gloves	Asenath’s Gentle Touch21
AG Boots	Windscream22
Gem Links SRS	SRS - Awk. Void Manip - Awk. Multistrike - Awk. Unleash - Awk. Unbound Ailments - Awk. Minion Damage
Gem Links AG - Spectre	AG - Spectre - Minion Life - Meat Shield
Gem Links Curse	Arcanist Brand - Despair - Desecrate - Flesh Offering
Gem Links Stone Golem	Stone Golem - Feeding Frenzy
Gem Links Envy	Envy (from United in Dream2) - Awk. Generosity
Gem Links Convocation	Convocation - Automation
Gem w/o Links	Vaal Grace, Vaal Haste, Flame Dash, Tempest Shield23

Key Changes

As a bird’s eye comparison with BG’s PSRS, these are the significant changes.

Category	BG’s PSRS	Our PSRS	Notes
Investment	5 ~ 50+D (*)	30 ~ 50D	It’s not clear on BG’s investment for end-game.
DPS (Uber)	18M	27M	Non-Uber hits the DoT cap, which is not representative
EHP (No Flask/Flask)	71K/114K	223K/270K	BG’s uses Progenesis while we didn’t, which may be a bit inflated
Keystones	Eldritch Battery24, Mind over Matter25, Glancing Blows26	None
Block	Capped with Glancing Blows	Capped
Suppress	Capped	None
Armour	High Priority	Medium Priority
Evasion	Low Priority	Medium Priority
Energy Shield	Medium Priority	Medium Priority	ES is med. priority in BG’s build as MoM delegates only 40% damage to Mana
Life	High Priority	Medium Priority
Clusters	1	2
Spectres	P. Judgemental, P. Forest W., P. Turtle, P. Warlord	P. Judgemental, Hulking, P. Turtle, P. Warlord	(**)
Flasks	Granite, Silver, Quartz, Progenesis	Quicksilver, Basalt
Weapon	United in Dream / Convoking (+1 Minion +1 Spell)	United in Dream
Helmet	Suppress & +2 All Minion	+2 All Minion
Gloves	Suppress	+2 Socketed Minion	Roles of Gloves and Boots can swap
Boots	Suppress	1 Abyssal Socket	Roles of Gloves and Boots can swap
Anoint	Death Attunement (+1 Spectre)	As the Mountain (+12% Attack Block)
Jewels	Amanamu’s, Green Nightmare, 5 Ghastly, 1 Cluster	Amanamu’s, 2 Forbidden, 5 Ghastly, 2 Cluster, 1 Thread, 2 Mega
Forbidden Jewels	None	Void Beacon
Minion Recovery	Minion Def. Mastery: Minions Recover 5% on Minion Death	Life from Death: Minions Recover 4% on Minion Death
Curse-Offering Loop	Arcanist Brand / Convoking Trigger Wand	Arcanist Brand
Auras	Envy, Det., Haste, Malev, Disc., T. Shield, Vit.	Envy, V. Grace, V. Haste, T. Shield, Vit., Det., Disc.	Bold: Provided by Spectres (***)

(*) +3 Covenant¹ is 500D+ and Progenesis is 100D+, it’s not build critical to have these 2 pieces so we excluded it from the pricing.

(**)

• P. Judgemental: Perfect Judgemental Spirit ¹⁵
• P. Forest W.: Perfect Forest Warrior ²⁷
• P. Turtle: Perfect Guardian Turtle ¹⁸
• P. Warlord: Perfect Warlord ¹⁶
• Hulking: Hulking Miscreation ¹⁷

(***)

• Det.: Determination (Provided by P. Turtle) ²⁸
• Malev: Malevolence ²⁹
• Disc.: Discipline (Provided by P. Judgemental) ³⁰
• T. Shield: Tempest Shield ²³
• Vit.: Vitality (Provided by P. Warlord) ³¹

BG’s PSRS

As BG’s PSRS guide went through, we’re using Summon Raging Spirit (SRS)³² that inflicts Poison³³ on enemies. We can have up to 20 SRS alive at the same time, summoning additional SRS will kill the earliest summoned SRS in a first in first out fashion.

The way that each SRS Minion inflicts poisons is through Chance to Poison Enemies on Hit, which commonly comes from these sources:

• United in Dream, Cutlass² which provides 60%.
• Ghastly Eye Jewels¹³ which when socketed, each provides 10%-15%.
• Chance to Poison Support³⁴ provides 40%.

A common early-game set-up is to use Ghastly Eye Jewels and Chance to Poison Support to hit 100% Chance to poison as United in Dream can be difficult to get.

The poison damage dealt per second is 30% of the flat Physical and Chaos damage dealt. Each poison lasts for 2 seconds by default. Therefore, the poison dealt is 60% in total over the 2 seconds.

Aside: End Game Min Max (Overkill) Loadout

We need to address a possible elephant in the room. In BG’s PoB³⁵, they provided an alternative loadout that represents what an end-game overkill setup could look like, under “End Game Min Max (Overkill)”. In our opinion, this setup is not nearly as polished as the non-overkill variant, we view it as more of a pipe dream than a well-calculated extension of their SRS.

This is not a critique on the intention of the design, as it’s clearly intended to be less meticulous. We want to raise attention to its details to prevent players from falling into folly, blind copy and pasting of its pieces.

Our reasoning pivots on an eyeball justification of how much value each piece could bring versus its cost. Pieces such as:

1. +3 Covenant. As of writing, it’s at 500D+, but hardly moves the needle in DPS with consideration to its exorbitant cost.

2. Convoking with perfect 15% Ghastly Jewels: 15% jewels are already difficult to come by, furthermore, getting additional benefits mods such as “Additional Chaos Damage” exponentially explodes the price on this. As of writing, just getting 15% and at least 30 additional Phys/Chaos is minimally 8D. Convoking goes for at least 70D.

   From our calculation, it does improve damage, but we don’t feel that this high of a price-tag justifies its investment.

3. Progenesis is probably one of the better justified investments here. Though, if you’re willing to sink 100D into it, we recommend to review other pieces before the investment.

EB & MoM & Aegis & Glancing Blows

EB & MoM & Aegis & Glancing Blows has a really tight-knit synergy that makes up for each other’s shortcomings.

Eldritch Battery (EB)²⁴ makes your Energy Shield (ES) “protect” mana instead; spending ES before mana. The main motivation for allocating this is so that you can fully reserve the entire mana pool to make full advantage of auras.

This however poses a huge drawback in defenses, which is why Mind Over Matter (MoM)²⁵ is also allocated, making incoming damage split between the ES that’s protecting the Mana pool and Life. Thus, we do not just fully lose out on ES protecting our life.

The build also uses Aegis Aurora (Aegis)³, which allows users to “Recover Energy Shield equal to 2% of Armour when you Block”. In many cases, without Aegis, when we take too much damage, ES will be drained, and can be difficult to regenerate due to the recharge cooldown. Aegis mitigates this problem by yielding instant ES when we block. Thus, as long as we’re consistently blocking, ES can be kept at a healthy level.

Capping block can be difficult, thus Glancing Blows²⁶ can be allocated to easily cap Attack and Spell Block at 75%. Though this comes with a huge downside of letting 65% of damage pass through despite blocking.

This is a high level diagram on how damage taken is split to respective lifeline layers.

flowchart TD
    A[100% Damage Taken]
    B -->|60%| C(Life<br>44.25% Damage Taken **)
    B -->|40%| D(Mana<br>29.50% Damage Taken ***)
    D -->|EB| E(Energy Shield)
    E -->|When Empty| D
    F -->|65% Damage| B[MoM<br>73.75% Damage Taken *]
    F -->|Aegis Recovery<br>2% Armour| E
    A -->|No Block<br>25% Chance<br>100% Damage| B
    A -->|75% Chance<br>Block| F{G. Blows}

• (*) $25\% * 100\% + 75\% * 65\% = 73.75\%$
• (**) $73.75\% * 60\% = 44.25\%$
• (***) $73.75\% * 40\% = 29.50\%$

As an aside, as damage is split between ES and Life at the same time, life leech from Bone Barrier³⁶ is consistently putting in work, and not just trying to heal a full life bar, which happens often in the case without EB.

Bone Barrier grants 1% of Damage Dealt by your Minions is Leeched to you as Life

United in Dream & Aul’s Uprising

A simple yet interesting pairing is Aul’s Uprising⁴ and United in Dream². By getting the Level 25 Envy³⁷ from United in Dream, then nullifying the reservation requirement using Aul’s, we can cast a free Envy aura.

Chance to Poison

One of the simpler goals is to achieve 100% Chance to poison, which can be achieved through:

1. United in Dream² which itself already gives 60%
2. Ghastly Eye Jewels¹³ which can grant (10~15%)
   • Darkness Enthroned⁵ can elevate this to (15~30%)

Chance to Poison Support³⁴ is also on the table, but it’s often not used in end-game setups.

The minimal combination to hit 100% is United in Dream with 2 Ghastly Jewels and Darkness Enthroned (1 can be not socketed with high enough rolls).

In the case of using Convoking over United in Dream, one would need at least 5 Ghastly Jewels (excluding Amanamu’s¹¹) that are decently high-rolled. By our calculations, they need to be each on average 14.29% chance to poison, which is going to get costly for good jewels.

Amanamu’s Gaze & Chance to Poison Balancing

With Amanamu’s Gaze¹¹, you need 4 Ghastly Jewels (excluding Amanamu’s). Thus, per the above section, it’s not that critical to hit max rolls for chance to poison if they are expensive (unless you’re using Convoking).

We feel that it’s good to try to hit the cap with 2 Ghastly Jewels, 1 in Darkness Enthroned, 1 outside. This is because getting Ghastly Jewels that have chance to poison on hit & important stats such as additional chaos/physical damage, attack speed, etc. tend to be extremely expensive. This leaves us with 2 free Ghastly Jewels that can focus on more important stats while keeping costs lower.

Getting the Fourth Spectre

To get 4 spectres, you need the following:

• Passive: Death Attunement³⁸
• Level 25 Raise Spectre³⁹

The difficulty is getting Level 25 on Raise Spectre, which BG’s PSRS achieve using

• Corrupted Level 21 Raise Spectre
• Helmet Mod: +2 to Level of All Minion Skill Gems
• Convoking Wand Mod: +1 to Level of All Minion Skill Gems
• Convoking Wand Mod: +1 to Level of All Spell Skill Gems

In this case, they are using a Rare Convoking Wand, United in Dream² cannot work. We recommend the below choices to work around it.

Though, there are some other avenues:

• Boots Delve Mod: +2 to Level of Socketed Minion Skill Gems
• Empower⁴⁰: +2 to Supported Skill Gems

We don’t recommend Empower unless absolutely necessary, as socketing Raise Spectre alongside Animate Guardian⁴¹ with 2 good defense supports is important to keep them alive in end-game content.

To summarize

Piece	+# Lv.	Note
Raise Spectre Lv.21	21
Helmet Mod +2	2
Boots Delve +2 Socketed Minion	2	Must be socketed here
Gloves Delve +2 Socketed Minion	2	Must be socketed here
Convoking Wand +1 All Minion	1	Sacrifices United2
Convoking Wand +1 All Spell	1	Sacrifices United2
(Awakened) Empower	2-4 (*)	Must sacrifice 1 support

• (*) +4 is 1 mirror. +3 could be enough if you can find another source of +1. But still, we recommend just getting the Helmet and Boots/Gloves, much cheaper.

BG’s PSRS Spectres

BG’s PSRS chooses the following spectres:

• Perfect Judgemental Spirit¹⁵

  Buffs SRS with Fire and Chaos Damage & casts Discipline³⁰

• Perfect Forest Warrior²⁷

  Buffs SRS with Onslaught⁴² and has Culling Strike⁴³

• Perfect Guardian Turtle¹⁸

  Buffs the character with Rongokurai’s Boon⁴⁴, grants 5% Physical Damage Reduction and casts Determination²⁸

• Perfect Warlord¹⁶

  Casts Vitality³¹ & grants Endurance charges.

We additionally recommend

• Hulking Miscreation¹⁷ as it also grants SRS more Damage and increased 30% Attack Speed.

Perfect Judgemental Spirit & Hulking Miscreation only works thankfully because SRS is both a skeleton and construct, which are necessary conditions respectively for the aforementioned spectres. See the PoeDB Entry for the SRS entity⁴⁵

Animate Guardian (AG)

Animate Guardian⁴¹ is also a core component in the BG’s PSRS build, which they use:

• Crown of the Tyrant (White Socket)¹⁹ which grants SRS 47 to 61 added Chaos Damage
• Kingmaker⁴⁶ which grants

  • Nearby Allies have 30% increased Item Rarity
  • Nearby Allies have +10 Fortification⁴⁷
  • Nearby Allies have Culling Strike
  • Nearby Allies have +50% to Critical Strike Multiplier

• Garb of the Ephemeral²⁰

  • Nearby Allies’ Action Speed cannot be modified to below Base Value
  • Nearby Enemies cannot deal Critical Strikes

• Windscream²²

  • AG can apply an additional curse

• Asenath’s Gentle Touch²¹

  • AG applies Temporal Chains⁴⁸ on Hit
  • Non-Aura Curses you inflict are not removed from Dying Enemies
  • Enemies near corpses affected by your Curses are Blinded
  • Enemies Killed near corpses affected by your Curses explode, dealing 3% of their Life as Physical Damage

Garb of the Ephemeral²⁰ is a major game-changer; gaining Action Speed not being able to be lowered below base value prevents Frozen⁴⁹, Petrified⁵⁰, any slowdown debuff. It also prevents enemy Critical Strikes, which is an additional nice to have.

Asenath’s²¹ applies Temporal Chains⁴⁸, which makes Poison³³ from PSRS linger longer, making them take more damage. Asenath also gives crowd explosions, which often procs on dense packs e.g. in Strongboxes.

Windscream²² is necessary as we already apply Despair⁵¹, thus AG needs to be able to cast an additional curse to inflict Temporal Chains on top.

Kingmaker⁴⁶ granting Fortification⁴⁷ gives 10% less damage taken, which is extremely significant. Furthermore, Culling Strike gives an additional edge in damage.

Crown of the Tyrant¹⁹ is just a flat damage increase.

Our PSRS Changes

Our build departs with many concepts of BG’s PSRS but still keeps several tried and tested strategies (across several leagues) intact. During our testing, we consistently challenged core-designs with alternatives and we found many areas of improvement which we have documented below.

There’s quite a few changes: we’ll explain the motivations of each with respect to the above design choices. We’d like to emphasize that these motivations pivot on the assumption of end-game (>=T16 Maps), thus may not be as impactful if the character is not comfortably there yet.

Re-evaluating EB & MoM & Aegis

Despite many benefits of synergy between these three, our test plays uncover that it’s not foolproof, with its fault amplified in late-game content.

Poor DoT Mitigation with EB & MoM

The synergy is prone to one common fault: DoT.

When we are inflicted with any unavoidable DoT, MoM²⁵ will kick in and drain through our ES, immediately making you not have any Mana to cast anything, given that you fully reserve your mana pool. This bricks your travel skills, and SRS summons. In this special case, Aegis³ cannot kick in to regen ES, as it only works when on block.

This adapted diagram specifically for DoT shows what happens.

flowchart TD
    A[100% DoT Taken]
    B -->|60%| C(Life)
    B -->|40%| D(Mana)
    D -->|EB| E(Energy Shield)
    E -->|When Empty| D
    B[MoM]
    A --> B
    A -.Cannot Trigger.-> F[Aegis]
    F -.Cannot Recover.-> E

We were frustrated at how many times this can happen in T17/Ubers:

1. Desecrated Ground
2. T17 & Uber Sirus: Awakener’s Desolation
3. Uber Shaper/Elder: Volatile Anomalies
4. Uber Exarch: Searing Rune
5. Many more

There are several ways to fix this issue:

1. Replica Sorrow of the Divine⁵² which allows you to pop a life-flask to instantly force regenerate your ES.
2. Reducing ES Recharge Start delay through the passive tree, like through Wicked Ward⁵³, Essence Surge⁵⁴, etc.

Though, as much as we try, we find that we’re not really satisfied with these band-aid solutions. Furthermore, these seem to just pile onto the problem instead of truly fixing the root issue.

We took a gamble and tried without EB and MoM.

Dropping EB & MoM for just Mana

Again, the purpose of EB & MoM in BG’s PSRS is to solve the issue where you want as many auras as possible yet still want to cast SRS consistently. We present an alternative solution, which is to just not reserve all mana instead, just enough to cast SRS.

By going with this design, we need to fix these:

1. Maximum Mana & Mana Reservation
2. Mana Regeneration
3. Mana Cost

As an example, in our build, the SRS mana cost is 54, thus, we designed ours to have a little more than 54 unreserved mana. We also have ~54 Mana/s regeneration, making us able to cast SRS every second.

There are many ways to solve the above, we list some that we’ve tried or used:

• Max Mana & Reservation
  1. Large Cluster Jewel: +# to Maximum Mana
  2. Passives: Sovereignty: 12% increased Mana Reservation Efficiency of Skills
  3. Passives: Mana Mastery: 12% increased Mana Reservation Efficiency of Skills
  4. Eater Eldritch: Helmet: 9% increased Mana Reservation Efficiency of Skills
• Mana Regen:
  1. Passives: Shaper: 40% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
  2. Passives: Dreamer: 30% increased Mana Regeneration Rate, 10% reduced Mana Cost of Skills
  3. Passives: Mystic Bulwark: 1% increased Mana Regeneration Rate per 1% Chance to Block Spell Damage
  4. Large Cluster Jewel: #% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
• Mana Cost:
  1. Life Mastery: Skills Cost Life instead of 15% of Mana Cost
  2. Ring Craft: Non-Channelling Skills have -7 to Total Mana Cost

These options are non-exhaustive, we can even sometimes fix Mana Regeneration with an Enduring Mana Flask. This is often a good flask to have as you may encounter map mods that stop/reduce mana regen.

Enduring:

• Effect is not removed when Unreserved Mana is Filled
• Effect does not Queue
• 66% reduced Amount Recovered

With these checked out, we find that it’s significantly more manageable than using EB & MoM.

Though, we have to acknowledge that this requires significantly more investment than just allocating EB & MoM. Furthermore, since our ES protects our life entirely, life leech from Bone Barrier³⁶ will be less effective overall. However, we argue that since it’s a defensive layer for Chaos damage, it may be desirable.

EB & MoM against 1 Shot hits

Mind Over Matter²⁵

• 40% of Damage is taken from Mana before Life

MoM makes it such that 40% of Damage is relegated to Mana (ES with EB), our max damage taken is affected. For example, given that we have 3000 HP and 3000 ES with 0 unreserved Mana, we can take:

• $3000 \text{Life} + 3000 \text{ES} = 6000$ Damage in 1 hit without EB + MoM
• $3000 \text{Life} + 2000 \text{ES} = 5000$ Damage in 1 hit with EB + MoM

We can see that in special cases, where $\text{ES}>\frac{2}{3}\text{Life}$, EB + MoM reduces our maximum damage taken in 1 hit.

We find that in many of our playthroughs when we specialize into ES equipment, our Life is usually $\approx$ our ES. This means that EB²⁴ and MoM²⁵ will result in a lower max damage taken.

Re-allocating passives without EB

If we drop EB²⁴, notice that the top right of the passive tree is spread thin, spending way too many points to fetch:

1. Instinct: 22% Suppress & ES Regen
2. Influence: Aura stats
3. Written in Blood: Life & ES
4. Large Cluster near EB

We felt that this wasn’t worthwhile for a whopping 37 points, in our version, we re-allocate it to mostly focusing on the left side of the passive tree.

37 if you break the branch at the Intelligence node right below Wandslinger.

This is also a supporting reason why we choose to not focus on suppress as mentioned in our next section

How often do you need to cast SRS?

One of the problems when dropping EB²⁴ is the SRS³² cast rate necessary in order to:

1. Trigger Minions Recover #% of Life on Minion Death for sufficient Spectre & AG survivability.
2. Maintain a maximum 20 SRS uptime.

Surprisingly, the answer is not very often.

Consider the case where we have a 20/20 SRS³² Gem linked to a 5/# Awakened Unleash gem. We get the following traits:

• 30% chance to summon an extra Minion
• Supported Spells gain a Seal every 0.66 seconds, to a maximum of 4 Seals

If we are able to cast SRS every second, we’d summon on average $1.3 * (1 + \frac{1}{0.66}) \text{SRS}/s\approx3.27\text{SRS}/s$. Our SRS would live for base $5s$, extended to $(5 * 144\%)s=7.2s$ with the Enduring Bond passive ring. Thus, if we held down SRS, we will be able to summon a peak of $3.27 \text{SRS}/s * 7.2s\approx23.5\text{SRS}$. This thus also gives us some excess SRS to trigger our Minions Recover #% of Life on Minion Death ability, or just some lee-way to maintain our SRS.

Some may consider this to be a bit too little lee-way, since we always have large downtime. It’s possible to fix this with an Enduring Mana Flask or Mana Regen on clusters.

However, we recommend to not have too much lee-way to not expire SRS too early. We need to take into consideration that spamming SRS at a distance will counter-intuitively reduce damage, this is because SRS needs to travel to the target, which usually takes around ~1s.

What about Aegis?

Despite dropping EB²⁴ & MoM²⁵, Aegis³ is still an insanely good shield. There are other contenders such as The Surrender⁵⁵ and Svalinn⁵⁶. We stuck with Aegis as we upgrade from BG’s PSRS, we didn’t really find much need to move to either.

While we do recognize that Svalinn is significantly powerful in increasing EHP, its investment is a bit steep compared to many other pieces we have.

Swapping Suppress & Glancing Blows for Evasion & Block Cap

In BG’s PSRS, their main defenses are:

1. Life
2. Armour
3. ES (with MoM²⁵)
4. Block (With Glancing Blows²⁶)
5. Suppression Capped

However, we find that in many cases (including other builds), specializing in specific lines of defenses can get extremely costly, especially suppress, often leading to diminishing benefits for larger currency sunk. We felt that achieving suppress cap was extremely difficult without a Rare chestpiece and trying to hit a Suppress & +2 Socketed Minion Gem mod on either Gloves or Boots usually goes to many divines. Thus, it’s more budget conscious to consider other more accessible defensive layers first.

Furthermore, we noticed that Glancing Blows²⁶ is not necessary as achieving a high block isn’t incredibly difficult if we spec into:

1. Safeguard⁵⁷

   • +3% to maximum Chance to Block Spell Damage
   • +10% chance to Block Spell Damage while holding a Staff or Shield

2. Mystic Bulwark⁵⁸

   • 6% Chance to Block Spell Damage

3. As The Mountain¹⁴ (via Anoint)

   • +12% Chance to Block Attack Damage while Dual Wielding or holding a Shield
   • +3% to maximum Chance to Block Attack Damage

4. Enduring Ward⁵⁹ (via 2 Megalomaniacs¹²)

   • +10% Chance to Block Attack Damage while at Maximum Endurance Charges

   We achieve Max Endurance Charge with the Perfect Warlord¹⁶ Spectre

Thus, we recommend taking as many lines of defenses as necessary, whichever comes first. If suppress just so happens to be cheaper, then it’s also recommended to go for that

1. Life
2. Armour/Evasion/Suppress whichever cheaper
3. ES (without MoM²⁵)
4. Block (Without Glancing Blows²⁶)

Changing Single to Dual Cluster

If you’ve played around in PoB, you’d notice that perfect clusters tend to have small passives that grant even more damage (and some utility) than the natural tree passives.

For example, branching into

• Redemption⁶⁰
• Spiritual Command⁶¹
• Sacrifice⁶²
• Sacrifice⁶²

May be less effective than sending points into the cluster.

We find that the optimal cluster jewel is

Large Cluster Jewel

• Adds 12 Passive Skills
• Added Small Passive Skills grant: Minions deal 10% increased Damage
• [Prefix] Added Small Passive Skills have 35% increased Effect
• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: Minions have 3% increased Attack and Cast Speed

Additionally, we find that the following are potentially useful

• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +#% to all Elemental Resistances
• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +# to All Attributes
• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +# to Dex
• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +# to Str
• [Suffix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: #% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
• [Prefix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +# to Maximum Life
• [Prefix] Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +# to Maximum Mana

For Mana mods, it’s to help when we drop EB

We also place these 2 cluster jewels on near Divine Shield and the other near Death Attunement³⁸. (This means we don’t anoint it, we instead path to it).

Jewel Socketing

In BG’s PSRS, there’s significant leeway in jewels that you can socket; though we find that for our design, there’s a recommended set of jewels you should try to achieve. We firstly need to discuss the number of sockets we have:

1. 1 Socket near MoM²⁵
2. 1 Socket near Eternal Youth¹⁰
3. 1 Socket near Mystic Bulwark⁵⁸
4. 1 Socket from any equip that has Has 1 Abyssal Socket
5. 2 Sockets from Darkness Enthroned⁵
6. 2 Sockets from Large Cluster Jewel socketed near Divine Shield
7. 2 Sockets from Large Cluster Jewel socketed near Death Attunement³⁸

We recommend the following:

• 1 socket near MoM²⁵ can socket any Ghastly (G1)
• 1 socket near Eternal Youth¹⁰ should socket a Thread of Hope⁹ Massive Ring
• 1 socket near Mystic Bulkwark⁵⁸ can socket any Ghastly (G2)
• 1 socket from the 1 Abyssal Socket equip can socket any Ghastly (G3)
• 2 sockets from Darkness Enthroned⁵ must socket Ghastly Jewels, it mustn’t socket Amanamu’s Gaze¹¹
  • One socket of Darkness Enthroned must have a Ghastly Eye Jewel with (14~15%) chance for Minions to Poison on Hit. (G4)
    • We can pick any other non-Darkness Enthroned socket for a Ghastly with (10~12%) to hit the poison chance cap
  • The other can socket any Ghastly (G5)
• 2 sockets from Large Cluster Jewels must socket total 2 Megalomaniac¹² with
  • Block passives
    • Enduring Ward⁵⁹
    • Flexible Sentry⁶³
    • … and many more (ref: Megalomanic¹²) and search for block passives until you can cap.
  • At least 1 has Blessed Rebirth⁶⁴
  • At least 1 has Life from Death⁶⁵
• 2 sockets from Large Cluster Jewels must socket Forbidden Flesh⁷ Forbidden Flame⁸ for Void Beacon⁶

Ghastly Jewels (including Amanamu’s), can have free-reign in placement, though we recommend the jewels socketed G4 & G5 must have 1 that has high poison chance on hit so you just need 1 other jewels to cap it out. Very importantly, do not socket Amanamu’s into Darkness Enthroned as it doesn’t increase the cap.

For the mod

• Minions have (10-15)% chance to Poison Enemies on Hit

Notice that you can Divine it, so if you find a jewel with lower roll on this chance with good T1 mods, you can consider re-rolling.

Thread of Hope

One of the best Thread of Hope⁹ placement is next socket near Eternal Youth¹⁰. The ring intersects perfectly with many useful passives:

• Nomadic Teachings⁶⁶

  • +2% to all maximum Elemental Resistances

• Versatility⁶⁷

  • 15% increased Global Accuracy Rating
  • 5% increased Movement Speed
  • +20 to Dexterity and Intelligence

• Heart of the Warrior⁶⁸

  • +20 to maximum Life
  • 10% increased maximum Life
  • +10 to Strength

• Constitution⁶⁹

  • +20 to maximum Life
  • 10% increased maximum Life

• Shaper⁷⁰

  • 40% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
  • Regenerate 1% of Life per second

• Dreamer⁷¹

  • 30% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
  • 10% reduced Mana Cost of Skills

We allocate all of these, but you can opt to skip them before Level 100.

Void Beacon

Void Beacon⁶

• Nearby Enemies have -20% to Cold Resistance
• Nearby Enemies have -20% to Chaos Resistance
• Nearby Enemies have 100% reduced Life Regeneration rate

Per the calculation in PoB, Void Beacon is more powerful than using 2 other Ghastly Jewels. Though by hijacking 2 Jewel slots, we find that we need additional equipment with an Abyssal socket, so it’s a bit of a pain to work around.

It’s also useful for mitigating life regen with Maven Witness regenerations.

Megalomaniacs

Megalomaniacs are the reason why we can easily Block Cap, in our build, they provide 24% Chance to Block Attack Damage and 4% Chance to Block Spell Damage through 2 Enduring Ward⁵⁹ and 1 Flexible Sentry⁶³.

Enduring Ward⁵⁹

• +10% Chance to Block Attack Damage while at Maximum Endurance Charges

Flexible Sentry⁶³

• 4% Chance to Block Spell Damage
• +4% Chance to Block Attack Damage

It’s important that you don’t need to get the same exact Megalomaniacs, you just need them to be enough to help cap blocks. In this case, Flexible Sentry is nowhere near a good pick, but we needed the extra Spell block, thus this does the job fine.

Furthermore, Megalomaniacs provide 2 crucial mods

Life from Death⁶⁵

• Minions have 15% increased maximum Life
• Regenerate 2% of Life per second if a Minion has Died Recently
• Minions Recover 4% of Life on Minion Death

Blessed Rebirth⁶⁴

• Minions have 20% increased maximum Life
• Minions created Recently cannot be Damaged (Recently⁷² means 4s ago)

Life from Death⁶⁵ is necessary which I explain in this section where I drop the Minion Defense Mastery for Life from Death.

Blessed Rebirth⁶⁴ is a perfect QoL for SRS as we usually spam summon them. This prevents any wipe of our recent SRS.

Dropping Minion Defence Mastery for Life from Death

Generally, people take Minion Defense Mastery⁷³ to spec into Minions Recover 5% of Life on Minion Death, which is one of the backbones of keeping Spectres³⁹ & Animate Guardian⁴¹ alive. Without it, losing it in T17/Ubers is almost always the case.

Since we drop the Sacrifice⁶² ring, we end up with no avenues for any Minion Defence Mastery. There’s an alternative in the Decay Ward⁷⁴ ring, though it’s a whopping 6 points to allocate it.

Instead, we recommend a simpler alternative, which is to get a Megalomaniac¹² with a Life from Death⁶⁵ passive, which provides Minions Recover 4% of Life on Minion Death. Not as much, but it’s a good enough replacement.

Prefer United in Dream over Convoking

The biggest drawback of using Convoking over United in Dream² is dropping Envy³⁷ by a whopping 10 levels, falling back to the Lv.15 Envy provided from Aul’s Uprising⁴. In exchange, we get the benefit of +2 Minion Gems, and additional Minion mods.

In our calculations, it does increase damage, though we don’t find that it’s worth it. A quick market survey of a subpar replica costs around 70D. We feel that it’s just better to stick with United in Dream.

Changes to Auras/Buffs

We revise the auras/buffs that is used. Some aren’t “auras” but we just lump them together for simplicity.

Aura	BG’s	Ours
Envy	United in Dream2 (Lv. 25), Convoking (Lv.15)4 (*)	United in Dream Lv.25
Malevolence	Self-Cast	No
Determination	Self-Cast & Perfect Guardian Turtle18	Perfect Guardian Turtle18
Discipline	Self-Cast & Perfect Judgemental Spirit15	Perfect Judgemental Spirit15
Vitality	Perfect Warlord16	Perfect Warlord16
Haste	Self-Cast	Self-Cast (Vaal)
Grace	No	Self-Cast (Vaal)
Tempest Shield	Self-Cast	Self-Cast
Summon Stone Golem	Self-Cast	Self-Cast
Fortify	AG41 Kingmaker46	AG41 Kingmaker46
Ephemeral	AG41 Garb of the Ephemeral20	AG41 Garb of the Ephemeral20

We felt that it’s rather wasteful to double cast Determination²⁸ and Discipline³⁰, thus we just left them for spectres.

We also note that there’s 1 less 50%-Reservation Aura we cast compared to BG’s PSRS. Notably, we would’ve included Malevolence²⁹ in the build if we had more sockets.

If we took out the Abyssal Socket, we’d lack 1 socket to max out Amanamu’s Gaze¹¹. Malevolence does increase the DPS more than the lost DPS, but we still do not have enough Mana Reservation to account for the massive 50%.

To solve that, we need to slot in an Enlighten⁷⁵… and respec some passives to Mana Reservation, or perhaps roll Mana Reservation on a helmet. These are all workarounds that in the end, will result in barely any net gain.

Changes to Spectres

To get 4 spectres, you need to path to Death Attunement³⁸ and have Level 25 Raise Spectre³⁹, see our previous section to learn how to do that.

We recommend using a Lv.21 Raise Spectre, +2 Helmet and +2 Gloves or Boots to hit Level 25.

There are a few spectres we can pick from:

Spectre	Purpose	Priority	BG’s	Ours
Hulking Miscreation 17	Damage	High		Yes
Perfect Judgemental Spirit 15	Discipline & Damage	High	Yes	Yes
Perfect Guardian Turtle 18	Determination & Phys Reduction	Mid	Yes	Yes
Perfect Warlord 16	Endurance Charge & Vitality	Mid	Yes	Yes
Perfect Primal Thunderbird 76	Grace	Mid		Maybe
Perfect Forest Warrior 27	Onslaught & Culling Strike	Low	Yes

We recommend picking the first 4, notably starting with Hulking Miscreation as it’s one of the cheapest yet most impactful spectres. Followed by Perfect Judgemental Spirit, which provides Discipline & Damage. Perfect Guardian Turtle and Perfect Warlord provides a lot of defenses.

We also recommend Primal Thunderbird as it’s usually overlooked, thus cheap. If you don’t use Vaal Grace, this can be a good substitute to ramp up another layer of defense.

Perfect Forest Warrior is low on the list as it’s effectively only providing Onslaught given that our AG has Kingmaker⁴⁶, which gives Culling⁴³ already.

Anointment

You may notice that since we path to Death Attunement³⁸, we don’t need to anoint to get it anymore. We change our anoint to As The Mountain¹⁴ as mentioned in our section for defenses.

Annex

Instant Leech

This was dropped in later revisions of BG’s PSRS but I think it’s worthwhile to still discuss at a high-level.

Instant Leech can be easily fetched with the Leech Mastery Node⁷⁷, however, given that:

1. 5% of Leech is Instant was nerfed from 10% in 3.26⁷⁷
2. It’s far away if you don’t spec into EB

It’s generally not recommended even if you go for BG’s PSRS.

In my opinion, Instant Leech is only useful if you have these conditions fulfilled

• You don’t die to 1 big hit
• Your SRS are attacking something
• You’re not on full-life

For many end-game content, rarely these all are happening at the same time. Many cases I find myself dying mainly to 1-shots, or large DoTs and rarely my SRS are in combat all at the same time. Thus, much like how BG’s PSRS drops the Leech Mastery, we recommend too.

Fun Fact: Original Sin doesn’t help

Surprisingly enough, Original Sin⁷⁸ will reduce our damage output. This is because it sets enemies’ Chaos resistance to 0, but in our build with Despair⁵¹ (-30%+), Void Beacon⁶ (-20%), Crown of the Tyrant¹⁹ (-10%), it actually reduces our enemies’ Chaos resistance much lower than 0%.