GhazzyTV's Zoomancer Necromancer Gear Progression (PoE Settlers of Kalguur)

Introduction

While the PoB shows you what gear we believe belongs in which budget, it might still be a bit unclear in what order we think you should prioritize what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritize when, and why. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the gear progression.

Campaign

During the campaign with this build, you will for the most part pick up items that have the links and colours you desire and hit them with an Orb of Alchemy or an Essence with an appropriate function to make them rare. You will be hoping for a resistance when doing this, and should you end up having an open suffix on the item the crafting bench will let you add on a second resistance roll or an attribute roll, depending on your current needs.
Keeping your resistances as high as possible, ensuring you have the attribute rolls and getting some life modifiers is all you need to worry about at this stage. Do keep in mind that resistances are not very important in the first couple of acts but becomes extremely crucial for your survival around Act 5 and forward and reaching the cap (75%) is preferable for all 3 elements at this point. If you’re struggling with gear to reach this you can always replace any of your offensive aura(s) for a Purity of Elements to help solve this potential problem.

Low Budget

We are going to make the assumption that you have kept your resistances capped going into this budget, and will be working with that assumption. If you do not have capped resistances when hitting maps, you need to get that sorted as soon as possible. Any attributes you might need to keep leveling your gems and/or equip gear will also need to be sorted either via gear or by deviating slightly from the skill-tree by picking up any needed “+30 attribute” nodes on the tree. Gear wise, pieces such as a Heavy Belt and/or Jade Amulet are great pieces to solve attribute issues.

Early gear

First we want to get a 6-Link. We recommend a 5 or 6L Corrupted rare of any ES or Armor variety or Hybrid ES/Armor variety. Using a mere Tabula Rasa is always an option but a corrupted 6-Link will provide other stats for you as well, just make sure you grab one with the correctly colored sockets!

A helmet with +1 or 2 if the wallet can survive that investment level of all minion skill gems is preferable, don’t forget to make sure the helmet has a life modifier! If you have an open prefix slot on the helmet can you bench-craft +1 to both Zombies & Skeletons which is highly preferable, you can get this craft by unveiling veiled items from the Betrayal encounters in Act 9 and forward.

1. Bones of Ullr To help prop up minions and reach level 25 spectre.

Next up we grab some amulet and rings with resistance rolls and dexterity rolls on them. The exact stats on what does not matter all that much, you just want a little bit more than you need and then move on with your life as all of these items will be replaced in time. Do not spend a lot of currency on these.

It is finally time to prioritize our old friend Darkness Enthroned. Minion builds like Ghastly Eye Jewel and this build is no exception.
Getting a very well-rolled belt, especially early on, is extremely expensive and not advised. Get a roll of 50-75% or so, and look to upgrade the belt later. The values above that simply aren’t worth their price early on, we can spend our currency better elsewhere.

Jewels

The main modifier is to make sure that literally, every, single, jewel you have slotted has a Life modifier increasing your health. Outside of that you can go for a variety of different damage modifiers ranging from “Minions Deal X – Y Additional Physical (or Cold) Damage” as any of them will work fine, physical is the better one but can cost a bit more. Other modifiers could be increased attack speed for your minions or “Minions deal #% increased damage when you’ve used a minion skill recently”

Shield

• Minion Damage, reasonably high roll
• Maximum life, preferably decently high roll
• Resistances if needed

The rest

A rare amulet & Rings purpose is to help solve your attributes and/or resistances with these pieces!

1. Unending Hunger is a luxury item. It’s price fluctuates wildly, it can be very cheap and it can be quite expensive. There is simply no way to tell in advance. Keep an eye on this jewel, if it is cheap pick it up early as it provides massive power to the spectres. If it is expensive, do not worry about it too much and pick it up later.

Concluding low budget

If you have not already, it is high time that you sort your flasks. Get flasks with the modifiers that correspond with the guide as best you can, and be willing to spend a little extra to get better rolls on your Rumi's Concoction. Moving forward you’ll also want to give yourself Chaos Resistances when possible to help build your defenses higher.

Medium Budget

This is the part where we move our Golems and Skeletons in to our helmet instead of our body armor. So before we talk about the upgrading path of your other items we have to paint a picture of what you’ll be looking for with the helmet choice first!

Helmet vs Chestpiece

The purpose of moving your Golems and Skeletons to your helmet is to alleviate socket pressure from the build and it also ends up being the path you’ll take moving in to high budget with the build meaning you’ll want to use a proper helmet. There are a handful of modifiers acting as “extra support links” for your minions that should be on the helmet, some better than others. Essentially when you go in to the medium budget for the helmet a combination of 2 of the following modifiers would be enough as this allows you to switch your Bitterdream weapon in to a trigger crafted +1/+1 wand making the build much smoother to play. The recommendation is to get a combination of at least 3 of the mods shown below.

• Socketed Gems are supported by Level # Minion Damage
• Socketed Gems are supported by Level # Hypothermia
• Socketed Spells have +#% to Critical Strike Chance
• +1-2 Level of all Minion Skill Gems
• Socketed Gems deal 30% more Elemental Damage (Essence of Horror)

Below you’ll find a video describing the crafting process of this type of helmet. Do keep in mind that in many cases it is cheaper to just purchase one instead of crafting one yourself.

Boots

Now that we’re stepping up our game we want to get rid of the Bones of Ullr as higher end-game map tiers will start to cause your skeletons to lack survival. We are solving this with a Medium Cluster Jewel making recently summoned minions immortal for 4 seconds and whenever any minion dies all your other minions are healed.
We now swap to rare boots intended to carry basic stats like life and resistances.

Cluster Jewels

Picking up 1 of the large clusters as shown in the PoB and move in to the Medium Cluster is of utmost importance to keeping your skeletons alive in the higher end-game content so this will be among the first items you’ll want to upgrade to. The second Cluster should be picked up quickly as well to give our skeletons that survivability that we took away from changing our boots. We also want to connect yet another 2 small Cluster Jewels; 1 is a reservation one with “Spiteful Presence” to allow us to run all our auras. The last small Cluster is an armor providing one that we want to roll to get “Enduring Composure” this is how we are going to make sure we have Endurance Charges in the build!

Shield

Now that we are looking for more damage output we’ll be wanting a minion shield with +1 level of all minion skill gems, any other modifiers such as minion damage or minion critical strike chance is great but never forget the importance of having a life modifier on the shield and/or any potentially needed resistances.

Wand

Once these steps have been taken we want to make sure the wand is a +1/+1 with a trigger craft bench-crafted, preferably with increased minion attack speed and if the wallet allows; increased critical strike chance is great here. Other modifiers such as increased critical strike multiplier for your minions isn’t a bad choice here either.

The rest

Ashes of the Stars is an incredibly powerful amulet which we will oil up with Stamina for another Endurance Charge that will weave in well with the Cluster jewels we just added to the build.

High Budget CI

This is where progression gets tricky, if you switch to soon to CI you will go from being built like an actual tank to the most vulnerable feather in existence. To avoid this it’s recommended to utilize PoB to check how much Energy Shield you would have on your character after equipping it and changing your skill-tree to the High budget version. The recommendation is to not do this switch unless you’re hitting at the very least 5,000 or higher Energy Shield.

• Helmet
• Body Armour
• Boots

You also want to get yourself both Large Clusters from this PoB as they also bring a ton of Energy Shield. The trick here is to verify your change in PoB before switching, just because Energy Shield is the main stat we are looking at doesn’t mean that you can completely ignore attribute requirements to both wear the items themselves but also for your equipped gems. Resistances is just as crucial as before with the exception that you no longer need Chaos resistance thanks to being CI.

Offensively you want to make sure you have your minion helmet and +1/+1 wand covered as well as the Cluster Jewels. Awakened gems is last in the progression to move in to High budget. So again; verify your character by setting it up in PoB and add the items you’ve purchased so you can easily check whether or not you have enough resistances, attributes and energy shield before taking the leap!

Final Notes

Balancing your upgrades means moving from your low budget PoB in to the higher ones. With that in mind you can start upgrading items and wait with big ticket expensive slots like the Ashes of the Stars and focus your initial item upgrades on items that would work in the lower budget as well such as the helmet or wand. Same goes for the transition to CI when moving from Medium to High budget!

Any rare item you get should always have a life modifier and make sure you always keep an eye out for your resistance(s) and/or attributes so you don’t end up creating a mess as you upgrade piece by piece! Same goes for Energy Shield instead of Life in the High budget PoB.