Dear exiles, today we're showcasing BalorMage's clever use of the new Dark Marionette Spectres introduced in the Affliction League.
The following picture is Dave, the minion. His entire purpose is to burn, explode violently, reform, and repeat. In fact, there's a whole family of Daves doomed to the same fate. Today, we're looking at BalorMage's Spectre Popcorn build.
How Does It Work
The Affliction League introduced the Breaker of Oaths, a curious character who sells corpses. These corpses can be animated with Raise Spectre. Many of them have unique abilities that aren't available anywhere else, and one in particular drew the attention of BalorMage.
The following is the Dark Marionette. It has the ability to reform when it dies - unlike normal spectres, which must be re-summoned from new bodies. At higher corpse tiers, this monster also gains the ability to explode on death.
BalorMage uses the Minion Instability Keystone, which detonates minions when they reach low life. By supporting these spectres with Infernal Legion, they burn to death and explode. A moment later, each minion reforms, creating a never-ending cycle of pain for the Daves and their enemies!
Offence
All of our damage comes from these exploding Marionettes, so how do we get the most out of them? The more we have, the better. We're getting extra spectres from sources like the following pictures.
The Dark Marionettes themselves are available in three tiers, as seen here.
The highest tier is ideal because they apply Scorch, a handy debuff that reduces enemies' elemental resists. That tier is the rarest and most expensive, so BalorMage explains that you can probably get away with having only a couple of perfect Daves in your retinue.
We can direct the spectres by casting a spell in the direction we want them to go. In this case, Balor uses the Arcanist Brand. This skill is handy because it lets us automatically trigger more debuffs, Flammability, and Wave of Conviction. The smoothness of play is at the heart of the build design.
There is one little concern with this setup - we have to balance our minion speed and the speed at which our minions die so that they make it to their destination before exploding.
One trick Balor uses is Maligaro's Lens. This shield reduces your elemental resistances. But when combined with Necromantic Aegis, the effects of the shield apply to our minions instead. With this lower resistance, our minions explode much sooner.
In this vein, it must be noted that Minion Elemental Resistance can stunt the build. It's important that our Raise Spectre gem has 0% quality because otherwise, they'd have more resistance than they would need.
The build's biggest advantage is its consistency and automation. The spectres will continue spawning and exploding, regardless of our movement, dodging, lag, or anything else.
Defence
Since we're free to dodge however we like, that's a defensive help. But we're also squeezing in as many other defensive layers as our budget allows.
Of note is our significant block chance. How are we achieving these numbers without the stats from a shield? The answer is Bone Offering. The skill consumes corpses to grant Block Chance, usually to our minions. But since we're a Necromancer, we can use Mistress of Sacrifice to direct some of those bonuses to ourselves.
We can increase the effectiveness of our offering even more by using the Wildwood Primalist Ascendancy available in this league. This tree allows us to stack charms that increase the effectiveness of our offerings for even more Block Chance.
We can also automate our Bone Offering by placing it in a wand with this mod that triggers skills automatically.
Conclusion
The build we've showcased today is the budget version with less currency items BalorMage developed in a private league. If you're interested, he has also outlined a more expensive min-maxed version to test the limits of what's possible with the Dark Marionettes. The build is smooth to play, easy to understand, and thematically horrifying, which are all things we love. Thanks to BalorMage for his contribution.