[Witch] PoE 3.8 Raise Zombie Necromancer Easy Build (PC, PS4, Xbox)

In poe 3.8, summon has been greatly improved. If you choose to summon as your league starter, this Raise Zombie Necromancer Build will be a good choice. You do not have to spend currency, you do not have to be good at the game, you really do not have to do anything special. All bosses (up to and including Shaper) just melt. Easy And Cheap

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Pros & Cons

Skill Tree

Ascendancy: Invoker, Bone Sculptor, Flesh Binder, Puppet Master

Pantheon: Major God - Brine King / Lunarius, Minor Gods - Gruthkul

Bandit: Kill All

Passive Tree & PoB

Path of Building Link: https://pastebin.com/YL7eHYxp

Gems Setup

All gems should be levelled to 20 unless otherwise specified.

Summon Skeleton, Minion Damage, Brutality, Melee Physical Damage, Maim, Ruthless

Skeletons are your main source of damage. Gems are listed in order of importance, so for example if you're on a 5L drop Ruthless. Once you have a 6L and your skeletons are doing excessive amounts of damage, you can switch out Ruthless for Melee Splash while clearing (and switch Ruthless back in for hard bosses). It speeds up your clear and stops your minions from getting overwhelmed by large numbers of mobs. You don't need the Vaal version, but you should try to get one as soon as possible and use it against bosses or hard monsters.

Raise Zombie, Brutality, Melee Physical Damage, Minion Damage or Empower

Zombies provide a valuable source of pack clear with their AoE slam, tank hits with their larger life pool, and supplement your damage. This should be socketed in your helm to take advantage of either a + minion gem level mod or Elder mods. Empower should only be used if you're using an Elder helm that grants Minion Damage already. You can get a level 4 Empower if you really have money to burn.

Shieled Charge, Faster Attacks, Fortify

Movement.

Flesh Offering, Increased Duration, Flame Dash

Flesh Offering is a big damage buff. Try and keep it up as much as possible. Flame Dash is just handy to get over gaps and walls.

Vulnerability, Curse On Hit Support, Ball Lightning, Culling Strike Support

Curse, minion direction and culling. No point in levelling Ball Lightning or Culling Strike. You can manually cast Vulnerability if you prefer, give up the culling, and leave sockets open for something else (e.g. Immortal Call).

Desecrate, Clarity, Summon Stone Golem, Cast when Damage Taken Support

Extra stuff. Desecrate helps you keep Flesh Offering up against bosses and get back dead zombies. Stone Golem provides much needed regen — you absolutely don't have to use it with CwDT

Gear Setup

You should not limit yourself to a certain part. This is a step-by-step process.

Low Budget/SSF

You really only need very basic gear to get rolling with this build. Wearing entirely rare gear is fine. Look for life, mana, resistances and dex. You can use literally any weapon (even a white level 1 axe) and it won't really matter. Aurumvorax is a nice budget weapon because it helps with resistances when the rest of your gear is bad.

Flask setup is pretty much constant. See sample gear below for what you want there.

Ideally, you'd want to use the following uniques on a low-budget character:

Tabula Rasa  (easy to farm from Humility div cards while levelling in Blood Aqueducts, or buy relatively cheaply)

Victario's Charity (very cheap to buy, quite common but not essential if SSF)

Violent Dead x2 (available as an act 5 quest reward, also very cheap to buy)

Alberon's Warpath also deserves a mention, as it's an easy way to source a 12th skeleton (which is neat as we summon 3 at a time). Ideally you want to do this through Catarina's craft onto body armour, but if you're using unique body armour these are okay too.

Medium Budget

If there have no mention a particular piece of gear in this section, it's unchanged from the low budget section.

Weapon: Try to find something with % increased minion damage on it. This can be be The Scourge, an item from the Temple of Atzoatl, or an item crafted with a Bound Fossil from delves. If you have the mods unlocked, you can craft a bit more minion damage or attack speed onto it with the crafting bench.

Jewelry: You want to either make or buy jewelry crafted with an Essence of Fear or Bound Fossil for increased minion movement speed. This will greatly speed up your clear, as it helps your (entirely melee-based) minions move between mobs faster. It's usually cheaper to buy essences and make your own than buy the jewelry pre-crafted.

Helmet: Some combination of a Bone Helmet, + to level of minion gems, and/or an Elder helmet with Minion Life and/or Minion Damage supports built in. Don't worry about enchantments, they're almost all worse than the Bone Helmet implicit and there's very little chance of finding an Elder helm with a good enchant.

Body Armour: Upgrade to a rare 6L with life (and maybe mana) when you can. Ideally you want one with an open prefix, allowing you to craft +1 skeleton onto it with Catarina 6. This brings us up to 12 skeletons, which is perfect as we summon 3 per cast.

Jewels: An abyss jewel with minion taunt on hit is highly recommended to keep boss attention off you. Life, mana and any minion damage stats are also good if you can get them

High Budget

Again, this is adding onto the medium section. Only discussing stuff with specific high budget options, rather than just better versions of the above.

Body Armour: Some uniques will provide more tankiness than a rare, although you'll be forced to switch to Alberon's Warpath if you want to keep your twelfth skeleton. Potential options include Cloak of Defiance, Belly of the Beast or Loreweave.

Weapon: You can try to get more stats on your weapon if you can afford it. Mana, resists and attack speed are the main useful ones.

Helmet: Your goal is an Elder helm with any two of minion damage, minion life or + minion gems. If it's a Bone Helmet or has the Flesh Offering attack speed enchantment, even better (though these will be very expensive).

Jewels: An Unnatural Instinct placed in the socket to the right of the Witch starting point will give quite a lot of extra life and mana. Alternatively, To Dust will give your skeletons a large amount of damage.

Leveling

Unfortunately, without a couple of unique items it's hard to use skeletons until you've completed the cruel labyrinth. If you have a couple of chaos to spend, skip down to the last paragraph of this section. Otherwise, read on.

The simplest way to level this build is to use Summon Raging Spirit in a +1 fire gems weapon, then a +1 minion gem 4L helm, until you have completed cruel lab. Then you can switch to the full build. 

• Level 1 through 8 is freeze pulse, level an SRS
• Level 8 get SRS, Melee Splash, Minion Damage. Get +1 fire wand/sceptre asap
• Eventually work towards a BBRR helmet 4 link, use recipes to craft +1 minion gems on it. Go SRS - Melee Splash - Melee Phys - Minion Speed (or Minion Damage if you want better damage for bosses or just clear)

As an alternative for people who don't like SRS, you can level with spells (e.g. Firestorm, Arc, Storm Brand, Freezing Pulse). If you want to do this, take the spell damage nodes from the Witch start (respeccing out of them later) and otherwise follow the tree as normal. Rush to Spiritual Aid so your spells are benefited by all the minion damage we take.

You can also level really quickly using skeletons from the start if you have access to uniques. Don't try to do this if you're new, or levelling in a new league. From Dust lets you summon 3 skeletons at once before getting Bone Sculptor, Sidhebreath gives some minion movement speed, and then you can use Tabula, Aurumvorax and Violent Dead. You'll also need a bunch of extra strength and dex on gear - Astramentis is ideal, but use what you can find. Remove the From Dust when you finish cruel lab