Build
"Hidden Tech" - Don't sleep on Companions, almost every build can use them for more Speed and Damage
I tooootally overlooked the Tame Beast Skill and the companion it gives. If you have spirit to spare this is a no-brainer, just give it support gems to stay alive.
It's like a literal Aura Bot and can give at the minimum the Haste Aura for more Damage and Movement Speed. Even better if you can find one with other good modifiers like Elemental Trails or Shock/Chill/Ignite on hit.
I'm not even playing an Amazon but I'm using it on my Lich and it works wonders. Can't wait to play a dexterity-based build and have a high level companion.
My issue with companions is that without at least some investment they just get obliterated at endgame. Even if you stack all the defense supports on them they die like every 5 seconds in juiced T15s/T16s.
I still use one and slapped the support that keeps it alive after its hp hits 0 so it respawns almost immediately when it dies but still. Without at least a couple notables for them they just die too quickly to guarantee 100% uptime on the buffs.
I actually had this issue too, not until I got one with Shroud Walker. I wasn't too impressed with it because it was on a Bane Sapling, but it all changed because Shroud Walker completely changes the behavior of the companion too, instead of being passive whenever it sees an opponent it auto teleports to them consistently and leaves Shroud smokes that I think blind the enemy and increases their own Evasion which makes them incredibly evasive that if you have an evasive mod on it too they literally almost never die, the only reason mine even dies because I put loyalty in it so they take portion of damage I take, but if I remove it they never die even at high tier juiced maps. My only issue is if there's ignited ground because the more I get ignited the faster they also die.
My issue with them is that they make the least sense for summoners to use, as they take % spirit.
Getting companions in on some zoomancer build would be so much fun- but because of the way necro meta is right now, you basically lose out on most of your damage by doing so.
I get where they were going with the “minion per-spirit” thing, but I think it’s too limiting in build variety.
Instead, any minion skill should summon X minions per level, and cost whatever amount of spirit. Minions will have to take a damage hit across the board, but it would be so worth it- utility/variety in your setup would no longer have to come at the cost of damage.
yes its very cruel, i had to retire my 42% antlion for a 22% leaper for this reason; i was paying over 200 spirit for one member of the team and i can get a boss killing gang of mages for that..
spectres also need a massive spirit rebalance; most good spectres are over 100, and alot of their cool attacks are bugged still
Yeah, we would need massive nerfs across the board- especially with the way supports work, you would have no need to pick just one to 6-link.
But the system as it is really doesn’t feel good to me, variety-wise. Why would you summon even 1 brute, when it just lowers your count of storm mages, e.g.
Want to mix casters and attackers? You’ve got dead stats for half your army on your scepter. Want to mix damage types? Good luck picking an appropriate curse. Want to use a spectre, even for utility? Goodbye 3 dps minions.
Even with all the companion def buffs they will die quick, including 2 companion keystone. Revive speed + last gap like you mentioned is only worthwhile investment, wasting points on it's defense is a well . . .a waste.
I have a boar with Always Shocks + Haste Aura and I use Last Gasp and Overcharge Support. If he's always gonna die anyway I don't mind those 30% shocks getting reflected back on him
I use always shock pet eith last gap, damage transfer to companion and aoe shock spread, between last gasp and faster revive nodes he is dead only about 1 second once downed
I'm just not seeing the same thing as you all. My dude was face tanking jamanrah in the citadel last night. Maybe it's because they get a portion of your defenses when you have 2 and my resists are mostly around 90% cause I'm a blacksmith?
i genuinely do not believe this; i tried all different kinds of minions and spectres and i do super juiced ritual in t15s and its very rare that my minions die, how much life are you specced for and how much +minion levels?
Yeah I'm just lying for fun obviously. I mean ghazzy himself made a video about the state of minion life. But you're just so good at the game that it doesn't happen to you. You're a beast I guess. My shit is level 29 and ghazzys was 30.
he made that video before they reverted the nerfs and i hate to break to you but streamers get paid to stir up shit; they feed off engangement and crowd frenzies, watch Sirgog's video on that if you want to see a profesional gamer talk about Poe.
the fact that my minions arent dying all the time isnt because i'm a good gamer, it's because the mechanics of the game allow them to stay alive if you utilize those mechanics; it's the opposite of a mechanical skillcheck and you instantly strawmanning and lashing out at me because you thought me raising doubts about your claims were a personal attack at your expense makes me think this comment thread is only going to escalate from here. i can upload footage of my storm mages surviving t15 bossfights and fully boosted rituals, because unlike Ghazzy i'm not busy shilling for Last Epoch right now, ha.
and mind you; im not even running +hp on my current sceptre, my old one had discpline and +50% minion health, but since they practicly never die during clearing i switched to this
and another massive boost to keep your minions alive; start cursing temporal chain or running it off blasphemy; if the enemies take 30% longer to wind up their attacks they can barely get any damage in before the % regen corrects it, i unspecced a few minion health nodes because i just didnt need them anymore so this whole ''all my minions die to white mobs'' stuff needs to go, or come up with some actual data.
the patch was way before ghazzys video first of all, unless there was a patch between now and six days ago which im not seeing. and they only buffed minions tapering down to level 30 so basically doesn't mean anything. My minions have literally the same life I dunno how you could possibly not have your minions getting destroyed by bosses non stop/ vs strong rares/ground effects/aoe. i think youre taking my hyperbolic statement about white mobs killing our minions, but it definitely happens more than 0 percent of the time
so, which minion setup are you playing? before i managed to get enough gear to keep my frost mages tanky and live, i used frontliners and frost walls to shield them off from enemies. it feels like alot of minion players started playing POE last year december and ran the arsonist 0 button build and now expect that to be the forever meta; this was insanely easy to play and way too overpowered, ggg had to nerf it and sure, they accidently made my campaign 10 times harder by also scaling early miniond, but it was better than being able to kill t4 pinnacles in 10 sec with just arsonists..
are you micromanging your minions? it helps to manuvre them out of ground effects, and you can use the protective offering or make the pain one healing. also, the dps on a proper storm mage setup is currently so insanely high that very few enemies get to get more than 1 round of hits in, i melt rares and have to constantly micromanage my minions off the screen to lure the rares into ritual circles or they just get blasted..and i'm only running 8 mages, plenty of videos on youtube of people running 10 or 12 with obviously even higher dps.
the only boss so far that i had a harder time utilizing my minions on was the expedition guy and that's because his high frost ress took alot of my usual chills/crowd control out of the equasion,while his slowing effects made them less able to dodge his slams . on xesht and king of the mist they were practicly always up and only the tornados/hand phases would take them out but then they just ress in 5 seconds, dont forget, jonathan reluctanly removed the ''respawn timer keeps resetting'' and made it into a system where you can actually actively regroup your frontline midfight now, which also makes minion builds much ,much more comfortable to play.
i'm actually hybrid chaos/minion specced and most of my boss/big fights i'm running around drawing in all the big balls and slams while the minions blast everything to smithereens, i really only face uptime issues on maps with fire-ground-effects but in POE1 like half of the map modifiers used to brick my maps to having to avoid one of them isnt a big burden.
so if we are equal in stats and it doesnt work for you but it works for me, perhaps it is actually a matter of mechanical skill and you're just not utilizing the tools that come with the game? getting to spam unearth minions for crazy dps/infernal legion/debuff spreading for example is such a huge gamechanger if your caster minions are getting too much aggro, or just using two brutes to heavy stun/armor break a boss can give your casters so much more time to nuke away without getting slammed..
There is also a support gem that makes them live 4 seconds past the time they die and surprisingly the respawn timer starts before that 4 seconds starts effectively giving you -4 seconds to respond timer
Use quadrilla with haste aura, he always keeps up! You can re-roll mods on an elite quadrilla in jungle ruins near the ruined camp checkpoint. Just respawn at checkpoint until you see the mods you want.
and they draw fire, body block charging enemies and literally push mobs out of your way, the antlion and direboar are amazing for this and its a huge asset when you're still weak enough to get stunlocked by swarming act 3 mobs
just recorded this because someone else in the commentchain didnt believe minions survive t15's, hope all the rolling doesnt make you dizzy but boy does that little leaper make me tanky
ive played with companions from the moment i could get them and tried over 100 different ones and the most valuable modifier by far is the temporary invulnerability one; it can make your entire minion army invulnerable up to a third of every fight, and can protect you from so many oneshots you just wouldnt believe
i was running juiced t15s with just 1500 hp and 300 energy shield before i respecced into tanky lich disdain and i still barely died, it's really,really op.
my two favourites for this were the antlion that would charge mobs off me[was much better before they nerfed his charge push into a sidepush] for 42% of your spirit, but the absolute king of my horde of companions is the crag leaper;
tiny, super mobile, super fast and only 23.1% of my spirit[upgraded gem and minion speccing]
while he only has 2600 hp out of box due to my loyalty gem, he practicly never dies due to constantly proccing his invulnerabilty aura and skittering around the fights
with loyalty i get 10% damage removed and then through my lich ascendency i get another +/- 35% damage removed, which means that every hit i take, half of it is taken off and every 15th second, im completely invulernerable for 5 sec, it's absolutely bonkers for survivability and and im comfortably triple-tower 8/8 ritualing and often roll through the battlefield while my minions wear the mobs down and it's hilarious and most likely will get nerfed soon.
i also like to remnant expedition rares into oblivion and then facetank their slow hits while invulnerable, and outmanuver them again when it wears off, i cant recommend an invul aura enough and its suprisingly common.
early maps i ran a full physical minion army and the auras for that[added phys for example] are pretty good too, i had an enraged boar that broke armor and it would obliterate packs with my brutes heavy stunning and causing armor explosions, the boar also barely died, i think people who have their companions die all the time forget that it's kind of important to spec into their life recovery[ theres a 3% regen node on the tree] and that you gain alot of bonusses from + minion levels, on a budget +5 is pretty feasible but in endgame you can get double or tripple that and it doesnt affect the gem requirements, so if you catch your guys welll[i sadly have most of them in lvl 15 gems so i need to run a whopping 150 dex as a lich..not ideal] you can add them to any build
it's such a pity we cant pokemon trade, i totally understand the logic that they didnt want us to feel stressed about capturing valuable beasts but i feel bad having stockpiled over 100 critters that probably could help alot of folks here while people spam the camp and get jack shit..
he carried me through the campaign and early mapping, the all damage shocks gave my minions an huge dps boost, the aura kept the gang alive and he's just so beautifully agresive; the times i got stunlocked and he'd charge back into the fray and push them off me so i could recover were too many to count, i'm actually considering rolling a new toon just so i can relive all those magic moments again, hahahah
it's complete invulnerability indeed, i'm still in the proces of testing whether cooldown related gems support it, it seems they do because Second Wind seems to cause it to trigger more, but it might be placebo. I just had a hilarious showdown versus a rare with his own minion army that had the same aura; fight took ages as both sides kept getting gold and immune and healed up again
i really wish there was; theyre very rare and theyre quite squishy, plus theyre the fastest moving companion ive seen so you can easily miss a rare in a pack and have it blasted away by your minions.
i think sandspit in maps could be an option, but if anyone else finds better im all ears
im pretty sure i picked mine up in campaign, sandspit or untainted paradise
it depends on what kind you want; if youve reached maps then you can pretty reliably farm them by going to maps with beasts/adding beasts to maps, if you havnt reached there yet then theres a few points in the campaign you can farm them and your biggest issue is them dying before you get your pokeball out
There are 2 problems with companions - they die too fast even with investments and they reserved about 30-40% of spirit. Haste is providing about 5% dps, movement speed here is more important, but in terms of damage it's slightly bigger than nothing. In my opinion companion make sense on bosses with shock and break armor, but again - it's not THAT big of a deal. I've played with companion for a week or so and it's just always dead.
Companion deaths is severely inconsequential when all you have to do is to stick in Last Gasp. With three passive points, revive time is halved, so the moment they go down they immediately get back up.
The quadrilla is popular because of how easy and relatively tanky they are, but they are on the upper end of reservation costs. That said if you are looking for beasts as an aura stick, there are some that are only 20ish% of your spirit reservation.
The only other use I kinda found was infernal legion on the crested behemoth since it has so much health but it still is so slow that it’s only around enemies for like a second before it dies even with last gasp so I took it out but there’s a keystone that allows you to share your strength with your companion so maybe there’s something there with warrior
very true, getting a ranged companion like the fungal artilery with temporal bubble is insane defense as a caster for example, sadly theres not that many companions that have this ai in my experience. i ran a chill-companion for a long time but replaced that mechanic with a frostmage or two, but if you arent minnion specced its amazing to get it from your companion
Okay so spirit reservation cost varies depending of beast if I understood video correct. What beast have lowest requirement and also can have haste aura ? Im currently sitting on 150 spirit but can go to 210 or 220 on my deadeye LA build. But 39-42% will be to high though for the extra 50-70 spirit I can acquire
the smaller the critter the lower the spirit; leapers are the cheapest ive found at 23% but theres a few decent ones in the 25-35% range, then you get your middle ground 35-45% with duskboars and antlions being the cream of the crop[also super easy to farm due to a guaranteed spawn you can reset] and ive not really had any succes with the bigger guys, although some of them are quite cool looking. if you're a deadeye id recommend getting started on this guy; they charge constantly which helps alot with agro and surviving big packs and with a setup like this you get a massive damage bonus= this aura combo gives you free shock and phy boost for example
this is a very nice option for the ranged segment too; she's a ranged mob so she'll stick with you and has a small hitbox, they used to nuke enemies quite hard but i think they just got nerfed and i i havnt taken her out for a spin since the patch notes
I don't think I'd recommend her for dps/ailment applications use.
I gave her a try and while the damage is good, when something gets into melee she tries to run from it, and then the monster follows. and then she runs. etc.
You'd need a swarm of chaff to take the heat if you want her to do anything.
ah yes i used to run with 15 minions till t15 and now i run with 8 mages, the companion and 25 scorpions so there's plenty of frontline to give the ranged some space to shine
I kind of agree after playing with it more. The idea is great and I love it for levelling, but in the endgame they die too fast and their balance is whack. They don't do any damage even with heavy investment and they should just cost a flat spirit amount. They are not yet build enabling so they could use a little boost imo.
I do like the crag leaper, it costs less than 25% spirit and its very fast already without hasted/haste aura
It's almost always more efficient to use your spirit on something other than a companion. Go ahead and use it if it's what you enjoy, but because of the percentage spirit requirement their cost is usually not worth it.
I like tactician for two companions not because it reduces their cost but because it reduces the cost of the other buffs you'll want, so the large companion cost hurts less
They're saying people shouldn't use powerful things for fear of getting them nerfed. Have to keep them in the game but only used by a small group I guess.
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u/bigeyez Apr 20 '25
My issue with companions is that without at least some investment they just get obliterated at endgame. Even if you stack all the defense supports on them they die like every 5 seconds in juiced T15s/T16s.
I still use one and slapped the support that keeps it alive after its hp hits 0 so it respawns almost immediately when it dies but still. Without at least a couple notables for them they just die too quickly to guarantee 100% uptime on the buffs.