BalorMage's Holy Relic Necromancer Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

Introduction

This is the most broken Minion build I have played in years, and might very well only last this league. If this build makes it to the next league then the build guide will be updated to a League Start guide, for now, I’m going to assume you have some low amount of currency at least and are starting this as an alt. it’s my pleasure to bring you the guide in both video & written formats! The PoB covers everything from levelling to end-game.

As this build is still incredibly new, there is still much experimentation going on so to see any new spicy updates I’d suggest checking out my YouTube channel for Super High Budget changes and variations. As well as the accompanying YouTube guide to go with this written one.

GhazzyTV wrote up a version of this build done as a Guardian, that goes elemental hit scaling, they are very similar playstyles just with a bit different offensive and defensive scaling.
You can find his guide here GhazzyTV Holy Relic Guide

Build Overview

In this section will go over the pros/cons of this minion build.

Pro’s

+ With this minion build, we have both full screen clear coverage as well as maximum single target in the same gem setup, with no swapping gems at any stages!

+ The Damage is abnormally high, actually to the point, it seems unbalanced for your level of investment.

+ While still being a poison build, we poison cap with very little investment, meaning a much larger portion of our damage is delt by the hit and so is quite fast to come out.

+ One button playstyle, you just spray Lancing Steel Of Spraying at everything and it auto targets and auto trigger everything.

Cons

– Path of building has no idea how much damage these minions do, and thus the POB’s are very misleading and show a much lower damage value than what we get in the game.

– That’s it, that’s the only downside. It’s the perfect minion build.

– Still uses an Animated Guardian (some people hate that).

Playstyle

Because Holy Relics are permanent minions and we can make them tanky enough to never die ever (even in Ubers and T17 content) we generally don’t need to worry about anything at all. And because our chosen trigger skill is a spray skill that fires many projectiles that all return and all pierce all targets and also Aim assist to anything within a pretty large cone of the direction you attack in, it is also super easy to play. This skill plays almost exactly like a CoC Detonate Dead of Chaining build, or is quite similar to bows or wands. But with the benefits of being a very tanky minion build.

Damage Scaling And Defensive Layers

Damage scaling is mainly handled in 2 ways, the first is minions levels. This is a very good way to scale Damage up to level 30 minions.
The second (and MOST important way) Is Cooldown Recovery of the minion. The ONLY way to gain cooldown recovery that affects the minion is with the quality of the gem. And we MUST hit certain cooldown breakpoints.

Relic Breakpoints of Quality for CDR: 2, 14, 30, 52(5aps), 82(6 aps), 128(7.58 aps)

The different ways to get more quality are – Enhance Support
- Quality on the Summon Holy Relic of Conviction itself (including the 23 corrupted outcome)
- Dialla's Malefaction
- Ashes of the Stars

Through experimentation, the most worthwhile breakpoints are 52 and 82. Aiming for 128 seems to cost too much, and only having 30 isn’t enough for it to feel fantastic in the end game.
So we aim for a combination of some of these to reach a required breakpoint.

This means that if we have 80 CDR, we might as well only have 52. As nothing else changes, but if we can push to 82, suddenly way more damage happens.

Defensive layers in this build Block and Spell block cap, along with Aegis Aurora to top our ES off every block.
As well as 10% reduced damage taken from the Necromancer Ascendancy Plague Bringer. And above 20k armour, as well as ALOT of Life Gain On Hit from our own attack.