Hello, builders! Come and join me in exploring this straightforward Stone Golem of Hordes Necromancer build in Path of Exile 3.23, which revolves around Minions. Stone Golems specialize in dealing pure physical damage, benefiting from Impale and Critical Strike Chance. One of the notable strengths of this build lies in its robust tankiness, with Minions actively drawing enemy attention through taunting.

These Golems wield a powerful slam attack, effective in both taunting foes and dealing substantial physical AOE damage. The attack’s cooldown can be reduced by utilizing gems, improving their quality, and integrating multiple Primordial Harmony Jewels, with Ashes of the Stars serving as a catalyst for optimization.

The build boasts exceptional tankiness, utilizing Chaos Inoculation alongside Aegis Aurora and high armor. This setup ensures that with each hit, you instantly recover more Energy Shield than you take as damage. To further bolster defenses, we’ve incorporated mechanisms to redirect a significant portion of incoming damage to be absorbed as chaos to which you’re immune.

How It Works

The new tanky Stone Golem of Hordes presents an alternative iteration of the standard Stone Golem. While it no longer provides life regeneration, it offers the ability to summon 2 additional Golems, totaling 6 Minions at any given time. This variant emphasizes durability through Chaos Inoculation, granting immunity to chaos damage while relying on Energy Shield instead of life. Achieving around 5K to 6K Energy Shield on a modest POE Currency budget is feasible.

Additionally, the build boasts high armor, spell suppression, and block chance against both attacks and spells. Despite limited AOE capability with only 6 Golems, enhancements to their movement and attack speed can be made to address this shortfall.

Single-target damage remains satisfactory and can be further augmented with items like Skin of the Lords and costly cluster Jewels. Assembling the build on a budget is possible, albeit with consideration of the potentially high prices of essential items such as Ashes of the Stars and Forbidden Jewels.

Unique Items

The primary source of Energy Shield recovery stems from Aegis Aurora and Divine Shield. Incandescent Heart, although inexpensive, serves as an optimal defensive choice by mitigating a quarter of Elemental hit damage. While Ashes of the Stars isn't obligatory, it stands out as the best amulet choice to aim for.

• Maata's Teaching: This is a commendable starter weapon, particularly effective if rolled with a +2 level mod and high crit chance, though it's advisable to upgrade it eventually.
• Aegis Aurora: This is indispensable, offering the highest Energy Shield recovery alongside notable block chance and armor. Opting for a corrupted implicit variant is recommended for the added benefit of 8% physical damage taken as chaos.
• Incandescent Heart: It has increased armor and Energy Shield, and a 25% reduction in all Elemental damage after allocating Chaos Inoculation, rendering it the premier armor choice. Corrupting it can yield intriguing implicit mods.
• Darkness Enthroned: It emerges as a popular pick for most Minion builds, offering the opportunity to socket optimal Ghastly Abyss Jewels, enhancing their effects by up to 100%.
• Ashes of the Stars: It stands out as the ideal choice for improving the quality of all active skill gems, benefiting abilities like Bone Offering, Flame Dash, War Banner, and Stone Golem.
• Fortress Covenant: It offers substantial damage, attack, and spell block chance for Minions when socketed in a cluster Jewel to disable its radius.
• Quickening Covenant: It provides significant spell suppression, attack, and spell block chance for Minions when socketed in a cluster Jewel.
• The Anima Stone: Use this for an additional maximum Golem, which it surely is worth a jewel socket.
• Primordial Harmony: It increases the cooldown recovery rate for your Golem slam and their life regeneration rate. Get as many of these as you can fit in your skill tree, at least 3.
• Thread of Hope: Use this with a medium ring socketed near Instability will let you allocate Lord of the Dead, Arcane Will, and Golem Commander.
• Forbidden Flesh & Flame: Liege of the Primordial or Elemancer will extend your Maximum Golem Limit by one.

Rare Items

It’s a chaos inoculation build, so look mostly for Energy Shield cap, your resistances, block chance, and try to gain as much spell suppression and armor as you can. mana reservation efficiency should not be a major issue if you have a good Enlightened gem. You will definitely need Dexterity and strength in the gear. Improve DPS by increasing the gem level of Stone Golem.

Helmet: A Dexterity helmet can roll spell suppression. Seek mostly resistances, reservation efficiency, and Energy Shield for an Eldritch implicit. You can get the physical damage taken as chaos.

Wand: Use a convoking wand with basic Minion Damage mods of various types, most importantly gem level for your Minion skills.

Boots: On your boots, look for the basic resistances with Energy Shield and movement speed. Spell suppression can be crafted or found on boots with evasion.

Gloves: Seek maximum Energy Shield, resistances, spell suppression, and attributes. For the Eldritch implicit mod, get more spell suppression chance.

Belt: The belt should grant you strength, Elemental resistances, Energy Shield, and armor or life regeneration.

Ring: Bone Ring is the best choice. It increases your Minions' resistances and has a separate mod pool that can improve your Minions' attack speed, damage, maximum life, resistances, or movement speed. You should get some Dexterity from it as well.

Jewels: Use Ghastly Abyss Jewels for your Darkness Enthroned belt to fix missing attributes or resistances.

Flasks

For flasks, choose from Granite, Basalt, Quartz, Mercury, and Jade. Their suffixes shall increase your armor, evasion, movement speed, and reduce the mana cost of skills and the effect of shock or curse on you.

Skill Gems

The Stone Golem of Hordes is a Minion that relies on physical skills like slam or roll, due to their low cooldown, serve as the primary damage sources in this build. Link it with Multistrike, Melee Physical Damage, Minion Damage, Brutality, and Impale support gems.

Utilize a default Animated Guardian, possibly configured to apply the Vulnerability curse on hit, although its optimal utilities are derived from the Kingmaker weapon. Ensure its resistances are capped. Specters offer various bonuses, with Chieftain Monkeys recommended for power and frenzy charges. Link these with Minion Life and Feeding Frenzy support gems.

Enemies in Pride’s AOE will suffer increased physical damage. Discipline provides additional Energy Shield and recovery rate, while Determination bolsters armor to mitigate physical damage from hits. Link these 3 expensive auras to the Enlightened support for reduced mana reservation.

War Banner enhances accuracy rating and inflicts increased physical damage on nearby enemies. When placed, it grants Adrenaline. Precision boosts accuracy and Critical Strike chance. Vaal Haste can temporarily boost Minions' attack and movement speed, although Convocation is favored in this setup. Aura spells linked to Generosity support won’t affect your character but amplify their effects.

Tempest Shield significantly boosts spell block chance, aiding in reaching the 75% cap, especially beneficial with Aegis Aurora. Vulnerability curses enemies, increasing physical damage taken and causing bleeding upon hits. Flame Dash serves as the sole movement ability for faster traversal. Desecrate conjures corpses, essential for Bone Offering, which grants attack and spell block chance for Minions and your character after allocating of Mistress of Sacrifice. Molten Shell acts as the protective barrier, absorbing incoming hits, and should be set as your movement key.

Bandits & Pantheon

Kill all the bandits for the 2 extra passive skill points. Soul of Arakaali is what we recommend for a major God. You don’t have any excellent defense mechanism against damage over time, and this 10% should help a lot. Soul of Abberath is great for the same reason. It lessens the duration of Ignite on you by 60%.

Skill Tree

The passive skill tree is a source of Minion Damage, Energy Shield, Aura effect with reservation efficiency, armor, and block chance. Allocate Divine Shield, Zealot's Oath, and Chaos Inoculation keystones. For masteries, get mana reservation efficiency as mana Mastery, maximum Elemental resistances for Minions as Minions Defense Mastery, and chances to block attacks per chance to block on a shield as Shield Mastery.

For armor and Energy Shield Mastery, select 10% of physical damage taken as chaos damage and one to recover 5% Energy Shield upon taking a physical hit. For Minion offense Mastery, choose to Overwhelm 20% of physical damage reduction and 20% increased eff of offerings.