Starter Minions
Build Overview
This build is designed to be powerful early, while being able to scale into a late game build that I will post soon!
Equipment
This gear is just showing the highest priority slots and stats. In general you are looking for armor/energy shield gear and then as many resistances as possible. Your most important dps tool is your weapon, getting extra spirit and extra ranks of minion gems is vital.
Skill Gems
Support Gem Requirements:
Str 10
Dex 5
Int 20
Punch
Item
Skeletal Sniper
Bonestorm
Pain Offering
Detonate Dead
Raise Zombie
Summon Infernal Hound
Replace Skeletal Sniper with Skeletal Reaver when you unlock them, running the same support gems.
Passive Tree
Keep in mind that the starting passives are different for **Witch** than what is displayed above, so even though the early passives look weird they are actually minion nodes. In terms of node order, first get Power of the Dead is then go straight to Necrotised Flesh. From there you should either get Relentless Fallen for more damage or uptime, or you can grab an Energy Shield node like Dampening Shield. From here get Entropic Incarnation and then Vile Mending. Next pick up the resistance nodes around Regenerative Flesh.
For your ascendency get the Summon Infernal Hound and then Altered Flesh
How it Plays
1. Use Pain Offering
2. Use Bonestorm, typically charging around 50%
3. Detonate Dead any corpses that get made
4. Raise Zombie if you need a stronger front line
How it Works
The idea of this build is to have high single target damage allowing you to quickly generate corpses for Detonate Dead to clear large packs quickly while still having the single target to rip down bosses. Bonestorm deals decent up-front damage, but the real reason why its good is the secondary effect. The residual Bones actually count as minion damage, which means they scale with all of your minion damage increases.
With your Pain Offering try to use it early in pulls and target a safe minion so that it doesn't get destroyed. Offerings actually have fairly low health, so its important to not put them too far forward. Once you get the Relentless Fallen passive your Raise Zombie will be able to keep up with you, and pairs very nicely with Pain Offering. Raise Zombie is an interesting piece of the build as its generally not worth casting, but when its good its very good. As you level you will hit big power spikes and big lulls, and there will be times when your normal minions are too weak to hold the line. That's when Raise Zombie comes online giving you access to a whole bunch of huge guys to front line for you.