[3.29] MasterT's Physical Soulwrest Necromancer

Intro:

Hellllllo Internet, welcome to my Soulwrest Necromancer, an extremely fast, tanky and well rounded character that requires very little investment to cruise through the game, and scales incredibly fast with cheap gear to become a power house in the first few days of league start.

Changes for 3.29?

Build is now Chaos Inoculation, with massive ES leech and instant leech making it significantly tankier. The difference is insane.
It utilizes a new ring craft in the endgame to get MASSIVE damage, pushing the damage multiple millions beyond what it was last league, especially if you set yourself to blood stance.

How it Works:

The build revolves around using the Soulwrest Unique Staff, a Tier 4 very common unique that gives you level 25 Summon Phantasm Support, these phantasms fire off a piercing physical spell projectile that is very easy to scale initially, but hits a wall later on for pure physical scaling at which point you wont scale it any further and will reroll into an endgame build, or follow a different guide to go full phys conversion. By default the limit of summon phantasm is 11 phantasms for a level 21 gem, level 25 does not raise that limit. However, the game treats the phantasm limit granted by the staff, and the phantasm limited granted by a normal support gem Separately, so if you socket Summon Phantasm Support into the soulwrest you get even more maximum phantasms. So by using a Level 21 phantasm support in the soulwrest, the total phantasms this can summon is 22.

Why is this a good league starter?

Soulwrest is an extremely common unique, the price of a almost max rolled one is 2c on day 2 of the league, its only expensive in the first few Hours of league start if you're a god gamer racing through the campaign. With it being so common, and giving a Level 25 Minion that early in the game, the build needs to scale little to no offence for majority of maps all the way to tier 16s. My old league start video linked in the changelog shows me testing the character with all blue gear in an area level 83 safehouse. Best of all, since soulwrest is Giving you the skill you dont need to six link it, you just need a 6 socket soulwrest and any support gems put into it will automatically be linked to the phantasms, a 6 link would only be needed much much later for the support spectre setup in the body armour.

Why Not Go Poison Soulwrest like Ghazzy recommends?

Poison soulwrest is strong, it utilizes Unnatural Strength on the necromancer ascendancy to convert the phantasm damage to chaos, and then by stacking multiple %Chance to poison on hit on ghastly jewels you reach 100% chance to poison, and with so many phantasms you can stack alot of poison. The issue with this is it feels really awkward if you do not have all those chance to poison jewels, making it annoying to gear. and Annoying gearing on league start feels bad. There are also very few spectres that help scale poison related minion builds, further making them even more gear reliant on damage.

Physical soulwrest on the other hand, can be scaled heavily with Pride and Flesh and Stone in blood stance, and curses like Vulnerability and Sniper's Mark as well as Crit damage scaling with Fresh Meat Support, all scaling that can be done without the need for any gear. Poison soulwrest is definitely better in the End end game that you can transition your build into if you really want to, but Physical soulwrest is by far superior and tankier on a league start budget, and gets to very very high damage numbers without needing to wait for the poison ramp up time.

Offences:

The phantasms are summoned by channeling cyclone linked with Cast while Channelling Support Desecrate and Spirit Offering to rapidly spawn all our phantasms as we spin through packs, manually casting Convocation into new packs and watch everything die in a very clean looking no visual clutter setup (besides the clutter of like 30 little phantom boys). The build also uses Ancient Skull around level 85-90 ish once the damage starts to fall off to heavily scale the minions. The downside of the Whisper degen is covered in this next section regarding instant life recovery for all minions so the downside is never felt, especially not in the endgame.

Annihilation Support:

Annihilation Support is an exceptional gem that makes killing blows with supported skills have a chance to explode enemies. This works VERY good with minions because this basically Adds this ability Into your minions, which means that any scaling that these minions have also applies to the explosions. And since in this build we are using Fresh Meat Support and Increased Critical Strikes Support that gives the explosions almost 6% base crit, combined with all the crit scaling we're giving the minions it leads to these explosions Critting, along with all the %more damage multipliers on the minions Also applying to these explosions.

Defences:

The build's defences revolve around using all the staff block nodes on the tree to get near block cap and a very high armour ES pool with hybrid gear and the Armour ES Mastery for 100% Increased ES from the body armour. This combined with Umbral Army from the Catarina Bloodline Ascendancy in the late game gives the build a massive amount of bonus movement speed and global defences, further scaling it using a Bonemeld amulet that 116% Increased global defences because of how many minions we have in our army. Bonemeld can only be used when you have alot of res on gear to offset the downside, so before that it will just be a generic +1 amulet.

The build also uses a The Sorrow of the Divine to get ES recovery from life flasks if the es ever runs out the player can heal it up with an Instant Life Flask.

With the very large ES Pool, the minions leech life to us with Bone Barrier and we convert that life leech into ES leech with Ghost Reaver, this combined with the instant leech mastery and So Many minions hitting, our es rapidly refills during combat.

And we have block with recover on block :D.

What other minions is the build using?

The build utilizes support minions in the form of an Animate Guardian, Raise Spectre, a Summon Carrion Golem + Summon Stone Golem in the early game, later on removing the carrion golem and keeping just the Summon Stone Golem.

Are the minions squishy? Will they die alot?

These supporting minions are IMMORTAL thanks to the build having 45% instant life recovery per second for all your minions from the minion defense mastery and the medium cluster for Life from Death, so they can only ever die to getting fully oneshot or some niche sources that turn off recovery entirely. In the early campaign if your spectres die they will just respawn in the next area you dont have to micromanage anything.
You can lose your Ritual spectres in the endgame if you take out the gem in a map, or take out the gem in hideout and then Leave your hideout before raising the corpses again. IF this happens you will need to go buy them again or find them again in ritual if youre ssf.

Levelling:

The POB has a fully detailed levelling setup, all the way from act 1 with skill gems and passive tree till the end of campaign and beyond. (ITS NOT IN MOBA, IT IS IN THE POB SEPARATE FROM THE LOADOUTS. YOU CAN SEE IN THE VIDEO HOW I SELECT THE DIFFERENT ACT BY ACT TREES AND GEAR, DO IT THAT WAY. CHEERS)

The first thing to mention is you can not level with Soulwrest, the staff has a level requirement of 60. So you need to do the campaign with different skills. This can be any build you want, you can go Elementalist with RF, you can go absolution necromancer, you can go Zoomancer, you can go raging spirits, whatever you prefer. I personally prefer raging spirits until act 6, and then buying a Alberon's Warpath DO NOT CONFUSE THIS with Replica Alberon's Warpath, the normal version is a completely different item. It lets you have permanent summon skeleton minions and is an extremely cheap boot that I picked up for 1c in act 6 and the rest of the campaign became trivial. The combination of Skeleton + Zombie + Carrion Golem perma minions, and the 1-2 support spectres for early campaign (info about those written below) is insanely powerful. All you do is shield charge around, and the only skill you will use is Convocation to teleport your minions on top of any pack you want to kill and it will disappear, and so will bosses. You dont need any good gear for this either just simple armour es socket colors and you will cruise right onto the end of campaign, you'll do your 3rd lab yourself easily, it will start to feel a Little squishy towards act 10 if you dont have resistances done properly but you will swap to soulwrest as soon as you finish campaign and you will basically be immortal until you reach red maps. Below is how you will be playing the build once you swap

2 soulwrests in the pobb?

You use one in your mainhand with the single target damage support gems, and another in your offhand with the Clearing support gems. You can instant swap between these by pressing X on keyboard and your phantasms will not despawn and they will benefit from the support gems in the active staff, similar to the tech i used for animated energy blades a few leagues ago if you are familiar with me from back then.

Not Necessary early game, you can stay on the single target setup until you can get 2 soulwrests, but do make it your first priority since it makes the game very smooth.

Map Mods to Avoid?

"!f ph|s rec|ur$|efe|reg|rch$"
Use this regex

SPECTRES AND ANIMATE GUARDIAN?!

THEY ARE IMMORTAL THEY WILL NOT DIE THERE WILL BE NO MICRO MANAGING THEM THEY WILL NEVER DIE DUE TO THE MINION LIFE RECOVERY INFO MENTIONED ABOVE.

The info on spectres and animate guardian setup is written at the end of this page.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Animate Guardian Gear?

It wont show up in the variants in mobalytics, but if you load up path of building you will be able to see all the different progression gear sets for the AG there.

How do I gear the Animate Guardian?

Go into any zone where you can drop gear on the floor, i usually go act 1 coast, and drop the gear you want the animate guardian to equip on the ground (some may be hidden on your filter so turn your filter off for this or hold ALT) and CAST animate guardian from your skillbar onto those items on the floor and he will equip them.

There is no way to unequip AG gear, you can only replace it with other gear. There is no way for him to Lose gear other than if you Replace it in the future.

What Spectres does the build use and Where to find them?

(ALL SPECTRES CAN BE GOTTEN FROM /global 6666 and asking the people in that chat. This is the necromancer channel and if you're not racing ahead, others will probably already have spectres you need and they can let you desecrate them from their pool. IF no one is replying then refer to the below notes)

The build uses different spectres at different stages of the game.

During levelling in the campaign, you will use a

1x Carnage Chieftain (Aoe frenzy charge generation)
1x Warcaller (20 second onslaught aoe buff)

You get these the Carnage Chieftains in act 2 broken bridge or old fields.
War caller is in act 6 in the zone where you fight Tukuhama, on the left of the zone there is a small island and you will find the warcaller there. I dont believe you can desecrate in the zone for this guy, you have to go get his corpse from the island after killing him.

During early mapping you will be using 3 BEYOND spectres. 2 of these will be

2x DEMON HARPIES (screeches to give 10 stacks of 2.5% increased phys damage taken, 2 harbies make this stack 20 times for 50% phys increased phys taken on enemies)
1x PALE SERAPHIM. (applies a web debuff that gives 15% increased damage taken and 15% reduced attack speed.

You get these by using a beyond scarab but you cant desecrate these. You have to Find the monster, kill it, and raise the corpse before it despawns in 3-4 seconds. This is annoying so if youre not experienced with this just go to /global 6666 in game and ask the people in there to help you. It is the necromancer channel and 99.99% of the time someone else has the spectre you want and will let you desecrate from his pool. I myself will be offering this so if you need these spectres tag me in my discord (link in the description of all my videos) and ask me for the spectre. But if you do want to do it yourself, a demon harpy is a Big tentacle haired mommy, very easy to see her Screech skill too. And Pale seraphim is a very pale spidery lady. Every time you open a beyond map it has a specific tileset of mobs that spawn. For the demon harpy you want your map to have rng rolled into demons, and for seraphim you want it to have rng rolled Pale monsters.

Ritual Spectres:

In the endgame once you have the currency, you will be using Ritual Spectres instead. These do not go into your desecrate pool so you cant despawn them in the way i wrote above, and have to buy these or farm ritual windows for them. The spectres are

1x Perfect Blood Demon (Pride Aura)
1x Perfect Forest Warrior (Onslaught Aura and culling strike)
1x Perfect Pain Artist (Zealotry aura and sometimes shocks the enemy too)

1x Spectral Leader (20% increased action speed aoe buff with good uptime)
He spawns in nightmare Ziggurat map. Go into the map and just desecrate at the entrance, you dont need to find and kill him for this to work. If he is one of the monster packs in the map he will show up in the desecrate pool, do it for 1-2 minutes per map if he doesnt show up then just leave and go next map. Or finish the map upto you.

How to Raise a Spectre in a map?

To raise a spectre:
Just cast Desecrate in that zone a few times, the desecrate pool is always filled with whatever monsters can spawn in that zone, and hold A while hovering over the corpses to see their names (You can only do that if you have the Raise Spectre skill on your skillbar).
Once you see the spectre you want's name pop up, you cast raise spectre on it and there you go, done.
In the earlyMy game your spectre limit is 2, so raising any more will replace your current ones BUT you will get them permenantly in your desecrate pool, so you can just go to hideout and get them back if you replace them by mistake.

How to get 4 Maximum Spectres?

Your gem gives you more max spectres as it levels. At level 13 you get 2 max, at level 25 you get 3 maximum spectres, and you get +1 from Death Attunement. You get your spectre gem to lvl 25 by using a lvl 21 raise spectre gem, with a lvl 3 Empower Support in place of Maim Support in your 6 link chest, and the +2 from bonemeld.

Mana issues?

The build solves mana issues in the early game by using Essence Glutton on the necromancer ascendancy, and later on after a Charisma annoint you will equip a low level clarity as one of your auras and that will fix your mana regen forever since the flat regen from that combined with the massive mana regen on soulwrest will give you around 100 mana regen per second or more. And Further Later on when you get Good rings with open prefixes, you can craft -mana cost of them and replace your Clarity aura with Enlighten, this frees up points on the passive tree as well.

Are 2 soulwrests important?

Yes. Its a universe of a difference to have 2 soulwrests, one for single target and pressing X to weapon swap to the other. The people who were not doing this until i told them to all said the same thing "holy shit its a whole different game now" so please dont skip it.

How to Craft the Gear?

Check the endgame gearing notes section for all the info there.

My damage feels less than what pob is showing, why?

The damage in pob assumes every single phantasm is hitting the target, and im not sure Why but sometimes its either that they are missing, or they're bugged and the devs need to fix it, but the pob dmg does look higher than the actual damage in game on single target, but it still has more than enough.

As mentioned in the video, the single target is a little awkward if the boss is in between a bunch of monsters since you cant control minion targetting Too reliably, but with enough dmg it becomes less of an issue.

Also please remember to weapon swap your clearing or your single target soulwrests.

My clear feels really slow, why?

You need Annihilation Support to make the clear go 100000x better.

What about New Socket Color Quality Bonuses and New Enshrouded Uniques?

Cane of kulemak would be an insane thing to use for Enshrouded Uniques. if we can do that with cane of kulemaks and they give the Increased explicit effect modifier as the enshrouded mod, it could Raise the level of the summon phantasms that are being triggered, as well as the flat phys they're getting from the staff. that would be mega

But we arent fully aware of if we can do this with boss uniques or what modifier would transfer from a cane.

For socket colors, it doesnt benefit the build Much as our main skill's socket quality does nothing, but you can raise up the quality of alot of the %increased damage support gems since the build is getting very little of that on the tree it actually gives a good bit of damage.

Why do we need Chaos Res if we are Chaos Inoculation?

Bonemeld amulet makes your minions get 50% of your resistances, if you have negative resistances they get even more negative resistances. And since Ancient Skull is applying a Chaos Damage degen to them, putting them at Negative chaos res will kill them even through the rapid healing from the Life from Death and minion defense mastery.

How Much Chaos Res Do I need for My Minions to Not Die to Bonemeld Killing Their Chaos Res?

You want to aim to be As Close to positive chaos res as possible. -10 to 10 chaos res is good enough in most cases, then just keep spinning and they'll stay alive. Meat Shield Support also makes them take less damage from the degen as far as i know

How does the build generate Power Charges / Why Are We Getting Max Power Charges?

Ancient Skull helmet does not require you to HAVE the charges, it just checks what your Maximum Possible charges could be, and gives your minions crit chance based on those. So we do not generate any power charges.

Bandits?

Kill all.

Gem Quality Priority?

- spirit offering > snipers mark > stone golem > mark on hit > purity of elements

If you have annihilation support, that gets first prio.

The damage supports in the staffs are all mostly equal damage gains from quality. Do the ones that give %increased damage first, and the rest however randomly.

- 6th March 2026
Posted the build for 3.28 League Start https://youtu.be/8Lz8boKAeic

- 14th March 2026
Updated the build with all the juicy fun 3.28 exceptional gem things and new discoveries, finalizing and locking it in as a 10/10 league starter and mid endgame blaster.

Added exceptional gem Annihilation Support into the endgame setup, MASSIVELY improves the clear speed. Its god tier.

- 23rd July 2026

Updated for 3.29, The build is now Chaos Inoculation once you get the bonemeld amulet, making it significantly tankier and is using a new ring craft for a massive massive damage boost in the endgame.