Defensive Scaling:
- Armor. Armor is our main base defensive layer, adding physical damage reduction. Also, just the physical damage reduction stat works. It's not that easy to get endurance charges into the build, but once you can, that's a lot of extra defences.
- Block. Using the ascendancy node Bastion of Hope, it's fairly easy to get block capped. Although it requires you to shield charge every 4 seconds. That's usually not a problem when mapping
- Maximum resistances. We get 80% max res using the passive tree and eldritch implicits.
- Physical damage taken as. We convert around 16% of physical damage into other elements or chaos damage, using eldritch implicits, which helps mitigate physical damage.
- Increased defences, from the stone golem, 20%, and the Umbral army ascendancy, at least 36%, and for every extra spectre, another 12%.
- Minions blind on hit, reducing enemies' accuracy
- Minions taunt on hit, making enemies deal 10% less damage
- Minions can block incoming projectiles. However, minions can also attract unwanted attention, so there's a counter argument as well
- Enemies are chilled, thanks to skitterbots
- Corrupted blood immunity, on the passive tree at first, and later using a corrupted implicit on an abyss jewel
- Elemental ailment immunity, thanks to purity of elements
- in late game, once you tree crafted good Armor / ES gear, you can combine
Mind Over Matter plus 
Wicked Ward plus 
Divine Shield for massive extra hitpool. As you're blocking and mitigating so much damage, ES regen shouldn't be an issue, and 
Eldritch Battery should remain operational. Just be mindful of constant DoT damage (like 600 chaos damage altar) as that messes up this layer of defense.
Offensive Scaling:
- The flat damage of minions. This is scaled by their level, which is one of the main reasons why minion levels are so important. It's also scaled by buffs such as hatred and wrath, by the carrion golem, and by flat damage on ghastly eye jewels. This flat damage is used as the basis for all other scaling, so it's very important.
- The increased damage scaling, which includes all sources of increased minion damage, for example on the passive tree, your wand and shield, but also stats like increased minion attack speed, and that sort of thing.
- The multiplicative damage scaling, which mostly comes from support gems which have more multipliers on them. A buff like hatred which adds I think around 30% of physical damage as extra cold damage, I also consider a more multiplier although I'm not 100% sure that's technically correct. It's the only source that provides the extra damage, however.
- Again, technically maybe not correct, but the 4th category are damage scaling factors that don't directly increase your damage output, but increase the damage received by enemies. You do this for example using the punishment curse or by intimidating enemies, or lowering enemies' elemental resistances, or by covering them in ash, or by scorching them, which again reduces resistances, or by penetrating resistances, or by shocking them with skitterbots which increases damage taken. I think most of these are damage multipliers, but I tend to describe them separately as it's not always immediately apparent they impact the damage a lot.
- Finally, after all is said and done, you can scale the number of minions you have. With SRS, the cap is 20, and you will reach that, using unleash. But if you would play a pure spectre build, and you go from 4 to 5 spectres, that means 1 more spectre with all this other scaling and damage, is very significant. In this build, spectres do some damage, but are mostly utility focused and buffing either you or the minions. They're not the primary damage dealers.
Trigger craft
One of the first things you should do in endgame, is get a minion wand with an open suffix, and bench craft the trigger craft. The way this works, is that it automatically triggers any skill that's socketed in the wand, starting at the top socket, and working its way down. That means it's important to first socket in desecrate, level 1, at the top, so it first creates corpses, and then below the desecrate gem, you slot in flesh offering, so it offers those corpses. The third socket is optional. I've put in a curse. You could put in convocation, if you like, or an aura, which wouldn't be triggered, but just be in the wand. Desecrate and flesh offering are the most important.
Be very careful when managing spectre corpses that you don’t trigger the wand and blow up their corpse.
How to Get Which Gear
- Helmet (Rog or Map Runners)
- Rings / Amulet (Map Runners / Shipments)
- Chest (Tree Crafting)
- Gloves (Tree Crafting)
- Boots (Tree Crafting)
- Wand (Fossil Crafting)
- Shield (Fossil Crafting)
Darkness Enthroned (From Abyss Bosses in Abyssal Depth)
Rumi's Concoction (random drop, I got it from the tree)
Anoint
Once you have some oils, you can google blight helper, you can put in the oils you possess, and then the website will list all possible anoints. I would take something with block, dexterity which you'll sorely need, or resistances. Those are typically cheap. Later, we have more oils and more anoint options, but at first, cheap anoints are quite good.
Pantheon
how to get divine vessels in SSF: trade 1 divine orb and 5 normal quality flasks to the vendor, and get 5 divine vessels, enough to get all the pentheon points you need.
Early Mapping
- Lunaris - physical damage mitigation
- Gruthkul - physical damage mitigation
Late Mapping
- Lunaris - physical damage mitigation
- Abberath - I run searing exarch maps, and burning ground is not fun.
Spectres
Spectres are buffed since 3.27: when they die, they don’t permanently disappear anymore. Spectres become little white blobs, but they return in a new zone. This is huge, and it means once you’ve found your spectres, you’re good to go.
- Carnage chieftain from act 2 - frenzy charges
- Host chieftain from act 6 - power charges
- Forest warrior - any rarity provides Onslaught. A perfect version provides culling too. From Ritual
Aspirational spectres (all from ritual), replace host chieftain first.
- Perfect guardian turtle - 5% physical damage reduction / determination aura.
- Perfect warlord - endurance charges / vitality
- Perfect primal thunderbird - grace
- Hulking miscreation - buffs your summon raging spirits with increased damage, attack speed, and cast speed, although this buff isn’t super consistent.
Animate Guardian
Some words about the animate guardian. I’ve put a section in the loot filter with items that are useful on the animate guardian. At first, you’ll give it items such as a leer cast, which drops fairly often, a dying breath staff, a wake of destruction. Later, if you keep grinding, you can upgrade its gear significantly and deck out the animate guardian with many rare uniques, such as a garb of the ephemeral, legacy of fury, asenaths gentle touch, and more. It’s SSF, it depends on what you find, but I’ll do my best to have the loot filter indicate decent items, similar to how it worked for mercenaries.
AG Gear:
Dying Breath or 
Dreadarc / 
Victario's Charity or something similar (Dreadarc requires +1 curse on the AG or it will overwrite your curses)
Leer Cast (random common drop)
Cospri's Will / chest with +1 curse (hit a hunters influenced chest with harvest 'caster' craft
Asenath's Gentle Touch / Any gloves with curse on hit
Legacy of Fury (from Maven) / 
Wake of Destruction (farmable with div cards - common drop) / 
Windscream (+1 curse - random drop)
Atlas Passive Trees
For atlas passive trees, I heavily recommend you make a beeline towards ritual and use that to gear up your character, get spectres, and just have some fun. Ritual is amazing I feel for SRS guardian, you can easily run it, it provides a ton of player power, and early on, it never disappoints. You can get so many good rewards from it, it’s quite insane, in SSF, so I personally prioritize it over anything else, even over atlas progression.
A second tree is a bit more up to you. I would likely go with some atlas progression, some kirac missions, some map nodes, some player power and abyss. You’ll be doing yellow and red maps and pushing for 2 voidstones at this point, so you can use some extra power, and you can use the maps. You should be pretty powerful however, if you did a bunch of ritual.
The last tree is a maven boss rushing tree. It’s a classic, really, but you need this. You want the invitations, get a bunch of maps, and if you are planning on getting 4 voidstones which this build can definitely achieve, you’ll have to farm the guardian maps, for at least a little while, and this tree allows you to efficiently do that.
Atlas Passive Trees:
Atlas Tree 1 - Ritual (57 points) - https://poeplanner.com/a/669T
Atlas Tree 1 - Ritual & Searing Exarch (112 points) - https://poeplanner.com/a/669S
Atlas Tree 2 - Map Progression (50 points) - https://poeplanner.com/a/669n
Atlas Tree 2 - Map Progression and Abyss (108 points) - https://poeplanner.com/a/66O3 - run this until you get the Darkness Enthroned, after that you don't really need abyss
Atlas Tree 2 - Maven Boss Rushing (107 points) - https://poeplanner.com/a/66bZ
Atlas Tree 3 I would leave open until you know what you want to farm
Mapping Progression
In terms of overall endgame progression, I suggest you focus first on Ritual, get your character into a good place. You can run endgame all the way to yellow maps on a 4-link and crappy gear, but once you start pushing into red maps, you should get a 5-link. Ritual provides plenty of those, gambling works as well.
Once you have that, early red maps shouldn’t be an issue, you can also check the loadouts in the PoB to see what I had in terms of gear and gem levels. If you want to start Maven boss rushing to get a bunch of fragments, I advise you get a 6-link, so those bosses don’t take 3 minutes to kill. Again, Ritual tends to give those, you can farm divination cards if you please, you could do a bit of Legion for geomancer’s incubators, or set up a safehouse in Betrayal. I have a whole video on how to get a 6-link, but I think having a 6-link and swapping all your support gems so they have 20% quality, which is by selling a level 20 gem plus a gemcutter’s prism, is the starting point for you to take on tier 16 content.
Then once you have 4 voidstones, or once you’re working towards that goal, you can take a look at the endgame gearing loadout, the aspirational gear, which has a few more items to chase. Very manageable items, I feel, such as the darkness enthrones, from Abyss. That belt is very good and easily farmable. That’s why I take abyss in my second atlas tree. And there are a few more items too, especially the ones that provide +1 minion levels. Minion levels are very strong and provide many advantages.
Flasks
- life flask with bleeding immunity
- granite
- jade
- quicksilver
- quartz
focus on:
- charges on getting hit
- duration
- increased armor
- increased evasion
- reduced effect of curses
- movement speed
Darkness Enthroned
One item in specific you want to farm for, using abyss, is the Darkness Enthroned. This belt holds 2 abyss jewels, and can roll up to 100% effect of those jewels. Using this belt, you can gain a ton of flat minion damage, which is a hard stat to get otherwise. Also, depending on the suffixes you roll, you can get immunity to bleed, stun, or other very useful affixes. This belt provides significant power and is always a massive upgrade.
Regex Strings
Campaign Vendor lvl 1 - 30: "r-[rb]-b|b-[rb]-r|r-b-r|b-r-b|Runn|rint|ll g|movement speed"
Campaign Vendor lvl 30+: "-\w-.-|(-\w){4}|ts:.+(?=(\S*r){1})(\S*b){3}|ll g"
Highlight skill gems (not perfect, but useful): "Animate Guardian|me totem$|rit$|^flesh o|mpe|crate$|ld ch|^vit|^cla|ty of e|^autom|nvo|tre$|mabi|lsk|ne golem$|n golem$|^has|ots$"
Rolling Maps T16: "!efl|ur$|gen|s rec|o al|non"
Tier 16s YOLO (you can run these but they're rippy): "!efl|gen|s rec|re he"
Tier 17s YOLO: "!sters r|m en|'v|teal|uct|acl|rune|gen|r li|pet|vola|s rec|k at|hex|ever|' mi"
Highlighting 5 or 6-link when spamming fusings: (-\w){4}|(-\w){5}
Templar
Guardian
