[3.24] Dominating Blow Champion - Farewell Adrena-minions

Firstly, of course, to get Fortitude to have permanent fortif-



Oh. Nevermind then. (More on that later)

The real answer is banners. The strength of War Banner and Dread Banner make physical/impale with Champion arguably the best way to scale Dominating Blow's damage.

Champion's Inspirational frees up banner reservation, grants aura effect, and gives bonus incentives for actually placing banners.

The Perfidy body armour lets us bypass the restriction of only having a single banner, and it also grants random bonuses to banner skills.



War Banner, for example, besides completely solving minion accuracy and increasing the physical damage enemies take, grants 2.5 seconds of adrenaline to us and our minions when placed at maximum stages. Perfidy can triple this duration, up to 7.5 seconds. Our skill effect duration and, optionally, the otherwise underused reservation mastery "Non-curse aura skills have 50% increased duration" can bring this to almost 11 full seconds of adrenaline for our entire army.

Dread Banner gives our minions a massive chunk of impale chance which is another huge damage scaler. It also reduces enemies' accuracy, letting us easily reach 95% evasion cap.

And then there's Bannerman:

While this build might serve as a reasonable template for other physical damage minions like Skeleton Warriors, Carrion Golems, or Zombies, there are a few hurdles to overcome.

War Banner only generates stages when you kill an enemy, which is a pretty rare occurrence in a minion build. Dread Banner only gains stages when you impale an enemy. Perfidy, among its numerous aforementioned benefits to the build, lets us generate stages for both banners on melee hit. As a strike skill, Dominating Blow satisfies these constraints, giving us banner stage generation even on bosses.

The fact that we're always attacking lets us solve another issue arising from our use of a unique weapon. Other minion builds often automate the casting of Desecrate and an Offering by crafting trigger on their weapon, which is of course not possible on Maata's Teaching.

We could use Arcanist Brand, but Dominating Blow gives us the ability to trigger offerings through Battlemage's Cry. The spells are triggered by attacks exerted by Battlemage's Cry, and the warcry's AoE taunt also synergizes with Champion's Conqueror and Worthy Foe. Also, unlike the trigger craft or things like Mark on Hit Support, Battlemage's Cry doesn't come with a mana cost multiplier. Call to Arms Support does have a cost multiplier, but it only affects the warcry itself.

Guardian and Necromancer offer more direct benefits to minions' survivability, but Champion can also be a team player. Conqueror, besides giving ourselves 10% reduced damage taken, also gives our minions 20% less damage taken.

Grace and Dread Banner give our minions almost 90% chance to evade attacks. Purity of Elements alone caps minion resistances which we raise to a maximum of 83% through the minion defense mastery.

Matua Tupuna greatly scales our minion aura effect, and it also especially boosts our Animated Guardian's and spectres' levels.



The easy levels give us a maximum of 3 spectres, and the AG has roughly 90k-100k life. Our AG turns out to be the actual Champion, granting us and the rest of our minions +10 fortification by wielding Kingmaker.

We previously ignored the discrepancy between gems that supported either our sentinels' default strike attack or their crusade slam ability, focusing on their strike.

Now that gem quality increases minion cooldown recovery, getting quality would lose damage because they use their unsupported slam more often. In that case, it makes sense to switch to slightly less optimal but more general supports like Meat Shield, Empower, or Increased Critical Damage that can support both the strike and the slam.

Main 3R3B or 4R2B six-link:

Vaal Domination - Awakened Minion Damage - Awakened Brutality

These rarely, if ever, change. The remaining supports can vary depending on your gear and preferences for single-target damage or map clear, respectively:

Awakened Melee Physical <-> Awakened Melee Splash
Predator and/or Meat Shield<-> Fresh Meat

Melee Splash isn't necessary at all while mapping, but it is very comfy for our army's upkeep and enemy corpse removal.

Another option that might make invitation-style encounters slightly easier is a dual five-link with Vaal Domination - Summon Skeletons. Note that getting Vaal Summon Skeletons here would divide your soul gain further.


Banner 3R1G four-link:

War Banner - Dread Banner - Arrogance - Precision

If you are struggling with sockets, drop Precision and replace it with your free reservation aura from Aul's Uprising. However, all of your aura effect makes Precision a 20% damage aura just from the amount of crit chance, so it's highly beneficial to try to fit it in eventually.


Battlemage's Cry four-link:

Battlemage's Cry - Desecrate - Spirit Offering - Assassin's Mark or Call to Arms Support

Battlemage's Cry can either be automated with Call to Arms or cast manually. Using Call to Arms Support means replacing either Desecrate (and thus the Offering uptime on bosses) or your Curse (moving it elsewhere to replace one of your utility links).

If you need to resummon your spectres, you'll need to unsocket Battlemage's Cry so that you can self-cast Desecrate.

Before swapping to crit, you can use Flesh Offering and Punishment instead. Also note that the order the skills are socketed into your gear changes the order that they are triggered, starting at the top left socket and ending at the bottom left socket. Color your gear's sockets appropriately for Desecrate to trigger before your Offering.


Support minion 2B1R three-link:

Raise Spectre - Minion Life - Animate Guardian

Put these in your shield for more levels. Reaching level 25 on the Raise Spectre gem gives us a maximum of 3 spectres, and the AG's survivability is naturally very important because of the gear it's equipped with. You can make do without these summons for quite a while, but I would definitely advise making use of them when you swap the build over to crit. If you want your AG to cover you with Kingmaker more closely, you can play around with Meat Shield instead of Minion Life.


Main Auras:

Pride - Purity of Elements - Vaal Haste - Grace or Determination


Fitting in Vaal Haste is why we go for Aul's Uprising, so drop it if you're not there yet. Champion gets a bit of both evasion and armour scaling from the small ascendancy passives, so either defensive aura will be good. Flasks can provide a decent amount of the other. Of course, you can aim for maximum tankiness instead by running both Grace and Determination instead of Haste.

Quality on these auras provides area of effect, which is actually a helpful bonus (especially with Pride) that gives you better coverage of your minion army.


Utility minion 2B two-link:

Summon Holy Relic - Feeding Frenzy


Because you are constantly attacking, Summon Holy Relic is used to reliably provide the Feeding Frenzy buff. Its healing aura is stronger than Stone Golem, and it gets into less trouble despite the Aggressive tag from Feeding Frenzy


Guard Skill 2R two-link:

Cast when Damage Taken - Immortal Call or Molten Shell

Change your guard skill depending on your defensive aura. Immortal Call pairs with Grace and Molten Shell pairs with Determination.

If your Cast when Damage Taken is level 1, then cap Immortal Call at level 3 or Molten Shell at level 10. Remember that Vaal Molten Shell will divide your Vaal skill soul gain, making it take longer for Vaal Domination to be ready.


Unlinked utility skills:

Shield Charge | Flame Dash | Convocation

Shield Charge is okay without Faster Attacks because of Spiritual Command and Haste giving us attack speed. If you spam Shield Charge, note that it will consume exerts from your Battlemage's Cry, but it's not overly concerning while mapping. Also, charging into packs works just fine because of your capped accuracy. If you desperately need socket space, you can consider dropping it.

Core Uniques:



Besides +2 levels, Maata's Teaching gives our minions base crit chance. You don't necessarily have to use it until you're ready to fully swap into crit, but it's an important piece of the puzzle when you do.

Not only is Perfidy very neat, as the overview elaborates, but it looks stylish too. The War Banner duration modifier is the only one that is impactful here. The corruptions to look for are +1 to Socketed Gems, +2 to Socketed Minion Gems, or +2 to Socketed Duration Gems.

Matua Tupuna is a very common unique, so it's another place to look for good corruptions. The bonus levels to minion gems free up one socket that would otherwise go to making our AG tanky enough, and being granted a defensive aura frees up another socket on a very socket-starved build. If you are okay on sockets, consider a physical damage taken as elemental implicit.

3.24 Necropolis:

There are a few big changes coming to the build compared to last league. We'll miss things like Affliction's spectres and Penance Mark, and the removal of the "banner skills have no reservation" mod means our double banner setup is locked to Champion again for now. Necropolis still has unclear potential with spectres from the league mechanic and T17 maps, and its new crafting modifiers may also give us some interesting tools to work with.

The main change to the core build comes from the overhaul to instant skills bound to left-click. Alongside that, the Call to Arms keystone was replaced and turned into a support gem.

We previously had Battlemage's Cry bound on left-click to fully automate our Desecrate - Offering - Curse. Since offerings don't affect us, we didn't strictly need 100% uptime, but it was very convenient. Not only did the AoE taunt synergize with Champion's ascendancy, but warcry cluster jewels were a decent place for minion Onslaught. There are a few ways to try to work around the changes:



Minor changes:

The Convocation skill had some changes to its gem to give higher life regen, and it can also be granted by minion items. Given that our weapon slots are occupied by unique items, we'll still need to work around the socket pressure.

The new Warlord's Call keystone replaces Call to Arms. My overinflated ego takes some small measure of responsibility for it being changed to a minion keystone. Sorry, everyone. Anyway, while we would gain some benefit from Battlemage's Cry (the buff would grant up to 30% increased crit chance for our minions), the downside is not being able to exert attacks, i.e., trigger our spells. Unless there's some unlikely interaction between Warlord's Call and Rallying Cry, I'm not sure there's much application for this new keystone for us.

A minor nerf is that Soul Eater has been changed to have a cap as well as to have stacks decay over time. Refreshing an Ascended Sentinel from Vaal Domination to maintain Soul Eater through a whole map is a religious experience, so hopefully 45 stacks is still enough to have some fun.

Outside the game, PoB for a while was miscalculating minion builds, and a big patch came through to adjust things for accuracy. If you were noticing a difference in the numbers, that might be a reason why.