[3.9] Omni-golem Primordial Chain Elementalist

For most content, you just run + quicksilver flask/leap slam through everything while your golems destroy everything in their wake. For harder enemies you spam your curse on hit setup to make them easy prey. There is no shame in standing still while your near-immortal golems constantly taunt the enemies off of you if you need to go AFK for a while. You could say it is a high quality of life build.

For our golems: We get 1 from base, 2 from Clayshapers, 2 from anima stone+primordials, 2 from elementalist passives, 1 from tree, and 3 from primordial chain for a total of 11.

Like most golem builds, it revolves around flame golems being your primary golem. Unlike most builds, your other golems also hit very hard. In fact, it is fairly easy to modify the build so ice golems acutally do more damage without lowering the flame golems' damage. For my version, I use 2 Clayshapers for the extra golems/damage. But, if you find that surviving is difficult, you can get a high ES shield (I recommend 400+) which will drastically increase your total ES. You can also substitute one of your primordial harmony gems for a watcher's eye for more defense options, but they are ludicrously expensive even for basic ones.

For the 11 golems, I use 6 fire, 1 ice, 1 lightning, 1 stone, 1 carrion, and 1 chaos. However, this can be changed based on your personal preference, but keep in mind that the flame golems will do slightly more damage than the others with most setups. In the passive tree below, I use many jewel sockets which are an anima stone (for 2 extra golems), a primordial might (for aggressive golem behavior and + golem life), and several primordial harmony's (for 120% increased golem damage per jewel and massive skill cooldown reduction so they can spam their strongest abilities). From the gem setups, your minions will have massive attack/cast speed with multistrike and spell echo. Your minion cast/attack speed will be so high that the skill cooldown reduction for your minions is the rate-limiting step on how fast, say, your flame golem can spam its magma ball. Therefore, the increase in attack/cast speed from minion frenzy charges obtained by using a Victario's Charity with the Necromantic Aegis skill node does not give any substantial dps increase for flame golems, despite Path of Building tell you that the minions receive 40% more dps with full fury charges. This is because PoB does not take into account cooldown in it's dps calculation. The minions cannot spam their attacks faster than the cooldowns allow despite whatever cast speed they have. With this build's 10-11 primordial harmony setup, the cooldown reduction is such that dual-wielding clayshapers is significantly ahead of Victario's. However, if you modify the build to have 13-15+ primordial harmony's then Victario's might be better and is probably better in melee golem builds.

FYI, to those of you who read the first version of this guide, I did not fully understand the theory behind what I mentioned above, as I was using Victario's Charity. I would like to thank Tomatopotato's comments and data for correcting me. I will link the document here. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lA7tpZ-7ZOSS2yWK3bWV9IBbYta7qMbAjvO1G96wVdM/edit#gid=1968740767

For survivability, We have Fortify on our Leap Slam. We get a ridiculous amount of physical mitigation and life/es regen from our golem steroids. An added layer can come from your minions if you use a stygian vise with a "minions taunt on attacks" and "minions blind on attacks" abyss jewel. I run a double curse on hit with Elemental Weakness and Vulnerability on my gloves for DPS but can be changed to Temporal Chains and Enfeeble for survivability. This allows you to get the shaper affix of "socketed gems are affected by #level Blind" on your gloves if you choose. Also, a lot of our defense will come from flasks (jade, rumi's, stibnite, basalt).

So, this guide is choosing to run Chaos Inoculation with pure energy shield gear to save on life flasks and to keep from having to try to build up chaos resist. However, using a life based build is also perfectly viable. Unfortunately, the gear is not easily interchangeable, so you will need to decide fairly early on. I will link skill trees and PoB for both.

The elementalist passive, Liege of the Primordial, gives you 550% increased golem buff effectiveness with 11 golems out (plus 80% from tree). This gives you massive defensiveness and offensiveness. You get tons of physical damage reduction, life regen, attack/cast speed, crit rate, and pure damage modifier.

You can use Grace instead of Hatred for base evasion which scales with flasks and offers improved survivability. I use Vaal Discipline for ES and an "oh crap!" button.

So in total: you have immunity to chaos damage,constant taunting and blind from all your golems, as well as blind from your stibnite flask. You get tons of physical resist and evasion from golems and flasks. This is even without any armor or evasion on your gear. Also, you have immunity to chill/freeze, ignite, and shock due to elementalist ascendanceies when your golems are out. This eliminates the need for most flask suffixes except bleed.

*ATTENTION: These stats are for a CI build. If you are using Life, prioritize that and armor/evasion instead of ES*

$$$ This is where it gets expensive. $$$

Other than a very well rolled Primordial chain, the 2nd most important piece of gear (other than you primordial jewels/Anima Stone/The Hungry Loops mentioned above) is a high level, elder helmet. I prefer a bone helmet with a 20% minion damage implicit. This is where our flame golem goes. The best possible rolls are +2/3 level to socketed minion gems, Level 16/18/20 Minion Damage, and Level 16/18/20 Concentrated Effect (or Minion Life) for prefixes. You can also do Level 16/18/20 Immolate for Suffix. If you are really lucky, you might find one with the "socketed gems deal 30% more elemental damage" from essence crafting. These make a pseudo 7 link helmet for your flame golem that give it more damage than even using a 6 link body armour with a level 4 empower. This will likely be your most expensive purchase and it is extremely hard to find or fossil craft. In fact, I've never seen a perfect one. Now, don't get discouraged, because this is absolutely NOT NECESSARY. I did fine until lower red maps with just Minion Damage and Concentrated Effect on my helm which you should be able to get for a reasonable price. I recently crafted a very good example that I will link here:



It should be noted that there is some debate about the effectiveness of concentrated effect. The decreased AOE makes it harder to shotgun the different golems' magma ball if you use Greater Multiple Projectiles, which some debates is a dps loss despite the increased damage gain from the skill itself. In practice, I find that concentrated effect is very strong, especially with increased minion aoe on the tree.

Amulet - Primordial chain (required and recently became very expensive!*) - lowest minion damage and life reductions possible. Minion movement speed is actually very important for melee golems (ice, stone, carrion, and chaos) dps uptime. Get the best one you can. If you can, try to get a corrupted version with either increased discipline or hatred aura effect, or the best possible corruption, "you can apply an additional curse to enemies". This will save you 3-4 skill tree points that you can spend either in ES, ES recharge, or more minion damage, but this corruption is usually very expensive.

Main hand and Off-hand - Clayshapers (required) - Minion life > minions physical damage > attack speed. Gives +2 golems. Very cheap. However, if you are having trouble staying alive or just want more survivability, consider running a high ES shield in your offhand, but you will lose 1 golem which is a significant dps loss considering the primordial harmony jewels. Also, you can try to get a Fortify corruption on 1 or both of them if you want to save a gem link.

Body Armor - 6 link rare int based chest, such as Vaal Regalia. Your goal here is for the highest ES rating possible. We do not need Shavronne's Wrappings because we use Chaos Inoculation, but this is a good alternative if you want to do a life/ES hybrid build. If you go for a life-based chest, ideally, you want to get a version with with Socketed Gems are supported by Level 1 Maim. This will give your melee golems in your chest armour a 7 link. You can get a good rare body armour more cheaply than you think. There is a Divination card (The Ethereal) That gives you a 6 link white Vaal Regalia of your level (up to ilvl 80). Now, granted, you cannot roll the highest ES affixes without an ilvl 86 item, but with fossil crafting I was able to make a 700 ES 6 link chest for less than a total of 60 chaos which is about 10 times cheaper than buying one off of POE.trade currently.

*Vis Mortis was recently buffed drastically for melee-based minion builds* It is now the highest damage chest option, but you will lose a lot of ES/Life to get it. Keep that in mind.

Gloves - Multiple options here. Priorities are highest ES possible but also resists as you are probably starting to really hurt for them. Remember that you can skip chaos resists, and you do not need life on any of your gear due to CI.

The highest DPS option is a Grip of the Council, especially if you are playing a melee golem variation. It is very nice because it gives 20% EXTRA physical damage as cold for our Ice, Chaos, Carrion, and Stone golems. However, the ES is very low and we do not use the HP on it. Also, as many uniques as we use in this build, resists are very hard to cap. I am currently using just a normal rare pair of gloves with high ES and resists for survivability. If you are good on resists but want more defense, rare Shaper gloves with "socketed gems are supported by # level Blind" work well. I will give examples below:





Boots - Priorities are High ele resists (to cap) > ES >> movement speed. For mapping, speed is very important, but with good flasks and all the attack speed/cast speed from the tree and our golem buffs, you may not actually need movement speed on your boots. Your choice.




Belt - Stygian vise (required) - #% increased ES from body armour (Delve/fossil only) > ES >> high resists >> armour and probably str if you need it. The fossil affix for %ES of body armour is really good with a very high ES chest. You can get up to 16%. The reason why we need a stygian vise, specifically, is because of the abyss jewel. Ideal stats of jewel are ES >> Minion Taunt on hit > Minion Blind on hit> Minion physical damage > Minion spells hinder by 30% movement speed.

Rings - This part is cool. I use two of the same ring called The Hungry loop. It is a unique unset ring that literally eats any support gems that level up to max level while in its socket up to 4 times. That means that you can select what support gems you want to make into a 5 link for each golem you put in there. Unfortunately, it does not get bonuses from quality, but on the bright side, it is very cheap to buy level 19, 0% quality support gems with very high %exp till next level to use on them to save time grinding. It is also very customizable based on your personal preferences. You can even throw the flame golem in one and put the ice or lightning golem in the helm if you want to modify the build. The biggest downside is that you lose all of the ES and resists that you normally get in your ring slots (and amulet) which is a lot!

For jewels, it is very straight forward. You need 1 anima stone for +2 golems. You need 1 primordial might for the aggressive behavior(some would argue you don't even need that due to the movement speed on the necklace). And as many primordial harmony's as you can possibly get. These are God gems. With 9 of them, you will have 1080% increased golem damage (plus 220% golem damage from the Elemancer passive) and 270% golem skill cooldown reduction. Go for those 2 stats over golem summoning cooldown which is kind of useless when you have this many jewels. If you are going for more of a melee/ice golem or lightning golem build, at least 1 Primordial Eminence jewel is recommended for the attack/cast speed, as they are not as affected by cooldown limitations as the flame golems.

However, if you have tons of currency and find that surviving is hard, consider a watcher's eye with some of the many Discipline affixes to replace one of the 11 PH's. I personally like the up to "50% blind when enemies hit you while affected by grace" if you are using grace instead of hatred for survivability. All of the Discipline ones are very good. My favorite are the ES on hit and ES recharge/regen.

There is one last thing that is very important. Do not get any + fire/ice damage/spell damage on hit in any of your gear. This is most commonly on gloves and jewelry. This will mess up the Elemental Equilibrium that we are using to buff our golems. For those of you who do not know, only your own personal elemental damage procs Elemental Equilibrium. Your golem damage benefits from it but does not overwrite it. With the Elemental Equilibrium (EE) node in the skill tree, if we hit an enemy with lightning, it will gain +25% lightning resist (which we negate with Elemental Weakness to -19%) and lose 50% fire and ice resist (-94% with Elemental Weakness). Also, keep in mind that any enchantment or physical/movement skill will ruin EE if you are using Hatred.

For CI/Energy Shield build:
Keep in mind that this gear is out of date.








x9 jewels, or if you need more survivability, use 8 jewels with a




For Life build:





As mentioned before. If surviving is an issue, change the clayshaper off-hand for a high ES shield, but keep in mind this will put you down to 10 golems from 11 and will decrease the total damage of each of your golems due to the Elementalist Ascendancy.

In all cases you want to go for level 21 golem gems over 20% quality level 20 gems. Thanks to divination cards, they are fairly cheap, but try to get the highest quality you can.

Awakened support gems will always be better than their normal counterparts, but may not be worth the cost.

Helm - Flame Golem - (Minion Damage in helm) - Elemental Focus if no Immolate in helm or Controlled Destruction if you do - Spell Echo - Greater/Lesser Multiple Projectiles for clear or Slower Projectiles for more damage/bosses. Concentrated Effect (if not already in helm) and Controlled Destruction both give more damage than Slower Projectiles if you don't need the extra clear of GMP or don't mind color swapping.

Greater Multiple Projectiles is faster for mapping and has better AOE with shotgunning. If you use GMP or LMP, you can switch out to a Slower Projectiles for bosses if you want. Lately, since the LMP buffs, I find myself using it for clear instead of GMP. The damage difference is quite significant now. However, when using Concentrated Effect and having 6+ flame golems out, I find that enemies are obliterated with Controlled Destruction even with less projectiles. Pick what you prefer. I would recommend against using Elemental Focus if you helm has an Immolate Suffix on it as it will keep your golems from igniting. Concentrated Effect also makes it harder to shotgun the molten balls when using GMP. The plus side of Controlled Destruction, if you choose to use it over GMP/slower projectiles, is that the immolate and flame wave skills that the flame golems use in melee range hit much harder. Some argue that GMP is actually better for bosses as well due to the overlapping shotgun effect of the magma orbs, but I have yet to see any concrete data that this is the case. See above for the helm affixes for the pseudo 7 link.

Body - Stone Golem - Ice Golem - Minion Damage - Melee Physical Damage - Multistrike - Added Fire Damage/Ruthless/Empower (Level 4).

Ruthless actually does more damage than Empower here, but Empower also gives significantly higher life to the golems. It also greatly increases the life/ES regen and increased damage you get from your golems as well. Added fire does more damage than both of them if you are using a flame golem setup with both ele weakness and flammability curses. If you are using a melee golem build with ele weakness and vulnerability or some other combination of curses, Ruthless is better.

This gives a 5 link to the stone and ice golems. These are our strongest melee golems in the build. The Multistrike is deceptively good despite what PoB says due to the low golem skill cooldown from all the primordial jewels.

*Keep in mind that the gem links in this build are pretty free form. If you wanted to make a melee golem build instead of a fire golem build, virtually everything would be different. You could also mess around with the non golem links.

Main Weapon - Carrion Golem - Feeding Frenzy - Culling Strike/(or Desecrate for offering skills)

This is our weakest golem. It is used mainly to keep up the feeding frenzy buff for the others and to cull big bosses. It is actually a very good golem and I feel bad for it in this build since we don't have any non-golem minions to take advantage of it.

After doing a lot of math, I have determined that it is better to keep the carrion golem in, rather than use 7 of our primary golem, but only barely. It is perfectly reasonable to take it out, put on another feeding frenzy onto your lightning golem, and use the weapon for more Quality of Life gems/defenses.

Weapon/Shield - Leap Slam - Faster Attacks - Fortify

Standard Leap Slam setup. Previously, I had used Phase Run and even Flame Dash and Lightning Warp, but I missed Fortify too much. If you can get a Fortify Corruption on one or both of your Clayshapers, you can skip the gem. This let me put Desecrate here and keep the culling strike on my Carrion golem.

Boots - Vaal Discipline (for CI builds)/ Hatred (for life or especially melee golem builds) - Zealotry (for flame or lightning golem builds) - Flesh/Spirit Offering - Convocation

Convocation is surprisingly useful. It resets the range of your flame and ice golems when used which makes them typically use cyclone/magma orb which is their strongest ability. This actually increases your damage quite a bit, but there is no real way of calculating this. Also there is the bonus of being surrounded in meat shields which is nice. It will also proc the AOE increase on the tree, so try to use either it or an offering skill every 4 seconds.

Vaal Discipline is your best survivability cooldown in a CI build. It scales really well with increased ES recovery from your tree or a Watcher's eye.

If you play CI, the tree does not include mana reserve reduction because It is hard to fit anything other than Discipline and one 50% dps aura.

Spirit Offering is a great skill. It gives all your minions up to 20% of their maximum life as additional ES every time you use it. It gives 29% of minion physical damage as extra chaos damage. This only affects the stone, chaos, carrion, and ice golems, but it is very strong with as much physical scaling as we give them. However, Flesh Offering is technically more damage even for melee golems, and the movement speed is good for all the golem's damage. The cast speed helps lightning golem, but probably not flame golem that much due to cooldown limitations. Choose whichever you prefer.

Hatred gives 25% of minion physical damage as extra cold damage. This stacks with Elemental Equilibrium (and our curses) which we are using with a lightning skill to buff our cold and fire damage. The ice/stone/chaos golems are all scaling very hard with melee supports, so this gives a lot of damage. If you are using the Grip of the Council gloves, Spirit Offering, and Hatred, then you are getting 74% extra damage for the ice/stone/carrion/chaos golems! In some setups this gives the ice golem (and maybe stone or carrion golem) more damage than the flame golems. It is perfectly legitimate to use maybe 2 flame golems with GMP for AOE clearring and keep 5 ice golems as the bulk of your damage. You can even put the ice golem in your helm if you want. So many possibilities. If you want more survivability, change out hatred for Grace.

Zealotry is one of the biggest modifiers of flame and lightning golem damage and also increases your own damage some. In fact, in the past I have made a 1.2 million dps Vaal Arc build buy moving 2 of the golems together on the weapon and making a 5 link Hungry Loop Vaal Arc ring. Unfortunately this drastically nerfs your golem damage, especially, if you take off elemental equilibrium to add on elemental overload and change the flammability curse to conductivity. Fun to play around with though.

Ring - Summon Lightning Golem - Minion Damage - Spell Echo - Added Cold Damage (if using a lightning skill for Elemental Equilibrium) - Elemental Focus

Other than Carrion golem which we just use for support, this is our weakest golem. This is due to the fact that it gets the most damage out of the last 2 links of the build and that EE really lowers its damage when we are using a lightning skill. Lightning golem builds are great boss killer builds though, if you want to do that.

Ring - Summon Chaos Golem - Minion Damage - Added Fire Damage - Maim - Feeding Frenzy

The links may look odd, but this is the best way to maximize the damage of the melee hit, physical spell cascade, and the damage over time chaos aura. It is very hard to build this golem well since the nature of the attacks are all different. We also get repeats of support with feeding frenzy to make it happen more often.

Gloves - Vaal Arc - Curse on Hit - Elemental Weakness - Flammability (for flame golem builds)/ Vulnerability (for melee golem builds). For more defensive options use Temporal Chains and Enfeeble curses.

I use Arc here since it has a high chance of shocking the enemies and gives shock effectiveness, but honestly, even with the Elementalist acendancy, we don't hit THAT hard with no damage links on the jewel. As I mentioned before, I have tried this as a 5 link in the Hungry Loop for damage, but I don't think it compensates for the damage lossed.

Ele weakness is used regardless of the build due to the bonuses to flame/ice/lighning golems, added fire supports, and physical as extra cold damage in the build. It also makes your arc suck less.

Flammability when used with ele weakness and elemental equilibrium gets the enemies fire resist ridiculously negative. This will drastically shoot up flame golem damage.

Vulnerability is perfect for melee golem builds, increasing physical damage and bleeding taken, not to mention maim.

If you are having trouble staying alive, and you don't mind losing a lot of damage, change out the two curses for Temporal Chains and Enfeeble. This will require a re-color of your gloves unfortunately.



*Also, you may have noticed that my Cast When Damage Taken Setup is gone. With the new Carrion Golem, I am running out of gem sockets very fast despite the Hungry Loop rings. And, since we don't use endurance charges, Immortal Call is not very good and Steelskin is debatable with all the golem defenses. If anyone has any better defensive ideas, please let me know.

For mapping. For harder fights replace Quicksilver with:



Your flask are very important and where a large chunk of your defense comes from. I recommend copying my flask combination as close as possible. You want them up at virtually all times when engaging enemies. The overflowing flask helps tremendously with this. If you would rather substitute a Taste of Hate flask for physical taken as cold damage instead of either the jade or overflowing flask, you can.

As an elementalist you are immune to all elemental based ailments such as chill, freeze, ignite, and shock. You are also immune to poison and chaos based damage with Chaos Inoculation. The only flask suffix that is not defensive and is required is bleeding cure/immunity unless you also want one for curses.

ES/CI version:
https://poeplanner.com/ABIAAQ0AEiMAAIPfilSufdIi9G0Za9tMs9Af7-tsC5MnvoqhLyj6gsf56EGHtz6DzDwtg1-4kxzcjxrr7qcIj0ZR-80WHxgdFPrSZp5yD5RvZlSg5mdxSp-JvBBRmE06xhhWf8bBxVhaUilV4Jit2mJodDsNEQ87P2Eohspx83l_Y0G-SR7ai2XJPb-X8h6boX0YGGpYBzLRRUfAZohAKpiQM6asqqkGSTlSV8kNfOq6tAzK00ZxgwlgQ249voBvnspKX7CbtYTF99eESFxrw23sGCy_EVCnKy_aly1JT7yq98G3MYx2J6lZ86yqcqmJ2GhY15Z-WTW5j_rw1UlRFVDUB9yNuwEBAmt6yL9GUvxMAAAAAAA=

Life version:
https://poeplanner.com/ABMAAQ0AEiMAAIPv6yj6gsf56EGHtz6DzDwtg1-18ngNwBpvO7iTHNyPGuvupwiPRlH7zRYfGB0U-tJmnnIPlG9mVKDmZ3FKn4m8EFGYTTrGGFaYrdpiaHQ7DREPOz9hKIbKcfN5f2NBvkke2otlOlhVxv4K2L01kmpDWfMaOJBVFm_jaqyYm6H31xhqWAf-j03jbqpKyIqvkBF7w6ZXPycqTQDuLOmGszLRRUfAZgSzogCIQCqYkDOmrKqpJy864TlSvOryRXyDES0snI6-ksHfsJrgRZ1TUvAfrKpyqYnYaFjXlvcy6hh2rM9--Ovz3WhlFHHZfIIHFy9k51XWgKTUB9yNuwEBAmt6yL9GUvxMAAAAAAA=

For leveling, go first for the big ES and minion nodes while picking up str/dex nodes early on that you can refund later. Then late game go for as many jewel sockets as you can get primordial gems for.

For the anointment on the necklace:
For DPS, go Ravenous Horde or Gravepact
For defenses, go Heart of the Warrior or Herbalism or a big ES node if CI
If you want more movement speed, go Harrier

For Ascendancies, go Liege of the Primordial and Elemancer first for the golem bonuses, then go Shaper of Desolation and Beacon of Ruin for crowd control/additional damage/rotating conflux. This is probably still optimal even without proliferation due to chill/freeze and increased shock damage.

This is situational and depends on the fight. I like Solaris for Major to get boss phys reduction, chance to get area damage reduction, decreased crit damage against me, and chance to avoid bleeds from crits. For fast mapping, Lunaris might be better. Brine King if you are getting stunned a lot.

For minor, I like Tukohama, but Gruthkul and Ralakesh are good options as well.

KILL ALL

This is the last thing you should worry about. Notice how I still don't have mine.

For gloves, any of the lightning based enchants is what I would go for. Note that Reflection does not work with our build because the amulet does not let us have any non-golem pets. Avoid any enchantments that will mess up our EE.

For boots, anything but added fire/ice damage enchantments work. Probably, my favorite is "Life and Mana Regeneration When Hit" because of Zealot's Oath.

For the helm, the 40% damage increase of flame or ice golem is the best. However, if you are unable to get it, buffing the damage of the stone, lightning, or chaos golems is OK. Buffing Spirit Offering's extra damage is great. Decreased cooldown of convocation and reduced mana cost of Hatred aren't bad either. Increased duration of Phase Run is also an option. Given the buffs to golem buff effect, that could now be considered for an enchant as well, possibly. I haven't actually crunched the numbers for that one.

It is possible to do ALL maps.

Elemental Reflect is not an issue for our golems as they cannot be hurt by their own elemental damage.

Physical reflect will kill your ice golem, stone golem, and carrion golem but when that happens, just summon more elemental golems.

Enfeeble does not matter on us. Temp chains is annoying but we are not attack speed based. Vulnerability is OK with the right flasks. Elemental Weakness is fine as long as you are overcapping your resistances on your gear (extremely difficult to do with all of our uniques).

Decreased/No energy shield/life regen can be done if you are careful thanks to recharge and vaal discipline.

No energy shield recharge is probably the most dangerous but your regen should be fine for it. If you get no energy shield recharge and regen on the same map, you might as well delete the map because your RNG sucks.

You are immune to most ailments including chaos based ones. Just bring a bleed flask. Solaris can help for crit maps.

https://pastebin.com/HGirS6qA

This is the path of building link. I use Local Identity's Path of Building fork which drastically improves the accuracy of the damage and golem effects. I am not sure how well this will show up if you import it to vanilla PoB.

The PoB listed starts off on the life version of the tree since this is what I have played most recently, but you can switch it to the CI/ES version at the tab at the bottom of the tree. However, you will need to create/import your own energy shield gear, since most everything I have on there has life at the moment. If you have any questions about how to use it, let me know.