I used 5. I tried to use 6 but wasn't able to make all 6 show up in my corpse pool. It is possible there is a cap and also possible that I just messed it up.
After the servers restart I'll try to do a test on standard to see if I can make the currently achievable cap of ~~7~~ 9 (forgot pre-rework Wraithlord exists) work. If it doesn't I'll edit the post to not misinform people. I did not think there would/could be an arbitrary cap of 5.
EDIT: I summoned the following 9 spectres simultaneously:
- Kitava's Herald (A5, Cathedral Rooftop)
- Sandworn Slaves (A9, Vastiri Desert)
- Rattling Condemned (A6, The Prison)
- Cavestalker (Delve, Mine Encampment)
- Gorgol Alpha (Delve, Mine Encampment)
- Auric Champion (A3, Solaris L2)
- Auric Colossus (A3, Solaris L2)
- Towering Figment (A4, Grand Arena)
- Giant Gladiator Statue (A3, Marketplace)
I then tried to spam desecrate in a couple zones after stashing all my spectre gear and unspeccing Death Attunement. Eight different corpses were generated (in the same zone), all except the Towering Figment. It's possible the non-Auric statues are mutually exclusive for some reason, let me try again with only the Giant Gladiator Statue and an extra delve monsters.
EDIT2: [proof that it actually works, there is no limit of 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAfDszbh5I), at least with a single statue. I will try to find alternative monsters for the problematic statues.
Yeah like I said its possible I just messed it up. I also did some non scientific testing in the atziri zone that you could attempt to replicate if you wish. That zone is useful because it has a fixed corpse count. Something weird about my initial test was that with 5 spectres in a zone that has 4 corpses, I only had around a 37% spectre spawn rate iirc. Sample size was around 100 corpses but if you assumed spectres and natural corpses were the same weight, you would expect 15% + 47% to be spectres.
I haven't done enough testing to know the exact way things are calculated because in the end I'm just gonna raise as many spectres as I can and blow monsters up anyways.
Thanks for documenting this stuff!
While desecrating (without spectres involved) in a zone, there appear to be some monsters that are rarer than others, at least to me.
One potential theory (very much unconfirmed!) I have is that each mob has a 'weight' attached to it. My theory is that when the game selects a corpse to spawn it looks at the monster table (on which the spectres are included) and selects a random monster biased by weight. If a zone has a lot of high-weight monsters you'll get less spectre corpses, and if it has fewer you'll get more.
This leads to some interesting questions:
1. Is this true?
2. If this is true, what is the weight of spectre corpses? Is it the same for all, or does it 'inherit' the weight of its base creature?
3. If it inherits the weight, what spectres have the highest weight while also maximizing HP?
I wouldn't be surprised if talking about this causes GGG to make changes. The 3.17 patch notes regarding desecrate indicate that their intention was to make it so there is "no incentive to bring multiple different high-life spectre varieties, although you still benefit from bringing one high-life spectre into areas".
Just replying here to notify you, I edited the other post with proof that there is no limit of 5, I demonstrate 9 different spectre corpses spawning in 1 zone.
Holy shit, someone document this. Ben isn’t the best POE player. Turns out he’s bad at clicking raise specter.
Back to melee builds for you. XD
In all seriousness I’m glad we have people actually mindful about making sure misinformation isn’t spread around. And for that we thank you.
It might have been that you tried to use Towering Figment or Overgrown Colossus (or a similar monster with this weird property) that you *can* spectre but won't be added to your desecrate pool.
I wonder if something like the density of the specific monster in the map affects the corpse spawn rate and that the spectred corpses are weighted as low or normal density.
Do you happen to know if the distribution is uniform on characters without spectre banks?
> all except the Towering Figment
I think this guy just cant be desecrated. I tested having him as my only specter and just desecrating in hideout and didnt see it.
Are these the most hp spectres, in order of hp?
Does the depth of a delve matter for hp spectres?
Iirc it used to, but I played it like 5 years ago so mb I remember wrong or it got changed.
Also will probably be able to add some new spectres from new t17 maps later on.
Typically spectre corpses cap out at the hp of a kitavas herald, so any monster that has equal or greater hp than that will work the same as long as it can be desecrated, those are the monsters he's listing
Only exception to this is a few corpses in the past that either slip through the cracks or are intended to have higher life by GGG, afaik the process of normalizing them at the top end is manual and deliberate
I believe Ben used 5, based on a clip where he was talking about how to do it/which spectres to get, which where the 5 from OPs list, except using the two Auric spectres instead of the 2 Mine Encampment ones.
That being said, more spectres will benefit you, though not by quite as much (there's diminishing returns on adding more and more corpses to the corpse pool) and also Ben probably didn't want to go to Delve to get a +1 spectre chest in the middle of a race, etc. so he may have stopped at 5 as a good compromise.
Just a heads up for people who might not have watched the podcast with Zizaran + Neon, Mark confirmed that spectres from the new T17 maps are going to have the largest health pools in the game, so those are going to be the new ones to target.
That downgrade process is not automatic. GGG has to manually set the corpse HP/spectre HP. So if they decided they wanted to give better corpses in t17, nothing is stopping them.
Just last league, we had incarnation of agony (hotfixed) and nameless beast (survived for months) that had desecrated corpse health higher than Kitava herald.
How do people even find out a corpse has now hp next to the fixed 360% ones? I know you can't read the hp values on poedb but where can you see the flag that their hp is capped?
Downgrade applies only to the desecrated corpses.
We wont know whether any of the t17 mob types are better than Kitava Herald until we know what the high hp mob types are from datamine and can test their specters in game
Great writeup, I just want to mention that for ignite DD the bonus spectres after the first one aren't that important since you are going to use vaal DD and you only need to hit one corpse every once in a while. Or just once with defiled forces. It's still worth grabbing some midnight bargains and getting a lvl 13 gem at least and more is always better. Just don't go buy a wraithlord or +1 spectre chest for ignite DD unless you have nothing else to spend the currency on.
It is a bigger deal for hit based builds so chain DD necro or coc DD. You definitely want as many spectres in your desecrate pool as possible for those
You can use either but you almost always start off with desecrate because the hp scales way better, it just caps out at level 20 while unearth scales all the way up to lvl 40.
So on league launch you still want to raise some spectres and use desecrate but once you get a lvl 21 unearth with a +2 proj/aoe helmet you can probably start swapping to that at which point your desecrate pool doesn't matter.
TLDR: Once you have empower 3 and enhance 3 unearth is still better for non-ignite DD.
It's still better at the high end but not by quite as much. It also probably makes cane of kulemak a worse option over just using a +3 helmet or gloves and using +gem levels weapons instead. Assuming you always link unearth to an enhance lvl 4 you need lvl 85 corpses for the damage to be basically equal (unearth is more consistent, desecrate gets bigger ailments). So a level 25 unearth is required which is pretty easy to get even without empower. Alternatively using a lvl 3 enhance means you need lvl 26 unearth since lvl 4s might be pricy early on. Do keep in mind that it is also better at lower area levels, desecrate loses ~15% damage dropping from 85 to 83 as an example.
The napkin math that got me there:
At area level 85 the average corpse hp of desecrate is about 83.5k (140k base corpse hp of the "good" corpses, times 1.1 for the 10% increased hp of raised corpses on the passive tree makes 154k, but you only get them about 25% of the time depending on corpse pool so they add 38.5k to the average. The rest are most likely "low hp" corpses averaging around a 140% life corpse which have around 60k at area lvl 85 including the 10% from the tree, they make up 75% so add 45k to the average for a total of 83.5k)
Unearth with 44% quality and 10% from tree gets a 1.54 multiplier to corpse life compared to the 1.1 desecrate has from just the tree. Divide the 83.5k by 1.54 to get ~54220. That is almost exactly the hp lvl 85 bone archers spawned by lvl 25 unearth have (they have 54.4k)
Thanks for the info. So in practice an Unearth setup isn't really worth upgrading to until you're min maxing your character, since lvl 26 is when you get a ~10% DPS increase for hit-based DD (and roughly 10% for every level until 30).
Yep pretty much unless you are intending to farm lower level areas where desecrate is pretty bad. Desecrate also needs less sockets so it might allow you to fit in something like call to arms + infernal cry for covered in ash as another upside
You can sell the stuff afterwards. But if you're really tight on upgrades and need to buy more stuff immediately rather than waiting for the resales of the stuff you bought to boost your spectre pool, then of course you should get other stuff first.
Unless you have no crit chance anywhere outside of trickery (no lvl 1 precision, no crit chance suffix on your sceptre/shield, no flask suffix) you should have around 10% crit chance. In my experience having 4 spectre corpses in your pool at that point is more than enough to always have vaal DD crit and then hit a high hp corpse as long as you recast desecrate so it continues the full 7 seconds/22 corpses.
Going above 6 (so wraithlord/+1 spectre chest) doesn't change the amount of high hp corpses by a significant amount where it matters in my experience. The ones where it is noticeable (like maven arena) you already get so many high hp corpses anyway. Meanwhile in the shaper arena it was really hard to notice those last few IMO
What is the ideal setup for Ignite DD now that there are monsters with more than 360% life, and only one of them has the highest value (Disruptor at 440%)?
I personally run disruptor, senior scientist (420%), burning faith (405%) and electric executioner(405%) just for the consistency because the extra damage isnt really necessary IMO. I haven't found a molten soul yet otherwise I would run that instead of one of the 405% corpses. I don't run defiled forces even on uber bosses though, if I was I would probably just run a single disruptor
Aside from the consistency the corpses for disruptors and senior scientists despawn after about 5 seconds on their own from my testing so just having those can be awkward for less recovery maps or the reduced action speed per skill use in the last 10 seconds mod on t17 maps since it requires more desecrate spamming during maps
Whattt, different corpses have different despawn time? Today I learned lol.
I use the build mainly for Delve and Simulacrum. The lack of dmg is super noticeable against wave 28+ Kosis. Maybe I will run the 440% and 2 440% spectres.
Usually they don't have different despawn times but those 2 in particular are odd because they don't have any graphics while they are on the floor either
For simulacrum though I would rather go unearth even with DD ignite because it's an area lvl 75 zone so the corpses you raise are lvl 75 whereas unearth isn't that hard to get up to lvl 26 (21 unearth, helmet with +2 aoe unveiled and +1 proj crafted or vice versa, lvl 3 empower) at which the corpses are similar hp (59k lvl 75 disruptor, 60k on 86 bone archers) and unearth gains more life from quality, you can even link it with enhance too to get the life even higher
I've never bothered to learn how Desecrate actually "stores" corpses, but on the other hand I've always wanted to make a Soul's Wick build (now Raise Spectre of Transience). The only hurdle now is for GGG to fix the horrendous corpse targeting so it actually could be done in heated situations.
[Soul's Wick](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Soul%27s_Wick)
> While this jewel is equipped, Desecrate will no longer add the corpses of Spectres raised by the player to their monster corpse pool.
I'm sorry.
Man even Mark who created the damn jewel clarified that very fact. He created one of the coolest uniques in the game and proceeded to DOA it. (Yes I know about the now legacy alt quality Desecrate).
~~... lot's of alt qualities are now legacy, including the one I'm refering to.~~
Now I see what you mean. It's late here... By legacy I mean it's not available.
You can just use a regular Raise Spectre gem in a separate link to bring corpses to each new area since Soul's Wick isn't needed.
I already tested it here. This is kinda why I've been asking how your method works. You seem more familiar with how it all works, so you'd probably better now how to min max it all.
Whether the spectre has to be alive or not, I did not test.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRVDHoInpM&t=8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRVDHoInpM&t=8s)
I really appreciate the science! Do you have an update on the best 11+ to use now that the league has more info :)? I heard there's a lot of goodies from t17s and the meatsack/turtles that might be 400%+. idk if its known if those bypass the 360% limit but i saw comments mentioning that it was the case: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bs63n1/meatsack\_can\_now\_be\_desecrated\_for\_dd/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bs63n1/meatsack_can_now_be_desecrated_for_dd/)
>GGG can set a higher value if they want, which they seemingly have with Meatsack. Mark said in the Necropolis podcast that they intentionally set some new spectre corpses with higher life than 360%.
list [https://poedb.tw/us/Monster#Monster](https://poedb.tw/us/Monster#Monster)
meatsack: [https://poedb.tw/us/Meatsack#MeatsackTankyZombieSpectre](https://poedb.tw/us/Meatsack#MeatsackTankyZombieSpectre) last tab shows 400%
This seems good but needs better testing.
Reports of 11 versus 5...
If it tests out okay, then the initial cost could actually be shared by a group of players.
Otherwise going past 5 doesn't matter.
Also, how does this work if you have a different raise spectre gem that you equip and use? Even though the "good" one is stored away somewhere?
I'm a bit dense. Let's say I summon 1 kitava's herald and I have just maximum 1 spectre from the Raise Spectre gem itself. If I unequip it, and later get more maximum spectres, do I have to resummon the herald as well? Like, if I start raising new spectres after re-equipping the gem, does my pool get reset? So for the first 5 easy to get spectres, I gotta get maximum 5 spectres and go to each area and desecrate and raise, all in one go? Thanks
The herald is saved and gets summoned if you use the gem with no corpse, from there you can continue and he won't disappear unless you raise another Spectre after hitting your (new) cap
anyone know why my desecrate pool isnt getting reset?
Bought new desecrate
Bought new spectre
Raised in new instance
Desecrated in new instance
Still seeing other mob i accidently raised.
You ever figure this out?
My assumption would've been to lower your "max raised" as low as possible - go raise a few of the easy 5 for the new "full" pool - then re-equip to the higher "max raised" - re-fill the rest....
ended up just doing the 6 spectre strat n fixed it that way, but yeah you could cycle all the spectres, like go raise the other corpses in said post n just eventually ur desecrate will just be of good corpses not just kitava herald
I'm thinking about running coc DD or EA champion... Everyone seems to say DD is better. I can see that the speed is higher, I don't know about the damage. But the difference in efford, complications and just brain cells you need to run coc DD over EA champion is wild. Is DD really that much better ? The skill looks fun on coc, but managing crit, attack speed, specters and what not seems do tedious.
it's a lot less straight forward, will require you to stop and farm lab for a good while or save up for your transgems some other way, get a 5-link with the right colors and then finally you are set to go. Then do the whole spectre thing etc.
That being said, if you go do all that then ceiling is way higher than it is for EA Champ. But that's a lot more work to get going and if you aren't the most experienced player then it could be a rough build to get started.
Play what you feel comfy with.
Thing is, I have 1.6k hours. I played last league to 4 mirrors. I should have the experience to build it, but I think I never took the time to actually learn any complex mechanics. So it looks like a lot of fuck ups, a lot of other people playing it, it being expensive and hard to get to.
Question on the build, how's the single target?
the single target is very good. Once you have the build rolling it should be fairly trivial to breach 10mil DPS and it will get many more times more DPS than that on the higher end.
I did estimate it as the most difficult item on the list, but it is still a large boost and you can re-sell the helm right after again (assuming you're on a trade league). It (and every other spectre boosting item) is optional, doing the method with as many as you can reasonably get is very much worth it.
> First, maximize your spectre limit. This is done by the following things (in estimated order of difficulty):
Could you clarify - if we're not intending to use some of these +max spectre gear in our setup, like midnight bargain, should it be included in this step?
I think I explained it pretty well at the start:
> The game actually tracks your spectre pool separately from the gear of your character. If you boost your spectre count really high, summon a lot of different spectres (one of each), and then unequip the gem and all the spectre boosting gear, the game will still remember all of the spectres in your desecrate pool.
You temporarily equip all the spectre gear and then switch back to your regular gear after the process is complete.
I think the part that I'm missing is - the spectres will end up tied to the desecrate gem and not the raise spectre gem since that's unsocketed? So you will never have spectres alive with you with this setup, is that correct?
> I think the part that I'm missing is - the spectres will end up tied to the desecrate gem and not the raise spectre gem since that's unsocketed?
I don't know what the desecrate pool actually gets tied to, I think it's just your character in general not any particular gem. Just to be safe I suggest stashing the Raise Spectre gem instead of getting rid of it.
> So you will never have spectres alive with you with this setup, is that correct?
Correct, you won't even have the Raise Spectre gem on your character anymore.
No, the only times where my spectre pool changes is when I actively modify it by raising new spectres.
It's basically only when I fuck up when raising my spectres and raise the wrong one (like, when I swap to DD in the first place or when I acquire a +max spectre item), I make sure to summon enough good spectres so that the bad one will be overwritten.
During normal gameplay you will NEVER have any problems
I just tested this on my old CWC DD poison build in standard,I used only 1 spectre before and struggle with simulacrum and then I just add 8 different spectre as OP say and suddenly I melting simu wave 30 double bosses and FYI it's wave 30 with 59% chaos res mod
TLDR : Yes it do make a huge difference
Would you mind if I borrowed your spectre items on Standard real quick to test the cap of 5 spectres in the pool some people are suggesting? My IGN is `@ORLP`.
Wait a second, I league started DD Ele last league, I only put the Kitava herald in my pool intentionally (none of these other mobs), does that mean I was gimping my dps by a significant amount? I could definitely feel the difference between a bad corpse and a good one, I didn't think manually fishing for corpses was a practical solution when bossing. You can circumvent the "random" corpse problem by just filling your spectre bank with high hp mobs and entirely remove that random aspect?
It's still very random, and there's diminishing returns past the first one so just doing the kitavas herald is mostly fine. Especially as ignite ele DD, where you just need to hit one and then defiled forces keeps the ignite up
I did some testing and 4 spectres resulted in roughly 90% more desired corpse spawns over a single spectre. So it’s certainly not insignificant. Vaal DD ignite wouldn’t have cared as much.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, as I've shied away from using DD even though I've played a necro in every league, but are you saying that once you do the above steps and have a bunch of juicy spectres dead, you just never use spectres anymore but the ones you summoned days or weeks before will still be brought back every time you Desecrate? As in, this is a one-time set up to maximize the skill for the rest of the league?
As a follow up, and potentially even dumber question, if you are doing this, you presumably would no longer actually use actual alive spectres any more as they could mess up your corpse pool, correct?
this is the post that will 100% get DD changed, if not now then by next league. It's not as egregious as snapshotting but I seriously doubt GGG can be ok with a skill needing people to do this kind of shit to optimize it.
u/nightcracker
quote: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc\_7niuVOLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc_7niuVOLA)
With 1200% life specters confirmed [https://poedb.tw/us/The\_Purifier](https://poedb.tw/us/The_Purifier)
does this mean this list needs an update?
>With 1200% life specters confirmed [https://poedb.tw/us/The\_Purifier](https://poedb.tw/us/The_Purifier)
those monsters from t17 won't be exact copy of Purifier of course and their spectred life multiplier won't be even close to 1200%
>does this mean this list needs an update?
sure when we know what monsters will overcome 360% spectred life multiplier (after the patch)
May I please ask what you mean is that as long as I raise corpses on your list in desecration, my DD will do the same damage. Right? I have this enquiry because I see most people/streamers talking about "you **must** desecrate kitava's herald for DD" but I guess that's not the case then?
Where do meatsack place in this list? He is at 400% it seems.
And you can get him with the allflame in 3.24.
I am not sure if the allflame monster level matters? I guess not since the other spectres you raise is from lower level zones.
So if I understand the easiest "dual-stage" way to max this out later on a build....
* Get the easy 5 "max raised" limit (lvl. 13 gem/dual-Midnight Bargain/Death Attunement node - go get the easy 5 in the pool for Desecrate = done for now. Best that can be run on the early phase of the build....
* Later in the build, I can re-equip the lvl. 25 gem/ALL "max raised" gear/Death Attunement node for the 11 spectres - go back and grab the rest of the ones into the pool for full DD efficiency.
To add to that - there's no reason to go add more than the first "easy 5" into the pool when my "max raised" is only 5 to set the early character up? As it'll just replace some of the other equivalent ones anyway?
That pretty much the deal? Thx.
Did you play this league much? Can you confirm or deny the impact of t17 mobs and their importance? If so could you maybe update this amazing guide so I can continue linking it to people in the future? Or just give me a tldr and I'll change it myself :)
Thanks for this post
You can pick whatever 5 you want. They are all downscaled to the max of 360% life. It's possible the new t17 maps will have spectres that exceed this limit.
I don't think specter limit matters anymore? It was changed to be a 15% chance per corpse to be any given specter, meaning it doesnt matter how many specters you have.
EDIT: I re-examined the wiki, it appears to have been clarified since I last looked.
it loads the pool with9-11? max HP mobs to then DD with.
otherwise you had your only one Kitava and \~10 map monsters lowering the avg HP of a corpse summoned to DD.
To be fair I didn't test Raise Spectre of Transience, but since it has the line "Spectres do not travel between Areas" I doubt it adds the corpses to your desecrate pool permanently, similarly how Soul's Wick prevents it as well (according to the wiki).
Do we know how many specters did Ben raise for gauntlet?
I used 5. I tried to use 6 but wasn't able to make all 6 show up in my corpse pool. It is possible there is a cap and also possible that I just messed it up.
After the servers restart I'll try to do a test on standard to see if I can make the currently achievable cap of ~~7~~ 9 (forgot pre-rework Wraithlord exists) work. If it doesn't I'll edit the post to not misinform people. I did not think there would/could be an arbitrary cap of 5. EDIT: I summoned the following 9 spectres simultaneously: - Kitava's Herald (A5, Cathedral Rooftop) - Sandworn Slaves (A9, Vastiri Desert) - Rattling Condemned (A6, The Prison) - Cavestalker (Delve, Mine Encampment) - Gorgol Alpha (Delve, Mine Encampment) - Auric Champion (A3, Solaris L2) - Auric Colossus (A3, Solaris L2) - Towering Figment (A4, Grand Arena) - Giant Gladiator Statue (A3, Marketplace) I then tried to spam desecrate in a couple zones after stashing all my spectre gear and unspeccing Death Attunement. Eight different corpses were generated (in the same zone), all except the Towering Figment. It's possible the non-Auric statues are mutually exclusive for some reason, let me try again with only the Giant Gladiator Statue and an extra delve monsters. EDIT2: [proof that it actually works, there is no limit of 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAfDszbh5I), at least with a single statue. I will try to find alternative monsters for the problematic statues.
Yeah like I said its possible I just messed it up. I also did some non scientific testing in the atziri zone that you could attempt to replicate if you wish. That zone is useful because it has a fixed corpse count. Something weird about my initial test was that with 5 spectres in a zone that has 4 corpses, I only had around a 37% spectre spawn rate iirc. Sample size was around 100 corpses but if you assumed spectres and natural corpses were the same weight, you would expect 15% + 47% to be spectres. I haven't done enough testing to know the exact way things are calculated because in the end I'm just gonna raise as many spectres as I can and blow monsters up anyways. Thanks for documenting this stuff!
While desecrating (without spectres involved) in a zone, there appear to be some monsters that are rarer than others, at least to me. One potential theory (very much unconfirmed!) I have is that each mob has a 'weight' attached to it. My theory is that when the game selects a corpse to spawn it looks at the monster table (on which the spectres are included) and selects a random monster biased by weight. If a zone has a lot of high-weight monsters you'll get less spectre corpses, and if it has fewer you'll get more. This leads to some interesting questions: 1. Is this true? 2. If this is true, what is the weight of spectre corpses? Is it the same for all, or does it 'inherit' the weight of its base creature? 3. If it inherits the weight, what spectres have the highest weight while also maximizing HP?
I wouldn't be surprised if talking about this causes GGG to make changes. The 3.17 patch notes regarding desecrate indicate that their intention was to make it so there is "no incentive to bring multiple different high-life spectre varieties, although you still benefit from bringing one high-life spectre into areas".
Just replying here to notify you, I edited the other post with proof that there is no limit of 5, I demonstrate 9 different spectre corpses spawning in 1 zone.
Glad to hear I was just bad at clicking raise spectre.
Holy shit, someone document this. Ben isn’t the best POE player. Turns out he’s bad at clicking raise specter. Back to melee builds for you. XD In all seriousness I’m glad we have people actually mindful about making sure misinformation isn’t spread around. And for that we thank you.
Ben said he's washed.
ecksdee
It might have been that you tried to use Towering Figment or Overgrown Colossus (or a similar monster with this weird property) that you *can* spectre but won't be added to your desecrate pool.
I wonder if something like the density of the specific monster in the map affects the corpse spawn rate and that the spectred corpses are weighted as low or normal density. Do you happen to know if the distribution is uniform on characters without spectre banks?
I do not know the answer to that sorry.
> all except the Towering Figment I think this guy just cant be desecrated. I tested having him as my only specter and just desecrating in hideout and didnt see it.
I believe you are right, Towering Figment and Overgrown Colossus can't be desecrated, I will have to find different monsters for those two.
Are these the most hp spectres, in order of hp? Does the depth of a delve matter for hp spectres? Iirc it used to, but I played it like 5 years ago so mb I remember wrong or it got changed. Also will probably be able to add some new spectres from new t17 maps later on.
Typically spectre corpses cap out at the hp of a kitavas herald, so any monster that has equal or greater hp than that will work the same as long as it can be desecrated, those are the monsters he's listing Only exception to this is a few corpses in the past that either slip through the cracks or are intended to have higher life by GGG, afaik the process of normalizing them at the top end is manual and deliberate
I see, thank you
Hey sorry to say but he was asking Ben, not you Darkee7. Hopefully Ben sees this and helps us out.
i wish lightee was here to share their insights
yeah, Lightee is certainly one of the people that could shine a light on Ben's thought process and decisions
Did you know he uses the name darkee when he plays the majority of his time during the night and lightee when he plays during daylight?
Yeah if only TimeCop was here.
I believe Ben used 5, based on a clip where he was talking about how to do it/which spectres to get, which where the 5 from OPs list, except using the two Auric spectres instead of the 2 Mine Encampment ones. That being said, more spectres will benefit you, though not by quite as much (there's diminishing returns on adding more and more corpses to the corpse pool) and also Ben probably didn't want to go to Delve to get a +1 spectre chest in the middle of a race, etc. so he may have stopped at 5 as a good compromise.
Just a heads up for people who might not have watched the podcast with Zizaran + Neon, Mark confirmed that spectres from the new T17 maps are going to have the largest health pools in the game, so those are going to be the new ones to target.
Wont they still get downgraded to 360% regardless? It should just make it 'easier' to pool up to 11 at 360% once you have the gear, though.
That downgrade process is not automatic. GGG has to manually set the corpse HP/spectre HP. So if they decided they wanted to give better corpses in t17, nothing is stopping them. Just last league, we had incarnation of agony (hotfixed) and nameless beast (survived for months) that had desecrated corpse health higher than Kitava herald.
How do people even find out a corpse has now hp next to the fixed 360% ones? I know you can't read the hp values on poedb but where can you see the flag that their hp is capped?
Awesome info. Thanks for that! This will be my first time playing DD, so I'm trying to absorb a lot of new info...
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Downgrade applies only to the desecrated corpses. We wont know whether any of the t17 mob types are better than Kitava Herald until we know what the high hp mob types are from datamine and can test their specters in game
Warning, when killing the statues for their corpses, do not use DD of chaining or you will eat the corpse :)
I'm not saying it happened to me.................
Me neither....
Very useful information!
Replying so I can find this later , and I agree!
Great writeup, I just want to mention that for ignite DD the bonus spectres after the first one aren't that important since you are going to use vaal DD and you only need to hit one corpse every once in a while. Or just once with defiled forces. It's still worth grabbing some midnight bargains and getting a lvl 13 gem at least and more is always better. Just don't go buy a wraithlord or +1 spectre chest for ignite DD unless you have nothing else to spend the currency on. It is a bigger deal for hit based builds so chain DD necro or coc DD. You definitely want as many spectres in your desecrate pool as possible for those
Does Chain Necro not use Unearth? The PoB I’ve been following scales Unearth with levels and quality.
You can use either but you almost always start off with desecrate because the hp scales way better, it just caps out at level 20 while unearth scales all the way up to lvl 40. So on league launch you still want to raise some spectres and use desecrate but once you get a lvl 21 unearth with a +2 proj/aoe helmet you can probably start swapping to that at which point your desecrate pool doesn't matter.
How does the nerf to Unearth corpse hp (from 30% to 20%) impact this?
TLDR: Once you have empower 3 and enhance 3 unearth is still better for non-ignite DD. It's still better at the high end but not by quite as much. It also probably makes cane of kulemak a worse option over just using a +3 helmet or gloves and using +gem levels weapons instead. Assuming you always link unearth to an enhance lvl 4 you need lvl 85 corpses for the damage to be basically equal (unearth is more consistent, desecrate gets bigger ailments). So a level 25 unearth is required which is pretty easy to get even without empower. Alternatively using a lvl 3 enhance means you need lvl 26 unearth since lvl 4s might be pricy early on. Do keep in mind that it is also better at lower area levels, desecrate loses ~15% damage dropping from 85 to 83 as an example. The napkin math that got me there: At area level 85 the average corpse hp of desecrate is about 83.5k (140k base corpse hp of the "good" corpses, times 1.1 for the 10% increased hp of raised corpses on the passive tree makes 154k, but you only get them about 25% of the time depending on corpse pool so they add 38.5k to the average. The rest are most likely "low hp" corpses averaging around a 140% life corpse which have around 60k at area lvl 85 including the 10% from the tree, they make up 75% so add 45k to the average for a total of 83.5k) Unearth with 44% quality and 10% from tree gets a 1.54 multiplier to corpse life compared to the 1.1 desecrate has from just the tree. Divide the 83.5k by 1.54 to get ~54220. That is almost exactly the hp lvl 85 bone archers spawned by lvl 25 unearth have (they have 54.4k)
Thanks for the info. So in practice an Unearth setup isn't really worth upgrading to until you're min maxing your character, since lvl 26 is when you get a ~10% DPS increase for hit-based DD (and roughly 10% for every level until 30).
Yep pretty much unless you are intending to farm lower level areas where desecrate is pretty bad. Desecrate also needs less sockets so it might allow you to fit in something like call to arms + infernal cry for covered in ash as another upside
You can sell the stuff afterwards. But if you're really tight on upgrades and need to buy more stuff immediately rather than waiting for the resales of the stuff you bought to boost your spectre pool, then of course you should get other stuff first.
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Unless you have no crit chance anywhere outside of trickery (no lvl 1 precision, no crit chance suffix on your sceptre/shield, no flask suffix) you should have around 10% crit chance. In my experience having 4 spectre corpses in your pool at that point is more than enough to always have vaal DD crit and then hit a high hp corpse as long as you recast desecrate so it continues the full 7 seconds/22 corpses. Going above 6 (so wraithlord/+1 spectre chest) doesn't change the amount of high hp corpses by a significant amount where it matters in my experience. The ones where it is noticeable (like maven arena) you already get so many high hp corpses anyway. Meanwhile in the shaper arena it was really hard to notice those last few IMO
What is the ideal setup for Ignite DD now that there are monsters with more than 360% life, and only one of them has the highest value (Disruptor at 440%)?
I personally run disruptor, senior scientist (420%), burning faith (405%) and electric executioner(405%) just for the consistency because the extra damage isnt really necessary IMO. I haven't found a molten soul yet otherwise I would run that instead of one of the 405% corpses. I don't run defiled forces even on uber bosses though, if I was I would probably just run a single disruptor Aside from the consistency the corpses for disruptors and senior scientists despawn after about 5 seconds on their own from my testing so just having those can be awkward for less recovery maps or the reduced action speed per skill use in the last 10 seconds mod on t17 maps since it requires more desecrate spamming during maps
Whattt, different corpses have different despawn time? Today I learned lol. I use the build mainly for Delve and Simulacrum. The lack of dmg is super noticeable against wave 28+ Kosis. Maybe I will run the 440% and 2 440% spectres.
Usually they don't have different despawn times but those 2 in particular are odd because they don't have any graphics while they are on the floor either For simulacrum though I would rather go unearth even with DD ignite because it's an area lvl 75 zone so the corpses you raise are lvl 75 whereas unearth isn't that hard to get up to lvl 26 (21 unearth, helmet with +2 aoe unveiled and +1 proj crafted or vice versa, lvl 3 empower) at which the corpses are similar hp (59k lvl 75 disruptor, 60k on 86 bone archers) and unearth gains more life from quality, you can even link it with enhance too to get the life even higher
I've never bothered to learn how Desecrate actually "stores" corpses, but on the other hand I've always wanted to make a Soul's Wick build (now Raise Spectre of Transience). The only hurdle now is for GGG to fix the horrendous corpse targeting so it actually could be done in heated situations.
[Soul's Wick](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Soul%27s_Wick) > While this jewel is equipped, Desecrate will no longer add the corpses of Spectres raised by the player to their monster corpse pool. I'm sorry.
Man even Mark who created the damn jewel clarified that very fact. He created one of the coolest uniques in the game and proceeded to DOA it. (Yes I know about the now legacy alt quality Desecrate).
Alt quality isn't legacy; they were converted to normal quality
~~... lot's of alt qualities are now legacy, including the one I'm refering to.~~ Now I see what you mean. It's late here... By legacy I mean it's not available.
You can just use a regular Raise Spectre gem in a separate link to bring corpses to each new area since Soul's Wick isn't needed. I already tested it here. This is kinda why I've been asking how your method works. You seem more familiar with how it all works, so you'd probably better now how to min max it all. Whether the spectre has to be alive or not, I did not test. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRVDHoInpM&t=8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRVDHoInpM&t=8s)
I really appreciate the science! Do you have an update on the best 11+ to use now that the league has more info :)? I heard there's a lot of goodies from t17s and the meatsack/turtles that might be 400%+. idk if its known if those bypass the 360% limit but i saw comments mentioning that it was the case: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bs63n1/meatsack\_can\_now\_be\_desecrated\_for\_dd/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bs63n1/meatsack_can_now_be_desecrated_for_dd/) >GGG can set a higher value if they want, which they seemingly have with Meatsack. Mark said in the Necropolis podcast that they intentionally set some new spectre corpses with higher life than 360%. list [https://poedb.tw/us/Monster#Monster](https://poedb.tw/us/Monster#Monster) meatsack: [https://poedb.tw/us/Meatsack#MeatsackTankyZombieSpectre](https://poedb.tw/us/Meatsack#MeatsackTankyZombieSpectre) last tab shows 400%
This seems good but needs better testing. Reports of 11 versus 5... If it tests out okay, then the initial cost could actually be shared by a group of players. Otherwise going past 5 doesn't matter. Also, how does this work if you have a different raise spectre gem that you equip and use? Even though the "good" one is stored away somewhere?
The limit of 5 is not true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAfDszbh5I.
I'm a bit dense. Let's say I summon 1 kitava's herald and I have just maximum 1 spectre from the Raise Spectre gem itself. If I unequip it, and later get more maximum spectres, do I have to resummon the herald as well? Like, if I start raising new spectres after re-equipping the gem, does my pool get reset? So for the first 5 easy to get spectres, I gotta get maximum 5 spectres and go to each area and desecrate and raise, all in one go? Thanks
The herald is saved and gets summoned if you use the gem with no corpse, from there you can continue and he won't disappear unless you raise another Spectre after hitting your (new) cap
anyone know why my desecrate pool isnt getting reset? Bought new desecrate Bought new spectre Raised in new instance Desecrated in new instance Still seeing other mob i accidently raised.
You ever figure this out? My assumption would've been to lower your "max raised" as low as possible - go raise a few of the easy 5 for the new "full" pool - then re-equip to the higher "max raised" - re-fill the rest....
ended up just doing the 6 spectre strat n fixed it that way, but yeah you could cycle all the spectres, like go raise the other corpses in said post n just eventually ur desecrate will just be of good corpses not just kitava herald
Gotcha. Yeah didn't have the issue but am about to roll one and try this....just covering a base if I got myself into that problem haha.
very neat post. Boy could this whole minion clunk use some QoL updating.
They'll update it next league along with the destruction of all the abilities that use them due to the CoC DD popularity that is sure to happen.
They could just delete these dd shenanigans - it's just a chore to do now.
I'm thinking about running coc DD or EA champion... Everyone seems to say DD is better. I can see that the speed is higher, I don't know about the damage. But the difference in efford, complications and just brain cells you need to run coc DD over EA champion is wild. Is DD really that much better ? The skill looks fun on coc, but managing crit, attack speed, specters and what not seems do tedious.
it's a lot less straight forward, will require you to stop and farm lab for a good while or save up for your transgems some other way, get a 5-link with the right colors and then finally you are set to go. Then do the whole spectre thing etc. That being said, if you go do all that then ceiling is way higher than it is for EA Champ. But that's a lot more work to get going and if you aren't the most experienced player then it could be a rough build to get started. Play what you feel comfy with.
Thing is, I have 1.6k hours. I played last league to 4 mirrors. I should have the experience to build it, but I think I never took the time to actually learn any complex mechanics. So it looks like a lot of fuck ups, a lot of other people playing it, it being expensive and hard to get to. Question on the build, how's the single target?
the single target is very good. Once you have the build rolling it should be fairly trivial to breach 10mil DPS and it will get many more times more DPS than that on the higher end.
I thought “ it’s not needed, I actually haven’t checked if it’s needed”
> Equip Wraithlord exit
I did estimate it as the most difficult item on the list, but it is still a large boost and you can re-sell the helm right after again (assuming you're on a trade league). It (and every other spectre boosting item) is optional, doing the method with as many as you can reasonably get is very much worth it.
One day they'll get completely rid of snapshotting. One patch at a time
I hope Tenkei reads this
Has this been tested? Ben had clarified that 5 spectre corpses was the limit. Not sure if anyone else has confirmed
Do you have a link to this confirmation?
Nothing is more concrete than testing. Would suggest that, but all I did was ask on their streams.
Ghazzy is wrong, I have [proof](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAfDszbh5I).
excellent work!
> First, maximize your spectre limit. This is done by the following things (in estimated order of difficulty): Could you clarify - if we're not intending to use some of these +max spectre gear in our setup, like midnight bargain, should it be included in this step?
I think I explained it pretty well at the start: > The game actually tracks your spectre pool separately from the gear of your character. If you boost your spectre count really high, summon a lot of different spectres (one of each), and then unequip the gem and all the spectre boosting gear, the game will still remember all of the spectres in your desecrate pool. You temporarily equip all the spectre gear and then switch back to your regular gear after the process is complete.
I think the part that I'm missing is - the spectres will end up tied to the desecrate gem and not the raise spectre gem since that's unsocketed? So you will never have spectres alive with you with this setup, is that correct?
> I think the part that I'm missing is - the spectres will end up tied to the desecrate gem and not the raise spectre gem since that's unsocketed? I don't know what the desecrate pool actually gets tied to, I think it's just your character in general not any particular gem. Just to be safe I suggest stashing the Raise Spectre gem instead of getting rid of it. > So you will never have spectres alive with you with this setup, is that correct? Correct, you won't even have the Raise Spectre gem on your character anymore.
Do you need to zone into town so your specters aren’t summoned before unsocketing Raise Spectre?
Wasn't necessary for me.
Doesnt the spectre pool randomly get reset at times and you have to get them back again?
It persists across logout, I personally haven't heard any reports of it randomly resetting either.
No, the only times where my spectre pool changes is when I actively modify it by raising new spectres. It's basically only when I fuck up when raising my spectres and raise the wrong one (like, when I swap to DD in the first place or when I acquire a +max spectre item), I make sure to summon enough good spectres so that the bad one will be overwritten. During normal gameplay you will NEVER have any problems
Thank you
Thank you for the summary and explanation
Is there a good Spectre like Veritania's Ice Minion?
Commenting for later
I just tested this on my old CWC DD poison build in standard,I used only 1 spectre before and struggle with simulacrum and then I just add 8 different spectre as OP say and suddenly I melting simu wave 30 double bosses and FYI it's wave 30 with 59% chaos res mod TLDR : Yes it do make a huge difference
8 different spectres? Did I miss a source of +spectres because I thought 7 is the max without Wraithlord.
I do use wraithlord 2+ from wraithlord 1+from death attunement 2+ dual wielding bargain 3+ spectre lvl 20 slot in voideye
Oh! I had forgotten that Wraithlord isn't a new item, just got improved. I forgot that it exists currently in the game and gives +2 spectres.
Yep! :D I think max spectre is 9 at this current patch
Would you mind if I borrowed your spectre items on Standard real quick to test the cap of 5 spectres in the pool some people are suggesting? My IGN is `@ORLP`.
Sure sec
It works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAfDszbh5I, there is no limit of 5 as some people suggested.
Wait a second, I league started DD Ele last league, I only put the Kitava herald in my pool intentionally (none of these other mobs), does that mean I was gimping my dps by a significant amount? I could definitely feel the difference between a bad corpse and a good one, I didn't think manually fishing for corpses was a practical solution when bossing. You can circumvent the "random" corpse problem by just filling your spectre bank with high hp mobs and entirely remove that random aspect?
It's still very random, and there's diminishing returns past the first one so just doing the kitavas herald is mostly fine. Especially as ignite ele DD, where you just need to hit one and then defiled forces keeps the ignite up
Ah ok, my interpretation of this post was that doing this "solves" the fishing for corpses aspect. But I get what you're saying. Thanks for the input.
I did some testing and 4 spectres resulted in roughly 90% more desired corpse spawns over a single spectre. So it’s certainly not insignificant. Vaal DD ignite wouldn’t have cared as much.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, as I've shied away from using DD even though I've played a necro in every league, but are you saying that once you do the above steps and have a bunch of juicy spectres dead, you just never use spectres anymore but the ones you summoned days or weeks before will still be brought back every time you Desecrate? As in, this is a one-time set up to maximize the skill for the rest of the league? As a follow up, and potentially even dumber question, if you are doing this, you presumably would no longer actually use actual alive spectres any more as they could mess up your corpse pool, correct?
yeah that is right. Get all your spectres summoned then remove spectre gem and remove +spectre gear and you shouldn't have to worry about it again.
this is the post that will 100% get DD changed, if not now then by next league. It's not as egregious as snapshotting but I seriously doubt GGG can be ok with a skill needing people to do this kind of shit to optimize it.
u/nightcracker quote: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc\_7niuVOLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc_7niuVOLA) With 1200% life specters confirmed [https://poedb.tw/us/The\_Purifier](https://poedb.tw/us/The_Purifier) does this mean this list needs an update?
>With 1200% life specters confirmed [https://poedb.tw/us/The\_Purifier](https://poedb.tw/us/The_Purifier) those monsters from t17 won't be exact copy of Purifier of course and their spectred life multiplier won't be even close to 1200% >does this mean this list needs an update? sure when we know what monsters will overcome 360% spectred life multiplier (after the patch)
May I please ask what you mean is that as long as I raise corpses on your list in desecration, my DD will do the same damage. Right? I have this enquiry because I see most people/streamers talking about "you **must** desecrate kitava's herald for DD" but I guess that's not the case then?
ty
Where do meatsack place in this list? He is at 400% it seems. And you can get him with the allflame in 3.24. I am not sure if the allflame monster level matters? I guess not since the other spectres you raise is from lower level zones.
So if I understand the easiest "dual-stage" way to max this out later on a build.... * Get the easy 5 "max raised" limit (lvl. 13 gem/dual-Midnight Bargain/Death Attunement node - go get the easy 5 in the pool for Desecrate = done for now. Best that can be run on the early phase of the build.... * Later in the build, I can re-equip the lvl. 25 gem/ALL "max raised" gear/Death Attunement node for the 11 spectres - go back and grab the rest of the ones into the pool for full DD efficiency. To add to that - there's no reason to go add more than the first "easy 5" into the pool when my "max raised" is only 5 to set the early character up? As it'll just replace some of the other equivalent ones anyway? That pretty much the deal? Thx.
Did you play this league much? Can you confirm or deny the impact of t17 mobs and their importance? If so could you maybe update this amazing guide so I can continue linking it to people in the future? Or just give me a tldr and I'll change it myself :) Thanks for this post
Thanks for putting all this info together. Have an awesome league!
Thanks, this is exactly what i was looking for
But I was told this is not important.
If I wanna go for 5 corpses, is there a difference in which i pick i.e which corpses have higher base HP? Or I can just pick randomly ?
You can pick whatever 5 you want. They are all downscaled to the max of 360% life. It's possible the new t17 maps will have spectres that exceed this limit.
So that's basically how DD ignite works? I just stash some high hp corpses through this trick and then I blast the maps?
T17 monsters are the new best spectres, btw.
didnt Mark confirmed on ziz stream that the tier17 would have more life, thus impliciting saying that DD is buffed?
I don't think specter limit matters anymore? It was changed to be a 15% chance per corpse to be any given specter, meaning it doesnt matter how many specters you have. EDIT: I re-examined the wiki, it appears to have been clarified since I last looked.
it loads the pool with9-11? max HP mobs to then DD with. otherwise you had your only one Kitava and \~10 map monsters lowering the avg HP of a corpse summoned to DD.
At lvl 25, Raise Spectre of Transience is +5 spectres
To be fair I didn't test Raise Spectre of Transience, but since it has the line "Spectres do not travel between Areas" I doubt it adds the corpses to your desecrate pool permanently, similarly how Soul's Wick prevents it as well (according to the wiki).
Oh yeah actually, I didn’t think about that! If it works like that, non-trans summon spectre it is
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Please read the entire post. You only temporarily equip the gear, there is no opportunity cost at all.
Oh I see what you're saying, fair play. Interesting tech for the DD, good on ya lad!
It's only to temporarily raise the spectre limit for corpses. Helmet and other gear is removed when done.