[Top 5] Path of Exile Best Summoner Builds (3.21)

Updated:

05 Aug 2023

5 – Crit Mage Skeletons Necromancer

A clear favorite of past leagues, this build continued its dominance over Necromancers due to its flexibility in gear, ease of playing, and straightforwardness. It’s not for those of faint computers, however, as your Skelies can and will demolish your frame rates, but it’s a well-rounded build capable of everything!

What the Crit Mage Skeletons Excels in:

Extremely Tanky with several layers of defense.
Can do all Content.
Can League Start and is HC viable.
Clears reasonably well.

Pick Crit Mage Skeletons If you Like:

Starting from scratch and becoming a god.
A build where each upgrade is meaningful and impactful.
Faceroll any content you throw yourself into it.

Crit Mage Skeletons full details:

Minions want as much Gem Level as possible since they scale mostly through base damage. So you’ll want a +2 Convoking Wand, a +1 Amulet(Ashes of the Stars is the best choice) with +1 Skeletons, and, if you can, Fleshcrafter, which is what makes our Skelies ignore the enemies’ Elemental Resistances.
Our defence comes from having a substantial life pool, a good amount of ES, and having full block due to Bone Offering and Aegis, as well as a ton of armour, to boost the ES recovery from Aegis.
We also have a cast supporting Spectres and Animate Guardian to protect us and buff our Skelies, giving them tons of damage and Charges.

Full build details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSMAyYI9hc

4 – Summon Reaper

While a very unconventional summoner, the Juggernaut is known for being a great carrier of solo Minion builds, like Herald of Agony/Purity, and it’s no surprise it can also do well with Reaper, the ‘waifu’ of Wraeclast.

What Summon Reaper Excels in:

Surprisingly quick Clearing with Asenath’s
Great single-target damage
Off-meta and thus cheaper than average.
Unique playstyle
Insanely Tanky

Pick Summon Reaper if you Like:

Having a buddy to clear your maps for you
Live out your ‘waifu’ fantasies
Command an army of one evil ‘mf-er’

Summon Reaper full details:

As with all minions, increasing the gem level is the best way to scale its damage. There are several ways of doing that, but one of the best, combined with the perks of a Replica Maloney’s Mechanism, is using a Synth Bow.
You can craft it relatively quickly. The hardest part is acquiring the base, as those can go over 20 divines easily. You then spam faceted fossils, until you hit +1 Strength or +1 Intelligence gems, with open prefixes. You do some mumbo jumbo, and you can reach a +6 Bow, which means, with an Empower 4 (5 if you’re rich), you can reach a level 31 Summon Reaper easily.
You’ll also need to ensure you cap your Minion’s bleeding chance, as that’s the source of your Reaper’s damage. And because we use a bow, we can abuse the borderline broken mechanic that is Ensnaring Arrow to maximise our bleed dps.

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/cashback/GraveWrought?time-machine=week-3&i=3&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26class%3DJuggernaut%26skill%3DSummon-Reaper%26sort%3Ddps

3 – Forged Frostbearers Spectres

Long ago, Spectres used to rule the Minion world and were one of the strongest builds in the game. After years of nerfs, it was brought down to mere memories of its prime. However, with the introduction of new mobs, in each league, there’s always the potential for the return of the king. And its deliverance has come!

What Forged Frostbearers Spectres Excels in:

Fantastic Clearing for minions
Automated gameplay (can AFK Simulacrums)
Insanely Tanky
High single-target DPS due to shotgunning

Pick Forged Frostbearers Spectres if you like:

One-click builds that play by themselves
Min-maxing builds to perfection
Minions firing so many grenades, your screen will be white.

Forged Frostbearers Spectres full details:

The Forged Frostbearers are new monsters introduced in Crucible league with a mortar and a ‘grenade’ spell. This grenade spell is an area-targeted spell, and because of how it targets, you can overlap its explosion when using Greater (or regular) Volley Support, as it lines up the projectiles side by side. And with lots of AoE investment, the area of each explosion will overlap, increasing the damage manifold.
Spectres take a lot of investment to work, and one of most crucial aspects is getting a high enough Gem Level to increase the amount of spectres you can summon, as that’s a direct multiplier of your damage. More spectres, more projectiles, more Clearing, more damage. You get 2 baseline, +1 from body Armor Delve Mod, +1 from Gem Levels, and +1 from Passive Tree.
And they work particularly well in this league because with Crucible Weapon passive Trees, you can get +2 levels of Socketed Minions, Socketed Gems are Supported by Volley support, Socketed Gems are supported by Elemental Army, which boosts damage, spectre life, and their survivability, by giving them resistances and increasing their elemental damage. That, combined with Shaper and Elder Wand Mods, and a Squire, means you’re effectively using a 10-Link Spectre!

For more information, check here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeKSpII9Bhw

2 – Absolution

Despite all the nerfs and changes to minions, Absolution is still king in single target and for levelling. While it suffers in clearing speed compared to other Minion builds, it more than makes it up with bossing and sheer damage potential.

What Absolution Excels in:

Can get extremely tanky
Active gameplay, despite being a minion build
Reach hundreds of millions of damage

Pick Absolution if you Like:

Leveling with your endgame skill
Controlling Innocence! (Vaal Absolution)
Strong and unique minion playstyle.

Absolution full details:

Absolution is unique because how you can scale its damage makes you tankier as you do it. It also requires active gameplay to summon your Sentinels, as you need to kill enemies to proc a summoning.
A lot of our damage comes from using Doryani’s Prototype, which creates an aura around us that equals our enemies’ lightning resistance (and we deal 100% Lightning damage with Phys to Lightning Support) to ours. As such, you want to have a little Lightning Res as possible, trying to reach negative 200%, as this will multiply the damage we do. The caveat here is that you’ll need a lot of armour to overcome the lack of lightning resistance and other blanket mitigation and avoidance forms, like Block, Spell Block, Divine Flesh, etc.
We can reduce our resistances through Melding of the Flesh, Ventor’s Gamble Rings, Threads of Hope, and we can also become a lot tankier; on top of all that, by using Divine Flesh, which makes 50% of elemental damage, we would take be considered Chaos. This is particularly strong against elemental Penetration and larger hits, as it halves the amount of damage we take that is directly reduced by Armor (for the Lightning portion only.)

For more details, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/Magoraz/FebC?time-machine=week-5&i=0&search=time-machine%3Dweek-5%26skill%3DVaal-Absolution%26sort%3Ddps

1 – Poison SRS/Spiders Necromancer

While not necessarily a new build, it became popular thanks to Balormage. As such, people took the build and threw their own spin to things. And thus was born Poison Spiders/SRS.

It requires a few unique items to work, and though this one has a Mageblood, you can do without it. Just gonna be a lot harder to cap resistances while also getting fully spell suppressed.

What Poison SRS/Spiders Excel in:

Insane single-target damage
Extremely Tanky
Fantastic clear
One of the best Sanctum clearers in the game
Doesn’t need much to start but excels with investment.

Pick Poison SRS/Spiders if you Like:

Tiny little minions that demolish brutes with thousand little bites.
Reach Dot Cap on a minion build with nearly no investment
A one-button build

Poison SRS/Spiders full details:

While Spiders have inherent chaos damage, Summon Raging Spirit does not. It also has 50% of its Physical damage converted to Fire, which is a wasted stat for us, since Poison only scales off of Physical and Chaos. So the way to get around that is by stacking as much Flat Added Chaos damage as possible. And the strongest poison Body armour in the game does exactly that. With the Covenant, you get a whopping Level 29 Added Chaos gem. That’s basically 3x an Awakened Chaos damage gems as a free 7th link!
Most builds use United in Dream, which gives your minions a 60% chance to poison, so you’d only need 40% left to make it work. But since we’re doing Spiders and using Arakaali’s Fang, we have no poison chance from our sword anymore. You must get 100% through Ghastly Jewels and utilise the Chance to Poison gem. It does come with some extra added chaos, but not much, which means you’re losing one of your strong supports.
And your spiders, curiously enough, get summoned while mapping because the Poison kill counts as yours, just like with the traps, and so you don’t need to keep casting while mapping to clear insanely quickly since the spiders are much faster than SRS!

For more information, check here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nboum3lDaVs