Zombies

My Best Minion Build Ever

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Good Morning Folks. We’ve gotten a timetable for the release of 3.28, which is going to drop on March 6th, with the big reveal stream taking place on the 26th of February. It is super fucking rare that I am still playing Path of Exile when the new expansion drops, but for better or worse, the Legacy of Phrecia event has held my attention. BelLovesArakaali might be my favorite minions character ever, and this is the first time I am playing with Spectres or Animate Guardian since they did some major quality of life improvements. What has surprised me about this character is just how much damage it deals… allowing me to focus on more survival. This might be the tankiest minions character I have ever played. Granted, I am still in the process of “breaking into” delve, but I am doing shockingly well down in the mines. It is not like resonators are really worth much of anything, but I still enjoy Delve even if it is not worth tons of currency.

Right now, I am mostly going horizontal at 100ish depth so that I can collect Azurite and start building out the rest of the trappings of Delve. I have reasonable resistance and light area for this level, and am slowly starting to increase the amount of sulphite that I can carry. Once I get a bit more unlocked, I will drop down to the 200ish depth so I can hopefully start getting Primordial Cities and maybe Aul fights. I really should be focusing on bossing with this character because that seems to be its true strength. When all of my minions are focused on the same target, it just sort of melts. I am curious how the Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch go when I unlock them, because the earlier fights aka Blackstar and Shrek, did not even get to a transition phase. I am going to do my best to get my four voidstones on my own, because I think Maven, Shaper, Elder, and Uber Elder are going to melt.

I really need 21/20 gems for Animate Guardian and Raise Spectre, but both are sitting at stupid prices right now. I am not making a ton of currency, so I can’t really afford either. Which means I probably need to pick up a good six socket staff and level up 3 guardians and 3 spectres at a time, and try to corrupt my own 21/20. I hate leveling gems, but if I start doing that… and also keep playing content, I will either get the divines needed to buy the gem outright or get gems to corrupt, either way. I am bad about not leveling gems in the weapon swap set, and I should really be better about that. While I play in a trade league, I greatly prefer being as self-sufficient as I can possibly be. One thing that I wish they would change in POE1 is make it so you only get 4 quality items to max out quality on a gem socket, or a flask. That honestly is the most painful thing about leveling gems: needing to get the gemcutters’ prisms.

Speaking of corruption projects, I picked up a second Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, and tried corrupting both my current copy and my new copy. One of them managed to hit 10% chance to Gain Onslaught for 4 Seconds on Kill, and this does, in fact, count minion kills. So this allowed me to drop my Onslaught flask and swap over to a Gold Flask for some additional rarity. Onslaught doesn’t really do much of anything for me except for the slight speed boost, but I am still happy to have it. I wish it applied to my minions. I wish there were something akin to Spiritual Aid that made buffs on me apply to the minions. That, however, would likely make everything highly broken, since you can target way more buffs at yourself than you can at your minions easily. I am really hoping that Foulborn Uniques stick around for standard, because they have added a lot of really cool interactions.

I am now trying to figure out where I want to go on the passive tree. I guess the next obvious choice would be to go after any jewel sockets I can make my way to easily enough. I need to redo my bandit choice since I have plenty of resistance, so that will give me one more skill point, and then I have seven left. However, I sincerely doubt I’ll level this character higher than level 95, just because of the sheer slog that it becomes then. Last night I picked up Fearsome Force when I dinged 93, which finishes out the minion crit wheel. I could always pick up various other nodes in the meantime and then respec to pick up jewel sockets as I get more points. In theory, I could spec into my minion damage cluster jewel that I have, but I don’t really have enough points left to do much of anything meaningful with it. Really, I am not sure how much it matters at this point because I feel powerful enough to do any content I would want to do.

I am continuing to slowly chip away at Atlas progression, and I think my goal for Phrecia will be to get 115/115 and 4 Voidstones. If I can get there before the launch of 3.28, I will consider myself really good. I do not really want to burn myself out ahead of the next league launch, but I am also mostly finding everything I am doing really chill. Once I hit maps, the Gauntlet style modifiers seemed to evaporate, and life was fine. Even the enrage mechanic doesn’t seem to come into play that often. I think I am doing t13s right now, but really, there is not a big jump between those and t16s, so I should be able to make it all the way up without much issue. I am still running a set of idols that is producing a ton of maps, so that I will have plenty to run as I slowly unlock my way to the top of the atlas. I have been so out of it lately that, honestly, I spend more time talking to “Erasure” or staring at the middle distance than actually playing POE.

The medical woes have been a real drain on my emotional and mental health. Hopefully, today when I get my MRI, I will start to get some answers. I think once I have a path set, whatever path that ends up being… I will be doing better. I hate the limbo of waiting around for something to happen, all the while it feels like I have a ticking time bomb in my body.

Temples of Bone

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Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have been trying to do this year is keep better track of the movies that I end up watching. I remember it was a bit of a challenge when I pulled together my 2025 in review post to figure out what exactly I had seen in a calendar year. Even then I realized that I missed a few phenomenal films like Sinners that I would have definitely talked about. My friend “The Librarian” reminded me that Letterboxd is a thing that exists, and also that I apparently have had an account for a very long time. This should not shock me because I tend to sign up for things as soon as they enter my consciousness, and then often times not use them for several years. See also that I signed up for SpaceHey three years before making a single post on it or even configuring my profile. Anyways part of this is that I am also trying to watch more movies overall and start chipping away at the massive backlog of things that I want to watch. Long gone are the weekends when I would rent 20 movies from Video Giant… but that does not mean that I lack the desire to do this thing.

Queens of the Dead – 2025 – 3 Stars

I think we are going to go with a lowest ranking to highest ranking scenario, and as a result we are beginning with Queens of the Dead which I gave 3 stars. I was honestly fairly disappointed with this… I love Zombies, and I love interesting takes on Zombies. Queens of the Dead gave me neither really… it is effectively a combination of Birdcage and The Return of the Living Dead. The film is way more of an “in joke” about drag culture than it is a cohesive zombie film, and the movie quality feels like this was a student project filmed on phones, and not even in a found footage way that would make it interesting. I specifically relate this to Return of the Living Dead instead of Night of the Living Dead, because this is a film that is way more interested in setting up the next punchline than doing anything interesting with the actual zombies. It could have been a much better film, and in theory it makes attempts at social commentary…. but does so in a hamfisted nature like a student play that has to tell you what its point was at the very end. There were some fun moments, and some humorous punchlines… but cohesively it was a bit of a mess.

The Running Man – 2025 – 3.5 Stars

One of the things that the 80s gave us, was a lot of dystopian action films… in truth a shocking number. The 1987 Movie featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and has gone on to influence so many things from the direct one to one copy via the Smash TV Arcade Cabinet, or more subtle influences like the existence of The Purge and Hunger Games. The remake takes things in a different direction, and instead of prisoners attempting to regain their freedom… we have a man who is just trying to get enough cash so that he can pay for medical treatment for his child. It is not a bad film, but it is not a great film either and I gave it 3.5 Stars. It was a fun dystopian romp, and I think it is probably way better than a lot of the negative buzz surrounding it. If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077… everything is very thematically on point, and given that we find ourselves in a deathmarch towards our own dystopia… there are moments that feel a bit too on the nose. It was worth a watch, but I can’t see returning to watch it a second time.

Predator: Badlands – 2025 – 4 Stars

Another film that I have seen a bunch of negative buzz around is Predator: Badlands. I love the Predator series, and was also a junkie for the various Dark Horse comics adaptations of this shared Aliens/Predator and potentially also Bladerunner universes. I think the big complaint that I have seen is the design of the Yautja from this film, but this seems fine to me especially given that Dek is speccifically described as a “malformed runt”. I am mostly on board with seeing more of this society fleshed out, and I really like the character of Thia. The thing that would have made this movie so much better for me personally is if they did the thing where they shifted from spoken Yautja with subtitles to both characters spending english, and there was a perfect moment to do this transition where Thia applies an “universal translator”. I don’t love spending an entire movie reading subtitles… and for this and this along I docked it a full star so only gave it 4 stars. I had a lot of fun with this movie and would absolutely watch another film with this grouping of characters.

Rental Family – 2025 – 5 Stars

Watch this film if you need a good cry. I am a sucker for Brendan Fraser in pretty much every role he has ever done, and I am so happy to see him back in the active rotation film wise. The premise of this film is so interesting to me, folks being rented to play a role in someone’s life… and the messy rammifications that come from that. Do you actually become that person for them? Does the role ever truly end? I feel for Fraser’s character when the lines start to blur significantly… in part because Fraser also needed people to play a role in his life. This hit me pretty hard because I am someone who has a pretty signficant adopted family, that augments my blood family… and all of them are so much more important to me than just digital folks I will never probably actually meet in the flesh. I have two people that I consider literal siblings… that I have never actually met. I think the whole blending of lines in this film probably hit me harder than it might a lot of people, and I cried… quite a bit at various points during the film. It was such a good cry however… and while I think this will be an emotional sucker punch to most people… I still think it is worth a watch.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – 2026 – 5 Stars

It is rare that you have a film that comes out and so completely gives the previous film a redemption arc. 28 Years Later was an incomplete film, and having watched The Bone Temple… I understand why. These are essentially two parts of the same film, given that Bone Temple takes place literally seconds after the conclusion of 28 Years Later. I would highly suggest watching them back to back and largely thinking of them as a single complete story. Bone Temple ties up the events of 28 Years Later neatly, but more important than that… ties up the loose bits of the entire series in a pretty little bow. There is a massive payoff at the end of this film for anyone who has been watching along as this series wound its way from days, to weeks, to years. I love zombies, but I have always found this particular rage zombies genre to be interesting… and this film does some deeply intersting things surrounding it. When taken collectively 28 Years Later with both parts is one of the better films I have seen in awhile.

So there you have the films that I watched since this weekend. Do you vehemently disagree with anything I said about these? Is there anything that I really have to watch? Drop me a line below.

Lightning Struck Friends

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably are expecting this post. I talked yesterday about wanting to try out Absolution… so last night I started a brand new Witch and got it through the start of Act 8. I decided to go with a Necromancer in spite of Guardian actually representing over 70% of the folks running Absolution or Vaal Absolution in this league. Guardian is really powerful as evidenced by how easy of a time I had with no real gear during the Toucan League. However, I opted to go back to the minion-loving roots of a Witch, largely because at this point I had already leveled 2 Guardians and an Inquisitor in this league and was a bit tired of the old man in a diaper that is the Templar. I can’t necessarily call mine a Necromancer because in spite of being over level 60… I’ve yet to take the time to do my first Labyrinth and actually ascend.

While technically this is a minion build… it feels absolutely nothing like MOST minion builds. Essentially you run around nuking things with a giant orbital strike of lightning damage and that then spawns up to three Sentinels of Absolution that also cast the same big lightning strike attack. More specifically I am using the Vaal version and thanks to Trade League I picked up a dirt cheap level 1 version with 20% quality on it so when finished I will have a 20/20 Vaal gem which is a bit of a challenge to actually get. Added to the mix are Spectres and Zombies with Feeding Frenzy support and Herald of Purity summoning up four Sentinels of Purity. Because everything seems to lag behind, I end up casting Convocation quite a bit to keep them grouped up on whatever target I want them to attack. The mix of me casting a giant nuke, and then having a swarm of minions… feels supremely odd and I am not entirely certain what I think about it yet.

I am following a guide, but at the moment it feels like my tree is spread out all over the freaking place. At some point, I am certain I will apply a measure of my own personal touch to this build, in order to make it a bit more tanky. This is going for Eldritch Battery, which means I am entirely losing my Energy Shield as a defensive layer. I should then in theory probably stack armor bases for various slots, but given that I mostly need blue sockets… that becomes its own nightmare to get colored correctly. What worries me at the moment is just how low my health currently is. Part of this is because I have been leveling with a 5-Link Thousand Ribbons and a handful of other uniques that made the early game a breeze… but have largely outlived their usefulness.

Almost 50% of players running Absolution are running a specific unique chest piece called Doryani’s Prototype, and I am really not sure if I want to go down that rabbit hole. Essentially the tech behind this body armor relies on you getting your Lightning Resistance as low as possible… for the best builds out there it can be as low as -200%. Then when you attack mobs they have the same lightning resistance as you do… allowing your lightning attacks to do outrageous damage against them. In order to keep from dying, you need to stack as much armor as humanly possible because the chest piece also allows you to soak lightning damage from hits as armor, but this makes you extremely vulnerable to any lightning damage over time attacks. I just do not feel like I want to play this game nonsense game of trying to juggle resistances and make sure one is bottomed out, while the others are high enough to matter.

At least for the time being… I am not going to do this nonsense. Instead, I am going to utilize the fact that we have a truly ridiculous number of six-links in the guild bank. I hand-picked a crusader chainmail that I was able to get 5 Blue/1 Red on pretty quickly through spamming chromatics. I am going to buck the popular advice and just build some measure of normal guild for the moment. I don’t really want to spend much currency on this build especially considering I am not even sure I am going to like how it feels. The only thing so far that I have bought is a Replica Dragonfang with Absolution on it which itself was less than 100 Chaos, so something I can make back rapidly just by selling off some delve stuff. Tonight I am certain that I will wrap up the campaign and start poking my head into early maps to see how this all feels.

I will probably try and knock out the first two Labyrinths over lunch so I can officially call myself a Necromancer. Probably the biggest expenditure I will have is buying a bunch of botched 20/20 corrupted gems in order to jump-start myself to a baseline of power rather than waiting to level them all.