Oneshot Abomination Build Guide

• Incredibly high dps (against dummy 30 million dps is very reachable)
• Clear is surprisingly good with stomp which now has earthquake AoE
• Tanky (About as tanky as a necromancer can get, with basic gear t20 gear shown in planner we sit around 9k ehp vs oneshots. There are variants that can get well past 60k ehp though with high end gear)
• Good recovery relative to other summoner builds
• Power spike is very early in gear progression (before empowered monoliths)
• Immense synergy with certain support builds can enable 9 digit numbers against the dummy (see variants for more info)

• Minion AI (abomination has imo the worst minion ai in the entire game by far)
• Summoning can take upwards of 60 seconds
• Abomination is not a permanent minion (will last between 4 and 8 minutes depending on gear)
• You need to swap 2-3 skills on bar whenever you summon.

Summoning

1. Swap out skills on your bar. You should have volatile zombies, summon skeleton, bone golem, summon skeleton mage, and assemble abomination.
2. (optional) Equip your hollow fingers. If you have them, equip foot of the mountain as well.
3. Stand in a fairly open space. The center of echo of a world works perfect.
4. Cast summon bone golem.
5. Cast summon skeleton mage 3 times.
6. Use minion command key to move them all to one side of you together.
7. From this point on, do not move at all.
8. On the opposite side of you cast summon volatile zombie
9. Cast summon skeleton until you are at your maximum skeletons. Make sure to position them further away from you than the zombies are.
10. Wait for your mana to be at ~75%
11. Cast summon volatile zombie again in the direction of the first set of three.
12. Wait for full mana.
13. Cast summon volatile zombie one last time. This will kill the first 3 zombies and cause them to spawn corpse parasites and vanguards very close to you.
14. Immediately place your cursor in the middle of the parasites and begin casting assemble abomination.
15. While it is casting continue to hold the key down. You can do basic inventory management while waiting. I don't recommend alt tabbing but you can try it if you want, it sometimes works.
16. After between 40 and 80 seconds (if it's more, congrats you've summoned a big juicy one. Enjoy your big numbers) the abom will be summoned.
17. Switch your rings and boots back to normal gear.
18. Switch your skills to infernal shade, bone golem, transplant, assemble abomination, and dread shade.
19. If there are any leftover minions, switch in sacrifice and carefully delete them so they don't eat your dread shade casts. Don't sacrifice the abomination by accident or you will be sad.
20. Cast infernal shade on abomination. If you have the blaze shade nodes then keep casting it until you see the larger aoe from a blaze shade.
21. You're good to go for the next 4-8 minutes.

You can also do a lighter version of this process for a faster summon of a weaker abomination. This is good for clearing echoes. Generally I will run with 6 skeletons, 1 golem, and 3 zombies for this. That will get you around 45 minions (22 seconds to summon) and last 4 minutes.

General Gameplay

While actually running echoes the gameplay is fairly simple. You walk to the boss, abomination will follow you and occasionally wipe out whole packs with stomp when it's AI stops getting stuck. Once you get to the boss you place your mouse cursor on top of it and press the minion command key, then the boss no longer exists and you can move on to the next echo. If you are at high corruption with many dangerous modifiers you can instead follow your abomination. Use the minion command key to make it move ahead of you and only follow once everything is dead. This approach is much slower but extremely safe.

Offensive monolith modifiers:

• Never take "enemies focus on attacking players", it is the single most dangerous thing you can click on by a huge margin. You do have the defenses to survive enemies swarming you but you are not immortal. Taking this modifier without noticing is the easiest way to get yourself killed on this build.
• Apart from that, like any other build you should not be taking crit unless your crit avoid is 100% and you should be careful about stacking up too much %increased damage on enemies.

Defensive monolith modifiers:

• "enemies have a chance to dodge" this is just annoying. Big slow hitters with high aoe are punished far far more than other builds by this modifier. It isn't a dealbreaker, but avoid it if you can because it will slow you down a lot.
• "enemies have increased health" this modifier is actually a good thing. Abomination has 40% of damage from crits leeched as life, but enemies don't have much health and you can't leech overkill. Giving them more health means abom can leech more and it will survive longer.
• No other defensive modifiers are meaningful in any way.

Abomination Skills

The abomination has a fairly large number of skills it can use. in-game there are only a few that you can see. In this section I'm going to give precise values for all of them and links to the sometimes unlisted pages for them in the skills db.

Remember that:

• Abomination itself has an implicit 40% less Melee Attack Speed, 60% more Melee Damage, and 70% more Damage.
• Many of these skills are copy-pasted versions of player skills. Their descriptions don't always make sense.
• If a skill lists attribute scaling that does not work with your own attributes, or attributes on the minion.
• The cooldowns in the data are not always correct. I have timed many of these out myself but there may be some minor errors. If there is a ~ in front it means I've timed it myself. Otherwise the number is confirmed to be true either by devs or game data.

Melee Attack

This is the basic melee attack is enabled by default.

• No cooldown
• 1.1 per second (attack speed)
• 18 base physical
• 5% crit chance
• 200% crit multi
• 100% added damage
• Physical, Melee, Area

This attack is horrible and a major part of the AI issues with abomination. It has no aoe or range. If you see your abomination tripping over itself stuck in middle of a pack doing nothing, this is what it's trying to do. The range on this skill is so bad that sometimes enemies that it is getting pathing blocked on are still out of range of this ability.

Bone Nova

This skill is enabled by default and has a 15% chance to cast whenever the abomination is hit.

• No cooldown (not 100% certain on this, difficult to test)
• No cast animation
• 12 base physical
• 5% crit chance
• 200% crit multi
• 100% added damage
• Physical, Spell

Without this abomination would be many many times slower clearing monoliths. The range on this is quite big and it triggers very often.

Arrow Nova

This is enabled if you have Dead Eye 1/1 and consumed at least 1 skeleton archer to create the abomination.

• No cooldown (casts automatically every 4 seconds)
• No cast animation
• 9 base physical
• 5% crit chance
• 200% crit multi
• 100% added damage
• Physical, Spell
• 9 projectiles, homing
• Modified by Horrific Volley

This is nice if you can fit it in, especially on permanent abomination builds. Not having an animation means the abomination is basically running around with this on numlock and it helps clear a lot.

Devouring Souls

This is enabled if you have Corrupt Palate 1/1 and have consumed at least 1 skeleton mage (of any type including death knights) to create the abomination.

• ~6s cooldown
• 0.524 per second (cast speed)
• 6 base necrotic
• 5% crit chance
• 200% crit multi
• 100% added damage
• Necrotic, Spell
• 6 projectiles, homing
• Modified by Frightful Feast
• Despite the description this does not inflict possess and thus does not scale with damage over time.

The go-to clear skill for permanent abomination builds. It has good screen coverage and its damage can be scaled quite well with cooldown idols and sources of minion adaptive spell damage.

Double Strike

This is enabled if you have Spoils of War 1/1 and have consumed at least 1 skeleton warrior to create the abomination.

• 8s cooldown
• 1.897 per second (attack speed) (the skill is 2 attacks in sequence, so it takes twice as long to cast)
• 28 base physical (first attack) 18 base physical (second attack)
• 5% crit chance (both attacks)
• 200% crit multi (both attacks)
• 100% added damage (both attacks)
• 100% chance to bleed (first attack only)
• Physical, Melee

The animation for this skill is really fast. If you are playing permanent abomination then you should be taking this. Otherwise though, its long cooldown makes it inconsistent and there are better options.

Note that this skill does not have the area tag, meaning Unholy Reach will not modify the size.

Soul Reave

This is enabled if you have Reap The Damned 1/1 and have consumed at least 1 wraith of any type (including blood spectres from sacrifice for some reason) to create the abomination.

• Combo skill (like umbral blades), the sequence is Soul Reave -> Basic Melee -> Basic Melee -> repeat
• No cooldown
• 1 per second (attack speed)
• 40 base necrotic
• 5% base crit
• 200% crit multi
• 200% added damage
• Necrotic, Melee, Area

The area on soul reave is massive, the only issue is that the other two skills in the combo sequence are the basic melee and I wish you luck with that. More often than not what happens is the abomination uses this skill, then spins in circles doing nothing until the combo times out after a few seconds.

Stomp

This is enabled if you have Shattered Similacrum 1/1 and have consumed at least 1 golem of any type to create the abomination.

• ~0.5s cooldown (data says 3s, this is not the case in-game)
• 1.1 per second (attack speed)
• 30 base physical
• 5% base crit
• 200% crit multi
• 150% added damage
• Physical, Melee, Area
• 50% increased stun chance

Easily the most consistent option abomination has, you can scale the cooldown enough to make this completely replace the basic attack. It also has very good damage scaling and aoe, a quick animation, and it even stunlocks anything that survives the first hit.

Tail Slam

This is enabled if you have Bloated Corpse 1/1 and have consumed at least 1 volatile zombie to create the abomination.

• 6s cooldown
• 0.55 per second
• 20 base physical (first hit) 40 base fire (projectile)
• 5% crit chance (both parts)
• 200% crit multi (both parts)
• 100% added damage (first hit) 200% added damage (projectile)
• Physical, Melee, Area (first hit) Fire, Spell (projectile)
• 50% increased stun chance (first hit) 200% chance to ignite with 100% increased effect (projectile)

A very interesting option overall and for this build especially because we are using zombies anyway. The range on the projectiles is insane, easily more than the entire screen and it does a ton to help clear. Unfortunately the abomination doesn't use this at range, instead it treats it as a melee attack but the range is much better than the basic attack. 100% worth trying it out if you can spare some points.

Note that Unholy Reach only applies to the initial melee portion, not the spell portion.

Dragonflame Nova

Note: It is unclear if this skill is intended to be cast by the player or the minion and I have heard there are some issues but have not tested it myself yet.

This skill is not part of abomination, but it is a spell that you can cause your abomination to cast using Dragonflame Edict

• ~2s cooldown (not totally certain on this, also do not know if it scales with minion cooldown recovery)
• No cast animation
• 80 base fire
• 5% crit chance
• 200% crit multi
• 400% added damage
• Fire, Spell

The resummon loop

In order to make this build work we need a way to generate a lot of minions. In general there are a few approaches to this, we focus on the second.

1. Use uncapped decaying minions keep them alive somehow (In the past we used pre-rework wraiths for this and had infinite minions to work with. Good times)
2. Cause new minions to be summoned when old ones are consumed (usually involves zombies)
3. Just summon a ton of minions normally (A staple of these setups is bone prison on bone curse)

In order to do this we use:

• Dark Retribution 3/3
• Awakening Presence 3/3
• Shepherd of Thralls 1/1
• Vile Force 2/2
• Immortal 4/4
• Sinathia's Resurrection

This is by no means the only way to accomplish a resummon loop, but out of all the setups I have tried so far this one is the most consistent and least mana intensive for the number of minions generated.

Level 1-15

I generally use skeletons + wandering spirits here and then switch in bone golem for skeletons once I get it. You can do whatever you want for this section of the game though, most things work.

Level 16-50

Volatile zombies. Put your first 5 points into Forceful Commander 5/5 and the rest can go wherever. Zombies have more than enough base damage to get you through all the way to empowered monoliths if you want to.

Level 51+

Here you can spec into abomination. Initially I would suggest running a permanent abomination setup using Age of Undeath 1/1 because your abominations early on are going to decay extremely quickly. In my opinion the extra damage from a full resummoning setup is just not worth it until you can get the duration out long enough to last a whole echo (generally around 400% increased minion health). You can stick with the permanent abomination for as long as you like, but it isn't going to be oneshotting bosses in endgame like the resummoning setup is.

Is this build a meme?

You bet it is. But it's a meme with so much damage that it's actually effective. This build sits firmly in that weird overlapping area between meme builds and strong builds and things like that are the entire reason I play ARPGs in the first place.

How much health does my abomination have?

I have a spreadsheet for calculating abomination hp based on minions consumed here (just make a copy to do your own values), it also can calculate the raw damage of all the various skills abomination has.

How long will my abomination last?

The above spreadsheet uses an approximation that ignores regen and infernal/dread shade because in the majority of setups those only will change the results by a few seconds. I have a different spreadsheet here (just make a copy to do your own values) which does it as a simulation.

Why are you not investing into minion health regen?

The short answer is because health regen does nothing in the quantities we can get it.

The long answer is that yes, the duration of abomination is proportional to the cube root of it's total hp, but the square root of it's hp regen. Eventually hp regen would produce a longer lasting abomination, but even the maximum possible amount of minion health regen is nowhere close to enough to surpass even a small amount of stacking max hp. By comparison, leech is far more effective as recovery and we get that leech for free.

Why are you investing into increased minion critical strike chance when dread shade makes them always crit?

Because the node that provides always crit actually is just adding a flat +100% to base crit. There is another node on dread shade that blinds the minion, and blind is a 50% less to final critical strike chance. So, if we get 100% increased crit chance then that counteracts the effects of blind and lets us always crit again.

What about Lich's Scorn?

So on paper yes, lich's scorn is a massive damage boost, but it is also a lot of upkeep work for a build that focuses on a single minion and frankly, we just don't need the damage.

However, Lich's Scorn does have a place on a build designed to support the abomination. Check variants for more information.

Why no Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living?

Because I like having defense on my character. These items were quite powerful in previous versions of the game but that is simply not the case anymore. This isn't a personal preference, there is just no way to make those items worthwhile mathematically for this build (or for the vast majority of other builds) compared to the alternatives.

In order to get Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living to be even slightly competitive with the extremely cheap endurance setup you would need them to look like this: Exsanguinous Last Steps of the Living

In the time you spent farming out those legendaries you could have also been farming other big ticket defensive options like Bastion of Honour, Ravenous Void, Vessel of Strife, and Red Ring of Atlaria, any one of which will allow the endurance setup to completely outclass anything possible with the low life ward setup.

How dare you abuse snapshotting!

So first, this build does not abuse snapshotting (which is mostly fixed in 0.9 by the way due to minions getting resummoned on zone transition) in the traditional sense.

This build can leverage the extra max skeletons from Hollow Finger to have additional skeletons consumed by the abomination and Foot of the Mountain to make the summoning faster (less time waiting for mana regen). In the process of doing so yes, we do snapshot some of the stats from those items. Namely, the intelligence from the boots and the minion crit multiplier on the ring however the impact of those specific stats is extremely low compared to the average impact of the additional skeletons.

It's worth noting that the additional skeletons do not always produce a better abomination. There is a large amount of variance between each summon. If you were willing to keep retrying the summon for good rng then you could potentially get thousands of minions (with astronomically good luck) with or without the additional skeletons.