GhazzyTVs Absolution Gear Progression (PoE Settlers of Kalguur)

Introduction

While the PoB shows you what gear we believe belongs in which budget, it might still be a bit unclear in what order we think you should prioritise what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritise when, and why. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the gear progression.

Campaign

During the campaign with this build, you will for the most part pick up items that have the links and colours you desire and hit them with an Orb of Alchemy Orb of Alchemy or an Essence with an appropriate function to make them rare. You will be hoping for a resistance when doing this, and should you end up having an open suffix on the item the crafting bench will let you add on a second resistance roll or an attribute roll, depending on your current needs.
Keeping your resistances as high as possible, ensuring you have the attribute rolls and getting some life modifiers are all you need to worry about at this stage.

Low Budget

We are going to make the assumption that you have kept your resistances capped going into this budget, and will be working with that assumption. If you do not have capped resistances when hitting maps, you need to get that sorted as soon as possible.

Early gear

The first order of operations is going to be acquiring a Sixlink. The base item here actually matters somewhat, as you want an Armour/Energy shield base to help ensure your Energy shield pool remains high enough to comfortably cast Absolution. If such an option does not exist, Tabula Rasa works in a pinch.
With our six link sorted, we will pick up a minion wand, a shield, a Citrine Amulet, some two-stone rings for resistances and a pair of Algor Mortis.
Essentially at this stage, we put something in every slow and then start worrying about exactly what is there afterwards.

Recovery shield

As absolution has a quite incredible level of base damage, we’ll actively aim to sort our defences first and foremost once we start to invest a bit in our gear.
The most cost-efficient choice here is to get a “shaper recovery shield” into the build. These tend to be a bit expensive on league launch, but luckily they are very easy to self-craft. Basic Shield

Minion wand

A simple wand with a +1, maybe a minion damage roll and an open suffix for trigger is more than fine here. We don’t really want to invest a lot in this wand, as we will be replacing it later.

Darkness Enthroned and Ghastly Eye Jewels

We’re now looking to add some punch into the build as we’re starting to take jewel sockets, and this belt gives us two and increases their effect.
For the belt itself, we are looking for a decent roll, but not a super high one as they are expensive. 75% is a good point to aim for, as it strikes a good balance between cost and effect.

For the jewels themselves, we’re not looking for anything incredibly fancy early on.
“Minions deal #% increased damage if you have used a Minion Skill Recently” is the All-Star mod here. Trying for 20% rolls this early will more than likely break the bank, so 18% is more than fine.
“+# to maximum life” is the other mod we’ll be looking for here, as a healthy life total is important.
Should you get any other damage mods along with these two, that is excellent and will only be a benefit.
If you can get one with those two mods and “minions have #% chance to taunt” that is absolute bank, and you will be keeping that jewel for a long time.

Cluster jewel

Like all minion builds we are going to want a cluster jewel to help us along as we are lacking points on the passive skill tree. Any random base will work for this, 8-12 passives are all fine. You hit this with an alchemy and take what you get, it doesn’t have to do anything fancy.

Flasks

If you have not already, it is high time you sort out your flasks.
Refer to the guide section on flasks, or the PoB, for specifics.

This concludes the low-budget progression.

Medium Budget Soft-Swap

In medium budget Absolution, it is important to understand a few things. We are aiming to go Doryani, which means we are going to want to drop our lightning resistance as much as possible. This can get a little unpleasant, as such we split the PoB into two progression steps – Medium Soft-Swap and Medium.
We will be going through them in that order, as it will give you the most pleasant journey towards success.

Wand

One of the first, and most lasting, purchases we will be making over the course of our Absolution Journey is a +2 wand with trigger.
What this refers to is a wand with the following mods:
+1 to level of all Spell Skill Gems
+1 to level of all Minion Skill Gems
Trigger a socketed Spell when you use a Skill, with an 8 second Cooldown.

This will be good enough for all of Medium Progression, should you hit minion damage/minion crit or anything else useful that is good. But it is not really needed.

Amulet

To help ensure that we won’t run into too many, too big attribute problems we are going to be looking for a Citrine Amulet with high strength.
There are a number of affixes that are interesting here.
+# to strength of a high value is important. This is essentially the amulets #1 stat. You want this roll to be as high as possible.
+# to attributes can help with reaching a high strength amount on the amulet
+# Fire/Cold Resistance mods are nice here as well.

Honorary mention goes to +1 to all skills, but that mod is likely going to be too expensive combined with everything else above. Do NOT compromise on the strength in order to get this mod, but take it in addition if you can.

Helmet

We are going to want to move our Absolution into a helmet, as opposed to a six-linked body armour at this stage.
For this, you will need a helmet with a shaper base, and a helmet with an elder base and merge them to get an item with both influences.
There are a number of options on this helmet, you can go with a minion damage/hypo/conc helmet or a minion damage/hypo/+2 helmet. Of these two the latter is far more expensive to make, and they perform equally well.
It’s therefore our primary recommendation that you go for the former, minion damage/hypothermia/concentrated effect helmet. Should you have an open prefix here that is amazing, as you can craft +1 to aoe gems and get a really good helmet.

As this process is a bit daunting, I highly recommend you check out this video if what is written above is not entirely clear to you:

Crafting minion helmets

Malachais Artifice

We are going to want to acquire these two rings now, to set up for the Doryani transition.
It’s vitally important that one of your Malachais rings have a maxed-out fire roll, and the other a maxed-out cold roll. Do not worry about the colour of the socket matching the type, just reroll that with a chromatic until it matches.
These rings will be with us for a long time, so get them properly maxed out and get some resistance catalysts for them as well. Make sure you search for them on the trade site with the quality maximum set to zero, so you do not get baited by catalysts.
Don’t use them until after the next step is finished.

Doryanis Prototype

It is finally time to acquire the namesake item for this archetype of build, the Doryanis Prototype itself.
As we are not housing a six-link in this item, it does NOT need to be six-linked. This is huge and should not be underestimated.
Exactly what combination of links and what colours you are going to need, depends a bit on how you want to set this up. There’s a myriad of options here.
For the item’s stats itself, it is recommended that you try to get a Protype with high armour and high energy shield.
Once you have this item acquired and rolled to have the sockets you need, you put it on along with the rings we purchased in the previous step.

A big thing to mention when gearing for the Doryani is the Reflecting Mist mechanic allowing us to flip modifiers on items where we can generate jewelry with insane amounts of negative lightning resistance whilst still having other resistances and defensive modifiers like life or energy shield.

Large Cluster

With our chest fixed up, we move on to the first Large Cluster.
What we really want here is a minion cluster with 35% increased effect, and Minions have 3% increased attack and cast speed. As a 12-point passive cluster with item level 84 is likely too expensive on Leaguestart, we recommend you go with an 11-point jewel.
The cheapest way to land 35-3 is to stick the jewel in the horticrafting bench, grab a few exalted orbs and start rolling it with either “reforge caster mod more likely” or “reforge speed more likely”. Caster is likely going to be cheaper, but both work.
Whenever you hit 35%, but not 3% and 2 other good stats, you exalt. If it fails, put it back in the bench and roll. The same goes for 3% with two good mods and no 35%. You can ofc skip the exalts altogether if you dislike doing them, but it speeds up the process. Up to you.

Small cluster.

Now that we have somewhere to socket it, we are going to be looking for a small jewel with 3 points, of the chance to block attack damage variety. We are going to want Second Skin on this jewel.
This jewel does not have to have anything other than its notable, but it can be a good place to get an additional roll such as life or energy shield, possibly chaos resistance. These are not mandatory, but they are helpful and usually not very expensive.

Second large cluster

Ideally, this cluster should be identical to the first cluster, in that we want 11 or 12 passives with 35 and 3, again.
Secondary stats here can be life or chaos resistance, both are useful really.
If a second cluster of this caliber is too expensive, just get an 11-pointer of again ilvl 84 and use it as it is. Roll it once you have more harvest juice.

Covenant jewels

Having acquired somewhere to slot them, the duo pair comes into relevance. Quickening Covenant should be rolled to maximum minion cast speed, and Fortress Covenant should be rolled to as high minion damage % as you can afford. If 43 is a LOT cheaper than 45, get a 43 and min-maxx those 2% later.

Ghastly Eye Jewels

The jewels we acquired for low budget are fine, and will still serve you quite well.
However, at this point, it should be possible to snipe a few 17-20% recently jewels with life and flat physical damage that are miss-priced. I strongly suggest you start actively looking for them every now and then, or better yet set up a live search with the parameters that matter to you and have it running while playing.

Flasks

This is a great time to go over your flasks and make bloody sure they are all up to date. If they are not, it is crucially important that you make sure they are now.

AG

If you have not set up your AG, it is also high time you do so.

Finally, we acquire a Melding of the Flesh and replace one Ghastly Eye Jewel with it. This will tank our elemental resistances, but you should be overlapped as it is and it should be fine.

This concludes the Medium Progression for Absolution.

High budget

High-budget Absolution is a Chaos Innoculation build.
If you’re new, that probably does not mean anything to you and that is fine. It means we take a specific keystone that puts our maximum life to 1 and makes us entirely immune to chaos damage.
This comes with some pretty massive upside, chief of which being that we do not need any chaos resistance on our gear.
The downside being that we are going to need to hit at the very least 4500 energy shield in order for the build to be playable. Ideally, we want 5500, but that comes later.
How do I do this, you might ask? Sadly, we are going to need to swap out most of our rare gear at this stage. It will take some crafting, and it will cost us.
Save up the pieces and swap fully later, do NOT try to swap into this budget too early as you will quite simply die.
With that out of the way, allow me to guide you through the steps here.

As everything else in this budget needs to be acquired and held onto until you can swap over, we are going to start off with the two most important damage items as they are usable while you collect the rest. If they are too expensive for you at the time, feel free to skip over them and come back to them later. They do NOT have to be done before the other stuff is done.

Helmet

We are going to want a new helmet. It will have many of the previous modifiers we were looking for, namely:
Socketed gems are supported by level # Concentrated Effect
Socketed gems are supported by level # Minion Damage
Socketed gems are supported by level # Hypothermia

The difference now, is we are going to roll for these 3 modifiers using an Essence of Insanity. We are using this Essence for its modifier, “Socketed gems gain 50% of Physical damage as extra Lightning Damage”. This mod is nuts.
Same procedure as before, we want the 3 mods, along with the Essence mod (which Essence guarantees) and either a +1 all minions, +2 all minions (if we are VERY lucky) or an open prefix for for the +1 level of socketed AoE gem craft like before.
This helmet is a massive bump over the previous helmet and is IMO the single biggest item upgrade in the whole budget, it’s +27.5% total DPS.

Wand

We are going to want to upgrade our +2 wand.
We now want the +2 wand to have:
Minion Damage – preferably 65-70% or higher.
Minion Attack/Cast Speed – preferably 20% or higher
Minions have increased critical strike chance – ideally 100% or higher.
If you get close to the values for relatively cheap, you should consider it and then as always upgrade and min-maxx later.

ES boosting clusters

One of the biggest enabling steps in High Budget are the two jewels with 35% increased effect, minions have 3% increased attack and cast speed and 10-12 Energy shield. Ideally, 12, but the price difference here is usually huge and they can always be swapped later.
Until you have these two expensive bad boys, there’s really not much hope.
The best notable DPS-wise here is Vicious Bite, but it is insanely expensive combined with the rest of this. If you can get at least one of these two with a strength roll instead, that would make your suffix pressure a lot easier to handle and I strongly recommend doing this.

Aegis Aurora

AA is an amazing shield for CI as it recovers an absolutely idiotic amount of energy shield for us and allows us to be extremely safe while mapping. It, unfortunately, has a 10% all resistance roll, but we just have to live with that minor drawback as the shield is entirely irreplaceable.

Gloves

We are going to want to make ourselves some minion gloves with high Energy shield. This means the base should ideally be Sorceror Gloves.
Get a pair with fractured Dexterity of 55 or higher. Roll them with Deafening Essence of Fear.
Roll them until you have good stats. They should have 200 Energy shield or more when you’re done. The more you can get, the better.

I will link a crafting guide video for those who prefer visual and audio at the same time.

Minion Gloves

Boots

Same story as before, we want super high Energy shield if we can get it. Boots can go really high, as high as 260 actually. That is probably higher than you are going to be able to go, but try to get as much as you possibly can here.
Stats like Movement Speed and Brittle Implicit help a lot as well but get sky-high Energy Shield here.

Amulet

We are going to want yet another Citrine Amulet.
We want this to have a dex roll, how high will depend on the roll on your gloves.
We also want the two modifiers #% increased maximum Energy Shield and +# to energy shield.
Finally, we want an open prefix (or a crafted prefix, same difference to us) in order to craft Non-Channeling Skills have -7 to mana cost.
This is the single cheapest item in the entire High Budget, but can sometimes be a bit tricky to find on the market. Live search this.

Ghastly Eye Jewels

We are going to want to replace all of our Ghastly Eye Jewels. We should have 4 of them left at this point.
We want high Energy shield, 30-35
we want damage if Minion recently mod, preferably 20%.
And finally, we want flat cold of as high tier as possible.
Play around with the numbers here a bit, see what is available. Just don’t ever go blow 30 ES.

Thread of Hope

We want a thread of Hope of the large ring variant. We WANT a -20 as it helps tank our lightning resistance. We use this access Glancing Blows, Divine Shield, a few armour/es nodes and Righteous Army for fewer points.

Flasks

The last and final thing we do before we are done with High budget, is to fix our flasks.
The perhaps single most important flask here is the enduring mana flask to help sustain our mana expenditure. We take a few nodes and use an amulet craft that helps mitigate the casting cost problems, but we are going to need this mana flask or we are quite frankly screwed.

This concludes the journey throughout High Budget Absolution.
Now that you have read it all, you need to understand that you can PoB your progress with your items and see if you are getting close to a threshold where you can swap or not.
If you plot your items in and get to 4500+, you can try. It’s a bit early, so it won’t really be comfortable, but you can try. Just remember to keep your old gear while you’re trying it, so you don’t brick yourself.

I hope you’ve had a blast with the guide and wish you many Divine Orbs.