TbXie's Carrion Golems Elementalist Gear, Jewels and Flasks (PoE Affliction)
Summary – TL;DR
As per usual, nothing matters more than capping your Elemental Resistance before anything else. This means modifiers on gear are subordinate to Resistances as long as you’re not capped. Since you’ll be running a decent amount of Unique items, it’ll be important to look out for a lot of resistances on your Rare pieces!
We’re providing you with an extensive analysis further down the page, but chose to start off with an overview / recommendation.
Our recommendation:
| Item Slot | Item Name |
| Head | Rare Helmet Base with +2 to Level of All Minion Skills, Life & Resistances |
| Amulet |  Replica Dragonfang's Flight |
| Chest |  Skin of the Lords |
| Gloves | Rare Gloves with Minion Damage, Life, Resistances, Attribute |
| Boots | Rare Boots with Movement Speed, Life, Resistances |
| Belt |  Darkness Enthroned |
| Rings | 1x  Profane Proxy and 1  Bone Ring with Minion Resistances, LIfe, Resistances |
| Weapon | 2x  Clayshaper |
For crafting Rare items, you can check out all the affixes that can roll on an item base, depending on its level, influence, and many other factors, using our affix tool.
Armour Pieces
Helmet
A generic solid Armour or Armour / Evasion Base is your best in slot. You’re looking for a Helmet with +2 to All Minion Skill gems. This is a fairly rare mod to hit on items, so generally, you’ll be much better off buying a copy of a Helmet that has this modifier, with some crafted Life or Open Prefix to do so yourself, and some okay resistances. If you’re actually looking to optimize your outcome, you could fossilspam a Fractured Life Helmet and finish off suffixes with Eldritch Currencies, but this’ll quickly run you 10-ish 
Divine Orbs.
Desired Eldritch Implicits: Increased Vulnerability Curse Effect and 10% Increased Mana Reservation Efficiency of Skills. If you can’t get 10%, A lower level 
Precision should be ran.
- +# to Level of all Minion Skill Gems (2)
- + # to Maximum Life
- Resistances / Attributes as needed.
Body Armour
The Brass Dome is the BiS Body Armour when looking at survivability. The reasoning behind it is that Armour is surprisingly good at mitigating small Physical Damage hits. Where as it does almost nothing versus bigger hits, we don’t really mind that as you have an obscene amount of Physical Damage Reduction from our 
Summon Stone Golem. However, as you’re playing a minion build, you don’t really have a good way to mitigate and recover from these small hits. Hence, The Brass Dome is a very strong piece to help you neglect those small hits from having an impact and will make you out-regenerate all of these small hits.
However, if you’re wanting to go for a bit more damage, especially now that we can modify corrupted items, gemlevels on Golemgems are really strong. Therefore, a 
Skin of the Loyal that is corrupted with an extra +1 to socketed gems (for a total of +2) will be a really big DPS upgrade. Due to recent reworks, Skin of the Lords is generally not cheap
Gloves
Just a Rare pair of Gloves works here, as long as you find high Life and a lot of Resistances. I suggest you start of with a pair of Gloves that has Fractured Life. Then you can hit it with Minion Damage essences in order to very easily get a really solid pair of Gloves.
_Desired Eldritch Implicits: . Firstly, Minion Damage is pretty nice! The second implicit however is a bit lackluster. If you manage to pick up some Hybrid Armour/Evasion pieces, you could run the % increased Evasion from Helmet & Boots to get a little extra Evasion.
- +# to maximum Life (Locked, Fracture)
- +# to Minion Damage (Guaranteed, Essences)
- Any Resistances, Attributes as required.
Boots
As per usual, Boots definitely require you to find Movement Speed as no-one likes to be slow. Additionally, the usual suspects come into play, Life, Resistances & potentially attributes if necessary.
_Desired Eldritch Implicits: Brittle Ground while moving is a very solid Damage bump versus bosses. Just run circles around them so you apply it. The second implicit would be 10% Increased Life Regeneration to scale Stone Golem’s Regen
- #% Increased Movement Speed (25+ but ideally 30)
- +# to maximum life (at least 75)
- +# to Elemental Resistances (enough to cap)
Belt
A Darkness Enthroned is impossible to beat here if you can invest just a little bit into jewels. You can start of by buying a Mediocrely rolled one and upgrade to a better one eventually. Early on, jewels in a Darkness Enthroned provide really easy solutions to Resistances and Attributes. You could get up to 20% All Elemental Resistances on a jewel like this, for example.
Accessories
Amulet
Since Replica Dragonfang's Flight exists. I don’t think you look much further. +3 to the level of your Carrion Golems, alongside some other interesting stats, is just too sick to pass up on.
h4. Anoint
You should be anointing Charisma to maximize the level of Precision you can run.
Rings
Your first ring will be a Profane Proxy which you will be socketing 
Vulnerability in to apply a level 30+ Vulnerability to every enemy!
For your second ring, it will have to be a Bone Ring. This is in order to cap resistances on your support minions, to prevent them from dying. Ideally, you combine the Minion Resistance rolls with some Minion Damage, Life & Dexterity. If that is your goal, you’re probably best of spamming Bound Fossils on a Fractured Dexterity base.
Weapons
This is another Unique slot. The Clayshapers are just too good to pass up on. 82% more Damage from a Weapon is more than we can find on any type of rare so this item shouldn’t ever be replaced. Should they be expensive in a league, 
Cold Iron Point daggers can get you through red maps easily.
Flasks
I believe flasks are highly preference-based. One isn’t just outright better than another one for specific / certain builds. Obviously, sometimes, there’s a set in stone set of Flasks you should be using just because they synergize with your build so well. This build has a couple of those irreplaceable Flasks.
For starters, I recommend running a 
Basalt Flask, as it greatly multiplies our Physical Damage mitigation since we already get such a high amount of reduction from the 
Summon Chaos Golem.
From here on out a lot of it is preference. For your utility flasks, my recommended setup will have a Basalt Flask, a 
Granite Flask a 
Jade Flask and a 
Quicksilver Flask. Given the investment you make into armour, Granite & Basalt are just good. The Jade Supplements that mitigation nicely. Your last flask should most likely either be a 
Divine Life Flask as there’s not enough sustain to not run a Life Flask in this build.
Regardless of which utility Flasks you go for and whether you follow our recommendations or not, you’ll need to stick to the Suffixes we have picked for you (Warding, Adrenaline, Heat, Iron Skin & Staunching). The affixes on your non-unique Flasks can be changed around, but I recommend the following setup (based on the Flask duration, charges, and affix priorities):
Our recommendation:
| Slot | Flask |
| 1 | Chemist’s Basalt Flask of the Penguin |
| 2 | Bubbling Divine Life Flask of Assuaging |
| 3 | Chemist’s Granite Flask of the Cheetah |
| 4 | Chemist’s Jade Flask of the Owl |
| 5 | Chemist’s Quicksilver Flask of Armadillo |
Be sure to check out our Flask Crafting Guide to learn everything you need to know about how to set up your non-Unique flasks.
Jewels
Cluster Jewels
If you are looking for the most optimal way to acquire your Cluster Jewels, or have any other questions whatsoever about them, such as how to craft or price them, we refer you to our complete guide on Cluster Jewels.
As mentioned on the Main Page of the guide, these are incredibly important for the build but can be acquired extremely cheaply! You really don’t need anything besides a single Renewal notable on them for starters, and these can be found for almost nothing. You want to run 2x 
Large Cluster Jewel and 4x 
Medium Cluster Jewel which all have a single Renewal notable.
- 1 Added Passive Skill is Renewal
Later on, with currency, you can upgrade to the following Cluster Jewels to completely optimize them:
Primordial Jewels
Since you now have acquired additional sockets, you’re just going to stack as many Primordial Jewels as you can. You want to run a single 
The Anima Stone, a single 
Primordial Might, two 
Primordial Harmonys and as many 
Primordial Eminence jewels as you can fit. Stacking Eminences to scale up your Golem Effectiveness provides you with Damage, Life Regeneration and Physical Damage Reduction.
Disclaimer about Primordial Jewels
Primordials jewels are now Delve-only. They are therefore a bit rarer than they used to be.
Animate Guardian Gear
End-Game Gear
An Animate Guardian can wear a Helmet, a Weapon (Either a 2-Hander or a combination of two weapons or a shield), a pair of Gloves, a pair of Boots, and a Body Armour. If you want the most efficient setup, it’s going to cost you a decent chunk of change but it’ll be easily worth it. Make sure you invest into the correct gear everywhere if you don’t want it to die. It is important you get the correct Helmet & socket the Animate Guardian in there, preferably at level 21, and linked to the correct support gems.
The items you want to use to summon your Animate Guardian are the following:
Dying Breath to provide Curse Effect, increased Damage and Aura Effect.
Southbound to provide your Animate Guardian with extra Life and some Cold Resistance.
Leer Cast for a cheap way to scale damage.
Gruthkul's Pelt to keep our boy alive.- Rare
Fugitive Boots hit with a Chaos Resistance Essence until you hit Fire or Light Res & an open suffix. Then craft the Res you didn’t hit & chaos resistance.
Main Page / TL;DR