GhazzyTV's Golem Guardian Gear Progression (PoE Affliction)

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 prioritize what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritize 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 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 is all you need to worry about at this stage. Do keep in mind that resistances are not very important in the first couple of acts but becomes extremely crucial for your survival around Act 5 and forward and reaching the cap (75%) is preferable for all 3 elements at this point. If you’re struggling with gear to reach this you can always replace any of your offensive aura(s) for a Purity of Elements to help solve this potential problem.

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. Any attributes you might need to keep leveling your gems and/or equip gear will also need to be sorted either via gear or by deviating slightly from the skill-tree by picking up any needed “+30 attribute” nodes on the tree. Gear wise, pieces such as a Heavy Belt and/or Jade Amulet are great pieces to solve attribute issues.

Early gear

The great pro of being a Guardian is that you literally just need to get yourself in to the first Lab to get the Sentinel of Radiance which single-handedly will carry your clearing all the way to maps by using your mobility skill and Convocation. So gearing during the campaign is all about Life, resistances and making sure you have enough attributes to cover your gear and gem levels. Due to this you are mainly looking to keep the defenses up with your gear and look for the end-game unique items when you’re able to afford or find them.

The first and most important piece of gear we want for this build, is a Clayshaper. This is borderline unbeatable for a Golem build, and it usually costs 1-5 chaos even on leaguestart!

Triad Grip is a massive damage output bonus for the build with proper colors, In this case that would be G-G-G-R.

Acquiring an early sixlink is the main priority after the Clayshaper. Wether this is a corrupted six-link or a Tabula is up to you. If the corrupted six-link is roughly the same price as the Tabula, it is much preferred and strongly recommended. This item should have an Armour/ES base, or a pure ES base if you have no other ES anywhere. This is to help pay for costs through the use of Eldritch Battery.

A helmet with +1 or 2 if the wallet can survive that investment level of all minion skill gems is preferable, don’t forget to make sure the helmet has a life modifier!

The Jinxed Juju is next on the agenda. This amulet provides you with a surprisingly efficient defensive layer, decent attributes and a good chunk of chaos resistance.

The next order of priority is acquiring a Darkness Enthroned and some appropriate jewels to socket in it. See the gear page for details on these jewels.

Then you fill in the order gear pieces with life/attributes/resistances as needed. Getting minion damage on shield, or even a +1 modifier on shield, is beneficial. It is, however, not required.

If you have not already, you now need to fix your flasks! Flasks are the number 1 underrated thing by newer players. Get them sorted, have a better experience.

This concludes low budget.

Medium Budget

A few things change in the medium budget, but for the most part it’s adding things onto what we already had.

An important early choice, which is dictated mostly by your currency situation and your familiarly with minion builds, will be wether you are going for a cluster setup or if you’re picking up Indomitable Army for the time being. Neither option is wrong. The cluster will provide damage, Indomitable Army makes the minions beefier. Personal preference which comes first.
Just remember to pick up Eldritch Battery to help sustain your mana costs, and that your gear has at least some energy shield to pay for costs.

After that choice has been made, you start purchasing Golem Jewels. What I mean by that is Primordial Eminence, Primordial Might and The Anima Stone.
These jewels will supercharge your Carrion Golems, make them more aggressive and give you an extra. All very good things to have.

As soon as you can afford it, you want to purchase a Replica Covenant chest. A 5 link replica Covenant is a straight upgrade over virtually any other chest, and should be prioritised highly. A six-link is obviously better, but you can and should get a 5-link as soon as possible.

Thread of Hope comes in to save us some points. Ideally we’d like a 10% resistance penalty thread, but these can prove to be expensive. Be willing to take a worse roll, if you can make up for the resistance penalty somewhere.

The small reservation jewel is relatively important, as we need it to be able to reserve everything we want to in the build. You are going to need this to be rolled to 35% increased effect, which I would recommend you do with harvest as that is cheaper than chaos spamming.
What exactly you get as the secondary stats on this is up to you, but there are a few that stand above the rest.

1. Maximum life
2. Elemental Resistances
3. All Elemental Resistances
4. Chaos Resistance
5. Attributes

Any of these are solid options to pair with your effect. Should you hit two of them and 35% effect, you have a very good jewel that will serve you well in most future builds.

If you did not do the cluster option earlier, it is now time to do so. Not only is the cluster itself going to come with notables that help us, minion damage travel nodes and whichever additional stats yours has, it also comes with extra jewel sockets. Golem builds love jewel sockets.

Once all of that is taken care of, you start upgrading your ghastly eye jewels and if you have not already, you 6-link your Replica Covenant.

That concludes Medium Budget progression and the current end-state of the build.
I hope you have lots of fun with the Golem Guardian and I wish you many Divines!