Overview
This build turns the Natural Order ascendancy into a beast-taming engine. Natural Order allows unique beasts to be tamed, and the one that matters is the Act 3 monkey — a companion that keeps whatever rare modifiers it carried at the moment of capture. Tablets that add rare modifiers to unique bosses in maps therefore become a crafting system for your minion: a monkey tamed while carrying Increased Critical keeps that modifier permanently, pushing its base critical strike chance to 100% and freeing every passive point that would otherwise go into minion critical strike.
The compounding effect is what makes the build absurd. Tamed rare beasts also keep auras, so a well-rolled capture can arrive with Haste and a physical damage aura already attached. Layer that on top of Silvenn’s Effigy, which raises the companion cap so a properly reserved character can field around ten companions, and the result is a wall of minions that both deals the damage and absorbs it — the build redirects 100% of hits taken to companions, which the creator flags as certain to be patched at 1.0 launch in December.
The defensive consequence is difficult to overstate. On hardcore, the creator tanked a meteor from Urbar of Ash and survived because the minions ate the hit and died instead. Pinnacle bosses can be AFK’d standing still. The build is deliberately called out as broken, and the honest reason not to play it is that it makes other builds feel bad by comparison.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Effectively immune to most damage while companions are alive — hits are redirected to minions
- Extremely SSF-friendly: the bow, Forgotten Warden and Silvenn’s Effigy are all self-farmable via ritual and the Bodac encounter
- Boss damage is high enough to stand still through pinnacle fights
- No balance changes in 0.5.5 — the previous guide and max-roll planner remain fully current
- Trench Timber gives minions enough toughness to survive one-shot mechanics that would otherwise kill you
Cons
- Bad clear speed — a deliberately slow “dad build” pace, poor at trash clearing
- A perfect monkey cannot be traded for; it must be fished for personally, which takes real time
- Rare-modifier tablets get expensive quickly on trade league, especially Cruel Hegemony
- Forgotten Warden and Silvenn’s Effigy will likely spike in price early league given the build’s popularity
- Explicitly expected to be nerfed or reworked at 1.0
Key Skills
- Tame Beast — the ordinary gem; the ascendancy is what unlocks unique beast targets
- Companion command (monkey) — your primary damage, scaled through minion critical damage multiplier
- Lightning Arrow — fills the single-target gap the companions leave
- Marian Wolf (Silvenn’s Effigy) — a strong secondary companion granted by the unique
Gear & Anointments
Bow-based, with the Cathas Balance spear-type weapon used for raw damage and Trench Timber preferred instead when you want minion survivability. Two early uniques matter most: Forgotten Warden (strong armour, and a good-looking cosmetic) and Silvenn’s Effigy, which raises your companion count and is very farmable from Bodac. Spirit Vessel adds another companion. Idols should be spammed for reservation efficiency, since fitting ten companions is entirely a spirit problem.
The real crafting work is on tablets, not gear. Transmute and augment every tablet first rather than immediately alchemising it — if the rare-modifier mod hits, regal it; if it does not, alchemy it. Cruel Hegemony plus two rare-modifier tablets yields a three-mod monkey; a Brand Mirror can double that to six mods, which massively improves your odds of hitting Increased Critical among the four stats a capture retains.
Endgame Notes
Riverside and Rupture are the map bases that spawn the tamable monkey; there is no stat difference between a map monkey and the Act 3 one, but maps let you stack tablets. The Frost Monkey trades the Act 3 monkey’s 25% crit for cold conversion and is the weaker choice. Gorilla Commanders from the incursion/temple mechanic have slightly higher stats with the same base crit, making temple tablets with rare modifiers especially valuable. Rite of the Nameless can force four-mod monkeys inside a ritual by chaining a Rupture or Riverside into a four-tablet city biome, but the setup is fiddly and unnecessary.
On gem corruption, order matters: six-link and Vaal a level 14–17 gem to fish for +1 level, then raise it to level 20 afterwards. Sockets cannot be changed post-Vaal, and Vaaling a finished level 20 gem with your perfect monkey inside risks destroying weeks of work.
Credits & Source
Build credited to Zizaran. See the source video for the full build’s gameplay footage and voice commentary: Play This Build Before It Gets Nerfed — Spirit Walker Monkey.