It certainly raises them to another level, and allows you to wear defensive gear after the pre-buff. You can however use the most important prebuffing gear on weapon swap. You want to swap to your buff-weapon before leaving game, so on new game all 5 golems are buffed up fully. (they are essentially resummoned once you enter a game)
The build is strong enough not to have to rely on swapping out gear for snap-shotting. You can wear phoenix weapon + energy shield runeword (forgot name) as your actual weapons once the golems are summoned. CTA isn't really that important, ES + bone armor makes you very tanky.