The Downfall of Zombies and Spectres in late game

"

Anyway back to the point. I have gotten all summoners to around LVL 65 and yep the zombies and spectors die quickly. Even rolling a 6 socket with minion life and resistance and all passives. USELESS...

If you are level 65, you should be around Solaris - Sceptre of God or early maps. I don't see how your Zombies or Spectres are dying quickly during this time. You must not put any points into minion tree or do not use +1/+2 minion helmet.

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Ghostredneck wrote:

Since POE Beta I have created 25 Pure Summoners, using mainly Shadow and Templar.

I am a dude and refuse to play a chick...yea i know, but hey .... its how i play.


Anyway back to the point. I have gotten all summoners to around LVL 65 and yep the zombies and spectors die quickly. Even rolling a 6 socket with minion life and resistance and all passives. USELESS...

Even with VAAL Summon Skeletons which is Awsome till late 50's.


At this Current State of the game there is no viable way to roll end game maps with a pure summoner spec , without expensive Uniqes.



This is my Opinion Based on My Experiances..

Hopefully a patch will eventualy Make this Build Viable without gimmicks..JUST PURE SUMMONER...ZOMBIES AND SPECTERES!!.

good thing you added that last part, yes pure summoners are not very good. hence why i said the current issue with summons i that they rely too much on external factors and dont do enough on their own.

this issue was largely side stepped by the pre nerfed auras which enabled you to run 4 auras easily to compensate some of the inherent flaws of minions

(ie slow clear speed due to bad ai , which was compensated for by snapshotting damage unique)

and snap shotting
(bad minion survivability which was compensated for by running 70% buffed support auras that most other builds wont care about)

even if you did not use snapshotting , the nerfs to auras (which translates to losing 25% of your auras and 35% of their effectiveness

that nerf to auras was a massive blow.

now that all those things have been nerfed hard or removed what we have left are the minions flaws and all, and they have many flaws.

"

Starxsword wrote:

"

Anyway back to the point. I have gotten all summoners to around LVL 65 and yep the zombies and spectors die quickly. Even rolling a 6 socket with minion life and resistance and all passives. USELESS...

If you are level 65, you should be around Solaris - Sceptre of God or early maps. I don't see how your Zombies or Spectres are dying quickly during this time. You must not put any points into minion tree or do not use +1/+2 minion helmet.

because he said pure summoner, the least efficent summoner build in the game is the pure summoner , it is no shock at all that he is struggling.

half of the minion gems are garbage, (looking at you minion speed and minion resistances)
and minions builds tend to be over dependent on gem level and +1 or +2 items just so minions are competent.

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meroi wrote:

I see several of the concerns raised, and I am not looking forward to end-game on my summoner.
But, I like being able to see stats, and when it comes to that, being a summoner has been absolutely horrible. How much damage are my zombies or specters capable of? I can only say "a lot", "a ton", "some", "a little" because they are only in relation of an enemy healthbar.
Will switching a gem increase the damage? I don't know, because I can't check it. So, there are no numbers anywhere apart from their life. By switching melee physical on my zombies with faster attacks, does it increase or lower the damage? I can't tell.
I feel there are so many gems that are required that don't really (but would benefit from) support-gems, so in the end, you get filled up. At least I am. Sure, I can possibly spare room for 1 more gem, but having curse on arc is to convenient to give up - with increased effect even.

Its a bit dissapoiting that the game has no DPS tooltip being dynamically updated or visible at Zombies and Spectres in game.
There is a lot of fan-made DPS calculator for Zombies and SRS but all of them have no part of dedication of GGG such as Zombies DPS calculator. (Outdated due to the Aura Nerf)
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3snIcWyxTVdZ25RbExIWjJHaWs/edit


The only GGG documented Minions stats sheet is this Minion Values.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ahqk9lptRHcMdHdjM1hTNTV1NzhBeEtQYlVvM1NvSFE
and it has been outdated since 1.2 version patch.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

that nerf to auras was a massive blow.
now that all those things have been nerfed hard or removed what we have left are the minions flaws and all, and they have many flaws.

Just because they want to prevent builds to take multiple Auras as part of their build that often, GGG have subsequently nerfed Summoner build in the process even after the Snapshot is gone.
As its not clear enough that without snapshotting, Zombies and Spectres are so hard to handled their survival without GG gears. Its so hard for Summoner to do hard Map mods specifically in Map with huge elemental AOE damage such Crematarium and Palace. (Just a mention to the tip of the iceberg).

Spectres always failing in end game maps unless they are lucky enough to avoid the damage, for example when Evangelist is casting Proximity Shield when Magaera casting Firestorm and killed her before the bubble is down (lvl76 Crematarium).

bump

Sorry for not reading all the pages as of yet. But I'd hazard a guess that the real problem is that when it comes to spectres there's pretty much no way to resummon them quickly (the ones we want, not random trash in maps). The obvious solution immediately springs to mind: what if we could "lock"/"attune" our raise spectre gem to a certain monster type to be able to resummon it from any corpse? I'm sure it's been suggested and debated before. Are there any prominent rebuttals and arguments against this?

(...and damn this thread makes me sad as I'm only just about to enter 75+, otherwise ripping through content with 4/5 spectres in moderately cheap equipment (the usual set of Vis Mortis, Montregul's/Bargain (I found 4 fat zombies + 4 spectres to do really well at 70-74), Ullr, Prism Guardian). And now you're telling me the fun is over. :< )

well to be fair pretty much any conventional build is greatly inferior to

the casts on X /crit builds .

you will be having trouble with white mobs in full group 78 maps while those builds will be solo clearing like everything is a joke.