A couple suggestions: Item UI quality of life, Animated Guardian improvement?

Suggestion 1

The Issue: When I start a new character, I see my inventory and I know that there are no items that I can use. As I level up, some items start to become blue to indicate usability, but there are plenty of items that I could use if I had, say, an extra 10 strength. And in order to see those items, I need to mouseover every item to determine which ones I'm a high enough level to use and are just missing stats, or which ones I need more levels for.

The Solution: Have a small UI indicator on an unusable item's portrait somewhere. Possibly a small color coded square in a corner, or multiple, to indicate what attribute or attributes your character is lacking to use an item, so you can tell what accessibility you have to your stash items at a glance.

Suggestion 2

The Issue: Animate Guardian is one of the coolest skills in the game. When you're playing a summoner in particular, he gets REALLY hard to kill, and holds a particular risk of losing gear if he ever dies. He's the only minion in the game that you can equip. You can give him your hand-me-down gear, even. You can do that without much worry because of the interesting weapon swap mechanic with him that you can make him vanish without death and resummon him (with full HP!) as necessary. Part of the issue is that amongst all this, he doesn't get any benefit from anything other than melee weapons and tanky gear. Your goal with him is make him big and don't let him die (which he usually won't on anything except maybe bosses, and then you can warp him away anyways).

The Solution: There is SO much more potential with this skill, I get giddy just thinking about it. Consider that an Animated Guardian is the closest thing to the Mercenaries in Diablo 2 that exists in this game. So why not go further in that direction?

What I thought was that you could treat his skill gem as a sort of pseudo-support gem simultaneously, allowing him to cast a spell or use an attack (or possibly more than one) linked to him, at the cost of, obviously, a link that would have gone towards a support gem. Also possibly allow it to equip a bow, and link say, Freezing Shot. The caveat is such:

Right now, there are three options with your Animated Guardian

1: Have two shields (or a free one) with Necromantic Aegis, to make it really tanky.
2: Have him on Weapon Swap, and saveable as such
3: Have up to 6 links for him, rather than three

You can only pick two under any circumstances, and I think that helps balance this idea out. If you want to equip him with 5 additional links (or a spell? and whatever) you can't have him on weapon swap for quick save-ability unless you use a two handed weapon or staff, which takes away your option of using a shield. It's pretty cool. Poetic, almost. To balance out the fact that he'd kind of be a walking spell totem, you could give him a penalty. But what this would mean is that Animated Guardian would become one of the most versatile minions in the game, with the caveat that you lose his gear on death, which I believe would balance it out (consider he's much less tanky in a non-summoner build). It would also leave his tanky "zombie that is always around even without a corpse" niche intact if you build him the way you currently can. It would open up more types of gear for him, because you could now reasonably use spell damage gear on him.

It may not be feasible, you may have to balance it out with reduced attack or cast speed for skills and/or reduced damage or some sort of mana system, but I think it's well, well worth it for how cool it would make this already underused skill. Now, that said, I'd really really love as-is a small mercenary-style inventory for him so you could at least compare to what he has equipped to whether you want to overwrite it or not. If you want me to be totally honest, this is my favourite skill in the game as it stands and I just want more reasons to use it.

I honestly don't know the odds of even having this post read, but it's not worth not posting if there's even the smallest chance.

Being able to equip him with a skill (especially a melee skill) would be amazing.


To be honest I would like to see the skill interaction changed to support a melee summoner rather than a pure one (i.e. 12% Increased Sword Damage passives affecting him). I don't care for the current summon system, it's fairly shallow imo (especially the fact that zombies and skelly max numbers are on the same nodes.

I also think that he and other minions should interact with CtC gems. Would make for some interesting guardian builds.

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it's fairly shallow imo (especially the fact that zombies and skelly max numbers are on the same nodes

I wasn't going to go into that, but as far as I'm concerned, skelly and zombie count are on the same nodes because those nodes are relics of a past game where zombies and skellies were basically the only available minions aside from spectres (which got their own node far away, because spectres were a higher level skill). They gave utility to basically all of the early available skills for summoners at once, which was great back in, say, Beta, but nowadays all it does it waste node power on something that a summoner may not want to do.

Nowadays, if a summoner wants to go Zombies, they're pigeonholed into getting one or two extra skeletons and wasting some of that potential node power. If they want to go skeletons, they're effectively forced to go zombies as well, because with each skeleton node you also get another zombie as well, and zombies are much stronger overall. They SLIGHTLY rectified this with the Army of Bones jewel in the Awakening beta, which I think helps to ease it out a bit, but Army of Bones strictly gives you skeleton count and no stats which leaves you still having to traverse to those minion nodes anyways.

It's a tough problem to solve because they've dug themselves into the tree being how you get more zombies and skeletons, but they haven't had to do that for other minions because they were designed outside that time (can only have one Guardian, can only have one Golem, can have as many Raging Spirits as you can cast) and they made them work outside of the tree. Unfortunately those creatures -also- suffer from the fact that in order to make them stronger you STILL need to go to the minion nodes, which pigeonholes you into taking Zombies as the best choice to supplement your build because they're so much free power as a result of their numbers just being tied into the nodes.

If I had to solve the problem, I'd do this:

-remove the +minions values from the tree entirely
-balance the numbers of Zombies and Skeletons around how many you want the player to have at their relative level values that you expect the player to have the nodes (skeletons already do this; do it more)

I understand that at the time, they wanted players to be able to sacrifice other parts of their own stats from the tree to be able to sprint to a further away minion node to beef their army's numbers, but that's just not how the game works anymore and it's only hurting modern minion builds. You can try to put a bandaid on it by creating specialized jewels like Army of Bones but until those nodes are changed to remove the +minions and compensate for it in some other way, summoners will always feel trapped to going Zombies and you'll never be able to fully specialize in one type of minion (or even balance to a point where players can).

Don't worry, I've had a few rants about this in global and I figure it's time to bring it to the forums. Maybe this is more of a discussion point and less of a "suggestion" but f*ck it needs to be said.

EDIT: If you really wanted to tie minion count into the tree somewhere, you could have a Notable, somewhere far into the witch and maybe another near the Scion somewhere, saying something like "Your minion spells can have 50% more minions". That would solve a few things:

-it would mean that Zombie and Skeleton players have specific nodes they could still traverse to in order to buff their numbers
-if it rounded up, it would give players an extra Golem after one node (it couldn't affect Guardian because of the nature of the summon unless you were to use two AG gems); if rounded down, it would make players have to take both nodes if they wanted it bad enough, allowing the option but forcing a choice
-It wouldn't be absurdly powerful for any individual minion skill, as most of them allow you effectively limitless minions with some other caveat (SRS, animate weapon, blink/mirror arrow, dom blow) and the ones that do have a limit already have ways to increase their values anyways (see: spectres, who I feel were done right)
-It would give a choice to SRS builds who may still want to splash zombies or whatever to take a node to the same effect as before the changes

Just doing my part to suggest a change rather than just pointing out what's wrong.

I don't think double posting is THAT frowned upon but I fell off the front page qq

You know what, even instead of all that, all you need to give people for animated guardian is a unique chest with a "drops on death" clause and a single socket and the line "Socketed skills can be used by equipped minions".

That's all I want. Now if only I had 1000 bucks back on release to drop on it before animate guardian existed.

well I also want the summoner nodes fixed. but that would keep me happy enough. I'm gonna repost with just that unique suggestion.