Skill Preview: Dark Pact

I like skills you can think about and use it in different ways. Good addition to the game for sure. But I am still hoping to seeing new melee skill in 3.0...

Looks cool.

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Dark Pact! While this skill is a work in progress and still may undergo some changes.

I hope its not too late to give some input/feedback :)

I'm a bit concerned about balance and interactions with support gems and other existing mechanics.

1. How does life and minion life affect the damage?
I think it would be problematic if the actual damage scales with a life value of the character or skeletons.
I think life should just be a resource required for the use of the spell without dying.
"Life Sacrifice Amount" should depend on the "Damage Value" and not the other way around.
Overkill damage to the skeletons by Dark Pact should transfer over to other skeletons if available or to the character if no more skeletons are available.

2. "Does not work with Cast when Damage Taken", Dark Pact could be a perfect candidate for some reliable self inflicting damage for CWDT triggering.
CWDT(and other trigger gems) could be balanced by making the triggered skills still require their Mana cost to be paid to be triggered, and adjust the Mana multiplier on these trigger effects maybe even adding a flat additional Mana cost like a reversed Elreon ring mod.

3. Does it scale with existing "chains +x times" mechanics to hit more of your skeletons?

4. if there are no skeletons will a dark pact totem/trap/mine sacrifice its own life or the life of the character?
It would be a shame if we could not use Totems, Traps or Mines.

So, dual Clayshaper with five Chaos Golems supported with Wither CwC Summon Skeletons and Dark Pact. Who needs zombies anyway?

The new skills are getting weirder and weirder mechanics.

And none of them is named blade-something so they must all suck :P

Will be interesting to see how does this skill work (or not) with totems and traps.

And so if you wither cwc darkpact...then why the blight was added?

jokes on them .. skeletons have no hp....


Ok in all seriousness this is getting stupid . the whole reason why skeletons arent viable outside of single target and bosses is because they are clunky

so what does ggg do.

make a skill that effectivly need skeletons already summoned.

which means you have to have spent time to summon a few skeletons

which mans the skeletons your summoned .. could not kill the shit you summoned them to kill

which means .. WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU NOT USING SRS YOU GITS.


50 fake money says people will find a way to make this build viable using ONLY the life mechanic for clears and the skeletons only for bosses.


adding more layers of complexity just slows your clear speed down and now you have a 6l skill that needs a second 4 - 6l skill to use all of its gimmicks.. so its not gem efficient either

and the trend for the last 2 years has been a race to figure out how to use less and less skills to do more and more

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mirage2k640 wrote:

Will be interesting to see how does this skill work (or not) with totems and traps.

Sunblast instant skeleton cluster traps?

WoW NICEEEE!!!

So if we ignore skeletons for a moment, how viable would this be for a Lowlife self-harming caster variant? Doesnt trigger the hits for a lot of the Beserker passives but would love some input on how this could work