Non meta permanent minions need some love and care.

Hello. I will preface this message by saying I exclusively play SSF only and so the issues I face are more because I do not have unlimited access to unlimited resources like trade. In general, I am asking for a higher ceiling to my skill and permanent minions in general, but within the SSF context which would also apply to trade league as there is a wide difference in min-maxed and then playable characters with not much middle ground. So, I will tailor my suggestions accordingly so as to not suggest making minions even more powerful in trade on the top end than current. It should be known that I do push SSF to the extreme and tend to obtain everything that is not a t0 or 10 days played + alone to obtain a single item. I should note it is also a complicated subject, and some of the suggestions I make may not be the best way to actually address the issues I feel this variety of skills has, but I am providing my thoughts on the issues and possible suggestions as a starting point. As I state further in the essay, it is not possible nor realistic to scale my character any further than where I would be at after 20 days /played, and I would like to be able to keep grinding for an entire league.

Okay so I have been playing Carrion Golem, with Raise Zombies in the 6 link since 3.22. I have tried a few different ways of building them and solving the different issues that come along the way. Essentially, my build currently is all my own with no influence from anyone else because there isn't really anyone in SSF doing it better (there is like 7 people playing it as a main skill). So I might sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but I wanted to explain that so as to give the reader an understanding of my level of game knowledge when it comes to this particular skill. Furthermore, I believe that Carrion Golem is a fantastic skill for players with wrist issues or fatigue issues, but it needs some love from GGG.

Also I would like to give context on what I deem "playable" and "functional". I expect a character to be able to beat Ubers, T17's, 500+ depth, wave 30 simulacrum, and so on, with reasonable build adjustments depending on the content, and within 20 days total /played for someone of my skill level. I cannot compare /played with my self and others to give an idea, as I do not know where others are at. To give perspective on this, I typically finish a build around week 3/4 of the league, assuming we are not seeking mega rares. I think a finished carrion golem character this league, after 20 days play time at most should be doing around 20 million POB dps on a defensive set up, or 50m on a squishy DPS set up. For context, I am currently doing 12m DPS on a block set up after 12 days /played. I understand that the damage requirements to actually defeat Ubers is lower than this, but it feels damn near dreadful to try the fights on less than 40m in my experience. When I talk about increasing damage numbers, it is not because I dont think you can defeat all content with low damage, its because by increasing the base damage we can then invest more into defences and still do roughly the same damage, or vice versa. I think this is needed.

Okay so here are some of the issues that this skill (along with any other pet minions at the moment really):

- In SSF, at current the only way to get reasonable damage is through the use of The Adorned unique crimson jewel. This is not something that one should reasonably expect to ever obtain good rolls on however, but I have had the luxury of owning one for 2 leagues in a row due to very good RNG. To put it into perspective, my 3.22 Carrion Golem in a Dual Wield set up gets roughly 2/3 more damage just from swapping out the old primordial jewels into an adorned set up. My current build, at the time of obtaining the jewel (about 2 weeks ago) went from about 3 million damage to 5 million damage, and it scales even harder as you invest elsewhere in the build. Unfortunately, The Adorned seems to be the only way to scale off-meta builds that would otherwise be barely functional in SSF. My solution to this is provide some new technology that allows minion skills, or even off-meta skills in general, a way to scale damage that is more accessible than adorned, but does not give quite the same power as adorned. Something like 70% of the power of a 130+ % adorned would be fair in my opinion. That being said, I do not feel that Adorned provides enough power to the build to make it compete with meta skills, but it does make it bearable.

- In any league, so not just SSF, specifically Pet Minion builds are heavily burdened with keeping their minions alive so as to be able to actually deal damage because if your minions are dead, well you deal no damage. This means that skills that have no reliance on this are able to deal significantly more damage just because they do not need to invest in minion survivability at all really. It is quite common for people, especially in trade league, to just invest low amounts of currency into AG, run desecrateable spectres, and then invest everything into damage for skills such as Holy Relic, Summon Raging Spirits, etc. This also means they can have significantly higher defences as well because there is less resources invested into the build than a permanent minion build. I think this is quite unfair, and there is two different ways I think we should address this, either one would be fine. Either remove the necessity of relying on suffixes (and in some cases prefixes) on gear as well as cluster jewels to keep them alive as well as deal damage, or just straight up buff their survivability in general via the skill gem. The reason for this is because currently the only way to invest in minion defence and also not lose all of your damage is through the cluster jewel notables Dread March and Renewal, and our damage comes from suffixes on bone ring/shield, the same cluster jewels, and prefixes on bone ring/gloves/shield. We are also tied to using bone rings to give enough resistances. without at least 4 renewal and 3 dread march, your minions are very likely to just die. Similarly, suffixes on gear are painful to sacrifice as we actually need those for ourself to get resistances, spell suppression, block, attributes, life regeneration, just to name a few different options one would want to invest in so that their own character doesn't just fall over. To give some context, a fully min-maxed SSF golem character will typically have only 15% overcapped resistances if they have spent hundreds of hours just in crafting gear due to the extreme dependancy on suffixes. This means something like exposure will kill us lol.

- Currently, there is only really 1 strong resource for permanent minions to build their own character defence and that is block. Unfortunately, we do not have good access to large portions of armour or spell suppression or evasion, just to give a few examples. It typically requires very heavy investment into only 1 or 2 of these, and it comes at a very heavy sacrifice to damage. Like I said, suffixes for minion damage and survival also occupy our own suffixes needed for these defenecs. If I take the exact same character, built identicaly with all slots except for obvious changes, and swap it from a dual weild flesh offering set up to a bone offering shield set up with investment into block cap, my character will go from 50 million DPS down to 20m dps, and that is with min maxed gear in every slot, something one should not expect to achieve unless they spend the entire league grinding. I propose that the Necromancer, and minion gear specifically, gets more accessibility to different kinds of defences and strong ones at that. I do not see it reasonable to expect a player to settle for 4 million damage after 20 days /played just so they can be considered tanky enough for Hardcore (yes, I POB'd this to check the amount of damage and defence I would get for such a game mode).

- There is a significant issue with the exact same equipment slots required to make a permanent minion build functional are also the exact same slots that one would actually rather have good defensive options in. For example, the body armour slot will be occupied by a Covenant or a +4 fossil crafted chest, when some of the new content requires items like the Fourth Vow, Loreweave, or Brass dome for example. If I was remove The Covenant from my build, I quite literally lose half of my damage. Similarly, about 30% of our damage comes from wands, and losing a wand slot just to run an actually tanky shield (Aegis, Surrender, Dawnbreaker for example) is very restricting. Yes, we do have minion shields that can roll damage or defence on, but they are not sufficient enough to provide actual defence and so imo it is better to not use a shield at all if you are going to use a bone shield for damage. Also bone shields are next to impossible to craft with actually good defence, but with decent damage as well.

- In the trade league environment, there is a significant difference in gearing on a min-maxed character and an average but well invested character for this skill set. Furthermore, it is not actually possible to progress in a linear fashion, rather, it requires you to first invest several hundreds of divines worth of crafting before you can make a switch to such a state of the character. For example, you cannot just keep upgrading your armour as you go along, instead, you must first craft perfect energy shield pieces so as to reach only 5k ES. This doesn't sound like an issue at first glance, but if we then look at how a minion passive skill tree is built, there is very little room to actually fill this gap with the tree because as stated above, we need it for other and also important stats. Similarly, if we are to no longer rely on minion stats for survival like life regen, pdr, max res, we need a very high damage rate so that our minions can leech life back, and that is only for our damage dealing minions. One would then have to expect that their support minions will die, and they will die often, in fact they may well not live at all in T17 content. It is therefore not possible to scale minion damage past a certain point, without doing similar to the defences, where we make 1 big switch all at once, and thats assuming leech is actually enough to begin with when there is a cap and the rate is based off minion life, which we lose if we want to get damage.

In general, I am not in agreement with the sentiment that only some skills should have good access to build power. I think there should be balance, rather than 2 or 3 skills being very good (in SSF or HC), and then all of the others feeling awful to play until you spend many days playing just to have it feel okay. I am not asking for things to be handed to me, but I want some love and care from GGG provided specifically to permanent minions. In a trade league environment, it is very different because they can just buy a t0 unique called the Squire for 3 divines and then unload 200 divines worth of metamod crafts into making a 12 link sword. In SSF, this is obviously not reasonable to expect a person to do. Furthermore, we only have access to the higher end of damage if the league is kind to us. Last league we had new spectres, and this league we have grave crafting. However in TOTA, we didn't have anything but a +1 intelligence gem tattoo. So, I think it is fair to expect that in future we may not be able to play the build at all if we want to defeat t17s and ubers, which lets face it, is actually the standard of end game for people who play significant hours and have a fair level of game knowledge like my self.

In summary, I would like for there to be more of a middle ground of accessible power in both damage and defences for off-meta skills that doesn't necessarily make it the new meta (aka, more powerful than current peak end game options like squire, adorned etc), but allows builds to feel somewhat comfortable on relative investment. For the trade players out there, I find it obsurd that the difference between a carrion golem build using double wands on min max gear will get about 60m-70m damage but a player using min maxed squire (t0 unique) will do 250m+. There is no middle ground, and this trickles down to SSF as often this minmaxed gear isnt even possible in that environment. On that note, I thoroughly enjoyed Last Epoch for its Circle of Fortune, a faction where if you play solo self found you have boosted drop rates but the items are locked to ssf and can never be traded. I think this could do well on POE as a more general overwork. I know that POE doesn't share this sentiment however, but I would like it to only apply to items of the t2/t1/t0 variety if at all, rather than every item in general. I think if it is reasonable for trade players to be able to buy these t0 items with only 3 days playtime of grinding, then it should be reasonable for SSF to obtain one after 30 days playtime, rather than epxecting to never see one in their lifetime outside of bug abuse or affliction league style mechanics. I think their needs to be more tools available to scale a build past "average" to min max, and this is very evidently a problem in that a lot of the top builds slap on a mageblood or original sin for example.

I would like to be able to scale my character all the way for an entire league, but at present, I cannot go much further than 20 days /played, as it doesn't provide anything to us due to the limited access to crafting currency and mega rares SSF has and it is therefore not realistic to expect to ever be able to achieve such items.

True

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imSoFuckungBad wrote:

True

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