► New Gem suggestion for Summoners vs. Bosses : SUMMON ABOMINATION ◄

Current situation :

A lot of Summoners have troubles vs. Bosses. Their army of minions gets wiped in seconds, leaving them completely helpless.

Why ?

Simply because having an army of zombies is good to fight an army of monsters.
But an army of regular zombies is nothing against a boss, it's like a swarm of flies to them, especially vs. the ones dealing large and powerful AoE attacks.

Suggestion :

So I came up with the idea of a new intelligence gem :

"Summon Abomination"
Merges the flesh and bones of all your zombies into a single, very powerful and resistant superzombie.
The more zombies you merge, the more huge, powerful and resistant your superzombie is.
The duration of this summon depends on the gem level as well as the number of zombies merged.

Now imagine a huge, hulking zombie with terrifying bone claws and sharp teeth, scary red eyes, infernal roaring and sheer brutality.

Balance considerations

Pro : This superminion would allow summoners to fight bosses.

Con : You would lose your meatshield ! So you would have to kite/dodge/take care of all the adds while your superzombie does most of the job vs. the boss itself.

AKA the big Flesh Golem from D3?

"

goetzjam wrote:

AKA the big Flesh Golem from D3?

Dunno, I quit D3 one month after its release in 2012 (and still wondering how I could manage to play that long :p)

I would much rather build around 1 super zombie over 9 normal zombies and they moved in that direction with Monte'Gruls which was great. +1

this suggestion by the op suggests a fundamental miss understanding of why summoners need minions in the first place.

again, it is NOT about having durable minions. because to be frank if you want tanky minions . the least useful stat to achieve this is a high hp pool.

if you fight a boss or monster that one shots all of your minions , having a minion with 2 - 3 times the base hp of your other minions only means it will last a few hits more. but in the end that damage source will still not be something your minions can tank indefinitely.

mitigation is more important than hp pool.


but back on point , the whole reason why summoners have minions like the zombie in the first place is to have the 10ish zombies walking around to provide 10 alternative targets for mobs to hit.

if all you have is 1 zombie and your self , that is a 50% chance for you to get hit.
if you have 10 zombies then it is less than a 10% chance to get hit . every extra minion you get is like mitigation for yourself.

minion count IS summoner mitigation, it IS their defense , it is their version of armor or evasion. lessening your minion count is like stripping an armor character of their endurance charges or an evasion character of their dodge.

What if the mega zombie becomes attached to your characters and you become the mega zombie. This will allow you to choose the target you want to attack. Your attack damage will be based off of your minion stats.

If you just create the mega zombie, it will probably hit all of the bosses minions instead of the boss making it still very ineffective.

When all the zombie flesh is beaten off of you, you become yourself again and are at 1 life. Similar to D2 bear and werewolf.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

this suggestion by the op suggests a fundamental miss understanding of why summoners need minions in the first place.

again, it is NOT about having durable minions. because to be frank if you want tanky minions . the least useful stat to achieve this is a high hp pool.

I'm sorry but... I've been playing summoners for years in D2 and several versions of summoners in PoE. Btw, where did I talk about HP in my thread ? I have never said HP pool for minions made them tanky, YOU did. This assertion can only come from someone that has fundamental misunderstanding of summoning ;)

If having durable minions wasn't the point, why do you think GGG has put so many passives in the tree, and so many minion support gems boosting the minions stats (resistances, regen, shield transfer, etc... etc... etc...) ?

Minions are first and foremost a meat shield. And you want your meat shield to survive long enough to be able to resummon the zombies that may (and *WILL*) fall during a battle. But you don't want ALL your army to fall in one AoE boss attack. You want them to tank, giving you time to cast (for example) a secondary build. I'm personally using dual flame totem for this.

GGG has perfectly understood this, and has introduced an item : Mon'tregul's Grasp. This item gives you LESS minions (so you're more vulnerable because your meat shield is smaller) but you have more resistant and tanky minions (oh look, +2000 life boost and more resistances per zombie :))

So, my suggestion follows the EXACT same logic as Mon'tregul's Grasp, but with the concept pushed to its extreme : only one minion, but extremely strong and tanky, at the cost of almost losing your protective meatshield.

"

FNX_Heroes wrote:

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

this suggestion by the op suggests a fundamental miss understanding of why summoners need minions in the first place.

again, it is NOT about having durable minions. because to be frank if you want tanky minions . the least useful stat to achieve this is a high hp pool.

I'm sorry but... I've been playing summoners for years in D2 and several versions of summoners in PoE. Btw, where did I talk about HP in my thread ? I have never said HP pool for minions made them tanky, YOU did. This assertion can only come from someone that has fundamental misunderstanding of summoning ;)

If having durable minions wasn't the point, why do you think GGG has put so many passives in the tree, and so many minion support gems boosting the minions stats (resistances, regen, shield transfer, etc... etc... etc...) ?

Minions are first and foremost a meat shield. And you want your meat shield to survive long enough to be able to resummon the zombies that may (and *WILL*) fall during a battle. But you don't want ALL your army to fall in one AoE boss attack. You want them to tank, giving you time to cast (for example) a secondary build. I'm personally using dual flame totem for this.

GGG has perfectly understood this, and has introduced an item : Mon'tregul's Grasp. This item gives you LESS minions (so you're more vulnerable because your meat shield is smaller) but you have more resistant and tanky minions (oh look, +2000 life boost and more resistances per zombie :))

So, my suggestion follows the EXACT same logic as Mon'tregul's Grasp, but with the concept pushed to its extreme : only one minion, but extremely strong and tanky, at the cost of almost losing your protective meatshield.

the suggestion wants to make a super zombie by combining all the little zombies , the largest thing that would come of this is a larger health pool. I thought that was exactly what you were talking about? what else would you want to gain by combining 9 zombies into one big one if not some sort of massive hp boost. because you get almost everything else by other means

you get block from aegis , block nodes and bone offering
you get resists from auras, minion passives and aegis
you get leech and regen from passivs and curses

the only thing you dont get much of from those mentioned sources is more base life and more armor (armor is a lost cause).

i have built 8 summoners in poe and 13 necromancers in d2 so i too , know my shit.

but since you ALREADY get those mentioned durability sources from else-ware , yeah that really only does leave life as the main thing this suggestion would yield.

minions only fall in battle if you let them die. the tools to make them near immortal exist in the game and have seen common use since the very beginning. I keep on seeing threads about bosses destroying minions and i just haven't seen it happen, i have seen bosses hurt my minions quite alot but nothing that wouldnt also murder a very tanky melee character. the solution to that issue is the same for melee chars as it is for minions. dont get hit by the smashes. even eyeball piety didn't kill a single zombie in merci.


montreguls grasp is a noob trap item, it is possibly the weakest summoner item in the game explicitly because it cuts down on meat shield count while only really providing an alternative means to cap zombie resists other than jewels and the purity aura. the life gained , while nice, is simply not the most effective stat to buff. if you want tanky minions you dont buy a montreguls grasp. you buy a saffels frame or rathpith globe and run necro aegis/ bone offering so that you have 70/ 70 block minions

to be frank you suggestion is flawed exactly because it follows the montregul logic.