Crazy minion support gem: "Merge"

"Merge" (blue minion support gem):

After summoning your first summon with this skill, additional summons will merge with the first summon, boosting its life and damage.

(You cannot merge more often then the maximum amount of summons of that type.
Summons with a duration will keep an internal count and lose merges when they expire.)

Level 1: each merge will boost your initial summon with an additional 30% more damage and life
and 5% increased size

Level 20: each merge will boost your initial summon with an additional 49% more damage and life
and 9% increased size

(additional more damage sources are additively added together)

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So:

- You have a max of 8 zombies. Merging them will reduce that to 1 zombie with (7*49)
343% more damage and life (effectively multiplying them by 4.43) and 63% increased size.

- You cast SRS with merge. All new skulls will be added to the main skull, but those "merge stacks" will still each have their proper duration. So when you stop casting, your big merged skull will lose all its stacks over time and shrink to eventually disappear.
We can best compare this to how Blade Vortex works: you have to keep casting to keep that SRS skull big and powerful.

Let's say you can keep your 1 SRS skull charged up to 40 merged minions by casting continously, then that 1 skull will do (39*49) 1911% more damage, or over 20 times the damage of an SRS skull without Merge. Ofcourse without Merge, you would have 40 of them!

The size of that skull is pretty hilarious too: 9% * 39 = 351% increased minion size. That is a huge flaming skull!

- With two clayshapers, you can also merge your three golems for one with (2*49=98%) double damage and life, and 18% increased size.

- Any minion of which you can have multiple can be merged, so you can also have a bad-ass skeleton or a buffed spectre. There is no way to have more then 1 AG however, so you can never merge him.

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The whole idea of this skill is to sacrifice quantity for quality.

The drawback is that non-merged summons will have a bigger total life pool (8 zombies with 100 life = 800 life, against 1 merged zobie with 443 life) and a bigger damage potential (same logic here).

So it is a rather niche and funny support skill. It can be useful for non-summoners to have decent zombies/skellies without much investment, for summoners with otherwise too many summons that tend to obstruct eachother or even for pvp where summoners today don't stand a chance.

I just love the idea of having much fewer but much more impressive summons. I'm sure this can be an addition that will increase summoner diversity, because today there isn't much.

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Please discuss!

No summoners out there interested in something new?

Could be interesting.

This is basically what Mon'tregul's Grasp should have been. Unfortunately dual-wielding them means you get no zombies, not 1 mega-zombie. Such wasted potential.

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This is basically what Mon'tregul's Grasp should have been. Unfortunately dual-wielding them means you get no zombies, not 1 mega-zombie. Such wasted potential.

I agree. Nobodu uses Mon'tregul since snapshotting has been removed.
I proposed to replace the reduced by less, so you could dual wield them, but apparently that would cause a coding error.
I still think they could replace the 50% reduced amount of zombies by -3 to maximum of zombies, to allow dual wielding.

Anyway, this support gem makes double Mon'tregul possible for ALL types of summons!

I think a better name might be "Amalgamated Minions." Merge seems like it might affect other things, even though it does describe what it does it's not as specific as it could be.

Brilliant gem idea, though. I especially like how it would work with Summon Raging Spirits.

I could see this as being something interesting and new, def. +1

Yeah, maybe this will make me rolling SRS build at last. Cacodemons FTW!

Thank you for the positive comments so far, but how can we make GGG read this?

-1 to OP
+1 to dual-wield Grasp