SNEAKY, CONNIVING, SHAMELESS ZOMBIE KILLERS !!!

"

Bretherezenx wrote:

Go read my post and read everything else I have said about Zombies, or shut up.

This is still a nerf to Zombies' clear speed.

Their bossing potential is literally not, and never has been, an issue at all. Never has been. Still won't be.

This is, in fact, a mapping clear speed nerf.

If you have to substitute a gem in to your build, sacrificing damage, for clear speed: It's a nerf.

Damage is not an issue! It never was! Open your ears.

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

Like toning it down a bit i'm not even arguing that slam won't be worse assuming the base cooldowns still 5s but this is not zombies being utterly destroyed. The hyperbole about how a slightly delay increase on slam ruins zombies is ridiculous in the face of how many buffs they are getting.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

"

Bretherezenx wrote:

Go read my post and read everything else I have said about Zombies, or shut up.

This is still a nerf to Zombies' clear speed.

Their bossing potential is literally not, and never has been, an issue at all. Never has been. Still won't be.

This is, in fact, a mapping clear speed nerf.

If you have to substitute a gem in to your build, sacrificing damage, for clear speed: It's a nerf.

Damage is not an issue! It never was! Open your ears.

You are the one who isn't reading, you can substitute a gem without losing damage as i've told you about six times in a row, zombies are getting practically double their current damage. They will clear faster, they will boss faster use your eyes and read the numbers.

"

Bretherezenx wrote:

Skeletons will be able to move as fast as Zombies, and also Dash to enemies. Their downtime between mobs will be almost non-existent, thus ramping up their already incredible damage even further. Compounding this, their AoE map clearing has never been an issue since their inception. They also have never had need of an AoE ability in their toolkit, much to the dismay of quite literally every other minion except SRS.

SRS used to be quite an insanely popular minion, but it fell out of grace very hard after over-nerfing. It is the one minion that truly shines with the Melee Splash mechanics, and for good reason; They're tiny, there can be a lot of them. However, they require quite an investment to be able to do competent damage versus literally every other minion to date; You can literally build Chaos Golems to do more damage than SRS to-date.

Ice Golems can lower the cooldown of their Cyclone to less than 2s, more than enough time for them to clear a pack of mobs, run to the next, and clear it again. Moreover, this ability does incredible damage, hitting hard, and hitting fast, and is also able to be supported by Multistrike. The only downtime of this ability is seen spent on bosses, and it's negligible at best--barely noticeable at all (Hmm, really, sounds a lot like Zombies pre-Blight!!)

Fire Golems can be made to shotgun and endlessly fire off said shotgunned Magma Orbs endlessly, without failure. They can clear very fast, and the build is very safe. It also, for less than 5Ex investment of jewels, much like Ice Golems, is an incredibly potent build.

Spectres require an entry-cost, but you can easily build Skeletons in the meanwhile. However, their clear speed and bossing potential has never been in question. Compounding this fact, they have neither been nerfed, or overly and strenuously buffed in the upcoming Blight League.

Carrion Golems, sadly, require minions other than Golems to get the full benefit out of. However, they are, in fact, a Golem minion. That means, you guessed it, almost a complete reduction of their cooldown timer to the point they're virtually Ice Golems with a short CD dash, and a large bone nova AoE. Added to that fact, they have an astronomical 80% more damage multiplier, that can further be increased...

Need I go on?

And then there are Zombies...

Sub-par basic attacks with a very minute cleave radius that, at most, can scarcely ever hit 3 of the tiniest mobs in their face given the right positional placing. Their Slam ability has always been the staple for map clearing, and at least partially for also dealing boss damage; However, recently, with a buff to Slam to never-miss, their Slam was the go-to for Zombies period. This was a godsend change for them, because Slam was already a good ability for both clearing, and dealing damage.

You could build around Slam, literally just as you build around: Tukohama Vanguard Spectre's totems, Ice Golem's Cyclone, Fire Golem's Magma Orbs, so on and so forth. To say that Slam is the worst offender of minion scaling because of jewels in the least is purely ignorant and profoundly asinine. But as I was saying: You could build around Slam. You could not, however, build around their basic attacks, and make them viable in all content. You could, but it made no sense, and required more effort than building them for purely Slam.

So people chose Slam. And it's been a helluva good time.

People complained, validly, that Zombies moved too slow, and I know I am not the only Summoner that has wished they had the movement and map clearing speed of some other minions. However, with Blight, we get exactly what we want: Aggressive stance Zombies, and faster movement for them as well. Literally the only two things that they have missed from truly shining and being on-par with every other viable minion in the game in terms of mapping viability.

Except, now, they are losing Violent Dead. Since SRS, this is the most blatant nerf to a minion that I have personally ever bore witness to. And yes, it is a nerf. They will not hit as hard with Slam, and they will not Slam nearly as often. This means that the entire Zombie Summoner meta has to shift DRASTICALLY in order to stay competent, whereas literally every other minion is getting massive QoL on top of blanket, rampant buffs. To top it off: There's literally just zero reason to remove the jewels in the first place.

Zero reason. Everything that a Violent Dead jewel does, Primordial jewels for Golems do as well (although they are more spread out.) If you wanted to remove the Violent Dead jewels from the equation, in my honest opinion, THAT is the way to go about doing it; Spreading their modifiers out across multiple items or modifications. That way it's a much more arduous, yet manageable, investment to obtain. This would be what I would consider a competent nerf to the Violent Dead jewels.

However, blanket-ly removing them entirely from the equation without base-line adding them to the Zombie skill gem (and you can argue that it has been, but until GGG says otherwise, or this is reflected inside of Path of Building, ergo being endorsed as true by OpenArl, and consequently, GGG) it is a blanket and unwarranted nerf that completely shifts the Zombie Summoner meta, and promotes them as nothing more than useless meat bags with high HP, to further promote their DD/VD/Cremation corpse explosion building philosophy that has existed for quite literally only one single League and was met with slight acclaim.

To that end, if the latter of what I just said is the reason for this shift in meta, then that is absolutely stupid, and giving the middle finger to everybody that has ever chosen to be a Zombie Summoner, for all these numerous years. We love our Zombies. We love them exactly where they were. We loved them even when they have been obviously inferior to other minions, and we played them while they were obviously inferior to other minions. Bringing them in Blight to the lime-light is not a bad thing. The other minions are like-wise being buffed. Making Zombies relevant in comparison to other minions is the sort of balancing that SHOULD happen; Not bringing everything else down, unless, like Cyclone, deserves to be--but bringing other abilities up to the same competitive level and playing field.

We all know GGG has a knack for overly nerfing, or overly buffing abilities, and this is all-for creating an "interesting" meta scheme that keeps players coming back. But a nerf such as the sheer removal of the Violent Dead jewels without even so much as stated stat compensation to the contrary is completely stupid from every design perspective that I can think of.

The buffs to minion damage coming in Blight, so far on my PoB, are only an increase of about 10-15% on the high-end, with incredible gear investment, and near-perfect Passive Tree pathing for my desired build. Consequently, on the low-end, this is an even more insignificant and completely minute alteration of their damage, except for the sheer and utterly large, noticeable, dramatic increase of the Slam's cooldown timer. Other minions are seeing even more ridiculous increases than Zombies are, and they are receiving no arbitrarily stupid nerf to round out said buffs.