Minion Feedback MKII - Ideas - Needed Changes - Irritations - The Future - Concerns about 4.0
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Hello users and the one guy at GGG who is payed to watch everyone fight in the feedback forum and occasionally glean some information from here.
As a life-long summoner/necromancer/dark lord of lazyness i have a few thoughts about various areas of summoning and some of these are extremely important to think about such as the 4.0 concerns further down, Please do take the time to read some of this and consider what i have to say. General Feedback: Meat shield - Feeding Frenzy - Death Mark The recent minion expansion brought some tools with it to help minion users more accurately control the behavior of their minions with Defensive/Agressive supports and the introduction of Death Mark which by all means are all very nice additions to the game depending on the minions used increased the viability of some of them. Meat shield i have not really bothered with as its description they are supposed to only attack things near me and i prefer to keep a healthy distance between me and a majority of the monsters/bosses in the game but from what little i have used this support it also seems pretty lackluster as my minions do stay somewhat close to me they are not really acting as the meat shield i would expect them to trying to stay in front of and around me in general. The feeding frenzy support has definitely been great on some minions where as others are essentially aggressive by default in how they act and the only difference i've been able to see with these pets are how far from the user they are able to target and pursue enemy's. Additionally compared to for example Agressive Golems which attack more often spectre AI seems to be about all that has been affected and this was extremely disappointing for having to dedicate an entire support gem just to make their AI actually go after enemy's 90% of the time rather than 50% of the time. Death Mark easily one of the best supports you added in the minion patch functions exactly how i expected it to with one exception covered in the below section. Needed Changes / Ideas: Death Mark vs Controlling when pets attack While the above supports helped out minion users are still lacking the ability to make their minions stop attacking which while some may not consider this a big deal its actually quite important, In a past thread i posted several ideas that would make minion users more competitive with self-cast/attack users who do not use minions but one of them stands out as the most important of them all and that is the ability to control WHEN your minions attack. The thoughts on this were simply to make it so a users minions do not attack until a player issues a command and for those minions to only attack in that area making them behave the same way as if a player were casting/using a skill/spell themselves allowing players to in high tier content be more accurate and wisely use their minions power. Death mark is cool but it does not allow for the management of cooldowns by carefully using a minions ability at the right time and in part this "passive" system of just letting minions do whatever they want casts shade upon minion users as "lazy" or "easy" and while i think passive minions are fine allowing that fine tuned control is very much NEEDED to bring many minions include often overlooked Specters into competitive play. So some sort of support/gem/item/passive is needed here to allow minion users who are not simply wishing to run around like a chicken with their head off(no offense guys i do that shit too on some builds) actually choose when they attack with some level of accuracy and take our pets into the deepest and most difficult content with CONFIDENCE not because they are strong but because we are using our skill to make them strong. Take Final Fantasy 14 for example i played a summoner which i was able to dictate where my pet was at any given time, which attacks it used or(didnt) and that was a critical element in my ability to complete the hardest difficulty in the game as well as my party, I could very accurately tank/off tank strong monsters and control the flow of battle all while playing my character at the same time, Minion users aren't lazy we just don't have much of a choice in how things work right now in POE giving us that control would be a big deal. This issue is also fairly frustrating when in group play since there is no way to control my minions in terms of attack/dont attack there are often instances where without de-summoning them mid battle i cannot wait for a player to re-enter a fight or for example use their Writhing Jar worms to summon their arakali fang spiders/etc Irritation - The Future: Non minion support gems Recently you added the support Barrage which completed the system of supports to add additional casts(spell echo) attacks(multistrike) and now ranged attacks(barrage) however for some reason despite this making 200% perfect sense to allow minions to use this it was disabled for them. Why on earth do melee and spell casting minions get all the cool toys when ranged attack minions already are nearly obsolete and they needed a little love, I personally do not use ranged attack Spectres which i would be this patch if the barrage support were enabled, This honestly feels a little (sorry) lazy to simply start pasting this on most if not all of the new supports as well as adding this tag to past skill gems which were build critical for some off-meta setups I understand that some of these supports were disabled for minions to allow for example Melee builds to receive some love and honestly seeing skeletons as powerful as they are in metamorph it was probably a good idea to lock some of these behind that condition... But do keep in mind some of us aren't going to play anything but minions no matter what you do and if we don't get some cool toys now and then in terms of supports we aren't going to have fun in these new patches... especially when like with -------->Barrage<--------- a support that should have been available for use in ANY ranged skill including minions as what is the reason when i can fill the screen with much more intensive minion spells already via spell echo and rediculous combinations, where's the bow/etc minion love GGG. If this trend continues with such frequency im losing a lot of interest in playing the game at all because all of these new melee/ranged/spell mechanics are out of my reach. Needed Changes - Irritations: Spectre Viability and Diversity Too many monsters in this game as of oriath and beyond have had quite a lot of their ability's taken away when raised as spectre and some of it does not make much sense such as Chrome Chimerals which use a mortar attack launch heat seeking damage over time orbs as far as i have been able to determine these are classified as "minions" which would make sense if there were not quite a lot of these monsters who's minion abilitys are currently enabled such as: Spectral Tactition(SRS) Reanimators(Zombie) ThoseKaruiGuys(totems) and a few more, why were these specifically disabled when the damage from them would unlikely be very high given they are minions-of-minions and of course the most important part CASTED by the chimerals. To make things worse a larger and larger variety of pets are disabled for use to the point in a lot if not most patches there are only 1-2 IF we are lucky that can be raised as a spectre and even if we are so lucky as to have these pets available for use they have often been gutted of most of their ability's which makes them almost useless to even bother with.. There is also the fact that quite a few monsters which we can raise arent available to desecrate and require significant amounts of time in some cases to even obtain them ex: Shavrones Greed(which is super annoying because of the passive damage skills being cast by the boss) and quite a few more that as far as i am aware have no relevant on-death effects that should bar them from being desecrated unlike the Knitted Horror etc. It should be somewhat concerning to you when in any given patch a specific monster is the ONLY one being used by 90% of the population of Spectre summoners in the game and i would hope two things would happen when this becomes apparent.. One looking into why people are not using the plethora of available monsters in your game and perhaps addressing their shortcomings such as the above listed (having their ability's disabled) and Two Also looking into why people are using the same pet so consistently and reigning that in a little bit so they are consistent with other pets so that nothing can truly (god willing) make all others obsolete. Irritations - Needed Changes: remove Spectre Armour +1 to maximum spectres This needs to be removed from the game entirely with the recent changes it allows pretty much every spectre build to reach 5 spectres where if a user weilding two midnight bargains for 6 but also reserving 60% of their life and surely forcing them into Energy Shield could use this but it would be a death wish giving a dual wield Midnight Bargain user only +1 to maximum spectres over other much safer builds at a significant cost making it almost pointless to use the second wand over the copy-paste victario shield setup and getting back 30%of your life enabling a life build at the same number of spectres as someone sacrificing everything to achieve that highest height. Does anyone not see the absurdity of having to equip two of these to only be able to realistically get 1 more spectre????? This doesn't make any sense to me at all even given that you have essentially enabled a dual MB user to now use shavrones wrappings which is great but to make things worse Raise Spectre was nerfed to require +2 more levels to acheive the 4th spectre only further hurting dual wield MB users by forcing them to use Empower3+ to achieve their +2 spectre knocking out a critical and potential damage support where as other builds using your new convoking wands can reach this with almost zero downsides. Needed Changes - the future: in 4.0 split up the minions Part of the issue i see right now with minions is that they are too closely related and because of this in part when you make adjustments to them it echoes out through all of them unfairly hurting some and buffing others, During the "minion patch" aka blight there were a disturbing amount of mass summoners(which i think should exist) however the cost of a mass summoner versus a specialized one was about the same outside of the number of used up slots a mass summoner had to fill to have their army the single minion specialist only has so many tools at their disposal to make their minions much stronger. A mass summoner can potentially use two 6linked minions at any given time and in 4.0 this is only going to become MUCH WORSE allowing users to have nearly every minion in the game as a 6link setup where as a specialized build will still be limited to 6 slots and never be able to truly compete, I hope this is something you're thinking about GGG because i sure as heck am as a lifelong Summoner it is something i CAN NOT ignore. By splitting up the minions even a small amount in the skill tree you would force mass summoners to spend more skill points to "have it all" where as a specialized summoner would have to spend less points specifically on that minion and gain a very clear advantage for having done so for their pet in question as a mass summoner is capable of dealing insane amounts of damage from the sheer volume of outgoing attacks as well as defensive capability's far above and beyond that of a specialist because they literally have a wall of flesh and bone blocking things from hitting them. Here is a rough example image that show how minions could be split apart to apply cost to mass-summoners while still leaving options open for them at a reasonable cost and allowing specialists to reap the rewards they rightfully deserve:  ------------------------------------ Well that's it for now my brain has turned to sludge but i will add to this later with a clear mind and having thought more on minions overall. Innocence forgives you Last bumped on Feb 27, 2020, 5:17:18 PM
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" It should come with massive benefits, like being able to leech life from minions damage or redirect a massive amount of incoming damage to them. Because running around like headless chickens is a defence against 100% pure distilled bullshit that PoE became in terms of enemy attacks. Zero visual clarity, and insane damage spikes that can one-shot 270k hp character. " Why? I think it is, on the contrary, should be more obtainable. It is gated behind extremely rare delve encounter, and good armor of this kind now easily costs 50 exalts. Zombie and skeleton mod can be just crafted - can do the same for spectres. And Midnight Bargain can use a revamp. Currently, rare convoking wands are just too powerful to ignore. " No, no, no. Generalizing minions in the last revamp was a massive improvement. Don't return to that. Adding more nodes outside of Templat/Witch sectors is good, but spreading them thin or specializing would be bad. Organic chemistry is a weird thing. If you add a spoon of shit to a barrel of jam you'll get a barrel of shit.
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" Honestly, I'd love if more build options became available for summoners. Jinxed Juju was a great idea, but the mechanic behind it should be buffed and expanded to other uniques or passives to enable a facetank summoner. I bet Dominating Blow builds would get a kick out of having an item that shares damage they receive between the sentinels, so they can stay in the frontline. Or a spectre/skeleton summoner with terrible armor/ES using their meatshield zombies to take a portion of the damage you received similar to MoM. This is just one example of course, but there's potential to make summoners more than just "throw walking shit at enemies and dance while they die". :P PoE players: Our game has a wide diversity of builds. Also PoE players: The [league mechanic] doesn't need to be nerfed, you just need to play a [current meta] build! MFers found strength in their Afflictions. They became reliant on them. I am not so foolish. Last edited by Pizzarugi on Jan 29, 2020, 6:32:37 PM
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As far as i know feeding frenzy and meat shield only increase/decrease the current agro radius field and dont do much else to minion behavior.(beyond the gem benefits)
One thing i think the game is currently missing when it comes to specters is the ability to select an attack mode. Having a minion "melee damage",minion "controlled destruction" and minion "vicious projectiles" gem which locks a potential spectre in the specific attack would probably make a lot more of them available for use. Instead of having this weird spectre with one beefed up move and doing some pointless rotation of other skills which are not supported by the skill gems you socketed him with. not sure if thats possible or desirable(might make them to powerfull?) but thats for GGG to decide. I also tend to agree with the midnight bargain critique, but i would take a different route. I think instead of removing the +1 chest(which is a solid big-ticket hunt item) it might be better to create a prophecy midnight bargain upgrade or alternatively simply rework the item how it drops. I think changing midnight bargain is a better route to summoner build diversity and goals then targetting the chest? I think they did a lot of work on minions though compared to two years ago, dissapointed we don't get beasts for the ranger side etc but those are little background dreams which i assume might not be adressed in PoE but might in PoE2. Nice draft sir, looks like solid feedback. Peace, -Boem- Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
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" The bargain getting some fated versions would definitely be nice.. but wtf would they even do to it. Innocence forgives you
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" Holly necro, worthy of a summoner thread i reckon. The midnight bargain To -> The hollowed swarm - 40% life reservation - can no longer use non spectre minions - +40-70% minion damage - -40% less spectre health - +30% minion movement speed - +2 spectre if intelligence is over 666 - +2 spectre if strength is over 666 - +2 spectre if agility is over 666 - 50% of chaos damage can no longer bypass energy shield Something like that would work i think. Peace, -Boem- Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
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" Lol i'd love something spectre specific but damn even with that stat requirement thats quite OP Innocence forgives you
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" How so? It would max out at +6 spectre's at a pretty heavy cost on character development while completely removing all other minions. Could add a -40% less spectre damage or something rather then the HP? To be fair i gave it 5 minutes of thought since you necro'd this thread from way back and bassicaly asked upfront what it would look like. I imagine most people would settle for +4 spectre's with something like this because +6 would require really solid gear and limit passive point investment in other stuff quite hard. Peace, -Boem- Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
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" Because i would have 10 spectres if i had two of those wands :P Overall thats the direction i want to see with an item that makes spectre the only pet you can use. 666 int and 666 str like, ez and all that extra str will give life for chayula to gobble up and spit out as ES, 8 permanent spectres was possible last patch and now its back down to 7 ... My biggest want i think would be something like this: Eternal Bargain(Staff) = Fated version of 2x Midnight Bargain +20-40 Intelligence Minions have 30%-60% Increased Movement Speed Minions deal 100%-150% Increased Damage +4 to the maximum number of Spectres Reserves 80% of life You cannot use non-Spectre minions you deal no damage with skills yourself Incompatible with chaos inoculation /shrug.. Its definitely something i need to think about, separating minions endgame needs to be more of a thing. Innocence forgives you
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The thing I came to realise when I was pondering my opinion on the state of Summoners is that in order to fix the problem, we ought not to nerf Necromancer, but Skeletons and Zombies instead. If we just nerfed Necromancer, people would turn to building Guardians instead.
The added physical damage to those 2 are too strong and could be toned down by like 10%. I think that'd be decent enough a nerf. Twitch: https://twitch.tv/artcrusader
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