Proposal to change / rework Mother’s Embrace

The idea of a mechanic that lets your minions benefit from your flasks is pretty straightforeward. This idea is mainly implemented into the game via two unique belts: Mother’s Embrace and Umbilicus Immortalis. However, both of this items are pretty much unused. In the current and past leagues, you find no characters via poe.ninja that use those items.

Lets first look at Umbilicus Immortalis. It makes your zombies and / or spectres use your flasks and you can not use your flasks yourself. With the use of different unique flasks you actually could increase your minions damage significantly, but the downside of not having flasks yourself is just too big. It is not worth to create a build that needs no flasks at all just to boost your minions damage. In addition the rest of the modifiers of Umbilicus Immortalis are pretty bad. To conclude Umbilicus Immortalis is an unused unique because the player is punished way to hard for using it.

Mother’s Embrace on the other hand seems to be a bit more usable, because it dont punishes the player as hard as Umbilicus Immortalis does. It makes your minions use your flasks when they are summoned with reduced flask charges used and increased flask duration for the minions. That means you dont lose the ability to use your flasks, but you are still going to get in trouble with your flasks. By design, this item should be used by builds that constantly summon minions. Builds that do that are mainly Skeletons and SRS, and you usualy summon a lot of them (especially for SRS). The result is that you will often be out of flasks, because 40% reduced flask charges used for minions is just not enough, and when you are out of flasks your newly summoned minions dont get any effect. To conclude Mother’s Embrace is an unused unique, because it’s effect does not really work for the builds it is designed to be used on.

Now here is my Proposal to change Mother’s Embrace (or possibly Umbilicus Immortalis), to make it a viable item: First, I think the effect should be brought down to just one flask. I’m thinking of something like „Your minions use your first flask when summoned“. Furthermore , there should be no flask charges used by the minions at all, so that the effect is used all the time. This would give minion builds that constantly summon minions the ability to give all the minions they summon one flask effect (probably from unique flasks like Bottled Faith, Lions Roar, Atziris Promise etc.). And if you think this effect is too good, you could balance the item by giving minions reduced flask duration, or making the player himself unable to use his first flask.

(And to be clear about that: Im not arguing that minion builds are weak and need a buff, I just want to make the unique usable to be used for some off-meta ideas)

Too good for the suggested change due to the worm flask and chains of command setup literally infinite worms and weapons spawning... it would be infinite

Too good for the suggested change due to the worm flask and chains of command setup literally infinite worms and weapons spawning... it would be infinite