Warbringer ascendancy: Ancestral Spirits needs an AI upgrade and possibly more.

Ancestral spirits has many many issues currently making it a VERY underwhelmingly ascendancy node.


1) The spirits AI: It's unclear if this is intended or not, but it appears that most of the minions summons, use most of their time either just idle walking around in circles, or doing some sort of animation in place, that seems related to the type of minion that it is.

For instance:

This spirit you summon, will often spent significant portion of his time upon being spawned, doing his chestpounding emote, effectively just stunning himself.


Another example:

This spirit will often start off using this particular move, where he uses most of his time alive simply channeling this buff for you in a very small area. I don't particularly understand what the purpose of this is, when the turtle simply passively has its effect as an aura around it.


1.5) Combat actions. Beyond these idle issues, the spirits also just seem to have very low interest in actually fighting. Many of them just wandering around in circles.

By extension, they also don't appear to draw any aggro at all. Testing with my character standing still and them being the only active ones attacking the enemy, the enemies will always rush my main character instead of dealing with the ones attacking them.


This creates very frustrating situations, where for instance one of the recommended support gems for Ancestral spirits, is inferno legion, which makes these minions deal fire damage in an AoE around them, equivalent to their max hp. Sounds like a cool idea and combo, given that you can scale their hp from both minion AND totem modifiers -- the issue is that since they don't draw aggro, and they just walk in circles or do moves seemingly targeting entirely random minions in view. This leads to you effectively almost never actually getting to deal damage with this aspect of the support gem, because the spirits don't really behave in a way where they stick close to enemies.


Additionally - the minions appear to simply disappear/die after using their skills once, regardless if the totem is still alive and his duration or not. For instance, the spirit gorilla after doing his charge, just fades out.



2) The damage. Their damage seems frankly missing? The tooltip seems to entirely just count additions to your characters attack. For instance my iron ring displays as giving the minions the added phys dmg, but only seemingly those types of modifers show up and display no other numbers when you summon them besides individual defensive stats, like their health, reductions and resistances, when they are alive.


Even tooltip issues aside, their damage seems WILDLY underwhelming, not just because they are having the issues with the AI as listed above, but also that the attacks seem very janky and often miss or have little to no effect. Like the gorilla spirit just charging a random single white mob and running off with them dealing 20-40% of their health in damage before going back to being idle and timing out.



3) Control: I imagine that this is probably a bug? But you also cannot control these minions with the direct minions keybind in the game. This would at least go some way towards helping you put them in a useful place, but they seem entirely to just act on their own, despite the tooltip not saying anything about these minions being uncontrollable.



Overall, they just feel like they do nothing. They don't really fight. When they do they deal no real damage. They don't draw aggro. The buffs they give are very short lived AND require you typically to be standing in a very specific spot.


If the intention of these spirits is simply to be support and not deal damage, i'd WAY rather see these be made into some sort of aura effect for your existing totems, rather than janky, uncontrollable minions that don't really do anything.

I Did some testing with Carrion Call, and they don't seem to take my resistances either, i'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong, or they are not considered my minions.

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ivanue#7934 wrote:

I Did some testing with Carrion Call, and they don't seem to take my resistances either, i'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong, or they are not considered my minions.

Yeah I keep testing them too and there are just so many things that I am confused about, especially regarding how their detailed dmg breakdown comes up with its numbers.



It seems that "adds X dmg to attacks" from ring directly IN SOME CASES, with an example of my Blackheart iron ring, immediately adds the chaos damage, but it fails to get the implicit addition of physical - initially, once I start dual wielding weapons and ONLY if I dual wield weapons, it will display this physical damage addition.

Some other cases where it DOES add damage to this display that I've noticed, is from the glove slot, with both treefingers added physical damage to attacks, as well as grip of winter's added cold damage to attacks, both show up directly.





Similarly, if I add this rare ring that I'm testing with, which adds physical and fire damage to attacks, it will ONLY obtain the fire damage mod. It will ignore the physical damage mod, until I start dual wielding later.


Interestingly, this ring also has a physical attack leech mod for mana, which apparently the totems also obtain according to the stat breakdown.




Whats interesting is then also, that if I am now to equip a weapon, it will show 0 benefits from weapons....



...HOWEVER, if I start dual wielding, suddenly it starts showing up even more weirdly.



Now it starts adding in the missing physical modifiers, from treefingers, blackheart ring any the rare ring. But this physical modifier ONLY shows up if I am dual wielding.







So yeah, it seems to count "to attacks" modifiers, in all cases but physical UNTIL you are dual wielding, then it starts showing up... Very confusing.

All minion AI and pathing needs a rework/change/upgrade/bump/boost etc etc.. lol fix MINIONS GGG!!!

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argoniashawks#7828 wrote:

All minion AI and pathing needs a rework/change/upgrade/bump/boost etc etc.. lol fix MINIONS GGG!!!

Possibly. My main character is a DD bloodmage, and my 5 brutes feel alright, aside from the obvious issues of them getting stuck in doors and close terrain and on urns etc, which just feels completely silly.


But beyond that, they atleast function. This... this just seems completely broken and like something is missing.


Their dmg feels like it doesn't exist, the way they interact with getting benefits as displayed above in some of my tests seems fairly odd and inconsistent between how you are playing the game, with physical stats only showing up when you dual wield... Shit is just very very weird.


Add to that as I went over in my initial comment on this, their AI just seems completely broken, with them often using significant portion of their time alive, simply emoting or doing random things like walking in circles.