Spectres huge missed opportunity and what they revealed to me about monster design in general

There are two major points I want to make here after testing and they are as follows:

1) Huge missed opportunity to make Spectres fun to play with and obtain more engaging combat with minions at the same time.

As mentioned by GGG as well, some monsters that you can use as a Spectre have different skills they use which is really awesome and good.. despite that however... you don't get to use them yourself.

There's one particular example that comes to mind from my limited testing which was the monster called Faridun Impaler. It has at least 3 skills from what I could tell, this minion alone would be able to give us 3 skills to put on our skill bar and use actively and possibly in combination with something else depending on what effects they could provide.

That being said, I feel like a lot of these skills might need to have cooldowns/longer cooldowns and be more powerful in Spectre format.

Now some might argue, what if I want to use a lot of different minions, they added a support gem for that explicit purpose after all and it is indeed a cool idea. There's a simple fix to that too.... just have the option to have them on "auto-cast" individually if you don't wish to engage with that. Same as there needs to be an option to use the skills on all minions of the same type at once if you so desire. You could have certain limitations that adapt to what the player does that would limit what skills would be able to be put on auto-cast at any given time.

Now, with the Faridun Impaler in mind, I will move to the second point.

2) A lot of monster design feels a bit lackluster to me

After engaging in the hunt for Spectres, I quickly noticed something that I didn't notice before, and that was a certain lack of depth to most monsters designs, with a few outliers (such as that Faridun Impaler I mentioned before).

What I noticed was that most monsters have an ability they use once when there's distance between them and the player (Either some sort of dash or a ranged ability) and then proceed to basically using melee auto-attacks on you till you or they die, basically sticking to you like glue if they are able to.

I strongly believe this is in part causing the swarming issue people are having with monsters, but it's obviously a bit more complicated then that.

Now this wouldn't be a huge issue if it was only white trash monsters doing this as you could argue they are made to be killed fairly easily with AOE abilities but there doesn't seem to be a difference between more powerful variants of those monsters (blue and rare variants) although I do believe there might be some outliers for some rares.

HOWEVER.. the way mods currently work on monsters make those significantly more dangerous and able to swarm players and kill them without them having much of an option in terms of reaction or some sort of skilled response. If the only answer to that encounter was: I could only pass these mobs with more damage or more defenses and no other way... then there's a clear issue here.

Monster mods shouldn't be about beefing up stats or giving them generalized abilities that have nothing to do with that individual monster.

This is one of those things brought from PoE1 that is very bad for PoE2.

This brings me to a suggestion towards this issue:

Blue status and Rare status should give those monsters new abilities unique to their monster type, thus making encounters with them more meaningful combat-wise.

For example, Blue variants of a white monster should have one or two extra abilities that are well telegraphed and can be reacted to, while Rares should have two or three extra abilities. To keep players on their toes, each monster type should have a pool of skills they can "pick from" randomly when they are generated.

I know how that sounds.... like an insane amount of work, but I don't think there's a better, easier way to do this. And usually taking the easy way out doesn't give the best results. Some skills could be reused between different similar types of enemies to alleviate that.

Taking the easy way out means putting rare mods from PoE1 to PoE2 such as the one that gives the blue mana drain circle around a Rare and calling it a proper challenge when it is obviously a very poor design choice.

I recall Jonathan saying at one point that Rares are supposed to be like mini-bosses of sort... for that to happen, they have to be and act very similar to bosses, like my suggestion implies, if they are to be a proper challenge to overcome with skill and not only numbers.