[New aura] Soul Link (minions)

I think it would be quite nice to have something of this sort:


Soul Link: Distributes damage received by minions evenly among all of them.


Skill level decreases overall damage received by 5%+1%*skill level or something like that.

Quality could give a small buff to minion speed or something.

Mana reservation could be flat since I doubt it will be that imbalanced, but it also could have something like 30-60% if the survivability bonus was good enough.



Constructive criticism welcome.

Why an aura and not a support gem?

Yea, it could be a support gem if the values were on a par with currently existing defensive support gems.

As an aura it would be a direct increase to minions' survivability, while as a support gem it would just be a choice to be made between the current support gems.

I honestly would prefer to have it as an aura, since it would not be very attractive to think if it would be better than, for example, a minion life gem. And then there is also that significant difference whenever it only works between one type of minions, and all of the minions (I doubt that many would find it attracting to support their spectres with the support gem type of soul link).

But yea... It is an option.

Auras are supposed to work on you and your party members too, not just your minions. GGG probably won't break that rule for one skill.

So if all minions take the same damage, and a summoner has 5 high-damage, low health specters and one tank, does that mean they essentially all turn into tanks, or does that mean that the tank would be rendered useless?


Either way, that would break the summoners.. Hardcore.

The Soul Link would pretty much make tanky spectres useless, since every minion takes same amount of damage.

The skill does this:

Let's say that you have 5 zombies & 2 spectres.
One spectre takes 1400 damage without Soul Link.
With Soul Link (lvl 1) on, all your minions would take (1400/7)*0.94=188 damage.

If all minions take same amount of damage at the same time (AoE), it would still reduce overall damage by the (5+gemlvl)%.

And I don't see how it would break the summoner if you actually had to drop one aura because of it.

Level progression could also be something like this:

(40+2*gemlevel)% Damage taken by minion split between all minions
(5+gemlevel)% Reduced overall damage taken by minions

"

KassuFin wrote:

The Soul Link would pretty much make tanky spectres useless, since every minion takes same amount of damage.

The skill does this:

Let's say that you have 5 zombies & 2 spectres.
One spectre takes 1400 damage without Soul Link.
With Soul Link (lvl 1) on, all your minions would take (1400/7)*0.94=188 damage.

If all minions take same amount of damage at the same time (AoE), it would still reduce overall damage by the (5+gemlvl)%.

And I don't see how it would break the summoner if you actually had to drop one aura because of it.

Well if that were the case you wouldn't need tanks anymore-- you could just have any many zombies/skeletons/minions/weapons/guardians as possible to spread the damage out and have them all do CRAZY damage and be unstoppable. This would not work.

Well yea, it seems that dominating blow, summon skeletons & animate weapon would probably make this a bit too imbalanced with vitality...

Would've been nice if it worked only for like zombies and spectres, but it would then be a bit too complex and senseless...

I guess it has to be a support gem then instead, working only for specific minions it is on.
Needs some tweaking on the numbers then also.

I don't think it should have the explicit damage reduction. That's what Purity and Determination are for, and damage sharing is already an amazing defensive ability. I'd make skill levels improve the percentage of shared damage, and probably start it much lower than 100%. I recall Warcraft 3's Spirit Link ability being incredibly useful even at 50% sharing. And consider that Mind over Matter, which is essentially the same principle (sharing damage over two pools instead of one) is considered quite powerful at 30%.

Of course, specific balance isn't something I claim expertise at, but yeah, 100% sharing seems huge.