Minion Balance Changes in The Fall of Oriath Beta

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Tarttycat wrote:

Show loves to summoners.

It makes me notice that Dominating blow is still useless,no one can make a viable build with such ridiculous mechanic.

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Dramatis_Persona wrote:

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innervation wrote:

I knew there was a good reason I kept putting off playing a minion build. Changes seem good. Anyone who regularly plays minions, can you give some context on these changes? Are minions really this underpowered that they need buffs on this scale? (I know skeletons are). Does more damage even help? I though minion builds clear speeds were more a function of minion move speed, attack speed, and AI limitations. I see spectres can get more move speed, but what about the other minions, and are there any plans to give zombies/spectres/skeletons the ability to be 'aggressive' like that one golem jewel?

I've been playing as an undead summoning necromancer almost exclusively in every league I've played in since I started over a year ago. And when I say that I play a minion build, I go all the way with it, without even leaving my summoner a button to attack with on her own (Lightning Warp is her only non minion spell and mostly used to warp somewhere, warp in my army with convocation, and then warp away to somewhere safe). So my minions do everything for me, and I just buff them with sacrifices as the situation requires.

To be honest, I've always been pleasantly surprised with how powerful minions are in this game compared with, say, the Diablo series where they mostly form a scrimmage line as the Witch Doctor or Necromancer actually does all the killing with their spells. PoE is the first of this type of game that I've played where you really can be assume the role of commander of an Army of Darkness, which I think is very cool. I've never felt that my undead minions didn't do enough damage. Indeed, not until I played through most of the game as another build did I even get a chance to see the elaborate spells of most of the bosses, as my minions normally hacked them to pieces before I could even tell what was happening. I haven't ever been able to devote enough time in a league to get far into Merciless, but at least by Cruel, my Witch has become the weakest link in my army by a large margin. I don’t mind this myself, and I did choose to buff them with support gems and skills, but I’m actually a little surprised by how big that gap is allowed to become, considering they have the advantage of allowing you to kill stuff while you literally do nothing but run away, which is very low risk. Normally I would expect that sort of risk reduction to have a trade off in time or some other reward, but as I mentioned, they kill stuff way faster than I can on my own while I need to jump around and dodge too. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve completed a master mission lying bleeding on the floor as I watch my minions win the battle for me a couple of minutes later.

I’d like to be clear that none of this is a bad thing, in my eyes. I like being able to play a minion exclusive build as a viable option. But to answer the original poster, I’ve never much felt that my minions weren’t clearing out rooms fast enough – maybe that’s something people encounter in the endgame. I will say that one thing I like about minion builds in all of these sort of games is that they seem less dependent on finding the right gear to be effective, but maybe in the long term that also may limit their power.

As a minion player, I can think of a few changes that would be nice. For one, being able to tell exactly how much damage my minions are doing, which has always been a bit opaque (though that spreadsheet seems to be what I wanted there, even though the info will be obsolete shortly). The biggest annoyance I have in my minion builds is that I feel I can’t equip an alternate set of weapons because if I have minion gems slotted in those weapons or those weapons increase the number of minions, they immediately die the moment I switch to my alternate set. It would be nice if your minions stayed alive when the gems and abilities they depended upon switched to the other set but not actually taken off your character (though I am glad that you can at least bind another spell to a hotkey after summoning a minion, in other games it always bothered me how this created an unusable button for the rest of the play session after you summoned a minion)

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Swazlee wrote:

Also, doesn't this just kill the new "The Baron" unique?

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willeke wrote:

When looked at my friends list at the first week of legacy, every single one of them played summoner ... I really don't understand this buffs. Summoner already facerolling everything with low budget cost and low risks of survivability.

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broarmy2345 wrote:

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chieftainkys wrote:

Is this for real? Are you NERFING Summon Skeletons? WOW. And here I'm leveling a Skele Summoner in LSC thinking at least one of my characters won't be nerfed to shit into 3.0. May as well just dump it now.

what in the fuck are you on about? you realize that 2.6 and 3.0 are different leagues and nothing will carry over into FoO temp league? If you want to just "dump it now" then you don't even like the build to begin with, why are you playing it? If i told you it will be nerfed in patch 203.5, would you care enough to "just dump it now"? or would it not matter because its in a couple centuries and currently has no effect on the game?

Edit: changed patch 203.5 to be scheduled in centuries

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Malone wrote:

1) summon skeleton

THe nerf is quite weird, it's not really used for the moment.

2) Zombie

Zombie does already enough damage and is globally fine, no need for a up

3) what about non-undead minion like golems ? Lightning / Cold golems need severe rework. Animate Weapon is broken as shit and need to be rebalanced.