Animate Weapon

I like the idea of it. I don't like how fast the weapons evaporate...the weapons seem a bit weak.... why not just make them permanent and limit the number to say 7 - 10 weapons... if it ends up being that OP with other minions then make it so it can only be cast with a max amount of any minions say 3 zombies 4 weapons... 1 guardian 6 weapons etc...

I do like having a use for all those weapons I leave behind at first it was pretty cool ... then just sort of a novelty imo due to the short duration and weakness of the spell overall. I didn't use it lone to be honest I just found animate guardian and a skele totem to be much more effective.... casting on weapons asap and running looking for a pack to use them on got a bit annoying to be honest... great concept but the practicality... meh ... not so much there imo.

Out of curiosity, I thought I'd ask why Animate Weapon doesn't have a companion skill to take advantage of your inventory yet.

Call it Replicate Weapon. Replicate Weapon would create a copy of your current main-hand weapon and put it on the ground in front of you for around 10 to 15 seconds. To prevent abuse picking up the copy destroys it immediately. Use skill levels to limit the number of transmuted weapons available, possibly by giving it a use system like traps, but the cap increases. Further limit it with a moderately long recharge time for the uses (roughly 10 to 20 seconds), and there shouldn't be a problem.

A similar skill could be done for Animate Guardian, Replicate Armour, to make a copy of whatever you're wearing, copying more item types in one shot as you level it, as opposed to a use system. I'd still keep the moderately long cooldown, however.

Additionally, these skills could also be used to fuel another skill I had in mind, Shatter Item. Think Detonate Dead except the targets are items you're allowed to pick up, and the damage would be based on item level and rarity.

You should be able to cast animate weapon without targeting a particular weapon, like you can with corpse-targeting skills. That would make it much more usable in combat without having to resort to trigger gems.

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Crizisrf wrote:

4) Blue weapons, the kind we never pick up (and probably even coding a bot to pick them would be counterproductive) - they're always left behind. And yes... we can't animate this trash, so the more rarity we get... the less items we get to animate. That's a serious shortcomming, given that outside of stacking IIQ/IIR summoners have no proper scaling (that's the sepparate theme that needs a serious attention).

Agreed, this is a massive shortcoming, and one that makes Animate Weapon nothing more than a niche skill for most characters. It's a terrible design limitation, and the alpha testers should be slightly embarrassed for letting such a design 'feature' make it through testing.

I understand it not being able to work on rare weapons, since that would make it a good griefing skill (it's already a good griefing skill for some situations, but no need to make it better), and probably a good self-griefing skill too. :)
But not working on magic weapons is just poor design. It's like, "Hey, do you know what would be a good skill? This skill that you can't actually use very well because haha, f*ck you."

I understand that you can still use the skill on rare and magic weapons if you pick up the weapon first, then identify it, then drop it again (all of which requires point-and-click commands, there are no hotkeys for any of that). This means you might be able to carry around weapons and then drop them if you know a situation where they will be useful is coming up. But it does not mean you could ever use them in normal play.

Same here. Either it should work with magic weapons (with unidentified ones too), or it will be useless.

Month passed since skill introduction and we still have no clarification concerning AW defensive stats, still no answer about any plans to allow rare items animating. Seriously completly no attention to skill. Why reliase a broken version of something with potential to be cool is beyond me.

P.S. Tried minion resistance and minion hp, still dies way too fast. Completly no reason to play around them rather then play around broken burning miscreations and zombie snapshot mechanic. Saw ppls making animate guardian work (in lower map tier), AW - no so much.

I agree with what most people say in regards to this skill. It's meh.

I'd like to see this type of buff to the skill:

The weapons animate for 30 seconds. If the animated weapon is dropped to 0 hp in combat, the weapon and item are destroyed. If the weapon survives those 30 seconds, it is dropped back to the ground and can be stored or reanimated.

It would still be a clunky skill to use, but it would provide a much higher risk:reward aspect to the skill because you can cast aura's and buff a high quality weapon to help you. Also you wouldn't have such a currency sink using the skill properly.

I wonder, what if you will loose all the weapons, but they will be invulnerable for those 30 sec and don't attract aggro? Like druid ravens in d2.

The problem with this conceptually-awesome skill is that animated weapons are created less frequently than zombies (drops are rarer than corpses) but they last only as long as skeletons, and are fragile!

A few possible fixes:

- As the guy above me suggested, make the weapons invulnerable (might need to be tweaked for PvP). Maybe give them 50% damage reduction, or double their health.

- Make the weapons persistent a la Animate Guarduan, but cap the maximum number.

- Greatly increase their summon duration (90 sec at least)

Additional changes needed:

- Let us animate ranged weapons.

- Let us animate unidentified weapons. It's really annoying not being able to animate blues that I'd otherwise leave on the ground. Plus it discourages me from using any magic find.

still total useless skill..


1. Let us animate unidentified blue items! No one takes them up... And in maps i think the high ilvl ones are allocated.

2. Make that the skill animates an area and not just the weapon on the cursor. And maybe add something that allows to animate 2-4 weapons in an area and not just one.

Maybe with these changes it would be useful.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of taking this as a quest reward because I thought it sounded cool, without realizing how it worked. Now that I know, I wish I could get a do-over on that reward. The weapons die fairly quickly, seemingly a bit faster than zombies. But worse is how few opportunities there are to use it. You have to wait for a white melee weapon drop, or else carry around identified blue or yellow items to toss down when you want to animate them. Really not worth it.