I was curious about how Raven’s would perform endgame and also while leveling up. I just wanted to post some thoughts I had about the experience.
Leveling Up:
Damage on Raven’s is pretty good and was okay for leveling through normal (I didn’t play nightmare).
I felt like number of hits were too low. I only had enough time to get a few attacks in before I needed to re cast my ravens. I was able to get into an okay rhythm, but it didn’t feel great. I found a few other problems with number of hits:
- Multiple ravens attacking a target in sequence would waste an attack when the target died to the first or second hit (or killed by me/merc). To expand on that, the Raven attack animation is pretty slow, so it’s common for their target to die before their attack finishes and they waste an attack.
- They didn’t add enough CC OR damage to justify spending ~60% of the time casting them. Thats less of a problem late game when you have higher FCR.
- Raven’s attack moving targets but frequently miss because the target has moved away before the animation finishes. Between this and problem 1, I felt like they were averaging more like 2-3 attacks per Raven.
Late Game:
I maxed Raven, all Synergies, and used Wolves or the Bear depending on the situation.
I was thinking of ways to make Raven’s work endgame and I decided to try out a Lacerator for consistent Amp Damage as curses are the only way to boost their damage. This didn’t work out as well as I had hoped for a few reasons. First, they still miss a bunch of hits from monsters moving and its worse because of more frequent faster mobs in Hell. Second, Lacerator causes monsters to flee and very quickly. Decrepify is the better option for obvious reasons.
I was curious to see if a Fire Iron Wolf could Enchant the Raven’s. He definitely tries to Enchant them. I couldn’t tell if it worked or not. There was no fire animation on the birds when the spell was cast, and I don’t think they caused a fire animation attack. So, I assume they can’t be enchanted, but the Merc tries to, and this happens a lot as new birds are being summoned almost constantly. If this is a bug, hopefully it can be fixed, but better yet just let the Raven’s be enchanted.
Conclusion:
The biggest issue with Raven’s currently, based on how they act and preform, is the number of hits. They just waste too many for 5 to feel good. Early game cast speed is too low for 5 (2-3) hits to work, and damage isn’t high enough late game to spend that much time casting them (even with high FCR).
TLDR; 5 hits per Raven isn’t enough.