Necro QOL - Add a "Control Minion" or "Teleport Minion" skill

General Discussion
1

As the title says, I believe Necromancer needs a “Control Minion” skill.

By this I mean a skill which you can assign to a hotkey or the mouse, and then click, and when you click/activate the ability, it then directs your currently summoned minions to the area you clicked, or directs them to attack the enemy that was selected.

Alternatively, if the issue is coding --then make the new skill and call it “Teleport Minion”, where it behaves the same as teleport does now with one caveat-- it should only teleport/command the minions of the necromancer, not the Necromancer as well.

I am not asking for a free teleport, just something to direct and better control the Necro minions more specifically. I am fine with the necro not having a direct teleport as a innate spell, but the minions need a way to be directed.

Personally, I would prefer a “Command Minion” rather than a teleport, as this means the minions can still get stuck in blocked doorways and environmental blockages and whatnot, I don’t want an “EZ-Mode” for minions, I just want literally any way to natively have some control.

Is there really anyone who thinks its a good thing that Necros have 0 control over their minions, and cannot direct them to attack a monster or even go to a specific location? Such as dodging around an aoe or poison or something? Its a critical part of the class fantasy, summoning and controlling minions.

As it is currently, the only possible way to get some control over your minions, is either a teleport staff/ammy, or an Enigma–and while I am fine with that being the only way to teleport both the Necromancer and the minions, I believe Necromancer 100% needs a skill that allows some more control over the movement of their minions.

What are your opinions? Do you really think that Necromancer was intended to have the ability to summon hordes of the dead (30+ minions, easily by the end of Normal mode), and then have absolutely 0 innate ability to control them in any way?

It’s a glaring hole in the class fantasy, and having some way to control the minions specifically would be wonderful.

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2

Indeed, for most classes enigma/teleport is about getting where you want to go faster. For summon necro, it makes the build actually function.

People literally just don’t use skeleton mages because they stand in the doorways and bring the game down to a slog.

Something like Command Skeletons from D3 that would make skeletons to pass through other minions to attack the selected target

something like turning into a spirit for a few seconds and bringing minions with and then appearing in the place you walked to.

An enemy targeted not-through-walls teleport with a cooldow like dragon flight.

A normal teleport with half the range and a 10 second couldown.

Lots of options, but something to mainly help reposition minions would be really nice.

3

I think they are already making Mercs/Minions TP to you if they are too far away in 2.4 no?

4

They already do that and have for a long time?

That’s not the issue. The issue is doing tombs and opening a door. Your skeleton mage steps into the door and starts shooting stuff in the room. Your whole army is kack blocked and you have to run really far away (mages sit and fire for a lot longer than a warrior will stay and fight) or just wait for first kill from one mage, corpse explode, and then resummon skeletons in the other side of the mage.

5

AI

  • Improved the reliability of pets, summons, and mercenaries teleporting to the player instead of being despawned

I think they are at least lowering the tether range to make it less annoying.

Personally I’d be fine with there just being a “pet move” hotkey. Maybe a “Merc attack” one as well.

6

Exactly, that is all I am asking for is as simple as a “Pet Move” hotkey, that just makes the minions walk over and congregate at the selected area or enemy, and then they can behave as normal and attack whatever is nearest, which would be the enemy that was clicked on.

I am fine with having to either walk my necro butt over to them, or teleport in order to get myself there, but control over minions is just so necessary that you quite literally have to find a teleport ammy/staff, or get enigma in order to have any semblance of control and survivability on higher difficulties. It is a baseline requirement to have to source a Teleport if you want to play necro at all, and it shouldn’t be (for controlling minions, at least).

Personally I’d be fine with there just being a “pet move” hotkey. Maybe a “Merc attack” one as well.

Yeah the ability in my head would indeed direct the mercs as well, basically it will tell any “minions” to move to the selected location, or move to then attack the selected monster (minions in this case meaning npc’s that follow you around and are on the pet/minion bar at the top left of the screen, such as the mercs, golems, druid summons, and necromancer summons).

7

That’s for when your Pride iron golem gets stuck five screens back and despawns instead of snapping to you like it’s supposed to.

Read the description of the problem and then please explain to me how that AI fix helps in any way. You are going to run back several screens just to get your mage out of a door, so that when you run back another one plugs the door again?

8

Just an assumption. It mentions mercs as well and as far as I know mercs don’t despawn.

9

You are 100% correct, the 2.4 minion fix is helpful for not losing your minions to despawn because of tether range, but not for minion control at all.

(Though Iron Golem is still bugged with the stupid Hostile bug. Meaning the IG will become hostile if it gets stuck on any terrain, and then gets killed by your other minions as it is now hostile–I’ve lost 3 Iron Golems in the last 3 days to this damn bug. You can’t even TP them away after they get stuck, because as soon as they get stuck and become hostile, they are removed from your pet bar at the top and can no longer do anything but get killed.)

As for the blocking the doorways and all that (and just skeleton mages in general), you are right it is extra extremely frustrating in the tombs and Arcane Sanctuary/Maggot Lair, and really anywhere with doorways or tunnels of some kind.

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10

Read the post above.

11

I think this you hit the nail on the head, this is the absolute best summation of my argument–enigma or a tp ammy/staff is 100% necessary to even function as a summon necromancer, its not about movement of the class or getting past hazards and areas faster, but to even have your minions hit something before it hits you, you have to have some way to TP, otherwise its a complete crap shoot if your minions will hit the monster attacking you, or just keep attacking something else, or they may choose to just not even attack at all and instead run into a corner and count the number of bricks in the wall for the entire fight.

The amount of times a monster breaks off from the pack to hit me, and I end up running back and forth past my minions and the pack of mobs to pray and hope to get them to notice and attack the thing that is chasing me, is very very high–sometimes it is fun, but I’d like a way to say “Clear the damn doorway” or “attack this guy chasing me”.

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12

It’s a problem not even druid summoners face. It is unique to the summon necro.

We need bodies to make new skeletons. A druids ravens can fly over wolves, and they can summon any of their minions at any place they want to, whenever they want to.

A wolf will never block a door and slow things down because they can drop their grizzly right next to the unraveller who keeps raising that one skeleton over and over.

This is why the necro needs a very limited, targeted approach to deal with minion positioning.

13

Initially I thought that will be the problem with everything you are suggesting, sadly. But I taught about something. When you reach your maximum number, what happens if you summon another skeleton, #1 die. And #2 is now #1. Instead of killing the #1, why they will not ‘‘teleport him’’? In fact, it could be a new skeleton and still kill #1, but because you already are 10/10 ( or whatever number ) in your summons, it does not take a corpse and cost a smaller amount of mana. The game already has a coding to do an action when you are maxed summons and you summons another one, they only need to change that specific situation to have a different mana value and no corpse. The mana cost still need to be enough high to avoid player spamming the skill to keep skeleton max life but no too high to be able to carry a good amount of them where you want them. It will not only help with their location but it will had to the gameplay.

I know it is not the best solution but I think it’s a developer-friendly solution.

14

Sorry for necro-ing ( what a irony :smiley: ) this now, when it is obvious it won’t happen ever but. I just wanted to add, that this one wouldn’t be much of a help, especialy i can’t count a situations from a single playthrough, where main source of my damage to get a first kill to use CE, is my merc, and he is very much of a lazy gipsy “covering” our backs while thin skelies try their best.

Areas like maggot lair(which is extreme) and other very choke pointy dungs are esentialy irelevant without TP.

But what drives me mad most ( i am beginer still without any source of TP) is act5, where my company prioritise to knock on doors or battering down an empty immortal tower, while i play matrix game dodgin projectiles or evading incoming melees.
That is just straight forward stupid.

I don’t know code, sure, but i doubt there is any formula ( or any effective and working one ) to make masters life priority 1.

15

Nice necro :ghost: :ghost: :zombie: Well since u couldnt resist the urge to raise this bunch of long forgotten bones from their grave i might aswell tell you that PoE1 has the perfect solution to this issue in form of a skill called convocation. This skill automatically recalls all ur summons to ur position instantly which would completely remove the need for teleport/enigma on summon builds since it has exactly the same effect just without teleporting.
Anyway we all know nothing will happen, game is in maintenance mode and with no monthly sub + the fact that this game probably sold like 99% of the copies it is ever gonna sell the chances of blizz spending any further time and money updating or adding new content/features are close to zero percent