We know that the D2 engine already supports persistent mobs because the iron golem is one. What are your opinions on making the Skeleton Warrior and Skeleton Mage persistent. The game would not have to store the exact skeleton values, but only their numbers. This would be 2 Byte of memory to the charfile as no one can have more than 255 skeletons of one type anyways. The game would only have to create X instances of the respective skeleton types on join every time.
This should greatly improve the QoL of the Summonmancer.
The Summonmancer definetely needs persistent Skeletons. I played a Summonmancer in Season 3, and it was really painful to resummon all Skeletons every game. I ended up not using summons at all in p8 games, only teleporting with the crowd and using CE. Thus, it truly didn’t feel like a Summonmancer.
Maybe something as simple as “banking” 50% (truncated to whole integer) of the skeletons corpses when you exit the game, that way you can raise half of your skeleton army for the next game. The “banked” corpses are always used first, they can be used in town, then you can use fresh corpses like normal afterwards to raise more skeletons.
I hate to play summoners - not my builds. But here I am to support it as I know that spending a minute on cold plains every game is a huge disadvantage.
90% of the game time you will have Pindles portal open, that’s effectively persistent skellies. The only time this is an inconvenience is when you are not to A5, in which case just go to A1 and kill some flayers
The only issue I see with persistent minions is snapshotting - get as much +skills as possible, including Battle Command and Skill Shrine, summon all your minions, then equip your standard farming gear, while keeping buffed minions forever (minus a few ones that die because of the lower skill level). The Druid would benefit from persistent minions even more than the Necro, because his power comes from quality of minions, not quantity.
That’d be yet another mandatory minmaxing - not fun at all, but still done tediously because of more DPS.
For this reason not only the number, but also all the stats of the minions should be recalculated on every skill level change.
There’s just a lot of quick-farm content I wouldn’t consider running with a summoner necro compared to another class thanks to this. This could really up the summon necromancer’s game.
It would suck some of the fun flavor out of Necros, but I suppose you could alternately change skeletons to just climb out of the ground, no bodies needed. Then the Necro could just summon up a hoard as easily as Druids summon up their zoo. That would just leave CE and Revive using bodies. And Poison Explosion, but lol.
Mechanically, it would be a good solution, but it would probably cause my inner creepy child to stare a bit more blankly into the void…
They’ve already done this with the persistent iron golem… everytime you leave/join a game… the lvl resets to the current amount of +skills you have equipped.
While we’re at it… make every golem persistent as well!
Sidenote: make fire golem worth casting and exploding or something lol… (lots of mana).
The only thing I can think of is cheating on mana, which makes it even less valuable to add anything at all to energy.
This would not be just QoL (like the original proposal, where skeletons persist through games, but still require corpses to resummon when killed), but a buff. A significant one against bosses, where each skeleton killed means a loss of DPS, and there are no corpses around to resummon them. It’d mean that skellies are essentially immortal, as they could be summoned out of thin air (not counting mana, but it’s a non-issue).
Druids do exactly that, but their minions are weaker than Necros’, so it’s quite balanced now.
Fire Golems already explode on death, and resummoning kills the previous one, so the mechanics is already there. The damage is pitiful, though (100 phys + 100 fire).
What about adding damage to skills, just like strength and dexterity increases damage of weapons (I know that no one pumps those stats except the dexazon, but at least it works in principle)?
If you played the game and did the quests, you could easily get bodies:
Act 5, just outside the gate are 4 bodies ready to be picked.
Act 5, Nihlathak … step into orange portal and can res as many skels depending on fcr … I can res 16 before they start standing up
the easiest lower level res of skels is act 1 right outside of town, easy kills.
Act 3 just outside town, when wanderer turns to 5 worms, easy kill, easy 5 bodies.
concentrate on getting certain skills first … Amplify Damage makes it easy to kill to get bodies.
Shop act 1 Akara for weaken or amp damage wands, even +to skel summon … I have seen +3 skel summon/+1 clay golem/+1 amp wands for sale there … take a bit to shop her
do act 1 outside of town, den of evil, and tristram runs a lot … pick up necro heads … many have +to skel mastery, others have amp damage skill and more …
always hire, equip, & use a mercenary and use a golem … helps to kill and gather initial army
find cow runs, let them kill all cows and leave, walk through looking for wands and necro heads … easy source of decent starter items for summon necros.
start with different character and save necro stuff as you find it and save it for when ready to build necro summoner.
**** So many ways to have a decent necro summoner. All it takes is a little effort.
My vote: NO to persistent skels. You already have a persistent merc, Iron Golem is already persistent. Face it, you’ll have to do a little actual work here, like it or not.
It requires so little effort and so little mana to gather an army … how easy do you want it?
.