Why bother with mages, just give us some skelly archers and it’d fit better into the Necro kit.
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Skelly archers deal mostly physical damage and a little bit of elemental damage. Moving the ‘ranged’ minion to a physical damage dealer will increase the damage a summoner does exponentially. It would not simply be a buff to the summoner it would virtually double the damage a summoner can do.
At high levels skellys can pump out 30K dps while mages are maxing out at 8K dps. Making it archers would basically make the 8K dps about 30K as well meaning a fully summoners minions would go from 38K dps to 60K dps.
It would also vastly reduce the elemental damage the summoner does moving most of their damage to physical.
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Considering that fire sorc builds can go roughly 50k damage but have the drawback of fire immunes, skelly archers shouldn’t have an impact since Stone Skin/Physical Immunes are existent in the game. Plus, even with the current improvements to skelly mages on the PTR they are still lacking in damage. I wouldn’t mind if the archers did less damage than warriors, it’d be something better than the mages at least.
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Elemental damage isn’t as important to fishymancers as Amplify Damage breaks physical immunity and they can’t have both that and Lower Resistance at the same time. Mages are terrible even with LR so fishymancers would jump at the chance to have skeleton archers instead of mags.
No, amp+CE combo is important. Skele warriors are just to make the first kill, so you can blow everything up. So why couldn’t mages be as good as warriors, whit LS?
Imagine a fishymancer whit only mages, a fire golem whit LS+CE, being equaly strong as whit only warriors, a clay golem whit amp+CE.
Agree with Rondel… D2R would be more varied and interesting if there were two types of summon necromancer:
- Physical summon necro - Skele warriors + amp damage
- Elemental summon necro - Skele mages + lower resist
Necros already create a huge amount of on-screen clutter… I hate playing in games with summon necros…
Last thing I think the game needs is for the game to incentivize a build with max skele warriors, max skele mages, and max revives…
Skills and synergies should encourage players to specialise in ONE of those abilities… That will be the most interesting and help limint on-screen clutter…
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As of the PTR, the mage + lower resist combo just isn’t as powerful as warrior + amplify damage combo. It’s not even close. If we want a mage + LR only necro to be viable then either mages or LR need to be buffed a lot.
The game with the current mechanics can’t really support mages getting as strong as skellies without making them extremely OP in Normal/NM. This is because of the way additional damage works. For physical damage there are a lot of items, runewords, skills that add a % of extra damage while only one thing, amp damage, that lowers the monsters physical resistance. We can stack a ton of % to extra damage because we have the aura’s, etc to do so.
Milox’s post below outlines it nicely.
On the elemental damage side there are only items/skills that lower the monsters resistances but nothing that will add a % damage to elemental summons. This means we can only lower the resists of a monster to -100 and we hit a hard cap on the ‘additional’ damage that elemental summons do. You could potentially make them stronger from the start but that will lead to very much OP mages once you drop 20 pts into them by the end of normal.
I’ve been thinking about adding in a ‘mastery’ to the mages after lvl 20. So at lvl 21 mages you get something similar to fire mastery adding a % extra damage for more points over 20. This makes them stronger only with additional points to a maxed skill.
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