I have given Kormac, the tanking follower, a thorns-based build, but he doesn’t have an entry on his stats sheet for thorns damage. We have a lot of experts here; fascinating reading every evening. Do any of you know if the Templar benefits from defensive thorns at all?
If so, does he also benefit from the offensive thorns-boosting equipment affixes, such as that on the weapon Hack, which delivers x% of your total thorns with each attack?
TIA
The issue is that even if he does cause Thorns damage to mobs that hit him, it’s going to be incredibly inconsequential amounts of damage at higher difficulty levels. As an example, a nicely geared Invoker Crusader might have 300-350K Thorns but they have massive multipliers to the amount of thorns damage generated, a Templar doesn’t. Even assuming he could get 300K Thorns, that’s exactly how much damage he’d cause to a mob hitting him. When mobs at higher difficulties have trillions / quadrillions of health, knocking off 300K per hit would take days to kill them.
He’s there for the healing, increased resource generation and, possibly, an extra cheat death for your hero, plus whatever bonuses he can confer by emanating items. Followers don’t do any meaningful damage.
The thorns don’t show on their character sheet, but it does work. But as Meteorblade wrote you can’t accumulate enough to be helpful. Once I stacked thorns on a templar, plus Hack and Heart of Iron, and lots of vitality, but the highest difficulty was T8 where it was viable.
Thank you both, Meteorblade and Indian. You gave me exactly the kind of answer I was looking for!