Follower improvement suggestion for patch 2.7

General Discussion
1

The follower system is boring. Most of the time people run with Templar or Enchantress. AFAIK Scoundrel is rarely used in any build.

Currently, Follow only provide 50% damage reduction through unity and 85% damage increase through Oculus Ring.

So here is what I am suggesting. Different followers now support and buff different play style, Templar for RGK, Enchantress for trash clearing, and Scoundrel for speed farming.

To close the gap between solo and group play, followers now also provide around 20% damage, 40% damage reduction, and some utility function. All skills are now divided into 4 categories: Offensive, defensive, passive, and cooldown. This way the balancing is simpler and the choice becomes player favor instead of optimization.

Templar
Offensive: 20% increased damage / 30% elite damage
Defensive: 40% damage reduction / 50% melee damage reduction
Passive: 2% life per second / 50% control impair reduction
Cooldown: taunt / heal and break CC you when hit by control impair effect

Enchantress
Offensive: 30% elemental damage / 50% area damage
Defensive: 60% all resistance / 50% range damage reduction
Passive: resource generation (like the old templar passive) / 10% resource cost reduction
Cooldown: Group monster / provide 30% of your max life shield

Scoundrel
Offensive: 20% attack speed / 40% increased to monster at full health
Defensive: 40% dodge chance / 60% armor
Passive: 25% gold found and 5 yard pickup radiuc / 10% cooldown reduction
Cooldown: blind enemy / increase movement speed

Follower item:
All legendary follower items now make the follower cannot die. Instead all follower items have been redesigned to enhance skill of different categories.

Item 1: offensive skill is 30% stronger
Item 2: defensive skill is 30% stronger
Item 3: double the effect of passive skill
item 4: reduce the cooldown of cooldown skill by 50%

Item 1 will increase damage to around 26% and item 2 will increase defence to around 52%, which will be acceptable.

Asheara’s Vestments
(2) set: your follower gain assess to all passive skills
(3) set: gain the effect of unity without using one.
(4) set: You are now followed by all follower
This may be a bit overpowering and may make the set essential for the solo build. Some fine tuning may be needed.

Placing your own banner (flag) could work as “Command follower to location” (by Scáth)

12 Likes
2

Sounds interesting. 20-30% dmg increase wont close much gap between solo and groups though. Might hardly be noticeable.
Some new legendaries for followers, like oculus ring, would be nice as well for that reason.

Just going to repost my legendary proposals from the other thread. Dont really care how the items are designed though, but I do have a preference for items that are not simple +% dmg to everything.

Ring:
Enemies hit by a follower takes 50% more dmg for 3 seconds from the same dmg type (fire, lightning etc.)
(so a follower using a lightning sword, would make enemies take more lightning dmg etc. Also affected by their dmg skills of course)

Amulet:
Follower gets an aura
Templar: Might - Players affected deal 30% more dmg to enemies within 20 yards, chance to stun enemy for 1 second on hits.
Enchantress: Holy Freeze - enemies affected attacks 20% slower and deals 20% less dmg. Has a chance to randomly freeze enemies for 1 sec
Scoundrel: Blessed Aim - Players affected deal 30% more dmg to enemies at least 20 yards away, chance to stun enemy for 1 second on hits.

(alternatively, just have 3 items, so people can mix aura and follower as they want - though I’d be fine with having some consequence to which you use)

2 Likes
3

Thanks for posting this!

Overall I really like this.
I’ll just comment on a few things that I have some thought on, so when I don’t comment on something I probably think it is okay or even good!

So skills like the Templar’s Charge, Onslaught, or the Scoundrels Multishot, Vanish, Poison Arrow, Crippling Shot, etc are now baseline for the Followers?

If that is the case, then I think that would be great!

I think you mean 50% All Res and 60% Range Damage Reduction, right?

I see you took some inspiration from my suggestions from another of your threads.

If that was the case, you are welcome"

For that specific case I would also reword Unity to work this way:

Unity
50% of the damage you take is redirected to everyone in your group who wears this ring as well. The redirected damage is split evenly between the other wearers of this ring.

^^that way the additional damage reduction will not go above 50% even if you have 3 invulnerable followers.

I will post some of my suggestions below in a separate post, but I think your suggestions are well thought out and definitely would improve Followers.

4

Here are some of my ideas on how the Followers could get improved.

#1 Baseline Aura for every Follower

Give every Follower a Passive Baseline Aura that is always active regardless what skills you have chosen on the follower.

—> Scoundrel - the offensively-oriented Follower

Swiftness Aura

  • x% increased attack speed
  • x% increased movement speed (can go over cap)
  • maybe even x% critical hit chance as well (small amount only, like 2-3%)

—> Templar - the defensively-oriented Follower

Defender Aura

  • regenerates x% life every second
  • increases armor, resistances and life by ~x%

—> Enchantress - the resource-, utility- and CC-oriented Follower

Mystical Aura
—pick several or all of the following ones for this aura—

  • gain CC Immunity
  • x% increased resource re-/generation
  • x% coodown reduction
  • you can move through enemies unhindered
  • gain x% of your life as energy shield that replenishes over time after not having taken damage

Some of the other passive skills like the Scoundrels Hysteria & Anatomy, the Templar’s Loyalty & Inspire and the Enchantress’ Focused Mind & Missile Ward could get incorporated into these Aura’s, but that is fine.

Or these skills even can stay as they are and the aura could be an addition to these, and that would also work.

#2 New Legendary Follower Tokens

First, every Legendary Follower Token should include the ability for the Follower to be invulnerable.

Legendary Follower Token 1
Your Follower gains access to all skills and becomes invulnerable

Legendary Follower Token 2
The cooldown of your Followers skills is reduced by 50% and he/she becomes invulnerable.

Legendary Follower Token 3
Increases the effects of your Followers Baseline Aura by xx% and he/she becomes invulnerable. — assuming that something like a follower baseline aura has become a thing.

Legendary Follower Token 4
When you and your Follower encounter an elite, your follower starts raging, dealing 50.000% increased damage for ~10-15 seconds - this effect can only occur one all 90 seconds. Your follower also becomes invulnerable.

Legendary Follower Token 5
You can have all three Followers with you at the same time, if each of them wears this Token. Your Follower also becomes invulnerable.

Numbers are of course just examples for the purpose of illustration.

#3 Eventually Baseline certain Skills

—> Scoundrel

Baseline Multishot and Vanish

—> Templar

Baseline Heal and Taunt

—> Enchantress

Baseline Charm and Disorient

#4 Alternative to #3: Baseline ALL Active Skills and combine it with XelNagaIvan’s suggestions of only having Passive Skills in the Follower’s Skill Tree

Make all Active Skills the Followers have baseline and let there only be passive skills in the Followers Skill Tree like in XelNagaIvan’s proposal, although I would adjust his proposal a bit and lower the numbers overall:

—> Scoundrel

Row 1: attack speed / crit chance
Row 2: dodge chance /
Row 3: increased movement speed / slows down enemies you hit and that hit you
Row 4: (special): gold find / magic find

—> Templar

Row 1: elite damage / increased damage against rift guardian
Row 2: armor / all resistances
Row 3: life regeneration / x% increased healing from all sources
Row 4 (special): items become indestructible / pick up radius

—> Enchantress

Row 1: area damage / crit damage
Row 2: recharging energy shield (based on maximum life) / CC Immunity (or: move unhindered through enemies)
Row 3: cooldown reduction/ resource cost reduction
Row 4 (special): XP Bonus / faster town portal casting

And certainly combine all of that with the Baseline Aura.

ty!

2 Likes
5

Here’s my suggestion I posted many times already on forums, which greatly improves SOLO gameplay, rather than groups.

Just check the post and if you don’t I’ll just post again the most important things:

Asheara’s Vestments

Set Bonuses:

  • Each time your follower deals damage your damage taken is reduced by 5% up to 25% and your followers benefit from your equipped legendary gems (2 pieces)
  • Your follower benefits and gains 100% more from your paragon points. Followers also gain access to all skills and their cooldown reduced by 50%. (3 pieces)
  • Gain all followers at once and increase their max damage by 10000%. Each time a follower hits an enemy you deal 7500% increased damage for 5 seconds. You can have one follower to fight by your side when in a party and the damage boost is lowered to 1000% for your follower and 750% for you. (4 pieces)

Oculus Ring

NEW Legendary Bonus (effect): - redesigned

Increases your followers attack speed by 25% and all damage by 5000% when playing solo and by 5% and all damage by 500% when in a party. While equipped by a follower an area of focused power is created on your location which increases your damage by 70-85% everytime your follower kills (or hits?) an enemy.

The duration of the circle would be 5 seconds. The damage boosts in is lower in parties to prevent too much “power creep”…

Azurewrath

NEW Legendary Bonus (effect): - redesigned

Deal 600-750% more cold damage (additive and benefits cold skills and weapons with cold damage as well) and have a 25.0%-30.0% Chance to release a freezing mist that freezes for 3 seconds enemies in 25 yard radius and deals 850%-1000% cold damage every second. While equipped by a follower your chance to freeze is increased to 40%, but the damage done by freezing mist damage is lowered to 220%-250% cold damage every second.

You’ll still get 10.0%-15.0% Chance to Freeze on Hit (lowered from 20.0%-25.0%), but you won’t get Cold skills deal more damage, because it’s already in the legendary bonus (effect). This could be an example of a weapon that not only benefits you, but also your follower.

Few years ago I also wished followers would be as strong as our main chars, so I made this…:

https://i.ibb.co/zrHsVyP/NEW-ENCHANTRESS.png

2 Likes
6

Awesome!

The rest is nice as well, but I just wanted to point out that one specifically.
It is probably not going to happen, but it still is awesome!

1 Like
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Thanks, I know that the inventory slots look kinda too small, but whatever.

It’s sad that D3 RoS doesn’t have offline mode and mod support, cause we could probably make such changes by ourselves, if Blizz allowed it. Some players could probably come up with even better ideas…

1 Like
8

It would be great to see some of these implemented! The follower is a great place to balance things out between solo play and group play. Besides, followers are pretty useless right now anyways…

It should also be noted that the Oculus ring ‘bonus’ from followers does not work for all builds, eg. Hydra Wizard (Pet attacks do not proc the ring so those build do not get rings to stand in.) It would be nice if the bonuses provided by followers could be applied to all builds.

5 Likes
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I’m all for improving followers. I was against nerfing follower damage during the beta when people were complaining that “followers shouldn’t be able to kill the Skeleton King, our character is the hero”.

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It would have been cool if followers could equip items in all the same item slots as the player. But that is a bit out of scope for D3 changes.
Hopefully in D4 :slight_smile:

4 Likes
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I wonder if the mount in D4 will replace the traditional follower. :horse: :horse: :horse:

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I dont mind the mount one way or the other. But that would be disappointing.
Unless D4 goes into full butterfly fantasy mode, and the horse turns into a mercenary whenever we enter a dungeon… :smiley:

Follower/mercenary is one of the most iconic aspects of Diablo series tbh (well, 2 out of 3), in the sense of having something quite different from what most other A-RPGs have. Would be a shame if it isnt in D4.

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Yeah probably won’t, but anyway two more of my crazy ideas that I made when RoS came out…

Followers Traits:

https://i.ibb.co/yX5Lgc4/Followers-Traits-Alpha-2-1.png

Jewels:

https://i.ibb.co/59H1Z3B/Cold-Breeze-Jewel.jpg

3 Likes
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Interesting. Like Paragon for Followers.

hmm, if they get randomly generated, then I would say that they should have the same effect in every socket regardless of which item, like in D2.

That would also give them a bit more of an own identity aside from gems and runes. Or maybe that is just a bit of D2 nostalgia from my part.

But I definitely would want to have randomly generated jewels like in D2!

If you are interested, this here is my idea of gems and runes for D3:
https://imgur.com/vxNiCtz
https://imgur.com/ufD0VZB

If you wanna take inspiration from that, feel free to do so.

My idea was that gems have a different effect in every slot (weapon, armor, off-hand, jewelry), …

… while runes have the same effect in weapon, off-hand & jewelry, but a different effect in armor, while jewels have the same effect regardless where you socket them.

15

I have made something similar to your gems idea well actually stones I think, but I don’t have the pic anymore, at least can’t find it… I made it before RoS came out…

As for the jewels, yes all jewels would work like those from D2 LoD and each could be inserted in any item (with sockets) with random affixes.

The jewel I posted was just an example…

2 Likes
16

Not to downplay anyone’s ideas but we have to take into consideration the development cycle D3 is at the moment.

It seems HIGHLY unlikely we get anything more than number tweaks and some legendaries changed and I for one am ok with that.

17

Only?! Those are tremendous boosts.

I love the scoundrel BTW - his commentary is the best! :wink:

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The 50% dmg reduction generally comes at a high dmg cost for the player however. And the 85% dmg boost is under optimal conditions.

In the end, to reduce the gap between solo and groups, much much higher boosts from the follower would be required.

Yeah, we have gotten new legendary affixes too, so those also seem realistic. But a complete follower overhaul likely isnt.

You can get quite far through new legendaries the followers can use however.

1 Like
19

Agreed on the unity, and the Ocuclus (?) ring is very discriminatory towards mobile builds.

+1

20

interesting, do u have other picture for traits? I wounder what have u suggest for other tab.

1 Like