These changes would far way more sense to a sumon set. The clunkyness of rathma just increased with this bone spirit thing, just by making skele mages permanent would make the set light years better and funnier.
i will never agree with sets who require a macarena dance to aply damage.
The 30sec was based on Mundunugu also granting 30sec… I really enjoyed how relaxed such a long DR duration made the gameplay. I just don’t want to be stressed out after a long day of work and some of these sets just don’t have a reasonable window to keep buffs/debuffs up when I’m a little zoned out.
Just my preference of course but when I play a pet build, I want it to be mostly relaxing… else I’d play something where I do the damage myself so I’d be more engaged.
Me too… that was an oversight on my part from a copy and paste of the current set bonus wording. Definitely not how I want the set to behave.
Thank you.
Yes, those are ridiculously annoying sets. By all means require a certain condition be met but those conditions shouldn’t be arduous. There’s a reason why sets like UE are popular… they’re not frustrating to achieve the buffs and synergises with the way the set’s supported skills are meant to be played.
I think in higher level play it might be a bit more difficult to keep the Revives alive and against certain rift guardians it would be annoying, because you could not revive anything after they died.
Maybe just make Revives last forever and make them invulnerable.
Good point that.
So maybe the set would look like…
(2) Set:
Your minions reduce the cooldown of Army of the Dead by 0.25 second each time they deal damage.
(4) Set:
Revive and Skeletal Mages last last forever and all minions are invulnerable. You gain 80% damage reduction for 30 seconds after casting Army of the Dead.
(6) Set:
Minion damage is increased by 9000% for minion melee attacks and 4000% for minion ranged attacks. Army of the Dead damage is increased by 10,000%
I decided to change the 6pc so we can pick and choose whatever pet skills we want and not just to meet a quota. If we wanted a Revive and Golem build, we can (though probably not optimal). The 30 sec DR duration would give enough time to make non-optimal builds viable.
Yeah, that is much better.
The only caveat I would have is that build would just basically be you doing mostly nothing.
I personally would prefer a Hybrid Build, aka where one half of your damage comes from your minions and the other half from your own spells.
But your version of that set is certainly much much better the the current one.
RatRuns with Rathma and LoD Singularity need to be tackled via changes to Singularity and Reservoire itself, so I guess you theoretically could also apply the 9000% increased damage to ranged minions.
Rat runs shouldnt be removed in first place, farming paragons is part of the game. The other classes just dont have effective sets to keep rath pace except for GoD, so instead of balance the game and make the classes even and fun to farm, they just killed both sets.
I want Army of the Dead back, it was trash all along until they did this new PTR. AOTD creates that fantasy of having a LOT of skeletons at your comand. But the “new” gameplay with Land of the dead (again) and just spamming Bone spirit makes no sense. Please bring back AOTD gameplay and let Bone spirit as an alternative, but not the main gameplay, please!.
Because Rathma now is another LOTD dependant set and it’s boring right now.
Also the mages being permanent would be a nice change.
I get most of the post but…
How are rat runs dead? Everyone has been running LoD mages as Rats for many seasons. Rats have nothing to do with Rathmas set anymore, they just kept the name.
I get trying outside the box but adding bone spirit to Rathma does not make sense at all. Keep up the feedbacks brother!
Any interest I had in a Rathma re-work went out of the window with the nerfs to AotD. Now it’s just another LoD build which players keep saying they want less of constantly, but Devs want to keep forcing on us for some reason.
This problem is inherently due to the fact that corpse related builds MUST use LotD because it’s the only reliable way to generate corpses, especially when you reach the Rift Guardian. Blizzard could solve this problem simply by creating other alternative ways to reliably generate corpses.
Maybe they could buff Moribund Gauntlets so that all your minions shed corpses every second, instead of just the golem.
They could rework Mask of Scarlet Death so that the necromancer player sheds corpses every second.
They could rework Funerary Pick to give you a stacking corpse buff, allowing you to essentially carry corpses with you through the rift and use the stacks for corpse skills.
Perhaps reduce the pet damage a bit to 7000% for melee and ranged and bump AotD damage up to 15000%… or something similar in order to split the damage 50/50.
I personally don’t mind the pets doing all the damage… my fave build is still the old M6 sentry build. Still hurts thinking about how it got butchered.
Very much so. I like the concept of the Singularity rune but it’s too dominating.
Agree. I was also looking forward to a build where AotD and Revive were both viable. Then I realised that Revive under the first PTR change did no damage. Then they made AotD DOA with this latest change.
I really don’t understand why Bone Spirit wasn’t added to the Burning Carnival set… makes it more versatile and it would fit the projectile nature gameplay of that set. Leave Rathma as a pet set where the pets do the damage.
Seeing what they’ve done to Rathma just reminds me of how they originally butchered the M6 set… sentries did bugger all damage compared to you. It just kills the experience for pet build lovers.
Some interesting ideas there.
I don’t know wtf a rat run is…
But the rest is pretty spot-on.
All Blizzard had to do was create a diminishing return on the Rathma’s Shield buff that was really only useful for the Rathma’s set bonus effect…
But instead, as other users have stated, “its a ham-fisted solution” to a very easy to fix problem
Before the change, I already saw the potential for abuse, before I even updated my PTR. I tried it, and saw exactly what I predicted. So how a whole team of people missed it, I do not know.
All thety need to do is make the buff last 4 seconds, then 3.5, then 3, then 2.5…and so on, then reset the buff for 8-10 seconds, then its fine.
But instead they did a blanket change to the whole passive and ruined it for the entire class, and made the set not fun at all.
i see it was my bad sry
The current iteration of using AotD (pre CD nerf) and Command Skeletons to buff and focus damage should keep you fairly active tbh, but I think there’s a problem of minion design in general insofar as only golem actually does stuff rather than existing as a turret.
Some other ideas
and multiple other topics.
Details differ but the general itch to be scratched could’ve been satisfied by dropping this fixation on Bone Spirit and replacing that with “minion damage” in all instances it appears in this patch, otherwise leaving the set as it was in v1 of this PTR, and addressing Rathma’s Shield directly.
Failing to address problems directly is a theme of 2.7.0 it seems.
and also more exotic content, a complete rework of Bone Spirit
It looks to clunky now to even play. All i have to do is look at it and can tell. Bone spirits are a charge ya have to wait for while no other skills do damage and it looks more like a single target style. Damage reduction now comes at a cost of damage. It might work ok as a elite killer with a few support chars idk.
ngl it’s super clunky and I don’t care for it. However, it’s fair to point out you can p much reset the cooldown/charge count on Bone Spirit at will - it’s not really the thing you’re waiting on in this build.
There’s a few choke points to play here.
Initial Ramp-up Ten of your “minion buff” stacks (a not-inconsiderable proportion of your power) are reliant on available corpses. You can easily find yourself in situations where you can’t get started without being forced to carry specific skills (LotD) or runes (Flesh Golem/Gift of Death/etc). Also better hope you don’t die at a bad time as that’s effectively the end of your run if you were already struggling at full power.
Bone Spirit Wait Time You can reset Bone Spirit on command as long as you’re generating enough corpses without even taking a special skill, as Revive consumes corpses and the recharge cooldown on Bone Spirit is reduced by 1s for each corpse consumed. It’s still clunky, though. You’re forceibly resetting your power calculation and disrupting your only real defense (minion wall) every time you do this.
The biggest wait time is really the (optimally) five seconds of travel(Defiler)/distance (Zei’s). A lot can happen in five seconds and tbh the cooldowns and windows align poorly. See: Bonds of C’Lena. There isn’t much you can fit into that 10s window without making Land of the Dead mandatory and absolutely slamming a consumption skill (Revive or otherwise) to get out appreciably more than three casts.
No flex in play Even if they put the AotD damage bonus back on Bonds of C’Lena it doesn’t scale well at all compared to Bone Spirit in damage and would quickly become irrelevant at optimally one cast every…8 seconds? Maybe? Hanging your hopes on minions hitting stuff in D3 is a risky proposition even with necromancers even before you get into stun/root/pathing issues and just general minion behavior.
So all your damage is in one skill, fine. It’s common in D3 builds, but it’s a terrible skill with only one real option for runes because it’s otherwise a single-target ability and half that rune’s power is wasted since it freezes on impact by default anyway.
The rest of your bar is pretty much forced by the set as instead of buffing a range of skills, the buffs are contingent of having all those skills. You aren’t getting anywhere without Command Skeletons, Skeletal Mage, and Revive. You also obviously need AotD and Bone Spirit.
You have one skill slot which p much has to be LotD or golem but also has to be Devour because oh btw you’re also burning essence like crazy maintaining mages if you plan on doing any damage.
What you’re left with is a build that’s only significantly different from other necro builds in that it plays worse and has fewer options. This runs contrary to their stated goal with the redesign. It’s also a hot mess to play.
It was probably done for the same reason for why Blizzard was added to Winter Flurry to be a part of the Hydra build: because the skill was not used otherwise, so it was lumped into a “random” build just to make it useful.
I am not sure if a simple alternative way to generate Corpses is enough.
You can make it baseline for the Command Golem skill to always drop a corpse every second on all runes and give the Golem +1 additional Corpse per second via the legendary Golem Gauntlets, but LotD still would be too good.
I think that LotD needs to be reworked as well.
Something like this:
Yeah, these are also very good ideas.
Maybe the idea of letting all minions drop corpses on the Morbid Gauntlets instead of just the golem is better than just letting the golem drop corpses.