I saw in the patch notes that Howl from Below now gives Corpse Explosion the Summoning tag, and I immediately started theorycrafting a build to try on the PTR. I want to do an Army of the Dead build with Sanguivor and Howl because the visuals of all of the volatile skeletons with the vampiric curse souls look really cool, and corpse explosion should now benefit from Unyielding Commander during Army.
The thing is that a lot of the effects in the build only scale one particular aspect, so it’s hard to feel like it’s worth investing in more than one of the volatile skeleton effects. For example, Aspect of the Accursed Touch gives vulnerable and increases the vampiric souls’ damage, Howl from below increases Corpse explosion damage, and Sanguivor increases AotD damage. None of the volatile skeleton multipliers stack with each other so it feels like there is no payoff for investing in corpse explosion as your source of souls for Sanguivor, and on top of that Army of the Dead doesn’t even scale with Accursed Touch.
I think it would make the build feel a lot more cohesive if the itemization pieces had tighter synergy with one another. The words “Volatile Skeletons” are used with capitalization in a bunch of these skill but it isn’t a tag that any of the items speak to directly. Could it be a tag that Army of the Dead and Vampiric Souls get natively, and that Corpse explosion can get through Howl from Below? If so, then Howl and Accursed Touch can grant damage directly to Volatile Skeletons, and perhaps Sanguivor can grant damage to Volatile Skeletons for the duration of AotD based on the number of souls unleashed.
There is the bigger problem of Army of the Dead being the minon ultimate skill but not scaling at all with minions. But as a start could we at least have all of the volatile skeleton effects work well together and reward you for investing in them?
Hellbent Commander, Great Feast aspect and Unyielding commander all boost summon skill damage specifically.
Adding corpse explosion via Howl is a great change, especially with +summon damage tempers being one of the few that got buffed this PTR.
Sang should have been +Hellbent instead of +mastery from the get go in my opinion so it could actually buff the skill it’s enhancing as well as the rest of the summon damage toolkit (minions)
Change the affix from each stored soul increases damage to each stored soul increases summoning skill damage by (x) amount while AOTD is active, further juicing damage output with Unyielding commander
And it was bug that didn’t work previously no less.
Howl from Below needs to be a choice in the skill tree, Souls and other special summons should also be in the skill tree, we still have no summon base skill.
Uniques and aspects should change the way the different summons interact with one another.
Hand of Naz is a good start, giving us a unique that makes only mages possible.
Now we have to have summons that interact with our minions, use their damage multipliers (at least in part) and give ourselves something meaningful to do.
I am testing this build at the moment on the PTR.
You could either play with 14 mages and no Ultimate with Heir of Perdition or use AotD with Shako and 12 mages. You can use Tyrael’s Might for much more survivability.
In Season 9 we can use a blink effect from seasonal mechanics and in addition use the teleport rune and are quite fast for the first time.
But still, the skill I use the most is corpse explosion and it’s only to proc more lucky hits.
Imagine if these effects would get the minion tag also. Or more like through the skills that generate these effects. Like LE does with skills that has an option to summon something. Like Forge Strike, can summon Forged Weapons, and FS it self has te minion tag, meaning it benefits from some minion modifiers. Obviously there are some modifiers it does not benefit from because it is not actually a minion. But this way the entities it summons does benefit from them.
So like minion attack speed would increase Volatile Skeletons runs speed, and also the Simulacrum from Mortacrux would be a summon and a minion, INSTEAD OF a Macabre skills, and it will have a shorter fuse timer. Ofc minion armour and res won’t be benefiting or takeing effect on these entities, because their whole point is to deal damage when they die. So anything that says “your Minions”, will also effect them, not just the permanent minions.
Just, imagine… Just trying it once in a PTR, to see how it feels.
The problem with the summon tag is, that we only have one multi in our skill tree to work with summons and that in Hellbent Commander, which gives us up to an 2.5 times multi.
Neither Kalan’s Edict nor other minion related multies give us multiplicative damage for summons in general.
And Unyielding Commander and Great Feast are the only aspects that directly work with summon damage.