Easiest band-aid fixes off the top of my head:
Permanent or longer spawning skeleton priest
- Speccing into the skeleton priest talent should allow your priest to stay active longer. Even giving the ability to resurrect a minion every x seconds.
Add more minion shadow damage
- Giving skeleton knights and golem shadow based abilities; there are nodes for shadow and minion synergy but no synergy between these two pets.
Bigger, probably never happen, blue-sky ideas
Giving Book of the Dead it’s own mini talent tree.
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Being able to specialize your minions (and even the buffs from their sacrifice) would feel a lot more rewarding than “Choose one of these 3 nodes”
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Speccing into minions from the main talent tree could then reward more points for your Book of the Dead. IE - “Your skeletal mages deal % more damage. You gain one additional skill point for your book of the dead.”
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This would eventually grant access to more powerful minions or playstyles at the bottom of the BoTD tree. For example: The ability to make Raise Dead command your skeletons to a target instead of raising a skeleton priest.
Seemed a bit silly to me that there was a last minute decision that minions “should not be a passive playstyle.” Yet, offering no meaningful way to control them.
4 Likes
Remove corpse generation from reapers and apply it to the hewed flesh passive in the core node for all pets.
Allow pets to pick up blood orbs
Change the stupid glow
Little bit of a stretch but since people cant seem to figure out the priest thing… make it a summoned minion with no attack that does supporty stuff and convert the activate button press to the command skeleton effect from d3
2 Likes
Create an entirely new code for AI cause right now it feels like it was imported from vanilla D2.
It is downright bad: enemy AI ignores your mobs and goes for you, your AI ignores enemy attackable mobs and goes for immune ones, golem pathing is simply running in a straight line from point A to point B and stand still if there is 1 fallen in the way.
6 Likes
A) Decompose and blight have increased minion damage.
B) The priest becoming an actual heal over time.
And C) Buff up all the minion legendarys/paragon board nodes.
I think if they did these three. It’d make a pure summoner build much much stronger. People that are using another build aren’t gonna pick minion paragon board. While they may use some minion legendarys to beef up there pets a little, it’d be better for them to just sacrifice them if you had to use the minion paragon builds for them to get there buffs.
So basically minion based paragon nodes beefed up quite a bit. Minion Legendary’s Beefed up a little, and the priest becoming a heal over time is the best bet.
This would give blight/decompse more reason to be used in minion builds, if the buffs are fairly good people are either gonna have to go pure summon build or full other build. For example make buff cult leader but make it so you have to have 3 minion types active and increase the minion damage buff, instead of for each one increasing it. Summon build needs to be an all or nothing type deal. To keep overly powerful hybrid builds from existing.
Builds have always been build one way, but they make minions to strong and they can give extremely heavy damage builds minions to soak damage why they get it, instead of having to play carefully(Carefully=Truck loads of damage). If people want to not have to play carefully then they’ll need to go full summon build but it still needs to survive enough, and pump out enough damage to be considered useful.
What they could do is buff up the sacrifice, and buff up minions. But make it work both ways. For each minion you have your spells damage is is reduced, but your minion is beefed up considerably. And buff up sacrifice so it’s more worth sacrificing everything than tyrying to keep them as sponges. Aka for summons Defense is the best Offense, and for non summoners Offense is the best offense.
I think making skeleton priest heal over timer the five seconds would help considerably, they could even, but to keep it balance they just need to select the skills that already buff pets or have pet interactions and make those interactions more useful. They tried to go with hybrid, you chose and left us with a few builds we can reliably choose from a numerous others that are nearly useless in the late game.
3 Likes
Simple fixes i would do:
Up the minion damage bonus from blight and drain essence
Make the skeleton priest heal an instant effect, not delayed.
Make essence drain serve as an “attack this target” ability.
And heck, why not make a leggo that converts all minion damage to shadow damage.
1 Like
Innate survivability seems to be the #1 issue. Yes, much later in the game there are tools to help deal with this, but needing to invest so much in minion survivability is part of why the damage sucks. This’d help earlier gameplay experience enormously as well.
Lack of ability to control minions and focus damage on relevant targets is also a major issue.
More advanced BoTD builds sounds really cool but more of a design philosophy overhaul.
2 Likes
Changing summon skeletons to “attack this target” when you have a full army rather than the priest.
Making the priest a standalone minion, summoned after warriors but before mages, who heals every 5 seconds (balanced downwards to address always being out, but still improved via the talent)
I would agree with these 2 suggestions
1 Like
1.Make summoner target as top priority, it is stupid that i can’t order my minons to attack specific target.
2.Summons must attack barricades, currently they are ignored, and i need to manualy destroy them by myself 
3.Increase max lvl of corpse generation % passive OR add more ways to get corpses.
2 Likes
How? Just adding a Pet Management.
I wanna bind in my damned keyboard WHERE my pets should go, WHO my pets should attacks, IF my pets should stop attacking.
“Big” content creator talk only about Druid and Barbarian (I wonder why).
Nobody talks about the Necromancer and their problems.
2 Likes
Until the core AI and play style of minions is fixed the other stuff in my opinion is redundant.
- Minions are a meat shield, they should be aggressive and attack mobs in the area.
- Mobs should not just ignore minions and charge through them to attack the player.
- Minions should not attack any mob which currently has “immune” tag
- Mob priority system. They should target bosses then elites then elite minions and then standard mobs in that order. Without the need for a player target command
- Minions should be attack barricades and quest items like those wailing host things in the story.
The above changes would all make a huge difference, in my opinion on how the class actually plays. After that we would then have to look at how the class feels and plays when a minion build plays like a minion build.
3 Likes
Giving us a better way to customize our minions. Lets call it a food cap of 12
Every minion is 1, you can pick anything
Priest is 2 and is a summonable like others and has a better heal
Golem is 3 (but you can have only one).
Items can increase your total food cap (boots and shield)
All skeleton damage is increased
bone mages no longer lose HP
Minions always leave corpses if they die and they respawn after you die on load up
Summon Skill increases attack damage/speed briefly and targets whatever monster it is used on.
1 Like
Mainly fix targeting, and fix the golems. They are buggy and broken. If they baseline worked, it would be more fun, but as of right now, summoner necro is not viable nor is it fun. Watching my Golem attack a fodder enemy off screen just makes me put my head in my hands and rethink why I’m playing summoner instead of sacrificing them.
1 Like
Drastically increased base survivability, such that you don’t need to use the minion paragon board for them to survive at higher levels of gameplay. Scrap the survival boosts in the minion boards, replacing them with additional offensive nodes. This would allow focused summoners to have powerful minions, while other builds could at least use their minions instead of being forced to sac them - although, sacrifice would probably still be optimal.
Reapers dealing shadow damage instead of physical. This would provide shadow builds with a strong alternative to sacrificing them, although it would probably require some adjustment to make sure it doesn’t become too strong. I can think of a few builds this would absolutely break.
Fix their bloody AI, and allow the bone brigade to properly occupy the attention of mobs like they used to.
3 Likes
I’m going to list off a few things already brought up by OP and others, but here goes:
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Give us a “summoning” skill cluster north of basic attacks that doesn’t require points to unlock, but simply unlocking each skill to invest into once you’ve gotten them from the book of the dead. Will allow us to get +summon skill levels from the amulet and +individual skills onto either boots or helmet (as both only have two skills currently). Also gives us the benefit of having an actual tangible upgrade pre-50, so that most of our skill points aren’t just littered throughout the passives.
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Make Reapers deal baseline shadow damage, and give us a legendary to convert any golem’s damage to shadow + some effect.
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Turn skull’s weapon bonus into +4-7% minion/companion/conjuring skill damage, instead of the wholly lacking life per kill. This would give us a weapon socket for niche builds like Necro summoners, Druid pet builds and Sorc hydra builds.
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Give us a third curse, that causes enemies to take a multiple of damage from our minions, and causes our minions to focus fire them. Alternatively, give us an innate skill to do as such. A new keybind likely not an option due to consoles.
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A couple more uniques specifically made for pure summoners. Marrowwalk, Leoric’s crown, leoric’s arm wand, Lidless wall. A bunch of existing unique monikers would work. They could be anything like “Gain movespeed per minion” with innate +summoning skills, “Enemies you basic are cursed with the target curse” and things like that. We currently have a unique ring I believe but it’s… lacking.
1 Like
Ive always thought Reapers should be doing less damage than skirmishers but in an aoe cone, shadow damage from Reapers and Shadow Mages should trigger shadowblight imho
We have to remember the game is on console; and therefore any suggestions need to work with the established game framework. New skills arent going to happen in response to balance issues, only stat changes and possibly secondary effects added on to existing skills and paragon nodes, or new Uniques added in.
Also remember there are two expansions planned, so additional skills may be added there.
For now suggestions ought to be constrained to the existing system. being able to direct minions with keystrokes isnt going to happen, as you have to limit it to how console controllers work.
Thats why the suggestion of adding the Priest as a summon, and changing summon skeletons to ‘attack this target’ once all minions have been summoned, rather than creating the current priest, might actually work.
Couple of “easy” improvements
Kalan’s Edict - Remove the “no damage taken” requirement. There is literally not a single other capstone skill that is removed because you take damage. No reason why one of the weakest specs has this on it.
Implement a priority system for summons targeting, this is in place of them giving us a target button, which I don’t think is going to happen anytime soon.
Boss(If “Boss” = “Immune” then target = “Thing that is granting immune”)
Elite
Elite minion
Normal minion
Then the reverse of this for monsters. Minions are higher priority then the player. Our skeleton army should be a meat wall between player and monsters.
Curses activate minion attacking. So cursing a group will make my minions head on in and start attacking.
honestly get rid of the “priest” heal thing and make that the kill command instead just have blood orbs heal them and have more ways for the necro to summon blood orbs
Here’s my suggestions:
- Fix AI…
- Seeing that there’s very little synergy between minions and our other skills, I’d actually add some minion themed skills. Ie:
Basic: Marks target, nearby minions focus the target, and next 5 minion attack hits on marked enemy does X bonus dmg, and generates 2-3 essence per hit.
Core: All minions focus the target/area with a “super move”, kinda like the cold mages blizzard. Maybe core being an empowered attack, that branches into either melee or mages make an improved super.
Macabre: Sacrifice a skeletal minion to give all minions and necromancer a bone shield, granting 15+5% per rank damage reduction, and Necromancers 5% + 1% per rank damage reduction for X seconds.
And so forth.
- I’d have Kailans edict be always on, as the requirement is just batshyte silly - also change to a mix of AS and dmg increase.
- Remove the weird requirements for the passives, and double or even triple the current passives, or at the very least a rebalance on paragon boards to help late game.
- Have the priest heal be either frontloaded, or at the very least an actual HoT.
- Necros are slow af, maybe give them a movementspeed buff/abillity somehow.
- And then something I forgot… Will update if I remember it!
This way we get to focus on being the undead commander, that a necromancer should be able to be. I hate current balancing - in D2 classes were wild in the power curves, and that’s part of what made it fun. I.e. nec/sorc were strong enough to get hell farming going easily enough with little gear farming in nightmare. Zealadin otoh, not so much.
Also not a fan of the current builder/spender system, as current builders feels like absolute dogshyte to use - if we could get to a point, where builders are no longer necessary, it would be fine, but we can’t unless we do some reaaally specific builds.
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