Idea for skeleton positioning

Remove the stupid priest effect and makes the skeletons disassemble and fly to target location harming anything in path and reassemble.

Change the spell raise skeleton to skeletal priest

Skeletal priest

Minion Summon

Summon a skeleton from a corpse to fight for you, in addition briefly summon a skeletal priest to empower your Minions for 8 seconds increasing their damage by 50%x and healing them for 40% of their Maximum Life.

If all your skeletons have been summoned your skeletal priest can also direct your Minions attacks while consuming corpses automatically within range.

Note
The automatic corpse consumption would still require clicking the spell, but you would no longer be required to target corpses to consume for skeletal priest, therefore allowing you to direct your minions instead.

1 Like

If I were a developer and skill designer, what I would try to do is make a skill, that has two modes, that has different functions.

Mode 1: Raise Skeleton.
Essence:0
Cooldown:0
Raise Skeletons form Corpses untill you reach minion limit.

When you have all your skeletos summoned the skill changes to it’s second mode.

Mode 2: Command Skeleton.
Essence: 0
Cooldown: 8 seconds
When you reached your minion limit, target enemies to command your skeletons to attack the target, driveing your skeletons into a frenzy for 8 seconds(insert frenzied dead aspect here), dealing 50% increased damage and gaining 40% of their damage dealt as health.

1 Like

Another idea would be to use the season 9 / mercenary mechanic.
Let us choose one skill and whenever we use that skill, all minions will attack the same target.

And I would like to see the priest making all of our minions unstoppable for 2 or 3 seconds. I think having all of our damage being reduced to 0 and we have nothing to counter this is bad design.
I think the Sorcs Hydras cannot even be CCed.

1 Like

i like your version more :smiley:

1 Like

Thank you. Your idea was good too. I think mine is still a bit too complicated. The solution has to be more simple imo. But there are many ways to go, and this is just one of them.

What target?
This skill has a corpse as the target.
Do you want to change it?
Will it work on a controller?

I see no possibility this could work in close and ranged combat.
And of course a 8 second CD is terrible, if you miss your target, wait 8 seconds for another try.

1 Like

the idea is the spell has 2 modes.

mode 1 = raise skeleton

  • this has no CDR and requires a corpse to summon a skeleton

mode 2 kicks in when you are at maximum skeletons

mode 2 = command skeleton

  • it has a CDR of 8s - prevents you from spamming it to force more decision making on what to target and leaves your skeletons with a bit of autonomy
  • does not require a corpse and just adds the current bonuses raise skeleton has to this new version, ie heal/damage multi etc.

I am sure there are kinks in this idea that have not been thought of, but that’s what we have game dev’s for :smiley:

I do however think we need a targeting option due to how clunky and bug ridden the game is when it comes to what minions can and do attack. It can be absolutely infuriating on quite a few bosses and in almost every mode of the game. If there is a specific thing that needs attacking currently you can almost just forget about it.

Maybe read more carefuly?

Mode 1 targets corpses, mode 2 targets enemy NPCs.

Yeah it’s not perfectly thought out. It’s just a concept I made up in a few seconds. :laughing:

Why dont they copy from D3… its the best Minion Necro in terms of speed

Aside from the skeleton warriors did not deal damage yeah. I also prefered the passively summoning and than command them, that active passive format worked well.

But for some, summoning from corpses is a must for nostalgia reasons I guess.

Or don’t like the concept of the necrotic energies make unknown soldires of a long forgotten battle summoned from the ground, to aid the necromancer.

It has to be a fresh corpse of an enemy because that is how D2 did it, like we did not past that point in time, to addvance and use a more conveniet concept. So we wouldn’t have this problem now, because the D4 devs don’t know how to solve this problem.

I never liked the D3 Necromancer’s implementation of how their minions work. Only the Mages do any damage. The Skeleton Warriors and Golem are there to help facilitate damage but not do any real damage themselves.

The only thing I hate about the D3 Mages are that they aren’t really minions but are more like summoning damage skills. They’re really no different than the Wizard’s Hydras or the Demon Hunter’s Sentries. It doesn’t play like you’re commanding an army of the dead.

At least in D4, it plays like you actually have an army of minions at your command even if you actually don’t have the ability to command them. In many respects the D4 Minion Necromancer shares more similarities to the D3 Witch Doctor. The WD has many pets, but you don’t have the ability to control them.

Just like with the D4 Necromancer, you have to actively move around to try to position your pets to attack where you want them to. I played the WD almost exclusively in D3, so I’m very used playing pet builds where I don’t have the ability to command my minions. It’s why I don’t get overly upset that I can’t actively command my minions in D4 even though every other ARPG gives you the ability to do so.

That is why most WD mains avoided the pet build. Only pet build that become popular was the corpse spiders, because you had more controll over them. And I know for a fact-even though we gave up quickly-that we asked for controll over our pets, after seeing how the necro is capable of controlling skele warriors.

The one thing that realy sucked is that they weren’t permanent minions, but atleast they dealt good damage.

I only ever played barb early on in d3, then barb minions with the IK set at the start of reaper of souls before they added all the "bracers/gloves that make spell X do 2342352345235% more damage. Once those items came into the game and the game was balanced around them I had no choice but to dump barb minions and go full minion build with WD.
So like you I have always played minions with little to no control of them, both in PoE1 (crawler/cyclone pet build), d2 back in the day and D3.

However D4 is a bit different, which is it requires the player in quite a few cases (mostly bosses) to use his brain and target a specific thing/mob/boss etc, and this is where necro minions struggle… the brainless minions :smiley:

Some examples:

  • Pit bosses with adds like the Drowned Seahag, your minions will waste huge amounts of time targeting pointless adds which have huge amounts of health and you do zero damage to them because they are not properly debuffed. With Seahag its extremely bad because her minions love to go off screen, with other bosses you can normally handle them with tendrils or a vortex rune. However this makes one of these two options mandatory and does not always solve the issue.

  • Minions attacking random targets during boss stagger phases.

  • Andarial - you need to kill the pillar’s with maybe 1/4 or less of your army due to them standing outside of the dampening fields or simply attacking the wrong pillar.

  • Duriel - randomly attacking adds and not focusing on important targets.

  • Harbinger - attacking immune portals, attacking the wrong portals, ignoring the cage on the golden lion, not attacking specific bugged portals and focusing on pointless portals during boss phase.

Basically I think they need to either change these fights to be less frustrating for minion players or just fold and give minion players the ability to target specific enemies.

1 Like

I played that build a lot. The lack of control of those spiders were also an issue, but it was minimized because of their short life span and the ability to continuously flood the area of attack with more spiders. It was for a while the best boss killing build in the game before it got unjustifiably nerfed in the final balance patch before the game went into maintenance mode. If the Rift Guardian had a lot of adds like Hamelin, you were cooked as all your spiders went in separate directions leaving you very little left to actually deal with the boss.

Blizzard did add an ability to control some of the WD’s pets with the introduction of the Carnevil mask. That mask allowed us to have up to ten of our Fetishes shoot darts at the same target that we were aiming to hit. That ability did allow the Zunimassa Carnevil/Dagger of Darts build to be ranked consistently in the S tier on Maxroll’s tier list almost every season.

I do agree that with the way the D4 is designed, we need to have the same level of control of our minions as the Druid is able to have with their companions. I’ve been watching my friend play his Companion Druid this season, and the way he can make his werewolf companions ignore all the boss adds and have them concentrate only on the boss makes me extremely jealous.

1 Like

Someone in this forum, long time ago, did a amazing idea, but probably will never be implemented due to change book of the dead.

He suggested skeleton priest be a permanent minion, with some cool options in book of the dead (like warriors, mages and golems). They keep buffing using corpse around.

The raise skeleton button will be free to control minions after reach max skelleton, they can even put a special skill on use.