One real fix to the attack command problem would be fixing the priest, it’s a really bad design right now. What should happen is the priest be an additional summon that just does its heal ability by itself constantly as its attack and all. This would free up the raise command, so what would you use it for at that point?
That’s right! When you are at full minions, this would become your forced attack command, with the addition of the damage boost built in to that as a “focused attack” kind of ability that focuses them on a specific target and buffs their damage, you could even have it be a higher multiplier than it is now as well if you wanted. This solves the problem of a lack of a focus attack hotkey, as well as solves the annoyance that is having to constantly spam the priest at all times for what should have just been another minion on the screen from the start.
While we’re at it, AOTD needs to be redesigned too, always hated how that works. The new ultimate is absolutely required for content now so AOTD has no use, what it should do is just raise a bunch of extra minions that are RANDOM from any you could get from book of the dead, including the modifiers. This would mean you could have a mix of any/all of them at complete random which would make AOTD actually work like its name says and actually be a real minion ability, with the random summoned minions getting every base modifier for their damage and such as normal minions would (with something like mendeln perhaps being an exception of course).
There’s of course so much to fix with minion necro design that it would be a massive post to all the things that need to be fixed/redesigned/changed/combined and so on, but the lack of attack command is stupidly easy to fix that also fixes a pointless annoyance at the same time too as a bonus.
This is a good idea, but it will bring another problem with consume corpse passives and legendary node (since most minion build use priest to consume corpse and control the proc buff)
Unless the priests consume corpse every second instead wait the buff duration, anyway will remove our control over it, but is a very interesting idea.
I think the major problem to implement a exclusive button to control minion is because some people use controller to play (not me, i always play with KB x mouse).
I havent experience with controller to see how viable is.
So they could balance minion damage around using this button, which would lead it to being a requirement to killing stuff effectively. Basically minions need less damage if they are coordinated better, which is what the button would provide.
I don’t mean import this ability as it was in D2, rather add a “command button” of sorts that suggests minions go to X location, they would then attack which ever targets closest.
The priest would not consume corpses anymore for the heal, it would just be its ability while it is out. The corpse consumption could be tied to the new focused attack where it consumes a corpse to cause the damage buff to minions instead, which prevents any sort of issue with the priests auto heal.
“edit” To note, this also prevents the issue with an extra hotkey as you said for controller players, since the focus attack would simply be tied to the raise skeleton skill itself so it’s perfectly compatible with controller users too.
I actually like the idea of the priest being a permanent minion, but consuming corpses to heal and buff damage.
We still have an issue with phantom corpses due to the cleanup algo cleaning them up on the backend without notifying the client. Having a priest automatically consume corpses to provide a buff and then activating the command button requiring a corpse would be interesting as well.
Still, necro should always spawn with a full compliment of minions on death at the very least.
Case in point - I got killed in a t3 ht after moving up from T2 yesterday. The respawn put me smack in the middle of a pack and was instantly killed again and again because I use blood golem and have no way to taunt things off me. Minions would have given more targets than just me and I would have had more than 0.5 seconds to run away. I eventually got through it, but it took 3 deaths to do it.
If there are elites in the mix they target them first, if a shield mob comes or barrier mob they target them over elites. This can be adjusted by the player in options.
It’s not a bad idea. They’d just have to put annoying things like masses from hordes high up the list.
On a side note, I’ve been playing around with fel glutton as a way to keep the golem always off cooldown and as a way to keep corpses out of the cleanup routines. Seems to work insanely well. I know I gave up another offensive aspect to do it, but it did make life better - as in fewer times of clicking phantom corpses.
Another thing I noticed, and tested to verify, is that aphotic no longer seems to have its bugged interaction.
I spent about 20 minutes kicking soul rift off and timing the how long it took to reset and the times are nearly identical. can anyone else confirm this is true?
Soul rift is just pretty bad for a minion build. It really only helps heal no real damage. Switch to Army of the dead for the command to attack. If you are not using Soul rift with the affliction key passive, its a waste.
Except Soulrift solves all you problems, gives barrier, makes everything vulnerable, and gives damage increase and it is way more easy to maintain a 100% uptime.
Now AotD should give insane amount of barrier with high lucky hit chance, but you realy have to go out of your way to lower it’s CD enough. AotD realy misses an “Increased Duration” affix like Soulrift and Bone Storm. You will have to use CT to make enemies vuln again(CT is realy clunky with it’s animation time), and only gives dmg increase to your minions with an aspect, which is okay.
Too strong compared to what? It procs off 1 in 6 attacks. Its still a small aoe. The minion build only shines with 2 mythics and even then it doesn’t match a spiritborn using non ancestorial uniques that can be easily gambled and/or farmed.
Virtually every class has builds that outperforms the summoner necro on pit clears with less gear once you progress past 70s by a large margin…
My necros clear speed is, at minimum, double my rouge and spiritborn currently and they are less geared than the necro.
It’s literally a 30x bonus through Supreme Soulrift with virtually 100% uptime.
compared to the minion attacks themselves. When testing with just a single active Skeleton warrior, it hits for about 60k-100k and the ring non crits for 2.2mil+ and crit for 3mil+
This means minion damage in endgame is almost entirely just ring proc’s and your minions actual damage is non existent.
I too would like to see minions doing most of the damage. I just think the devs either have no idea how to do it or don’t care to. So for now, I’ll take what I can get.
We are getting there slowly, don’t forget seasons 0-3, where without mendeln doing a NMD100 was absolutely brutal and lilith was off the tables (until the mid season patch in season 3).
