It’s not just that, though, it also gives you reduced cooldowns on your blood mist and blood wave. Plus iron maiden isn’t as good without minions, since all that damage has to be done to you. It’s possible the lucky hit chance with blood surge isn’t enough (though if it is hitting everyone around you twice, that means each cast that does full damage could generate 1.2 lucky hits on average, so you’d only need to cast it 5 times to reduce all cooldowns by 1). Still, that might cost so much essence that you can’t really gain much from it.
Bear in mind that having minions up means you have to spend an active skill slot on them, so the skills you suggested would require you to sacrifice all minions.
The book of the dead bonus on that sight aren’t updated yet. you get 15% shadow damage now for sacrificing warriors. This is a change I was asking for after the prior beta, so was very happy to see this changed in server slam. the 10% didn’t seem enough to give up those warriors. Also the shadow mages get extra attack every 5 attacks now instead of 6.
Yeah, a pure blood build would have to be minionless to make the most of it.
Honestly, only chose Iron Maiden to fill a 6th skill, and there aren’t any blood themed curses for some reason. Though, I suppose I could do a blood golem for the build and dismiss curses all together.
i made the blood build mostly cause i diddnt want to depend on skeles or any pets for that matter that might be very squishy without the talents . i choose to take those talent points that i feel would be wasted and put them into furthering the blood skills and getting the fortify and whatnot.
i also diddnt want to depend on minions i couldnt actually tell to target single targets or control at all really. i would love the cushion they give but at least in this scenario i control my damage and where the mobs go.
I’m not smart enough to crunch numbers, so I try things I see online, and go with the one that feels the most natural to me. For the beta, that was Icy Veins Sever/Surge build. For release, I’ll just play around until more builds become available. So when season 1 starts, I’ll have a plan.
Oh, I do that too! ^^ Even in D3, I’m still messing around with my necro build now that I have good gear. But the min-max builds usually give great starting points.
i will say i tested over the last 3 betas (i think or was it 2) anyways i tested most of the skills and know how they operate functionally so i have a better understanding of how they would play and then i think of scenarios i would get put in and how each would work.
given all that i kinda put into a build stuff like am i always ranged? am i always melee? what immunity or other cc break do i have?
little stuff like that.
i think youll be more invested if you do that research even with a pre formed build
So far, with a pure blood build, I see 2 approaches.
Either taking a curse, or taking a golem (obvs blood for theme).
However, if golem counts against the stand alone passive, not only are you down +30% crit damage, but you’re losing 2% damage from the passive. So, it’s a difficult thing to consider.
Does your golem do more than the 2% dmg you’re losing, and is not getting the +30% crit dmg worth having a tank…
My preference would be bone based or shadow based, but ultimately it’ll depend on what’s good for end game pvp, my expectation is more shadow based.
Decompose, blight, shadow corpse explosion, blood mist, shadow mages, decrepify being the skill layout I’d expect.
For leveling I’ll almost assuredly be bone spear based… Minions where already a liability vs bosses in the normal open beta, let alone server slam when they where rancid garbage, and while blood nova is good on its own, I prefer having better ranged abilities and blood spear still sucks.
That said it also depends what legendary items I get my grubby little paws on as well. I’ll respec to whatever is good/most efficient until end game and pvp.
I disagree. Althought the minions have a different purposes. Thorn based dmg on self, and on Defender Skeltal Warriors, and Blood golem, is a good fit for any blood build. You need those as meatshield, in a passive defensive layer style, your enemies kill themself on them, and you can heal them back with blood orbs.
Unless the game makes corpses more available Minion builds are gonan struggle in harder content.
They don’t seem to scale as much as other skills do and require a ton of points to buff just minions.
No way to control them is extremely limiting as they will eat every single dmg nuke and u will lack corpses/time to keep them all up and running if they are dying at a quick enoguh rate.
I enjoy minion builds (why I played em in D2 and i play em in POE) but from what betas have shown I have concerns for viability long term.
There are 2 full paragon pages that buffs minions and golems. We’ll see, if it will be enought or not. You got minion buffs like: armor, all elemental resist, max hp, attack speed, % dmg reduction, Also can buff these further with glyphs.
See, I was considering running blood golem in conjunction with stand alone. Since golem will most likely make up the 2% dmg loss, but then I can still get +40% to the bonuses from sacking warriors and mages.
