- Not really much in the way of love for Minions Necro.
- Affliction: Damage bonus capped at 400%. Ouch. There aren’t many builds that use affliction and only one that cares about affliction’s damage. And it’s barely breaking into t4. This kills the affliction build completely.
- Shadowblight might be something for leveling and low pits. Capped damage means that it will stop scaling at some point in the pits. Could be a boost for BCE, though. I can’t tell.
- Blood wave still one of the top builds, though dramaticlaly nerfed. Blood Spear now the top build, though minorly nerfed. Sever doesn’t get nerved, so it stays ~100. Minions caps in the 90’s, though massive mages may make a minion mendeln season a minor possibility. Sanguivor AotD in the 70’s, no buffs for that. Blue Necro might be doable.
All in all… pretty disappointing. I know you are trying to vary build damage sources, but multiplicative scaling is not really going to let that happen unless each damage source scales at the same rate. Getting people to use lessor used powers doesn’t just need you to nerf the top builds, but also requires the bottom builds be brought up enough to be worth running.
Affliction, Sanguivor, Infinimist, Blighted Corpse Explosion - all builds that need love.
And blood lance was severely weakened…
Minions Idk… I need test… But I think my loved bone golem thorns continues severely bugged/dead (I dont see any fix on notes).
All minions need is a targeting command now
Caping unproblematic thing makes no sense. Caping necro keypassives, while Sorc Combustion is doing infinite damage.
Blighted aspect should not reset every 6 seconds, and then Shadowblight might see a combe back.
Minions pushed above Pit 100. They were one of our strongest builds.
The new mage unique is questionable at best. We’ll have to see is they stay on target, and if they reset attack count after teleporting, because if they reset their attacks, it’s going to be less Mendeln procs. It’s still a net DPS loss when they teleport.
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The new gloves look incredible but there are a lot of knock on effects they will result for a minion build, from corpse production through to aspect juggling and mythic/unique selection. But for me personally as a “homebrew build player” it looks like a fun problem to solve.
lucky hit on gear now improving minion lucky hit is a nice buff.
as it stands with the the nerf to overpower damage, most of us minion builds in the pit used Ahu+zan to really push our damage, this is going to hurt a lot.
The loss of 150%x from boss powers is going to also hurt a lot, and as far as I can see the only replacement through the horadric powers is a 30%x which is not very effective on bosses without adds and 6% int will not cut it.
So getting 12-14 mages is a huge damage increase over the current mix of minion types, it looks like the loss of around 120%x (if you factor in horadric powers) is going to dampen that damage increase…
with all that said, a pure mage build is going to be an absolutely awful experience on andariel and harbinger, along with a handful of pit bosses. get those reports in if you go on the PTR or we will have an extremely frustrating experience on live.
I want to build another tank next season, but it looks like its going to be much much harder, as I myself being forced off grandfather in favour of a scythe, which loses me a lot of all stats for my paragon board, which in turn forces me onto shroud (all stats) instead of tyreal’s. Also tyreal’s is taking a nerf by the fact that the max all resist is no longer as much of a survival improvement as before due to max res going up to 75% and unique gems offering another +3% to max res.
Anyway im very excited about juggling gems and horadric powers along with the mage gloves and solving barrier generation.
Soulrift nerfed, not just losing the barrier but the damage as well.
That is a pretty big hit. While I agree that all of these buffs should not be consensed into one skill, there is no compensaton for it elsewhere. We lost our most reliable source of barrier and a decent damage buff.
Reliable source of barrier without an aspect. Remember we have Bone Storm as the strongest barrier there is, perhaps in the whole game.
That is the pont. Bone Storm needs an aspect that you will not be able to fit into any of the builds. Shielding Storm aspect should be an upgrade node not an aspect.
minions will produce a lot of barrier now with lucky hit reletively reliably, combine this with rune choices and the 30%x barrier gen from the horadric powers and you will have huge barrier gen.
I personally will miss the current boss power where fortify generated barrier, that was absolutely insane with minions. perma barrier and fortify all just from that power and tempering chance for your minions to to fortify for 3% on my amulet.
Soulrift is almost pointless now other then vuln and if your build has no synergy with the other ultimate choices then at least its 15%x.
Minions already got our LHC, what changed? Nothing. This does not create a choose between 2 good options(which would be the idyllic case, and devs should be working towards that), but choose the least bad one. They just F-ed up the whole class, none of the balance changes make sense, it realy shows they have no idea what they are doing, and weren’t thinking every change through thoroughly enough, yet again.
that’s what I thought… but apparently not? I spotted the following under the miscellaneous part of the patch notes.
- Summons, such as the Druid’s Companions and the Necromancer’s Minions, now inherit Lucky Hit and Overpower bonuses.
So either these “bonuses” are something other then more lucky hit chance on gear and other sources or something else.
I agree that nerfing both the barrier gen and multi from soulrift was overkill, because now what does it do? an ult to provide vuln? thats pretty bad. The 15%x is not reflecting an “ultimate ability” and the extra potions is just nonsense, no one cares about that.
But with that said soulrift needed a nerf, I would have said remove vuln from it or (not and!) the multi.
Anyway barrier will be an easy solution, but it won’t allow you to just stand in death and ignore mechanics completely.
I saw that, but that is allready how it works. They inherit all our stats, 100%.
well its quite possible they weren’t, and hopefully in S9 they will.
Either that or they just made a pointless patch note, which also has happened before.
Ironically I agree with this nerf. Necro have many ways do get barrier. Is a change that (starts) empower creativity… so is good path to me.
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I think if the nerfs go through the PTR unchanged, no Minion Necromancer build will use Soulrift now. You’re losing the two main reasons for using this ultimate skill: barrier protection and a large damage buff without needing to use a dedicated aspect. After the changes, you’re left with mostly resource generation and permanent vulnerability which makes using Soulrift much less enticing.
Instead of doing a modest nerf, they did the typical over nerfing and mostly killed it. I would be okay with either removing the barrier generation or reducing the damage buff but not both. If they had kept one of those two abilities as is, there is still use for Soulrift as you don’t need to dedicate an aspect slot to use it. What benefits that are left could still be useful if you use the QAX rune, but you could get both resource generation and vulnerability without having to resort to using the nerfed Soulrift.
So right now, I just can’t see myself using Soulrift for next season. I think our ultimate skill options will go back to using either AotD or Bone Storm again just like in Season 5 before Soulrift was introduced in Season 6. Too bad they couldn’t balance it correctly so all three ultimate skills were equal build options instead of only giving us two realistic options again.
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the issue with this is to make them good you need to use an aspect for each. in pits I see 100% uptime on AotD being easy so that would probably be worth it if u run the aspect on your amulet (weapon will obviously be service and sacrifice) and with bonestorm you need to have a free defensive slot which is hard as legs are probably still bloodmoon if you want the crit damage + free curses and hellbent.
So i see myself probably using the nerfed soulrift still… but honestly im trying not to think about it to much as i find if i get to into the PTR i ruin my live server experience.
Way I see it, Soulrift wasn’t intended to be the Minion ultimate but it became that because the bonuses were too good, and they were too good to the point to where you weren’t thinking about using anything else but that. You as a player are supposed to be reviewing your choices, weighing their pros and cons, seeing what’s right for you. Not picking 1 thing that’s the best no matter what. Cause then that’s not a real choice.
Ultimately I think Soulrift will be just fine, but used for what it was intended for, Darkness/Shadow damage builds (which incl minion variations).
I don’t disagree either. But there is no same level of compensation again.
Keep in mind, that for the maximum effect, you have to use Ultimate Shadow aspect as well, otherwise you only get 50 % of the barrier generation.
Now we have as an defensive Ultimate:
- Blood Wave for 20 % damage reduction.
- Army of the Dead with High Lucky Hit chance for more Necrotic Fortitude procs to get barrier.
- Soulrift to get enough Essence to spam Blight to proc Necrotic Fortitude.
- Bone Storm with additional one or two aspects to get barrier.
- Or test decompose with high lucky hit chance or Corpse Explosion with a faster cast time but lower lucky hit chance to trigger Necrotic Fortitude.
It’s possible that the best Ultimate for Minion Necros in Season 9 is not using one at all.
But what I like are the Minion changes with the Hand of Naza and the changes to Shadowblight.
You don’t need Shadow dot (corrupting) damage any longer, just stack enough Shadow damage.
- You start with 200 % weapon base damage.
- 300 % bonus will bring you to 800 % weapon damage.
- Aspect of decay will bring you to 4800 % weapon damage.
- Blighted is a bit of a mystery. Is that bonus global or per mob?
If it’s global, this could get really high, I think about 15 procs of Shadowblight per second and per mob are possible.
Ebonpiercer doing 4 projectile dots over 3 seconds, that’s 24 procs (4 projectiles, 3 simultaneous dots, 2 ticks per second) per second, 13 for Blight - that’s 37.
100 % attack speed, than it’s 74.
Cast twice, that’s 148.
Devided by 8, because Shadowblight only proc’s every 8th damage instance. In total 18.5 Shadowblight procs.
Over 6 seconds that’s 111 procs per mob, which would be up to a multiplicative bonus of 2775%x.
- With a 27755 %x damage boost we get up to 29 times the damage, that’s 139,200 % weapon damage, not including other additive and multiplicative damage boosts.
I used Bonestorm with my Bonegolem full time too before soulrift comes. I loved it…
On PTR (and maybe after) I’ll probably go back to using it as my main generation.