Historical context only matters to long time player, not really new players. When I think about the name “Necromancer” I think about raising the dead. Also, there is no artificial boundary between a minion build and these abilities. In fact, it would be cool if they can be integrated into a minion build one way or another.
What I also want to see is something like what they did for companion druid. Druid companions can actually gain skill tags like Storm/Werewolf from their aspects/gears, which opens new ways to play the build and more scaling options for them. The Storm’s Companion pants is a perfect example of not throwing a boring buff like +50% damage, instead indirectly buffing the building by allowing new scaling options.
It is a subjective statement. I put it out there because I sense you’re coming from a long time player’s perspective. I want you to see it from someone who doesn’t know much about the game’s history, only picking a class from because of the class name
Let them balance each direction first, and then we can talk about hybrids.
I’m not saying they should allow us to scale them together immediately. They should at least not limit the minion build to things like having only one good core skill Blight, useless interaction like having a ring that auto trigger minion buff and corpse explosion yet corpse explosion doesn’t scale at all.
You know what I’m grateful for, I wasn’t going to play this season because of the completely silly PTR version of AotD, but I did and its turned out a lot of fun!
With the bugged ring this has ended up being one of my favorite seasons as minions are strong and doing most of the damage and I am not casting a single spammy damage spell like BCE or blight. Now for higher pits I am kind of forced into maybe using Blight and helm of perdition, but since I’m not doing that… im actually playing fully passive, just casting my ult (soul harvest), buffing minions (which they do not receive due to a bug LOL), bone prison and tendrils. I am basically just “crowd controlling” the enemies for my minions to kill.
I also love the grow witch power, its nice to have a visual + a 61%x damage bonus.
Also pit bosses capping out at 3 debuff stacks means I literally stand in the middle of the room on pit 100 and get hit by all the mechanics… I wanted to build tanky this season, and I was able to! I even reduced how tanky I was lol.
Absolutely! I am (underneath my ire) happy with the changes to summons. Heck, I’m thrilled with the season-based summon synergy.
But yeah, it sucks knowing we’re not playing with all the tools we should have in the toolbox.
I’m probably being too harsh, I just don’t like being told to curb my complaints.
The real problem is that they don’t know what the Necromancer is supposed to be. They have no plan. They used to have one—bad, but still a plan. Now, we’re in some kind of transitional phase, and they have no idea what the final result should be. And that’s bad.
Everyone is talking about the ring’s scaling bugs but missing the bigger picture. Just look at our minions:
Skeletal Warriors
Skirmishers – In my opinion, the most balanced and reasonable. Good enough for the first time.
Defenders – Does anyone even use them? Have your minions ever died so often that you’d need the second rune?
Reapers – “We couldn’t make the first two work, so here’s the ultimate third option. Always use it.”
Skeletal Mages
Shadow – Yet another damage multiplier. The second rune is “okay” at best.
Frost – Decent.
Bone – Every 6th attack fires a Bone Splinter? Seriously? The spear is bugged and doesn’t scale (how is it even supposed to work? Based on bone passives? If not, what’s the point?). The second rune was designed by a madman—it doesn’t fit into any logical build.
Golem
Bone – “We remember that you like generating corpses—here, have some more.” The other rune is probably unnecessary…
Blood – Another damage multiplier…
Iron – Good enough early on, but the sacrifice is so tempting that even summoners are giving it up.
And these problems won’t go away just because they fix Mendeln.
True, and you know what, just take the ring out, I can’t care less. Compensate us with higher minion base damage. Doing this can probably prevent them from dropping into this endless cycle of fixing the ring again, and allow them to focus on issues like you mentioned here.
We’ve been asking for that from s0 to 3. We never got it. The compromise was letting minions benefit from 100% of Necro’s stats which worked well to a great extent but then they added Pit & tiers that go beyond what nmd100 originally offered, and so there was a new ceiling that we again could not reach. Couple that with the broken items, mechanics, etc and it’s just not a build we can setup to fully maximize what’s possible.
Hmm I’d really like the devs to come out and explain why this cannot be done (or maybe they did, I just don’t know). I’m not sure exactly how they coded this with Skeletons, just base off golem damage, it would have 0 damage if I don’t equip a weapon. This means Golem base damage is from our weapon damage, there is most likely a multiplier attached to this conversion. I don’t see why can’t they just adjust this multiplier a bit. Or they can even be lazy and just bump up all the numbers on our aspects … It’s just math at the end of the day. I’m a programmer myself, I cannot see this being a technical issue, and I think this is just a “willing” issue for whatever reason (philosophical most likely).
Do you remember a tweet/poll put out by the devs sometime last year? It asked something to the effect of “Which should be more powerful, the necromancer or the minions?”
When I saw that, I knew minions would be in for a rough road. The devs apparently conceptualize minions as separate from the necro, not an extension… which is a very strange perspective from the devs, considering they’re the ones who made minions THE CORE CLASS MECHANIC (as opposed to something you can spec into).
Asking which should be stronger strikes me as about as out of touch as asking something like “which should be more powerful, the barbarian or the arsenal?”
It seems to me like minions had a vision somewhere in mid-development, but then some direction change screwed it up, and it never came back. Maybe it’s just an irrational pet peeve of mine, but can someone explain why - when the thee skill types are blood, shadow, and bone - we randomly have cold mages (not blood) and an iron golem (not shadow)? Where is the cohesiveness, the synergy?
I brought this up some time before. It’s weird how minion damage is so good during leveling, it’s the best option to choose. But in endgame their damage is nowhere. Where does it go? Can we flip their damage scaleing? So it’s low while leveing but than gain more and more so they benefit more from all the multipliers? Instead of seemingly scaleing their base damage with diminishing returns. We don’t even know how much of the wepon damage each individual skeleton deal, and we don’t see that number go up.
I was sure that they would simply put on the Kalan’s Edict something like “The Necromancer deals -90% damage, Minions deal +90% damage (I mean conceptually) and the issue would be closed forever.
I think this goes all the way back to D2. Remember, before D4 launched, we got D2R, which was well received by old-school fans.
In D2, skeletal mages were raised randomly with an elemental affinity, and you always wanted to have a couple of cold ones. First, because it gave you access to CC (back then, you didn’t have slows, stuns, and crowd control on every corner). Second, frozen enemies shattered into ice shards, which looked amazing in 2000.
The Iron Golem also has its roots there. It was a unique mechanic that created a minion that persisted between game sessions and inherited all the properties of a metal item (auras, stats, etc.).
So they were added as a nod to the fans—but as always, they managed to mess it up.
Was about to create an Army of the Dead build wherein “Army of the Dead’s damage is increased by 40%[x] of Skeleton Mage and Golem damage bonuses.”
It seems it does not recognize bonuses coming from the Mage and Golem glyphs. Bonus tempers on gears are recognized just fine. Perhaps it has something to do with the wording?
(working) Gear tempers: Golem Damage , Skeleton Mage Damage
(not working) Glyphs: GolemS Damage, SkeletAL MageS Damage
This reminds me when they said they fixed Wolf companions sinking into the ground. Than complaints continued that the bug still exists. Devs are ignoreing it ever since. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this is going to be the case here also.
well reanimation and great feast are definitely not fixed to work with mendeln, i personally tested great feast and watched macrobioboi test reanimation.
Those were the two biggest multi’s i was going to benefit from, so i htink its safe to assume nothing is fixed unless someone wants to test everything all over again…
