Necromancer Pure Summon Buff

Necromancer
1

So i’m level 52 and in World Tier 3, which isn’t enough to say how they are in end late game, albeit I don’t feel like they are magically gonna stop getting three shot(only because of a passive) in higher end content, with a few paragon board things to increase survivability.

It seems to be very dependent on the creature’s i’m fighting, most normals monsters I can keep them alive well, except i’m spending more time focusing on keeping them alive. Which is fine that’s the play style I expect from a minion build.

However right now their survivability is hit or miss. Sometimes a creature just deletes them, and if they haven’t done enough damage to get a pile of corpses, or my army of undead is on cooldown, I’m pretty much just stuck running away. I also went with a straight shadow summoner build, however I didn’t take corpse explosion cause I need as many corpses as I can get to keep them alive 50% of the time.

There damage could be better and I know they will only get stronger with paragon board, but right now it seems fine, however when i’ve partied with other people even lower level than me, i’ve literally seen people delete like 13+ mobs in a matter of seconds. Where it takes me like 20 seconds to delete the same amount of mobs.

Before anyone is like well necromancer is safer cause you got your minions taking hits, Well if i’m in a fight for 20 seconds taking no hits trying to kill 13 monsters, and another class is in a fight for 1 second, the chances are I got a better chance to die then the other class.

At the very least they need to be much more survivable. Once one dies, if you can’t get another up in time to be able to keep constant priests going, they will all die. It’s happened quite a few times, where I’ve just had to leave and come back cause I don’t got my full team and no corpses, so the minions can’t be healed during combat before they start dying, and while army of the dead helps, it’s basically used as an Oh No button.

I know that they don’t wanna buff minions to be where they are more worth it to have minions over sacrifice. Cause then people could run around with a full damage build and just keep their minions out for the extra survivability.

So my suggestion give the third point of every minion buffing talent have a secondary effect. For instance skeletal mastery could keep the damage and health buff, and skeletal warriors could gain a chunk of damage reduction, or each third minion mastery talent increases minion scaling by 2.5-5% or something like that, so if you maxed: Skeletal Warrior Mastery, Skeletal Mage Mastery, Golem Mastery, Deaths Defense, Hellbent Commander, Inspiring Leader, and Bonded in Essence and Khalan’s Edict. All your minions would be scaled by 20-50%, While also taking away the effectiveness of just not sacrificing your pets. While you could not sacrifice them and grab all the minion talents that’d take 22 points to get the extra scaling, and would cause you to lose out on more powerful talents for your casting build. Meaning you could still do that and be effective, but you wouldn’t be as effective as just choosing pure shadow, pure blood, pure bone with sacrifices, or pure summon without.

TLDR;

I’m in W3 using a pure summoner build.

The damage don’t seem terrible and I know with paragon board upgrades they damage will increase, but it still seems like it could use a little buff.

Survivability is the biggest issue, it is hit or miss. If one of your skeleton dies, and you don’t have two corpses to summon another and a priest, there is a good chance they will get wiped, forcing you to either run away and get more, or using army of the dead.

Some creatures, mixture of creatures, affixes, aoe’s, just wipe all the minions and you have no control over it. And your forced to run away till you get army of the dead back up.

The enemy scaling is gonna get more high than your minions using paragon board(damage might be fine, but survivability is only gonna get worse. If i’m already fighting monsters that wipe my minons in start of end game, it’s only gonna become worse.

Upgrade 3rd talent in each respective minion buff to increase scaling, or add damage reduction, or something to all minions(so people can’t just put 1 point in each and make minions that survive much better making minions a better alternative to sacrifice for damage.)

TLDR; Done.

Either do what you did in WoW and make minions not take aoe damage or heavily reduced AoE damage, or program the AI to dodge attacks

I believe every ARPG should have a summon class/build that is effective at late end game. And when we are putting almost half our skill points to increase their effectiveness they usually seem like wasted talent points when the same 22 I could put else where, and wipe mobs in a matter of seconds.

Minions felt good in the first world tier’s, still had to heal them fairly often, but they didn’t just flat out get destroyed as soon as I walked into a fight, it was usually closer to the half end of a fight that they’d need heals.

The only other option I could think of is, make offense your best defense and make them so strong they demolish everything before they die, but that doesn’t seem like the Minion way. I’m fine with slower paced fights for the added survivability.

I’ll add an update when I get higher level, and more well geared to see if anything changes, but i’m honestly expecting it to get much worse, unless I get some legendary effect/paragon point that is a game changer.

2

Ironically, when i gave in and started running corpse explosion with the shadow node (and hew flesh) i had more corpses to work with than when i was running straight minions.

In any kind of crowd, the ce dot will easily make double or triple the corpses back you spent. Against bosses i always at least break even (unless they move).

I agree btw, minions need a buff. Ive pumped everything I can into minions, and theyre still not the main source of my damage (that would be ce and blight).
Admittedly, i can full on spam blight and ce in any kind of big fight. But that has its own issues (visibility)

3

Are you using the Defender Skeletons, or the regular Skirmishers?

4

I use the skirmishers, I haven’t tried the defenders yet, though i’m sure they help on some fights, I still have some minions I need to try out, i’ve tried all the golems and like the vulnerable applying one the best, still haven’t tried to the other mages but i’m running shadow build so i’m stuck with shadow, except for the blizzard mages. And Haven’t tried reapers or defenders.

5

Paragon 60, pure summoner.

Heavily recommend you to spec into reapers with the chance of them dropping a corpse. I rolled with both them and skirmishers, all itterations, and I have to say with high attack speed (which you will be getting through legendaries, skills, glyps, nodes, etc) they will be literally producing insane amount of corpses for you to spam your priest on.

I do not know if it is intentional, I do not know if Blizzard didn’t foresee it, but in most fights they just do not die for me. Only thing that does kill them is 1) you not pressing that or 2) random Champion stacks with Lightning and Fire gore that AoEs it all down (but it has to be legitimately be at least 5-6 champions at once).

1 Like
6

So i’m level 57, and I decided to go miasma corpse explosion/minions with the sacred that makes skeles appear and blow up. It’s much better than my pure summon build where I had blight and decompose. I also switched to reapers and was using bone mages but it gets to hectic to see so I switch back to shadow mages.

I’ll say yeah this is a decent amount better, but it’s not my summons that are killing stuff, as much as it is my corpse explosion. So it is not considered a pure summoner build unfortunately. But this is the closest that will work.

I feel like Decompose, Blight, Skeletons, Golem, Decrep, and Army of the dead is that “Pure summoner” build. With either Shadow/Bone/Blood points or a mixture of them depending on your mages/golem that is if they actually effect your golems/mages. For example is blood golems active ability considered a blood skill, if so it should create blood orbs when used. Are your bones mages attacks considered bone skills. Questions I don’t know the answer too. But even if they were, a pure summon build is just not viable, you can probably weasel your way through to Tier 4, But it needs to be better.

People that are using Corpse Explosion, with beefed up pets can’t not say they are using a pure summoner build, and more that they are using a shadow builds/corpse explosion build with pets to soak damage… Your damage isn’t coming from your pets, or you beefing your pets up. Had some friends tell me to go with corpse explosion for a pet build, so i tried it, and it doesn’t play like a summoner build. While that is the case, it’s about the closest I could come up with, but would probably work better to get more corpse explosions legendarys, and corpse creation legendarys and sacrifice the pets. Or Or go bone build with beefed up pets with the focus on a few bone legendarys ontop of the pet legendarys.

Maybe they just need too beef up the minion legendarys/Paragon system, and make priest heal over time, instead of buffing the pets. Maybe if they doubled the min-max values of all minion legendarys it’d be worth it. Then they don’t got to worry too much about people going a full damage build and having pets as a survivability thing.

7

Yeah I agree here.

I think increasing inherited player stats by a percentage per node is a very reasonable solution. I’d also love to see some expanded options on how to improve our minions - be it through the talent tree or via book of the dead.

8

This is pretty much the direction I went. Additionally, buying that 2nd node behind Army of the Dead and saving it for when all minions are down will immediately restock all of them. Been pretty clutch in a few boss fights.

9

It depends on who hit first. My Skelly Mages are so pro-active. They always hit first and they can chill froze aggressive targets. I have that legendary that chills mobs.