So the sword is an AotD item. But we STILL DON’T WANT AOTD TO BE USEFUL. We want OUR SKELETONS AMD GOLEM TO BE OUR MAIN SOURCE OF DAMAGE. I get it, AoTD doesn’t realy get played, but this uniqe while evidently promotes AotD, it will not solve the lackluster state of the skill. So maaaaybe before I get a GF I could consider useing it, but I could also just slap Unyielding on a 2h scyhte and would fulfil it’s porpouse better.
The aspect… Just why? It makes Kalans buff inconsistent, it will not benefit from Reanimation, and will contribute nothing for Mendeln. Also just stop trying to make us constantly revive our skeletons, WE ALL HATE IT. I allready hate spamming Raise Skeleton for the Flesheater buff, this will not make me feel better about it. Also why would I give up my meat shield, I can’t hide behind mages even if they are invincible. And I also can’t come up with any hybrid build that would want to use it.
Devs, you could have just increased minion damage or increased minion damage aspects, and it would have felt way more useful than this aspect. Even farting in a jar and throwing it out the window feels more useful than this aspect.
The weapon would be fine if it didn’t try so hard to make AotD good. If it said “your army of the dead no longer does any damage, instead your minions gain XYZ” yep thats a sick summoner weapon. But no it says, “you are now an ultimate necro and your minions are here to boost your ultimate skill, don’t forget to take all the ultimate aspects because they matter more now”.
As for the aspect, it needs to be my choice as the summoner to either use it to have suiciding warriors, or build out some passive healing that keeps them alive. I think it will be extremely tough to generate 25% of maximum life as healing per second for my skeletons. Maybe its possible with 4/3 in Bonded essence + Gruesome mending? maybe 99% damage reduction on defenders works? Maybe I sacrifice reapers for 20%x shadow damage and go mage only?
At this point im thinking a mage only or mage golem build is the answer…
Anyway, I feel like they looked at the metrics and saw that no one likes AotD so thought… I know what… lets buff it more. Rather then thinking why does no one like it.
Well atlest minions spread vampiric curse, and if I remember correctly that makes enemies vulnerable, but that alone still doesn’t feel good enough.
Well the porpuse is them dying and blowing up to deal damage, maybe if they would instantly get resummoned automaticly after exploding. And makeing shure they get to live for atleast 10 secs so Reanimation could trigger. But still Kalan’s buff would be up and down constantly.
FYI this answers the dead skeleton warrior issues:
Kalan’s Edict
Previous: Your Minions gain 3%[+] Attack Speed and 3% increased damage for each active Minion.
Now: Your Minions gain 3%[+] Attack Speed and 3% increased damage for each active Minion. When one of your Minions die, your other Minions enrage, dealing 20% increased damage for 3 seconds.
I see the Kalan’s change as a wash, at best. It wouldn’t be so bad if the skeletons died one by one, but they’re all subject to that 25% debuff.
Without the aspect, they rarely die so the change doesn’t matter. With the aspect, you’ll have a very short window where the enrage buff and minion buff overlap. Basically a negligible overlap and doesn’t address the loss of attack speed.
Let’s say you also want to use this unique and aspect together. AOTD wants CDR but this aspect is constantly killing off your Reapers. Just doesn’t seemed to be designed very well.
I don’t understad that who ever designed these, haven’t they thought these thing through? Why is it always us that see these things and problems instantly, but not the person designing these items?
I have to completely agree with this topic. These two items are quite literally dead on arrival. Let’s go through the list of problems, and I’m sure I’ll miss some.
New Aspect:
Our primary power with minions comes from Mendeln procs. And now our warriors can’t stay alive long enough to proc it. This literally cuts our damage in half straight out the gate.
Edit: to be fair, Mendeln procs on your mages will now be double damage and they were stronger procs anyway so maybe this aspect is actually an overall slight buff to Mendeln procs?
Warriors constantly dying is going to make it very clunky to try to keep your Skeletal Priest buff up. The gameplay loop is going to be wildly inconsistant and not feel good at all.
Hellbent Commander buff won’t be up 100% of the time. With Occult’s Dominion and golem, you’ll have 6 “permanent” minions so you’ll have to constantly be making sure at least one warrior is alive to keep the buff up. Sacrificing your warriors won’t be an option as I’ve seen some mention.
You’re going to have to over invest in attack speed to keep the Cult Leader legendary node maxed or suffer a decrease in damage because every time a warrior dies, your attack speed bonus from Kalan’s Edict drops off anywhere from 3-18% (not to mention the 3-18% dmg loss as well).
If for some reason you insist on building around this aspect and your warriors exploding for whatever cool effects, then you had better not think about using blood orbs at all or they won’t die often enough. So now minion builds lose access to one of our biggest damage multipliers via the Blood Begets Blood paragon board.
This aspect may quite literally be the reason I finally give up on Necro minions and walk away from this game. If the devs can butcher something this bad, then I feel like I’ve lost hope that they can right the ship.
New Weapon:
This one doesn’t have nearly as many of the obvious flaws as the aspect. It “should” outpace Grandfather as we could masterwork the mastery passives high enough to outpace the 2x GF multiplier but it’ll depend on how well we masterwork our other gear. Unless I’m not thinking it through properly, won’t GF still be the best weapon once fully optimized? And this new weapon is just a stop gap. Once you get enough passive ranks from Blood Moon Breaches and Mendeln, the ranks on the sword will no longer double our damage like GF does, so as you get stronger, the sword gets overall weaker.
The biggest problem is that its aspect only scales AotD and not minions. Your minions are effectively support again just to stack vampiric curse before casting AotD for your big damage boost. Which, ultimate scaling is capped now, so it feels like a lose lose.
Is there a world where this sword is just best used for an AotD build where you sacrifice your minions entirely? Because, while the build is already functional now (albeit like C tier), why would the devs want that type of build to be functional at all? Why would there be a skill called “Army of the Dead” where you sacrifice your army to use it most effectively?
I’m sure there are more things I’m missing as I fall asleep in my chair. Feel free to add to the list. This campfire chat has left a very bitter taste in this necro lover’s mouth moving forward.
Just now reading the patch notes and it does seem they adressed some of these issues. Kalan’s Edict has been changed so now when minions die, your other minions deal 20% more dmg. So that sort of covers that gap. Problem still being that you still have to overcap attack speed to make sure Kalan’s stays active 100% as your minions are dying.
Just imagine that aspect on a weapon though, 200%x on mages. Spamming bone golem for corpses, soulrift for vuln/barrier and then blood orbs+ 4/3 bonded in essence and 4/3 Gruesome mending… 800+ willpower is achevable, Iron maiden healing + blood orbs. maybe one can keep skeletal warriors alive long enough to proc the 80% max hp heal at the end of skeletal priest.
If they make this aspect in a such a way you can build to either use the explosion or not, i will be happy. if its impossible to build in such a way as to prevent the warriors from dying I find it unimaginative and boring.
My first thought when I heard them revealing their new “minion” items was that the developers really want us to sacrifice our minions. If we don’t outright sacrifice them via the Book of the Dead, they now want us to sacrifice them during our gameplay.
It also made me shake my head when I quickly realized how the new items don’t work well with our existing Aspects like Reanimation. It made me seriously wonder once again if the developers actually play their game.
Also I find it telling that the developers actually believe that AotD is a minion skill. Do they even realize that the best AotD build this season sacrifices all the minions?
If the developers believe that AotD is a minion skill when we true minion players know it’s not, I can totally understand how the new “minion” items came into existence. I’m betting that the developers will be totally perplexed by mid season on why we minion players have rejected utilizing their awesome new “minion” items.
Playing an AotD build already is very clunky play style, and these new items will only exacerbate it next season. Our best minion related item, Mendeln, won’t even work with the new items.
For me, I’m planning on ignoring the new items unless it’s the best items I have while I’m leveling. Once I get to the end game, my plan is to make another Mendeln build just like I did this season or Thorns if it’s actually viable next season.
I was seriously worried I was going to be the only one who felt this way. Sometimes it feels like as an actual minionmancer I’m screaming into the void. I miss the D2 days when half the fun was building as large an army as possible, not treating them as fodder to fuel some big ultimate attack. We should be getting a D4 version of the arm of king leoric, a badass wand to make our warriors better, not some dark knight vibe greater sword that only buffs mages, golem, and AotD. To this day I use skirmishers with the additional warrior simply because it gives me the biggest army(put occult dominion on my amulet for the same reason and can still hit Torment 4 so thats nice). I feel like I could go on and on about how much this new item and new aspect bother me but I can’t think of something to say that hasn’t already been said. Hopefully someone on the dev team reads this forum.
All the while killing the AotD bulid with the ult bonus caps. Blood Wave probably deserved it, but Bone Storm an AotD too. Why? What is this lawn mower method? One ult is problematic, let’s punish all if them.
Exactly. They do not want the necromancer to have minions be OP so they are basically bricking this build and forcing us to sacrifice them whether we want to or not.
I get what you are saying, but honestly the only way I play AotD again is to use unyielding commander, which would mean I want it to just support rather then carry.
But honestly I really like soulrift as it feels much more like a “support ult” then AotD, and that’s what I want out of an ult. I want to press a button that makes my minions go crazy for X seconds, not press a button and my minions are over shadowed by some insane alternative form of damage for x seconds.
I have no problem that AotD got killed, if I am fully honest. But I just don’t understand the logic. If they killed it, why are they giveing us a uniqe for it? Also as a side note, that we all agree on I think, AotD is not a minion. Doesn’t matter how many times the say it. So this sword is not an item for minions. The stats on it are realy nice for minions, but that doesn’t makes me want to use it instead of a GF, or even Unyielding on a 2H. Lucky it’s only PTR so… yeah.
I don’t think these minion additions are very exciting to build around, atleast for me. If I’m going to sacrifice most of my survivability, resource generation, vulnerable and DMG(x) from Soulrift, and also massive CritDMG(x) and all stats from Grandfather, it should be or atleast feel more impactful than my unreliable volatile skeletons gaining a damage buff.
My suggestion which is based off of Ralph’s “your army of the dead no longer does any damage, instead your minions gain XYZ” suggestion, might be a little too hard to implement until S8, but I’ll give feedback for it during PTR anyways: When you cast Army of the Dead, instead of spawning any volatile skeletons at all, it superbuffs all your existing minions and any minions that you spawn during the duration (maybe extra duration), similar to growth, and also gives them extra effects.
For Skeleton Warriors that could be:
-Skirmishers gain an extra attack like a dual wielder
-Defenders make all your minions immune
-Reapers reap an extra large area and deal extra damage when only hitting one enemy
For Skeletal Mages:
-Shadow mages attacks explode and weakly pull in nearby enemies
-Cold mages deal more damage per debuff on the enemy and cripple enemies with their attacks
-Bone mages attack much faster and apply thorns on hit but deal less damage
Golem suggestions:
-Bone golem gives you damage reduction and applies thorns in an aura around it
-Blood golem continuously drains enemies around it which always overpowers and fortifies both of you
-Iron golem dashes to enemies to attack them and deals extra damage, and if you would take fatal damage if dashes to you instead, gives you a barrier and releases a shockwave that pushes enemies away
This is basically too farfetched for D4 and all we are getting are extra damage uniques and aspects just like the existing ones but thats how I feel uniques should be; instead of just buffing numbers it promotes new playstyles and encourages you to take new minion types you normally wouldnt take.
I also think the new aspect is lackluster but it also promotes a different playstyle (somewhat) and I think the unique is more of imporance for potential changes. Since you are basically locked to RoM and multiple (x) aspects along with Occult Dominion which should have been a passive long ago, the unique should atleast feel like an unique and not another aspect. Obviously I’ll have to test it first and hopefully I’ll be positively surprised.