The new ability for them to cast our bone spears is very cool. The biggest problem with bone mages is the fact that they are un-tenable after a certain point with attack speed. They really need to have their life per a cast toned down to say 8% instead of 15. or atleast 10% that the talent used to have.
Ring of Sacrilegious auto-revives the Mages after they die
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life on kill and blood orbs and skeletal priest spam in the build stops it in most cases in season 3. with life on hit and them receiving 100% of our stats (not sure this will be included, i assume it is) would make life on kill and life on hit very powerful.
Blood orbs though are really strong to resolve this issue too, and can deal with it single handedly if you produce enough.
I love the concept of blood orbs, but I hate playing fetch.
If you want blood orbs, but don’t want to really invest any extra points, there is a tempering affix that increases blood orb proc chance of hemorrhage. Building towards that now to see what kind of shenanigans it may cause.
The problem with blood orbs is every Necro skill is casted… you have to plant your feet and cast them there is no dynamic moving skill other than blood mist. Even then that is being turned into a mobility skill. Blood orbs should have a MUCH larger pick up radius or allow our minions to pick them up.
I was testing a build last night in the PTR. I got +4 mage mastery on my gear giving them an extra 80%x damage and health (140%x total) and put a maxed blood getters aspect on my amulet which gives the necromancer 105% of the effectiveness of the priest empowerment which also applies to the minions. So with that, the heal from the priest is doubled and works on both you and your minions. I stood at the test dummies for 10 minutes nonstop and my mages never died as long as I kept the priest buff active. So you can passively keep your bone mages alive permanently with no investment in tk blood orb chasing or life on kill or anything. I did also have 33.5% increased healing on my gear as well and 30% healing passive on the skill tree. I didn’t test enough to see how much healing I could sacrifice to keep them alive still.
did you have 100% IAS on your minions also btw?
but it shows it will be far easier then season 3 to keep them up, which is an improvement!
99% cause luls but close enough (assuming kalan’s edict was actually working which I haven’t confirmed but feels like it is). Also regarding the IAS, it ought to be quite easy to hit 100% if things remain as they are at the moment to the point that Kalan’s edict might end up being useless anyway even with the rework. Use it for leveling then swap to a different passive once you cap via gear.
yeah i think its gear mods/paragon/kalan’s edict or frenzied aspect /paragon/gear for me.
But yeah there are pretty much 3 useful key passives now depending on your minion build. shadow/bone spear mage/physical… and even then you can mix stuff up too.
I believe minions can already pick up blood orbs since s2
You have to pick it up, and it heals minions also as a baseline effect.
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