Can anyone tell me what’s up with the spiked armor passive and the number displayed in stat for the inherited minion thorns.
55.2% golem thorns stat.
No thorns on build and no stats listed for thorns.
3 ranks of spiked armor
My thorns is now 2041 (lvl 96)
Golem inherited thorns 21,518,534 ???
Why is my golem getting 7M thorns per rank?
It is only a visual bug… it wont do any damage in nm70+…
Its only a visual bug.
I wish we were getting over 30 million Thorns! I don’t know where you get that Thorns won’t do any damage over dungeons higher than NM70, but my Thorns Minion build is doing fine in NM 80 - 90 dungeons easily completing each one. I’ll be going to NM 90 - 100 in the next day or so.
EDIT: I completed NM 100 that same day without any issues. I finished it with zero deaths, no potion help, and in a reasonable amount of time.
I was clearing 80-85s no problem with my thorns build too and level 61+ pits.
Switched to a shadow minion build and although it’s probably the way I built it, it absolutely sucks in comparison.
Whoever started this nonsense that thorns doesn’t work at higher levels is a grade A troll. I was literally 1 shotting bosses on spawn (before I could target them) with thorns.
When fighting Duriel, the 2 enemies that spawn at the start don’t even appear, they die as soon as the ground starts to rumble.
Thorns is great.
I dont think any1 questions if thorns works. It is the needleflare aspect which i dont see proccing from minions hinders the clear time. Tbh without any aid i cant really tell if it is working. Maybe i should record a run and use software to check if if it proc or not… I would like a dummy of maybe customize a damage categorie in a different color to really see what is happening
Probably just change the aspect to something already applied and see if your damage / speed changes. I know people say that aspect is broken, and if so, fixing it could be really powerful for some builds. I’m running needlefalre too, so i might test it too.
Visual bug, I was disappointed to find out minion thorns WASNT broken and that I can’t go past 90 in the PIT with a quad GA Razorplate with minions .
I think i’ve just discovered something about thorns minions.
Based on how ‘inanimate’ objects work, i.e., they don’t attack me, and they take way longer to kill than things that do attack me and my minions. I’m 100% certain that a full thorns minion build works, in that thorns does do the majority of my damage.
However, if I spec OUT of minion damage multipliers, remove the golem/mage/skeletons glyphs, legendary nodes, and rare/magic nodes so that their own damage is awful, i do virtually no thorns damage either.
It looks like minion thorns damage is basically on their own damage % multiplier. So to get the best damage from minions, you probably want to use skeletal warriors with maximum % damage and taunt, and stack skeletal warrior inherit thorns.
Drop the golem and mages, for attack speed/health and vulnerable damage.
I think this will maximize the thorns damage and stuff will just melt.
I’ve been able to run 70 Pit without too much trouble using a golem focused build with thorns stacking, where anything that hits me directly either dies instantly or 1 shots me (not so great), but changing the paragon board to add extra glyphs instead of golem & minion damage and suddenly none of my minions do any thorns damage.
I guess I have some testing to do.
I think you’re nerfing yourself unnecessarily if you stop using your Bone Golem as the Bone Golem has at least two times more Thorns than your Skeletal Defenders if you overcap your Total Armor.
Also I find having Taunt every 6 seconds from the Defenders is not as useful as I first thought. I can activate my Bone Golem currently every 3 - 4 seconds so my Bone Golem is Taunting at almost double the rate of my Defenders.
I’m finding the majority of my Thorns damage is coming from my Bone Golem with my Skeletal Defenders giving supplemental damage on top on what my Bone Golem does. Because of this, I’m building around my Bone Golem more than my Skeletal Defenders.
Yeah, I had over 900% golem damage, and you could see when enemies hit the golem, as they’d get chunked. But the taunt rarely works, he’s only 1 minion, and bosses and enemies like the Butcher completely ignore him.
If most of the enemies are attacking my warriors, then my golem damage is irrelevant, so I either want to use the golem for small burst damage and keep my warriors, or just get rid of him and focus more on the warriors.
I know exactly what you’re saying, I had it the same way and the golem is super powerful when setup probably, but I want to see if I can figure out a different setup.
Probably won’t work. Be good if we could figure out the DPS of our army based on our stats, as ‘attack power’ is completely irrelevant.
Then i’d be able to actually calculate the best setup, but it’s even harder with thorns because you have no idea how often your army is being hit or what multipliers are effecting thorns.
If I take the 99% damage reduction on warriors, not only should I never need to res them, but I can add some shadow stuff and have them ticking shadowblight whilst also dealing thorns damage (apparently they still taunt too, because of a bug).
If this works, then things should melt, but it’ll take a little while to actually setup my gear and farm the gold (again) to respec. Although I do have a couple of scrolls.
It appears you were right. Running a full warrior thorns dps build does not work. Once they die, i’m dead in the water without corpses (especially if I die). Their thorns damage appears negligible, and their own damage is pretty poor, even with shadowblight and skeletal priest buff etc…
It looks like full on golem damage is going to be the go to, which means that the warriors are just there to soak, and thorns is mostly useless at that point because they don’t attack the golem much.
I did have a build that I could clear NMD100 and Pit 60+ fairly smoothly using AOTD and thorns - no shadow damage, but I think I might have peaked with that. So thorns army doesn’t really appear to be a thing.
I ditched the golem and thorns and went for full shadowblight.
Corpse explosion and the minions together really stack up the shadowblight procs really quickly.
Have only cleared pit lvl 56 so far to tired to dodge the 1 shots on the boss next pit run after that.
I have been getting shadowblight procs off up to 9.5M on packs.
Only getting up to around 6.5M on the boss since I just can’t stack a single target that fast.
I need more attack speed 
The mass of damage numbers is insane though and all the mobs are pretty much permanently stunned.
I did try a shadowblight build the other day, didn’t really work out; my thorns build was better. With my original thorns build I was almost running through dungeons at the same speed as raxx on his barb, as my minions were just destroying stuff, and the 61 pit boss died in about 20 seconds tops.
But when I got to the level 64 pit boss, something was different, boss lasted way longer and I started getting hit by the Lillith mechanics and 1 shot. So i’ve played about 8 other builds since then, and kind of given up.
I might have to go to the maxroll guides to make more progress, but i’m broke and have to get new gear again lol.
Dunno how much more I will be able to scale the damage.
Using Decay on my 2 hander and blighted on my amulet for maximum shadowblight damage and have 1000 shadow damage over time so far for the big multipliers.
Not really sure what other aspects help the most yet still working on the build.
I was truly shocked by how good the Crippling Darkness passive is once you get 5+ ranks of it.
Packs just get stunned in place in place and the bosses stagger pretty easily.
If only I could find a scythe with as good stats as my 2-H sword.
How did this become a discussion about Shadow damage instead of Thorns? I played a Shadow Minions build in Season 1 and hated every minute of it. I’ve found that I only enjoy playing a Thorns Minions build in this game.
I know that playing a build that procs Shadowblight is the meta, but it doesn’t matter how much more powerful a build it is if you aren’t willing to play it. I’ll play my Thorns build until it’s clear I hit my build’s ceiling. At that point I’ll end my season and move over to playing Grim Dawn again.
New patch notes that are out today lists that the Minions’ Thorns tooltip visual bug has been fixed.