Heres an idea:
Instead of basing control magic on hp of the summon, which makes it clunky to use. It could be time based, so that you can target any summon, but control of the summon will return to the original owner after some time. To not make it super OP, the amount of time controlled should be in line with the max HP or level it has. So for example a level 1 water elemental could be controlled in a fight for 9 seconds and a level 3 water elemental for 3 seconds. The enemy can use dispel/abolish to return control.
Whats the effect of this?:
-You may want several Spell Breakers for 100% uptime control of summons.
-The spell becomes less clunky to use since you dont need to spam click the summon for when it’s HP reaches a certain treshold.
-This fixes the issue where control magic isn’t ideal to use since you don’t want to control a low hp summon because thats like giving free gold/xp.
2 Likes
3 seconds is not even worth.
agreed, it is maybe 2 attacks, so why even bother?
OP Just gave 3 sec as an example. Of course It could be balanced so as not to be worthless. The main Idea is still kinda interesting, but I prefer the way It is now
Its just not a well balanced skill. Spellbreakers start with only 75/250 mana, something you can’t improve with upgrades unlike sorcs/priests. The only ‘normal’ summons you can target with control magic are water elementals, treants, skeleton warrior/mages, carrion beetles, spirit wolves and sentry/stasis/healing wards, as well as neutral units from beastmaster/firelord/ranger. It can’t target infernals, phoenixes, pocket factories, doom guard, tornado, panda spirits, avatar/spirits or owls. Since it costs 0.35 mana per hp, a spell breaker can only steal 214 hp units or less when built, 714 hp at max mana- which takes nearly four minutes since making a breaker, without an archmage. Using a single autocast of spell steal drops that by 214. Even when you have spellbreakers, you can’t steal fresh water elementals thanks to their giant HP and its never worth it to steal individual skeletons for twice the mana it costs to make them. Even in the unlikely event you see a carrion CL for some reason, 490 hp at max level is prohibitive. Even wolves got an HP buff to 200/350/500, making them very hard to steal, especially if there’s any bloodlust being thrown around. And wolves and beetles, like wards, all have invisibility abilities that make it hard to steal them unless you have detection. Bears, lava spawn, even DR skeletons all have pretty formidable HP pools that either can’t be stolen or take a full mana pool which you will never actually have available unless there’s a mana fountain to park your breakers on top of.
Basically, control magic is useless for anything except stealing wards. And its a great skill for stealing wards, don’t get me wrong. But often that has little effect since wards are just ‘click once to kill this’ anyway.
OP’s also right about it being self-defeating that you’re handing an experience bounty to an enemy or denying both gold/xp from yourself when creeping.
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Well that could have been idea, let it work on ultimates.
Something like:
-Infernal/Doom Guard/Phoenix: 3 seconds of control (enough to make them run away)
-Water Elemental lvl3: 9 seconds of control
-Water Elemental lvl1: 36 seconds of control.
-Sentry Ward (its level 0): Infinite time. It’s level 0 after all.
Let it go, just let it go.
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Control magic is a clunky spell best left to obscurity.
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