I know this staff was touched on early when the Patch Notes came out, but I’d like to bring it further out in the open and propose that this item changes.
Why, oh why, is this item not compatible with the Permanent Wraith nodes? Yeah, I know that’s what it’s designed to do. My question is WHY would anyone combine a rapidly decreasing Wraith with an additional constant 6% Health Drain?
I assumed that the entire purpose of this Staff was to make a pseudo-permanent Wraith build where the Health Drain was sufficient to discourage making a 40-50 minion Army and instead focus exclusively on the Wraiths while using other skills (Wraith’s heal on Crit node + Aura of Decay’s healing) to overcome the staff’s constant Drain + increased damage taken from Dread Shade or Infernal Shade.
I know this may possibly be abused with Fire + Crit Fire minions since they leech more than enough with Crits, but I’d look into the Skeleton Fire Arrow + Skeleton Fire Mage damage and Crit potential before completely gutting the concept of a Wraith build. You already have to dedicate multiple skills, idol slots, and your survivability by having a 2H staff instead of a shield. Can we please have it so that we can have 10+ permanent Wraiths and actually enjoy the Necro mastery class. Please?
All of your concerns seem to be about the Summon Wraith Skill itself.
The staff incentives a playstyle, where Wraiths are you main mana spender and you need to keep summoning them.
I absolutely love this item, even though I am not a minion fan overall.
The amount of mana regeneration granted by this Item is crazy, especially weapon slots usually don’t have any mana regeneration as a possible affix.
So you can also throw some very expensive other things on top of wraith for different situations.
For example I play a very successful build using Volatiel Zombies for AoE and Wraiths for singletarget.
This staff elevates this playstyle to god-tier.
The whole reason why they did the changes to wraiths was to not allow 20-30+ minions from a single skill. And they pretty much succeeded with it.
If you want permanent minions, there are plenty out there.
I could see another unqiue in the future allowign a few more permanent wraiths, but I personally really like that we have so man different minion playstyles.
Summoners are one of my least favorite playstyle, but because of things like Wraiths i actually enjoy playing summoner, because it’s not boring.
Why would it be? Do you understand the design purpose of the node?
This is a standard tradeoff choice for 1h+shield vs two-handed weapons. It is like saying, “You already have to get wet by going swimming.” Yeah. That’s kinda how it works.
I have enjoyed multiple Necros perfectly fine without any Wraiths in any of them, as have many others. Hyperbole isn’t a complaint validity enhancer.
I already have a build where I throw Wraiths and Zombies at the screen, and it’s very Mana-heavy. I’m aware of the weapon’s mana regeneration, but in most instances, you still need a good mana regenerator. to break even after the costs just to have the pets on the field. The only ones I’m aware of that do well with giving you Mana back are Rip Blood, Summon Skeleton, and maybe one or two others), but it’s rough having to resummon pets while also having to use another skill just to regain mana back. I know there’s Transplant, but now you’re losing Health in addition to trying to get mana back.
I was hoping that this staff would have been a clever way to make a psuedo-permanent Wraith build while discouraging people from just slapping it on a minion army and making it OP that way. Instead, it just makes it so that you’re still relying on things like Skeletons and Mages, since they’re the only ones that actually stay on the field so you can focus on staying alive.
That’s a brain fart. I meant to say “Necro mastery skill” as in the skill that you get when you select the Necro. My question is, what makes the Wraith stand out as a Mastery skill as opposed to being a reskinned Skeleton with far less QoL in using it? Yes, you can make Putrid or Flame Wraiths, but we already have Skeleton Mages for that. I was hoping that this weapon would have been a fun way to use the Wraith skill, but instead makes it more tedious.
You don’t necessarily need an active mana regenerator.
It all comes down to preference and investment.
You need to understand, that on builds with high mana cost skills like wraiths and zombies, regardless of how much mana regeneration you have, you will always spend more mana, than you regenerate.
Mana in LE is a ressoruce you actually have to actively manage, at least when you want to play a more active build.
I really don’t know how you would think that.
The item literally does the opposite, very expandable short lived wraiths in masses that you constantly need to resummon.
I have seen weapons in other games “override” a skill’s restrictions in order to help overcome some of the skill’s weaknesses. I was hoping this was one of those weapons, but clearly that’s not the case.
Considering that the cost of summoning multiple wraiths not only includes a 200% mana increase, but puts it on a 6 second cooldown, it sounds like the only way to take advantage of that is to constant spam them every so seconds just to keep the uptime (which removes the whole Mana Regeneration buff entirely since you’re just using it to spam the Wraiths). This makes it functionally equivalent to having to spam Maelstrom stacks or Sigils of Hope, and we were told that the devs were trying to remove that sort of gameplay where you have to spam cast something just to make it feel useful, but this weapon is going in the opposite direction.
You are in full control over how many wraiths you cast.
You don’t need to spawm it, but you can regulate yourself, how many you need and can sustain.
For example on a boss you pretty much want to spam it until you are close to oom, but on regualr mobs you might just wanna use a few at a tiem to stay positive mana.
Or you wanna use a skill like volatime zombies to deal with AoE.
There are so many chociesyou can make with the skill tree and taking this item or not.
Nothing is forcing you into any direction.
The unique just gives you the ability to have massive amounts of wraiths for a very high opportunity cost.
That’s how uniqeus should work.
If you don’t like it , you can still play with up to 8 wraith in the base skill tree.
I think this issue is much less you having an issue with abberant call, and more so perma wraiths being really bad.
I dont think its fair to criticize op for wanting “perma wraiths” when that is a feature in the wraith tree, and was presented as an option, a choice. You “can” have permanent minions, they just really suck and you run out of passives to even take for perma wraiths that are not just filler stats.
The root of this issue stems from the option presented of “here you can play with permanent wraiths” when really that option is just a complete and utter noob trap because they are way undertuned numbers wise and nothing was really changed enough in the wraith tree to really get that playstyle to even be worth doing.
Abomination I think has a fair usage case where there is decay based builds that can pick up decent goodies in exchange for the decay, where as wraiths get basically 0 upside by going permanent and I think thats the core underlying issue in this thread.
Which is that there really isnt any support for perma wraith playstyle, so it kinda feels bad that the option is there but there is no support for it.
All of what DiceDragon is true, though it’s only half of my complaint.
Currently, we have multiple types of permanent minions that are designed to stay on the field as long as possible and thus are built for survivability as well as constant high DPS. I’m referring here to Skeletons, Skeleton Mages, and the Bone Golem.
We also have pets on a timer, where no matter how much you put into minion health, leech and regen, will always die because of the exponential decay and you have to go through the effort of resummoning them. Here I’m referring to the Abomination and Zombies, as well as Dread Shade.
What we don’t have are pets that are on a constant health timer, where uninvested, they don’t contribute much, but if you take the time to invest in minion regen and healing effects, they can fight as well as the permanent pets. Of course, this can get tricky with numbers because you can also use this strategy with permanent pets, so you’d have to have some powerful nodes in the skill tree so that these minions would survive a health drain that would kill off Skeletons and other permanent pets.
As it is now, nodes on the Wraith tree like spending 3 points for “your critical strikes heal Wraiths for 30 Health” are utterly useless when Wraiths are losing hundreds to thousands of health per second. And if you want to take the “rapidly losing Health” minion, Abomination does what Wraiths do many times better. And as a temporary suicide pet, Zombies do that job better.
Wraiths just don’t have a real identity that you can build around. Compare that to Reaper Form on the Lich where it’s a cool transformation that also grants you a ton of buffs and a dash. Wraiths are simply an uninteresting skill since there’s no real strategy behind them. You always want the mana efficiency and casting nodes. You want the flat damage nodes, and the only choice is whether you want melee whackers, poison bolts, or fireballs to synergize with the other minions you’re running.
While using this item, I haven’t been able to notice a difference between 300%increased minion health or 0 points in minion health. In fact, when I time wraiths with dread shade and the item degen on them vs with just this item’s degen, they both die at about the same time. This suggests the degen is too heavy. It pidgeonholes all wraith builds aiming to use the item into glass cannon mana whores.
Further limiting build options - the melee wraith AI is awful. The poor guys cannot seem to do anything unless they are by your side. The melee wraith is really not an option until the AI is fixed.
On the flip side, ‘Locus of death’ ranged wraiths are very satisfying to use, and can get a nice build going which is fun until about level 85-90 monoliths when any boss ability repeat wipes all your minions faster than your mana regen can keep up, while you are kept so busy dancing to dodge mechanics that you cannot use any alternate form of mana regen like casting rip blood.
It’s only when you go watch a void knight build stomping whole screens brainlessly that necro becomes crappy. If you simply accept that it is not a class that is even remotely tuned to do very end game content, it’s still fun to try builds.
I have been testing this item in a Poison Minion build alongside a separate Necrotic Minion build I’m trying out (not the build I recently posted). Firstly, I vastly underestimated how good the Mana Regeneration is, and I vastly underestimated how good the Wraiths are when you stack that many of them. This item is really good, much better than I was anticipating.
This doesn’t change the fact that I would like to have standard decaying pets that you can invest in through minion health regen and various healing modes. I think the number of rapidly decaying minion skills is too much, and it would be a nice change of pace to have a weapon that has too much a decay to keep Skeletons alive, but the skill tree provide enough regen so that you can build around it.
Here’s my experience with the Aberrant Call’s Wraith build:
It’s very reliant on having a lot of mana, mana efficiency, and big cast speed. It naturally draws you to Dread Shade with the node that gives you the buffs in exchange for increased damage taken. Combine that with not being able to use a Shield, and your defensive and sustain options are very limited. The Volatile Zombies being able to heal you when they explode carries this build a ton, and this type of build would not be possible without them.
The “Echoes Inside” of the Summon Wraith tree is completely worthless, since with enough cast speed, you can summon the same number of Wraiths without the big cooldown. In fact, this node is a great example of a “noob trap”, as if you decide to take it while you’re leveling in the campaign, you have a increasing amount of time and XP until you can take the “Stygian River” nodes to give it more QoL. This is not an issue when you’re level 85 and the skills level up much easier, but a huge detriment when you’re level 30-40 and it takes a lot longer to get the skill level ups.
As I mentioned previously, when the Health Drain kicks in, Wraiths lose hundreds of Health per second, so “Wraith Feast” is a particularly bad node. I know the synergy is supposed to be “summon lots of Wraiths at once, have it a big Mana cost, then use Spirit Link to give yourself a big Critical Chance boost;” not only do you not have enough nodes to get all the buffs you need, but it does very little to keep the Wraiths alive more than their natural decay allows for.
All in all, the Wraith tree needs a lot of work for it to be a worthwhile class tree. The only node route worth taking is the “stack lots of flat damage” + “increased cast speed and mana efficiency.” I don’t see the “Bleed & Bleed effect” nodes being any good, especially since there’s no synergy between them and the “Blood Spectres” from the Harvest tree (which additionally aren’t worth using either since they take too many skill points and the other Harvest nodes are far superior), the nodes with the “chance of damned on death” are laughably small. There’s a lot that can be asked for, especially with having more synergy with the other Acolyte skills.
