After playing today with Acolyte’s Dread Shade ability and its 18-second cooldown variant it’s become a bit apparent we could use some help with how we target friendly targets with abilities, at least when dealing with numerous minions, and especially so in Multiplayer where things are likely going to get congested quickly. I frequently find myself mouseing-over my Arch Death Knight and having its name at the top of the screen (as though he’s the priority selection) but the Dread Shade casting going onto the nearest Skeletal Vanguard instead, because it is closer to the mouse cursor than the intended ADK.
I propose a Loot Filter-like system for targeting that allows us to set a priority level, or at least exclusions, for friendly-targeting abilities like heals and buffs.
For example, a ruleset for this filter may include rules like:
EXCLUDE temporary minions (e.g. Corpse Parasites, Forged Weapons)
EXCLUDE melee minions
INCLUDE health-draining minions (Abomination)
EXCLUDE ranged minions
INCLUDE spell minions (important for Death Knight - unlike normal Skele Mages, it’s Melee, -until- you add Hungering Souls or Necrotic Mortar to its skills)
For Dread Shade, in this example, it would make it much easier to target our friendly Arch Skeletal Mage or Death Knight, or our Abomination when they’re surrounded by Archers or Vanguards.
The logic construction for this would be (I would think) fairly simple, using the same database-referencing that allows us to have Tunk’s entity data-tables on Tunk Lab, and the UI would just be copied-and-pasted-and-trimmed from the Loot Filter System we already enjoy.
I agree.
My suggestion is to be able to cast Dread Shade (and other similar buff spells) on the ICON in the top left.
If the icon represents more than one minion, then the closest minion is chosen.
As someone who plays mostly single minion builds it would be mighty helpful, but then you can just automate it…
Currently dreadshade can only target your own minions to avoid griefing situations and if you have only 1 minion, it will always just go onto that minion regardless of where you aim.
So if you could create a list, you can simply exclude everything that isnt the correct minion, and set it to auto cast.
The ideally are trying to work away from having auto cast or automation be core to skill identity.
I personally think having to aim the dreadshade if you have multiple minions not too much of an ask for a skill that is otherwise stupid strong for how easy it is to use.
Because Dread Shade and 2+ minion builds is awful thats why
Some things in this game are fairly unplayable longer term so you just avoid them and Dreadshade with multi minions is one of them
Dread Shade has some sort of ‘smart targeting’ on a controller, if you use it and the minion is behind you, it still targets them, if it cant it just waits without blowing your cooldown. You can auto cast on controllers with Steam settings but if you have 6 Wraiths, 2 Golems, 8 Skeletons you have no control of your Dread Shade placement so you lose massive damage and actually I dont think you can autocast it then anyway so you may as well not play the build and just go Abomination
Yeah I hate giving players more options on how to target their own skills
I would say sure if it was actually about like “let me hold a button to high light minions and thus letting me target”
The thing you are talking about is not exclusive to controller either. because dread necro can only target minions even if your minion is off screen, if you have a single one, and cast it it just snaps to them lol.
So with this change I could run fire golem and mages and skeletons for big RF golem, and just slap my dreadshade ive set to only target my golem on auto cast with a CD.
Thats what this is, its not for better targeting, its so they can simply make it so they always get their shade on the correct target with no aiming or thought.
You can autocast it because with the Egoism? node it adds a cooldown (and gives 100% crit lol) and the duration is longer than the cooldown so there is no thought required there, the next issue is if you dont have a cooldown you now need to cast it on multi minions regularly which is awful. If you decide to leave the cooldown you now have little control of placement on the minion then you also need to remove the HP drain or your minion will die in between packs
The skill itself is awful with small packs of weak minions and is very unfun to manage, if using a single minion Dreadshade is a mandatory autocast and forget it. If you could convocate/teleport all your minions onto you then cast Dread Shade it would be far better for multi minion builds
