Why do these trap nodes exist? The either cut your minions in half or drop it to 1 and not only do not give you anything in return they make your minions weaker because of it. If you run 5 or more skele then adding only 80% damage no extra health or anything else for curring the number you can summon in half is a massive loss that only nerfs you more the more skele you can summon. Same with Archlich, if you can summon 3 or more skele mages then this node is again a massive trap. You lose out on not only the damage but the stacks of debuffs that the extra mobs would give you.
While the āfew but strongā minion nodes are generally weaker, there are some upsides.
Each individual minion is a bit tankier, which makes keeping them alive a lot easier.
Also there are a couple of effects that only affect a limited nubmer of targets, which can be beneficial to have fewer strong minions.
I can defintiely see more stuff in the future that would add these few but strong minion builds even more.
While I havenāt bothered to play it myself, I have heard the Archmage is very strong and probably better than 3/4 regular skele mages.
for skeletons, the effects are take way half your skeletons for the rest to do 80% more damage and give them a size increase of 15%ā¦ they gain no health, attack speed or anything else, its literally just a pure nerf, you lose out on 20% + damage from minions, i say + because you lose all the benefits of the ignites/frost/armor shred/poison and whatever else they were adding for you build. Its not few but strong, its just fewer. Since it gives no health benefit the node should give them +200% damage or more as collectively thats a massive loss of meat shield and stacks of other stuff. The size increase because minions block eachother is also a nerf as other minions cant move through them and do nothing but run into them like a wall.
The archlich suffers from this a bit less, but it evens out to having 2.5 - 2.8 mages, so basically if you have 3 or more then it again is a massive nerf.
The other classes all give a trade off or benefit for basically every single node, the necro is the only one i see that gives you insane trap options that make your build objectively weaker for taking them.
A simple change for this would be scale everything they get based on the amount you lose, so the more you lose the more you gainā¦ lose 1 minion 50%, 2 100%, 3 150%, 4, 200%, 5 250%
that way the more you invest in the minions the more you get back. and make it get everything, health, attack speed, damage.
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Again I agree that generally speaking, these nodes are weaker for thhe most part, but its not true for every build.
There are some builds that can utilize these nodes so much to their advantage, that they are better in that specific instance.
I donāt know how much different stuff you already tried out, but I really hate spilling all the beans, when peopel still ahve stuff to discover.
All I say, there are skills that very positively interact with fewer strogner minions.
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Solo archmage gets to use auto crit dreadshade and +60% more damage.
Since we get an extra 60% thats only available on dreadshade for a single minion, its actually equal to 3.68 mages.
The archmage also gets to shoot 5 projectiles instead of 3. This might not seem that handy, but most of the time minions dont spread out their fire and just shoot at one target like idiots so more projectiles helps a lot.
Trust me, if you have never played a solo archmage build, its so much better then normal skeletons until you have the minion hp for your skeletons to not get owned.
For normal skeletons, the benefits are much smaller. but they still exist. Rogue builds want less minion count, as running around with maximum possible minions means less CDR for rogues and less damage.
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Its easy enough to get all minions to crit 85%+ of the time so again thats not really an increase in damage, the 5 projectiles from a single archmage is like a shotgun, even if 5 mages are only shooting 3 each that covers a much wider range at 15 projectiles, so a net gain of 10 for clearing purposes as generally enemies clump up so a shot that kills one mob the second part of that shot wont hit it and kills others. I can somewhat agree with rogues cutting it in half for less cdr but honestly, melee minions are trash on necro because of AI.
I have tried a solo archmage, all forms, the damage was just so much less it was not only not worth it the thing just goes splat because it is now the focused target, even with the leech.
I am not sure if its because I have a decent amount of minion HP and damage, but even with easy to obtain items there is no mathematical way for the limited minions to be better. to cut the minions in half they need to give a numerical edge as you are burning a point to cut your damage, as it is so far, you waste a point to do less damage with all but the rogues. As I said if you gave it a sliding gain on % based on how many minions you lose then it might be worth it. As is nowā¦ its trash
Permanent Abomination means you have limited skeletons anyway, so you pick the half as many node and Archmage nodes so your limited minions are as strong as they can be.
perm abom is ridiculously weak to begin with even if you sac a full group of skele and skele mages to em, now your making em only sac 6 at mostā¦ yeahā¦ if your gonna make a perm abom your best bet is to get 5 skele mages and as many skely without taking the node munch em all for abom, resummon the mages and ignore normal skely. I am still not seeing anything to make those nodes not a turd sandwich. To clarify Ill list it.
10 skele archer > 5 skele archer with +80% damage bonus (IMO best normal skele minion go flame archer)more arrows, more burn effects more meatshield, more damage
This is a loss of 10% pure damage per hit considering no other effects
10skele warrior > 5 skele war with +80% bonus,
more damage, more meatshield, more boneshields from when the cast it no contest in any way
again 10% damage loss, in addition to the boneshields and effects loss
10 skele rogue = 5 skele rogue with 80% bonus you have less minions so cdr is faster, you could go with less skele rogue, like 4 halved to 2 but you completely gut your damage.
This one is a bit more complicated, while you lose the 10% damage you gain almost what you lose because of the cdr but then you lose the effects because of less hits per second
This is taking a basic 100 damage per attack from a minion (pulled outta my rear) multiplied by number of minions then if using phalanx halved the total damage +80% so for 10 minions 1k damage, using the node dropped to 500 damage +400 from the 80% so 900 damage then you would also calculate the missing damage from shreds and dots. This node only gives bonus damage and size increase, no health or attack speed increase. So you end up with less damage and less āmeat shieldā
This would only be forgivable if the % increased per minion it decreases by say starting at 80% then 15% more per minion it sacrifices or something similar
Skele mages, your mages and minions in general (except golems) should have an 80%+ crit chance while even badly geared at higher levels or vs higher corruption echo, preferably 90%+ so you dont really gain much for the dread shade always crit stuff, so with that number in mind
5 skele mages (extremely easy to obtain) overwhelmingly outperforms 130% damage and health bonuses even 3 skele mages end up pulling ahead in damage thanks to resistance shreds, burn effects and others.
For this it ends up being 130% increase, so again we can take 100 base damage per minion, 500 damage for a full group. Being only 1 minion gives us a 230 base damage and 230 base health with double the projectiles from this one. this ends up again sacrificing over half the damage and even if you say the double projectiles can all hit the same target that is at most 460 damage so again a net loss but the projectiles cant all hit the same target so it unds up being less than 3 of the normal mages in performance.
gimped non decay abom isnt even worth mentioning if you are trying to keep your minions under decay cap summoning it and still trying to use them.
This is all in addition to the fact that you are paying a point that could be better spent elsewhere to gimp yourself
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This is looking at it purely from a āmathā point of view.
Which if thats your only logic, then ill say right now, all the minions on the list with those passives are dead in the water without them anyways.
People play perma abom with hungering souls āProjectile abomā and solo archmage because they still farm 300c, and require almost no gear or effort. Abom never dies because it has thousands upon thousands of health. Same with the single cryo. So the gameplay is literally just cast the minion once when you log in, and maintain buffs. you dont have to do anything else.
The trade off exists for that very reason. its a node that isnt strictly power focused, its a QoL node.
if we are talking math, playing skeletons is a bad build so what is even the point?
Not every node is designed to be a strict power upgrade. Some are designed to make synergies easier to use.
Again if your goal is to play the game from a strictly efficient math prospective you never touch skeleton mages anyways because they are not wraiths.
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You seem to think the game is a spreadsheet and the way to win is to get the biggest numbers. If thatās what you consider fun, then more power to you, itās how you win the game. Plenty of us donāt play that way.
I only gave objective reasons of why the skills are not only bad but complete traps and yet people want the feels not the reals. Instead of countering my points you say āits not how everyone wants to playā or āYour saying the game is a spreadsheetā. Sorry but 4+4 does not equal 13. Now as i said with certain things (rogues) or insanely niche builds (thrash abom) it might be mehā¦ or only a small downgrade.
I am wanting the game to be better, I want the class that i really like to be better, ive watched people quit because of how bad AI and those trash skills are. I do not want them to leave as it makes the game suffer. Saying āits fineā or āits a preferanceā is not helping the game get to a better state, and giving exact reasons why its objectively bad vs subjectively feels good might get the devs to look at it and maybe make it better.
Personally i hate decay minions, they can rot in a cold dark placeā¦ butā¦ i understand people like to play them, instead of saying its fine while the place burns around me id rather help them get to a better place and I would HOPE that other people can want necros that like non decay minions get to a better place. The its a niche skill or node line of thinking is horrible as it only promotes a meme build. make the skill appeal to players instead of people wanting it to die.
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This is my problem with your take, nothing in these games is purely objective because not everyones goals is the same. not everyone wants to go to 500+ corruption or push 700 arena waves etc.
Archmage isnt for you,
if you were to buff it, how would you choose to go about it? giving it a sliding scale of investment for each lost minion? well it gives 130% currently. you get 3 mages by default, so lets say it gives you 65% per lost mage. So at a max of 5 mages you lose 4, and get 260% more damage. With a baseline of 5 base damage, an archmage only does 3.6. But wait, we get access to the dreadshade solo minion node, so it does 60% more damage. Now my archmage deals 5.76 base damage, its greater then that of taking all the small mages.
This would also nerf solo archmage lich, as they dont get access to ANY increases to mages other then the tree one, which would make them spend more points to get the same value they had before the change. Deathseal archmage is cool.
You can make an argument about only running a single minion. But then we have to look at beast master, where givin the options, you only have two choices. Single minion, or wolves. if you are a crowstorm focused build, running a single crow is actually straight up better then running multiple crows until you have 5 and adaptive crow damage on a LP artors. Because the solo minion nodes are so bonkers powerful.
There is no way to set up archmage to where it is balanced against minion count, it either is stronger then having the minion count, or weaker. For the people who are clicking archmage cause they enjoy the playstyle, nothing changes. They were clicking it regardless of its power level.
The only thing it would change is when it becomes stronger then the hoard, at which point minmaxers pick it simply because its better numbers game wise.
Which ones & how high corruption can they push compared to comparable builds that donāt take those nodes?
To be fair, thatās generally what min-maxing is about in arpgs in general.
Hereās a pretty strong Archmage build, again she mentions the main pros of Archmage are boosted dreadshade, limited buff management and better survivability.
Also another trick if you want 3 minions for Hungering souls, skeletal warriors with bone armor are the tankiest but there is a travel node for +1 skele(4 max) when going for the only sumon skeletal warriors node. You can remedy this by reaching 6 max skele and then using the halve number of max skeles to hit perfect 3 minions.
Sure, which is why I didnāt belittle him for it.
I play to have fun maximizing the build I decide would be fun. He plays to have fun maximizing the best build available. There is a very definitive difference in our playstyles, but both are valid.
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Archmage is many times stronger than a smaller pack of mages that there is no comparison
I played Necro and switched to Archmage when MP released. Archmage does approx 12-45k crits and the normal mages were doing 400-700 or something, plus you can auto cast Dread Shade and use Infernal Shade while the Archmage can sustain its HP during the degen
The only way This is even remotely true is you had no minion gear, passives, and were not putting any points into the tree.
Basic mages do 3-5k with horrible gear or no gear and just using the passives, mine do 7-26k, with not great gear. I use 5 of them, currently attempting to go full non decay flame minion spec, 2 flame wraiths, 5 flame mages, 10 flame archers, and a flame golem (that because of minion blocking and bad AI almost never gets to fight)
So still nothing on these two skills? As is they are still a horrible joke, Archmage only makes sense for a Lich build as you have to go less than 4 mages for it to actually increase anything and necro as well as the skill both give you more mages, dread phalanx is just a straight up nerf, the absolute only benefit is if you have 3, 5, or 7 skeles. and thats like 6% 3% and 1.7% damage increase but a massive decrease in stacks (shred, Poison, burn or frost), effective minion HP, area of effect, life or ward on minion cast or deathā¦ there is absolutely ZERO point in getting this besides having less minion clutter. This ends up being a nerf of 4% at 9 minions and around 9-13% at 11 minions.
Suggestions for both of these skills would make it ramp up damage, health, and attack speed per minion you loose with them. just please do something, its bad
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mono mega skelly mage is probably one of the most beginner friendly builds, to rush you to lvl 80+, requiering close to no geare, and can farm high lvl monos with ease, sure it seems trash to lose the damage of that manny mages, but a dedicated 1 mega minion build, makes the mage into a monster
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