Assembling the Abomination

We’re working on new boss fights to add more variety to our endgame content and once again raise the standard of our boss encounters. A couple of these feature particularly impressive models which you’ll hopefully enjoy seeing as much as we enjoy designing them!

As we’re not ready to begin showing these off just yet, we were inspired to look at some of the creatures we’ve added previously, and their journey from initial concept to implementation.
 

Only the most powerful of Necromancers can create such a foul construct.

 
In Patch 0.7.9 we implemented the Assemble Abomination skill for Necromancers. Already a large monstrosity, its appearance varied depending on which minions were unfortunate enough to be involved in its dark summoning ritual, rendering it one of the most complex models to have been created for Last Epoch to-date. Let’s explore its ideation!

 

Designing The Base Model

Initially we did some exploratory concept art to help us decide what kind of shape and size we wanted this minion to be. Sergey produced a variety of different designs - some focusing on the horror of multiple minions being stitched together, others iterating on the idea of a lumbering brute, and others still exploring the idea of a large devourer of bodies.


 

Our preferred fantasy for this minion was to have a large behemoth ponderously approaching enemies, visibly in a state of undeath but not completely losing the idea of a menacing beast descending upon its prey. With this decision made, we began refining the idea.


 

As our designs consolidated towards a single concept, Sergey worked on increasingly detailed sketches to further flesh out the minion. Details such as asymmetric limbs, a visible rib cage, and the minion’s palette began getting locked in at this stage.


 

We then began creating other art for the minion, such as this material reference sheet which is created to help the 3d artists better understand the vision for the model. While mostly referenced by our modelers, these can also help our animators.


 

Designing Minion-Specific Appendages

With a firmer idea of what the abomination itself would look like, it was time to focus on how the model would change to reflect the ‘ingredients’ used in its construction. There was minimal iteration needed here - the first round of designs were very popular internally.

 
We hope you found this post interesting! We look forward to being ready to start talking about the contents of Patch 0.8.2 in detail later in its patch cycle. We currently anticipate this update taking a couple of weeks longer than most of our content patches.

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Interesting, I never used he abomination so I dint know it looks different per what minion it absorbs. GREAT attention to detail guys!

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Sergey keeps delivering better and better stuff. Art department nailing it.

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Eleventh Hour Games is on fire! Already teasing 0.8.2! Love it

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Love it i really feel the monster coming out in me!

Bring it on!

Love the insight on how you do things. Very curious what you will deliver with 0.8.2.

Beware! The Spriggan breaks free!!

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My birthday is March, 30th. Just saying. :wink:

Not happening, the patches are ~2 months apart, since 0.8.1 hit mid-Feb, I’d expect 0.8.2 around mid-Apr.

I know, I was just joking. And Sarno said it would be a bit longer, so probably end of April or early May. :wink:

This topic actually confuses me greatly - its obvious EHG/your team has spent a lot of time designing this skill, from animations/skills/artwork/designs and the skill is actually pretty unique compared to the plethora of summons in every aRPG ever…but why do you insist on leaving this skill so unplayable?

Ive posted feedback about this, quite a while ago actually in December of 2020 - I cant be bothered retyping it but the TLDR is EHG have gone too heavy into the thematic approach of making the Abomination endlessly degen, ontop of requiring 2 other permanent degeneration spells to even feel useful, plus Abomination doesnt work well with other minions as other minions steal his recovery from leech so he just runs around slowly degenerating with nothing to stop it, when he dies he is painful to resummon

ive already suggested how to solve this as well since its removing the Abomination degen part of its skill tree could be too powerful however making a unique namely an Amulet that removes degen from Abom and also removes other minions as a drawback - on an amulet due to Death Rattle…that leaves the original idea intact and the unique provides people to actually use this endgame. The other simpler idea is to leave the degen intact and make a way so Abomination “Reassambles automatically after 5 seconds” which I dont mind either as a mechanic. Ive just been playing an Elementalist in PoE who relies on having 5 golems alive to provide me buffs - prior to this patch you had to manage them by keeping them alive and it was too tedious - GGG made the mechanic ‘golems revive recently after being killed’ or so, if they die you dont really care as they will automatically be back in a moment but you may need to be careful for 4 seconds

Unless something changes I will not ever play this skill again and I dont feel many others will either, it just feels so wasted currently

Spriggan pet is about maybe 25x stronger than Abomination in general and thats not even a joke, she has a ranged attack, a heal, heal aura and my level 95 Druid’s Spriggan can deal up to 250k damage per attack on normal mobs in Empowered Timeless - an ‘attack’ being all 5 balls hitting one after

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Multiplayer

Or is the spriggan evolving :thinking:

Yeah, clearly there some design issues with Abomination. I think we haven’t seen major changes to it is because the devs haven’t circle back around to fix weak skills. There a good amount of those kind of skills in the game that have clear design issues and/or underperform with a mixture of other skills overperforming. I guarantee that we will see an update to Abomination just like other skills before 1.0.

This topic is not about balancing or overhauling something. This is a glimpse of how the process of creating the abomination looked like. Abomination is not only a Necro skill, but also a Monolith boss. And the newest teaser is that new bosses are coming in patch 0.8.2. The balance and mechanic of the skill have no relation to this topic.

Although your statement is right. Just the wrong place. :v:

Noice!

On the topic of abomination I’m so glad the dev team decided to show off the creative vision and how it came to be for a monster type like this. My first interaction with Abomination was in monolith fighting it for the first time and I was really blown away at the attention to detail; he said used different parts of his body to attack WHOA. On top of looking very gory and have high level of detail, it had a great thought process in its design which it delivered well. I hope there is future detail like this in upcoming bosses.

Keep up the good work!

Its definitely not a thread regarding balancing however after Sarno mentioned and ive even played the skill enough and the fact this thread is all about Abomination I cant help post

So as I expected and this thread proves a large amount of time was spent creating Assemble Abomination - there is one paragraph regarding Ambomination implying its a boss but all the text is regarding the minion itself. The boss has completely different attacks - but the mechanics on the minion are as detailed as the animations - not only does it gain powers, it absorbs the HP per minion during the cast etc

I Apologise if my post seemed negative but I like this skill and want it to work

I actually like #12 or #4 designs on first diagrams

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