Skeletal mages are still considerably more tanky than bone golems, which feels wrong. Sure, golems have a huge health pool and a lot of armor. But they have no meaningful way to restore it, so mages out-tank them, no competition. They need a way to restore a percent of their health. Leech is useless because they have so much health and do so little damage. I have hundreds of regen on my golems and their health crawls back up over time. And the health-on-hit node is a meaningless amount of health (reasonable for restoring health to you, meaningless to the golem). It seems pretty clear that golems are meant to be permanent tank minions, but they do a bad job at the role right now, even if you go all in on them. Which is a bummer because they look awesome with the new models.
quite a few of the minions to me just feel bad. Bone golems should have a huge regen, speccing into non decay wraiths shouldnt be such trash. It seems fairly obvious the devs just dont like non decaying minions so they tuned them way way down.
As far as Iâm aware, the Acolyte minions are the only ones that decay, and the Sentinel Forged Weapons. Iâve played Sentinel and Manifest Armor doesnât decay and Iâve played Primalist and none of those pets decay. MA and the Primalist pets can be built to be very resilient to the point of almost âimmortalâ in may ways.
This isnât true. I would recommend looking at the common builds that people are using with bone golem. Thereâs a guy who is at ~1,100 corruption on bone golem. Itâs a wildly-tanky minion. You just need to give him some HP and some source of leech for himself (as well as a bit of resistances in the necro tree). For a general idea of the build, you can look at LizardIRLâs build on maxroll. The guy running in super high corruption is doing it a little differently because he needs a shield at that corruption level, but you will get the essence of it from the maxroll guide.
Your flame wraiths should have leech and if they are attacking they will stay at max hp. They only decay once their job is done and they are out of combat again.
ahh the broken bonecurse spam mechanic, yeah ive seen this, its not really relying on minion as much as the rip blood to proc bone nova and using the curse to force the nova specifically from the golem. You end up in a spam of epicness for the bone nova.
Thanks for the response Toro, I donât think youâve really shown that Bone Golems are generally tanky though. That build is very specific (and spammy/clicky). It works because you can force your golem to attack way faster than it otherwise would, and you can give it meaningful leech thanks to the combo of a specific passive node and dread shade node. Iâm using the new unique that gives you multiple golems, and invalidates the bone shatter approach because it gives it a cooldown (plus you canât apply that dread shade node to more than one minion). If there is only one very specific way to make this minion tanky, then it doesnât really count in my opinion. It certainly doesnât count as a well-balanced skill.
That being said, that build sounds interesting and Iâll probably give it a try 
No worries. The other possibility is that the item you are using a rare unique item that isnât a strong item and gives you multiple golems at the expense of making each of them significantly weaker than they would be on their own . In a sense, youâre running golem in one specific (currently weaker) way, and in general the golem is extremely tanky. When youâre looking at a skill tree to determine how you want to spend your points, I would recommend not only looking at each option individually but all of them in aggregate and think about which ones can stack/scale some offensive/defensive ability or attribute for you or your character. In this game, if you donât scale things, you will likely have a tough time.
If you hit âCâ to open your character stats and go to the Minion tab, what is the value of your âIncreased Minion Healthâ?
There are some defensive nodes (leading to Fragments of the Fallen) in the bottom middle of the Bone Golem skill tree. One of the key defensive nodes says it only works if there is only one golem alive. Additionally, giving your minions leech is a very important thing for most of necromancerâs minions. If you are not giving them scaling in their damaging abilities (their base attacks are very weak) then even if you are giving them leech it wonât have substantial effect. If you are not using the defensive skill nodes in the tree (canât fully use these if you run that Aaronâs item), it will feel weak. Again, the golem can easily live with no problem at wildly-high corruption levels.
In the skill tree, you can see there are 4 quadrants: top left for normal bone golem, top right for pyre golem, bottom right for blood golem, and bottom left for deathchill golem. If you look in the top left for the normal base golem, you will see that a large number of nodes are specifically about the âretaliationâ style and using Bone Shatter. If most of the nodes are modifying/buffing that one ability of the golem, Iâm not sure how it can be labeled as some small, esoteric subset of ways to play Bone Golem.
To be clear, I havenât seen one good build where Aaronâs Will doesnât significantly reduce the efficacy of the golem skill. I also spent a lot of time trying to make it work. Maybe it could work for a support role in teamplay, with 4 deathchill golems running around freezing everything but it certainly doesnât work for solo play with normal golem (reduce golem stats via nodes not working that require one golem, and and give a cooldown to their main damage ability) or pyre golem (removes ability to consume the low mana cost skeletons to buff the aura up).
To phrase things like how you are: I donât think youâve shown itâs generally a weak minion. There is no skill in the game where it doesnât matter how you allocate points (also in conjunction with affixes on gear for minions).
You might be right, maybe Aaronâs Will just needs to be rebalanced. But:
Is there another way for golem to do remotely close to as much damage as the ally hit bone shatter approach? Without high damage relative to health, 5-10% leech from an item doesnât keep a minion topped off. Again, if thereâs only one viable way to use a minionâŚ
My original counterpoint: Skeletal Mages. Vanilla mages without any specific item or combination can be very tanky because they have several meaningful health recovery skill nodes (leech percent, max health on crit,. high crit chance, ward per sec), where golem has none.
Also, my point of reference/frustration is whether the minion can be used against T3/T4 Julra. Without having to be resummoned. Which is a high bar, but primalist minions can do it, as you pointed out. Kiting around high corruption echoes and killing things before they attack you and resummoning minions all the time isnât what I mean by âtankyâ.
If you direct him to stand where Julraâs telegraphed attacks arenât, you can have no issues with bone golem survivability on T4 Julra, which is substantially easier than the 1,100 corruption reference. Any minion can die if they stand in her stuff. You are also able to kill T4 Julra quite quickly with a strong bone golem build. If you do run that build, one of the best items you can get is the Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros â once you have that, you would move a couple points to convert rip blood to necrotic damage source, and you will have between 5,000-17,000 ward depending on your stats (health, cast speed, ward retention and intelligence).
By the way, a simple search on youtube will show you evidence of what Iâm saying.
Okay, sounds like you are happy with Bone Golem the way it is. Iâm still not (tried the ally hit bone shatter build and didnât find it fun). So my feedback to the developers is that Iâd like to play Bone Golem as one of many minions (preferably with Aarons Will too) and not have it be the weak link, and not have to resummon. Obviously they can ignore me if they want.
I havenât tried this bone curse/rip blood thing at all, but my bone golems have had no difficulty staying alive by using the node where they heal every time they hit something.
The most recent changes gutted it.
So basically the only even somewhat, albeit spam clicky, non decay acolyte minion build has now been made trash? Skele themselves are squishy as you get even lower corruption levels, and unless you go full range on the mages they are squish as well deathknights are horrible because of AI. So it seems the only viable build is being forced decay flame wrath build 
Its sad that if you get Aarons will you are basically forced to give up a second skill tree or use wear other items just to utilize it.
Skelly Mages get one-shotted often. Golems do not.
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