I mentioned an idea of this in the abomination post currently being discussed on the forum, but thought it was an idea that should be highlighted on it’s own.
When discussing necromancers, i am of the belief that minions should always be the rule, not the gimmick. and in the case of dread shade, we see a skill that has a problematic interaction with our minions (being that it kills them) when the skill itself could have been another minion.
you wouldn’t even need to change all that much about the talent tree, it could have just gone like this:
“Dread Commander”
“Summon a skeletal commander with rapidly decaying health to inspire your undead hordes. you may only have 2 Dread Commanders at a time”
mechanically, it’s just a wraith with the dread shade aura, but by being it’s own minion, you:
expect it to die
don’t have to worry about miss-clicking the wrong minion
have more minions (always a win for the necromancer)
i don’t really expect it to change, but i do think it’s a shame that necromancers have skills that could have been minions but weren’t.
A couple of nodes would need to change (the ones buffing the host mob) but it would have the additional benefit of making it more obvious when the Shade is up. Though I also dont have an issue having skills that buff the minions.
I think that would be a very good idea. I don’t like how Dread Shade currently works and I feel making it a separate minion would fix all what annoys me.
Yuck, enough with the decaying minions. I already hate the fact that the only 2 buffs for necro are designed to slaughter your minions, its to much of a cost.
you really shouldn’t be using an arch-mage on a necromancer, this is sort of of topic, but it’s mathematically a hard net loss for the only class that would even bother to consider it. (unless there’s some secret interaction with dread shade specifically i don’t know about?)
it is true that the devs seem to have some weird fixation on punishing the necromancers for being necromancers. like, they’ve become enamored with some sort of backwards philosophy that, if we gain even the slightest amount of power past a certain point, then it must come at some sort of hindering cost that none of the other classes have to deal with, and personally, i think it has everything to do with wraiths, and that one dude who won the leaderboard for an update (i think it was boardman?) because they found a way to break it such that they could keep 300+ wraiths on the field at all times, and spawn camp the arena to floor 900 or something unreasonable. and rather than fix the problem skill (that being wraiths) the devs started making new skills added afterwards toxic against the necromancer to punish them for having a different broken skill, but that’s just my observation.
personally i would have redesigned the necromancer from the ground up in terms of the minion mechanics and would have given them a mechanic similar to the summoner from dungeon defenders, in that they would have like, a “big ol’ sack of bones” that they ‘form’ their minions from, and each minion would have a different bone cost, once the bag is empty, they can’t summon any more minions, leveling up increases the size of the bag, while the minion talents that gave extra summons would just reduce the bone cost of the minion. want 8 golems? you can have it, but it’ll cost you all your bones, want 40 skeletons? you can have them but nothing else, want 1 commander, 2 golems, 5 mages, 12 skeletons, but now you have 7 bones leftover and don’t know what to do with them? use them on the cheap temporary minions wraiths, or use them to form a weaker abomination, who would just consume whatever was left in the entire bag, and gain power based on that instead of having to spend time eating your minions.
unfortunately, such is just a pipe dream, and as far as i’ve seen in the year and a month since i first picked up this game, the devs don’t really “redesign” the concept behind an ability. i’ve noticed a few talent tree’s they’ve rebuilt, and the passive tree turning sideways for poorly understood reasons, but the skills they’ve worked on have always fundamentally been the same as before.
I really like this idea, i don’t really like the idea of a temporal buff that kills my summons just for a buff, i really see that this devs have a perspective based on is necromancer, plays with death so half of the things he summons need to be temporal because get ¿rotten? i don’t know i really hate decaying minions or temporal minions too, give me something physical, no a shade that vanish when you need it most.
Necro is my first love in ARPGs. I like making an army of different kinds of minions that serve different purposes that meshes together into a murder factory. Dread Shade is strong enough to feel mandatory, but doesn’t feel like a minion at all to me, and I don’t like that. I don’t like a lot of things about it, to be honest, but that is the one that I don’t like the most.
I detest it, I hate purposely killing my own minions to make them a bit stronger. It is already taking up a precious slot that i could be using for something else (although most things suck for a pure minion build) but you are imposing a massive additional cost of in essence sacrificing a minion. So this spell has 3 different costs, opportunity (taking a slot) mana (not a small amount) and killing one of my other abilities to make it work. With the steep cost of it this thing should work a lot better than what it does.
I am all for making this thing a different perm pet that mostly buffs other minions, almost like an aura. Depending on how you spec it in the tree they might buff the minions in different ways, maybe one tree deals with ice/slow another deals with physical/bleed/haste another makes leach, maybe add movement on another branch. Hell this could be an amazing support minion for full minion builds
I feel that if they move a pet buffing skill to a curse focused class, most people here might lose faith in the devs ability to design a game and may abandon ship. Tbh I’m not entirely sure what your logic behind this statement is, maybe there’s something to it, but it seems like it was only made to needle the people here.
I think the people who are here commenting for a change like the skill, or at least want to like the skill, otherwise they wouldn’t bother, but in its current form it’s unjustifiably counterproductive to the class that uses it. The amount of power it gives is significant, sure, but understand that the punishment aspect tacked onto it is meaningless busywork… like, we’ll just cast it again as soon as the minion dies, but now our time has been wasted, and once your army gets past a certain size, you spend an unnecessary amount of time worrying/ trying to figure out which minion it went on in the first place so that, by the time that one dies you know what to resummon. There would be no functioning difference if the skill was simply permanent, since like I said, we’ll just cast it again the moment the minion dies. Unnecessary punishments aren’t engaging gameplay or interesting player choices.
Well based on that, I’d say it would have been an even greater shame, because as far as we know, like the lich, the warlock will not focus on pets (because the necromancer already exists) so giving them a skill that exclusively buffs pets is akin to forcing necromancer a to dump points into their tree to get a skill designed to benefit themselves. I don’t see what use such a skill would have to a warlock, for that matter. Arpg’s aren’t really known for establishing pure support classes, y’know?
How is it hyperbole? I read your reply to the same comment, and you seemed to assume that dread shade would get a replacement, where as the commenter just said the skill would get moved and nothing else, which would be a terrible and out of left field sort of change.
I don’t think my response was over the top, you and I just interpreted the comment differently.
Am i the only one who actually likes that skill as it is? 