Dread shade should have been a minion

Feedback and Suggestions
12

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

3 Likes
13

So, if dread shade gets moved to the warlock tree, is that ‘problem solved’ for most people here?

14

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.

15

My intention was not to needle anyone, nor to be logical. I can rephrase it thusly:
Based on this:

Would it be less of a shame for you if the exact same skill were in warlock’s kit when it is released?

16

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?

1 Like
17

Potentially, yes. But it would depend on the particulars. Such as:

  • It’s high enough up that it’s locked out for non-Warlocks? Yes.
  • It’s not, but the replacement in the Necro tree competes with it in power? Yes.
  • It’s not, but it’s still high enough up with that losing points in Necro to get it isn’t a good tradeoff? Yes.
  • The replacement in the Necro tree is flat out better, or is more concretely minion-y? Yes.

But if it were more like - Put 5-15 points in Warlock to still get Dread Shade and also still get the Dread Shade replacement - probably not.

1 Like
18

Come on man, that is really extreme hyperbole and it’s not going to make anybody listen to you here.

19

Couldn’t agree more! It’s a mandatory skill currently, make it a minion.

3 Likes
20

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.

21

How is it hyperbole to claim that “most people” would lose all faith and abandon a game just because a pet related skill got moved to a tree that isn’t solely for pets? Dude. Come on. Listen to yourself.

Pets are not the exclusive realm of Necros. Acolytes have most of their pet skills as either baseline or easily accessible to any spec. It would not be a slap-in-the-face travesty to put one in the tree of a class we don’t even know anything about yet.

Of course I assumed that. In this hypothetical future, they’re not going to rip Dread Shade out of the Necro tree and just leave an empty hole there. Why would I assume the least charitable possibility to react to in this hypothetical scenario? That isn’t productive in the slightest.

22

"A master of the forbidden arts, she tears into the essence of her foes, twisting and corrupting their spirits. Curses that dim the mind and break the body, the faintest word from her lips bear vile enough magic to snuff the life of her enemies entirely. " pulled directly from last epochs official website, notice no mention of minions (which are, in fact, the main feature of necromancers)

because the scenario offered no other information, my response wasn’t an assumption, it made use of 100% of the information that was presented, and assumed nothing other than what was suggested.

23

“An acolyte who has embraced the corruptive nature of her power and uses the magic of blood and death at the expense of her own health. Stealing life, consuming the essence of the dead and the damned for strength. This power will make her invincible.”

Description of a Lich, pulled directly from Last Epoch’s website. No mention of minions, and yet Death Seal - which is exclusive to Lich due to its position in the tree - can be specced to give a Lich an extremely powerful minion buff. Is that a 1 to 1 comparison with Dread Shade? No. Does it show that a class’s elevator pitch is absolutely not the be-all-end-all of what that class can/will do? Yes. I could also point out how much else there is to a Lich that does not conform to that description, because there’s a lot.

It is extremely unlikely that the devs would move Dread Shade to the Warlock tree without putting a replacement in the Necro tree, and you know it. What you’re dressing up is just being obtuse and pedantic, and it is not a valid reason to assume the least charitable hypothetical as the most likely reality.

24

There is an incredible difference between that and this, dread shade doesn’t just have an optional talent pathway to buff minions, it’s the only function of the ability. putting it on a warlock who isn’t generally going to be a pet focused class means giving them a spell that they would have to spec away from just to be usable to them (if it could even be made usable to them)

I agree, that was never what this ongoing argument was about, but on that note, i don’t know what it’s worth to you to win this increasingly fruitless conversation, but you seem to have made a determination that I’m out to deceive you, so i guess I’m sorry for wronging you?

25

Great suggestion/feedback. Would love to see a minion that ‘inspires/buffs’ your other minions instead of the current DOT/Curse on applied minion.

2 Likes
26

I don’t have any problems using the Dread shade. It’s an amplifying aura. It should remain so.

27

Neat. I was going to suggest you make a separate post for your Dread Commander idea but I guess you already did it.

Now I guess the three main Necromancer skills that needs fixing is:

Abomination - As done in my own post
Dread Shade - As done in this post
Skeletal Mage - As I think I’ll make a post about

Mainly I’m thinking about one thing you’ve brought up before with the Archmage skill node. There is one other major thing though that I’ve noticed is that Skeletal Mage abilities that cast skills such as Sacrifice or even Hungering Souls for the Death Knight they only cast the base skill meaning you can’t invest a skill slot into improving their skill as well.

You also have the Dread Phalanx for Summon Skeleton which halves the summonable skeletons by half without giving enough power in return to justify the skill node.

Then of course you’ve mentioned the issues with Summon Wraith. A good concept to be sure but utterly broken under certain conditions because of the no summon limit. They are of course meant to used with Sacrifice if you build for that but then again that can also get out of hand because of the no summon limit.

Come to think of it with so many issues it’s almost like Necromancer would need enough work to call it a rework.

You mentioned redesigning the way Necromancer summons things and while I agree using a separate resource like a Bone Bag might be too much there are other ways to tweak things. I did like your post on it though and gave a vote.

For instance instead of having to summon minions separately they could be max summoned in one button like what the Beastmaster can do. That would certainly clear up not just the Wraith issue but also the issue of running into a boss that AOEs your minions to smithereens and you’re left almost defenseless while dodging projectiles.

Another method would be that most minion spells auto-summons the minions to your cap. With that you could even add a usable minion ability similar to what the Beastmaster has.

Maybe even both where you can summon your cap of Wraiths with one button, maybe they still decay, but then you can use their button to activate their ability. Then you have your Skeletal Mages auto-summoned to their cap and their ability button available to use at all times.

Some things to think about to be sure but alas we can only address 1 thing at a time in a post. Although maybe I’ll make a post linking the other posts with footnotes for easy reading if they don’t want to go into the other posts.

28

You can build dread shade to not kill your minions. You can cast it on enemies and decide to either buff all minions in the circle (melee minions build) or outside the circle (ranged minions build).

Did you try this playstyle? I use it most of the time as dread shade is one of the best (if not the best) minion buffs in the game (60% more damage + attack speed).

29

As with some other posts, I appreciate the creativity of these suggestions here. But I also don’t see any need to change dread shade. It’s one of my favourite skills and favours different playstyles. You can kill your minions with it (and build around that feature) or you cannot (node: enemy of my enemy).

Cheers

1 Like
30

I believe the reason i personally dont like it, it doesnt thematically fit necromancer. Necro has way to many skills all about getting rid of minions vs keeping them around. 1 skill out of everything a necro gets, everything else is from acolyte.

2 Likes
31

I agree that I’d like some sort of buff/aura minion granted from the necromancer tree. Whether it replaces dread shade or is in addition to (its benefits would probably need to be mutually exclusive with dread shade),.

I would be very interested in seeing a whole ability tree focused around this new buffing minion type that could even have the secondary focus of skeleton vanguards as the skeleton commander’s personal bodyguard, but unlike other trees have nodes to buff the vanguards as well.

1 Like