The Summoner is my favorite class type in ARPG.
I love all the summons and skill combos Last Epoch is offering us.
But in my subjective experience, the number of summons you can summons at same time, it far too high.
Boardman our crazy builder recently showed a build with 200+ Wraith summoned. 200 is ultra high. But 40 is ordinary, and it’s a very big number aready.
It’s a powerfull build for sure, but for me, it’s too much.
Too much units on screen.
Too much sounds heard.
That feeling you don’t have several important minions, but a big cluster, a mass of laggy minions.
And I can’t imagine the CHAOS it could be in Multiplayer, later in the game developpement.
Maybe my opinion is very minoritary. I don’t know. If it’s not, I think you should consider reducing the number of minions of the Necromancer (Actually the main “problem” come with the Wraiths) and off course, increase their power to compensate.
Well there is nothing that forces you to summon that many minions. There are several ways for summoner builds that summon few strong minions. In fact almost all summon skills have some kind of nodes in the skill spec tree that support “strong” minions instead of an whole army.
It’s true, nothing forces me. But having more minions is currently much more efficient.
It is much easier to rip blood on their concentrated mass.
Poison-based Wraiths are much more effective in large numbers given how Poison works.
There are many Nodes that benefit from a high number of minions: higher protection / armor / regeneration. From the ward to the death of the minions. Or special minions (Putrid Wraith).
The most efficient minions builds generally seek to either have a lot of hit points (reflective builds), so you need a lot of minions, or seek to do a lot of hits, to inflict the maximum number of hits and ailments.
If we could use a build with fewer minions so efficiently, okay, but we can’t really.
And I say it again, more fundamentally, I wonder if it is really nice to play with 40 minions.
Do you find that pleasant? I know you like Necromancers.
Yes you are correct. There are alot of interactions outside of the actual minion skill trees.
There should be more nodes that interact with having less than X minions i think. There are already some of those, which are cool, but not enough or storng enough ones to make it really matter.
Probably there could also be some nerfs to skills that interact with multiple minions. For example capping the maximum amount of minions a skill can interact with. There could be nodes that increas this.
The problem isn’t “too many minions” and that shouldn’t even be the title of the thread based on what you are saying. The problem is that having fewer minions shouldn’t be as much of a drop in efficiency as it is.
Ever since Diablo 2 necro there’s nothing I enjoy more than having as many minions as possible. If EHG made it so you could have less minions (and I already feel like the Necro in LE can’t have as many minions as summoner can have in other ARPGs) I would be very discouraged and probably try to find another game to stream and support. Having lots of minions in an ARPG is one of most satisfying things to me.
Also: Usually when people find a build they don’t enjoy they find another one. One of the best things about Last Epoch is that you can modify your skills and build to suit your play style preferences. I don’t see how someone else’s build affects your “gaming experience” at all when you can simply play a build with less minions. And less minions being less efficient does NOT mean you can’t do all the content in the game anyways. It’s still more than viable and just because it’s less efficient, in my opinion, doesn’t mean it needs to be addressed right away, especially with all the other much more important issues that need addressed in the game, like game breaking bugs, optimization for necro builds, optimization for the game itself, and so on.
except all of those nodes are mathmatically hard nerfs IF you’re a necromancer, since you can get otherwise just more minions that the nodes are worth (specifically for archmage and dread phalanx)
if you’re a lich player who wants minions for some reason, those nodes are great…
I’m playing necro with a limited amount of minions (16 base up to 30 with wraith summon).
It’s certainly subpar in DPS compared to an “army” build but definitely not an hindrance to clear the endgame content for the moment.
Currently doing the level 90 MoF and for the moment it’s all good.
The only boss that is a problem is Lagon due to certain bugs in the level design.
So you can definitely play necro both ways, one will be more succesful than the other I agree.
Seems like a balancing problem imo; which is a problem with a number of builds. Don’t think a build should be able to summon so many without some kind of counter balance even with good gear. It seems like really uninteresting combat.
if you have 16 base minions, then that tells me you aren’t using archmage or dread phalanx, which are the talents i pointed out as being tremendous nerfs to necromancer output (as opposed to just not being buffs)
Indeed but compared to the average number of minions wraith build revolves around I put it in the category of low minion build. Personnal interpretation from me.
But effectively taking those nodes that limits to 1 or halves your minion number doesn’t seem outweight the advantage of having just more minions.
If I have 5 minions with 10 base dps and 200% increased damage for example, my minion will deal 10x2x5= 100 DPS.
If I take a node that reduced to 1 minion but only gives me 80% additional dps, my minion will only deal 10x2.8 = 28 or 10x2x1.8= 36 (depending if it’s an increased or more damage modifier). So I’m dividing my DPS by at least by 3 by going for such nodes.
it’s not quite that bad (for archmage) but short version, it’s slightly stronger than 3 mages, but weaker than 4 mages, and necromancers can get 5 mages.
meanwhile dread phalanx is a hard 20% weaker if your max skeletons is an even number, and becomes an actual damage nerf at 9 or 11 skeletons (while at 5 and 7 it’s a very small, almost insignificant damage boost)
Archamge doesn’t seems that bad of a trade off with the more 130% and the double projectiles.
For dread phalanx, if I take my example again with 10 skeletons
10x2x10 = 200 -> (10x2)x1.8x5 = 180 so you still lose dps.
archmage doesn’t actually double projectiles, it just give it 2 more (from base 3) so a 66% increase, assuming all 5 projectiles hit a target, archmage does at best 382% increased damage, which is worse than 400% normal damage from 4 mages.
also, as i stated, dread phalanx ALWAYS is a 20% damage nerf if your max skeletons is an even number (due to the nature of rounding up) you seem to think i was arguing that it was good?
ah, well your example used an even number, so even at 4 it’d be 20% less damage, which was why i thought you were trying to make a counter argument to what i had said.
I’m curious, why is it necessary to limit build options when EHG provides you with non-minion or less minion builds that are viable? The minion heavy builds are a love letter to the old D2 Skelemancers who loved to fill the screen with Skeleton Mage spam along with their sword wielding brethren.
There will always be a “top” build for any particular class in any particular game. If you’re a min maxer and you don’t like the build you’re being shoe horned into, then you can decide whether you want to min max another class, adjust your priority for playing the strongest build in the class or stop playing the game entirely.
You haven’t offered a compelling reason for limiting build options other than you don’t favor mass summons and you want to be the strongest necromancer in the world without them.
I’m pretty sure the devs never wanted so many wraths to be arround and a fix will happen. Yes it’s bad by design if you loose effectivness if you want fewer more potent pets and it don’t work out because only strength in numbers count. Then again it would be sad if more minions don’t get better results.
I simply think the take on minions is a bad one and I would like a different approach like:
-8 T1 Skeletoons summoned everything is normal
sacrifice the possibilty to summon 8 and summon 4 T2 skeletons that are stronger and more durable and have a skill they use
sacrifice more, get even more buffed pets with more skills to use
And so on and so forth for all kinds of pets. Same for BM instead of summoning a wolve pack just summon a lone wolve that’s bigger and more badass. There are plenty of options to make every kind of build viable technicly but it seems like we get a rather blunt approach here.
Just one reason more to never touch pet builds they are simply to wonky to even think abou them… from my point of view.
I can’t speak much of the necro side of things, but I am running a direct comparison of running Beastmaster with a typical pet army and a Beastmaster that only runs 1 pet to take advantage of the partner nodes. The one-pet loyalist is only level 67, compared to 77 for my pet army, but I had not realized how stark the difference was until I ran Chapter 9 with the pet army for the first time - it was so much easier than the 1-pet loyalist I was blown away. I have found multiple reasons why this is the case:
Avoiding enemy 1-shots is much easier for the pet army: since you’re not in the fight, by definition it’s a lot easier to notice enemy wind-ups and avoid the most dangerous hits. Additionally, since DPS is much higher for the pet army, it’s a lot easier to dispose of enemies before they do their most damaging attacks again and again.
Gearing: simply put, it’s a lot easier to put points in minion damage, minion melee damage, and minion leech when you don’t have to put a lot of points in things like purely defensive buffs for you (since you’re in the thick of it as much as your pets are) and offensive buffs for yourself like the passive points in the Shaman tree that give you attack & cast speed with an active totem. I’m getting several hundred % more minion damage with my pet army than with my 1-pet loyalist, and that has everything to do with sacrificing a lot of gear and passive points to ensure that I can inflict damage on the toughest enemies.
AoE: Simply put, having more minions means that you have a lot more AoE to deal with annoying boss adds and groups of tough enemies. As it is, Serpent Strike (which I use as my main damaging attack since it provides the DoTs I need to weave in and out of battle and provides a great amount of Dodge rating so I can stay in the fight for longer) just doesn’t match up against having 4-5 additional pets wailing on a group simultaneously.
Necromancers are a lot harder to balance for fewer pets because the pets are expendable by design, so it pays to go for an extreme offensive approach. The main point is that you have to consider multiple factors when trying to approach pet builds in this manner and it’s a lot more complicated than just “have fewer pets, but the pets you do have are bigger and stronger.” You have it right when it comes to giving them new abilities, but as the above poster pointed out, you have to do it right so that you don’t end up having a straight damage nerf by choosing the “fewer but stronger minions” nodes. I’ll share more once I level up my 1-pet Loyalist to match my existing pet army build so I can have a more comprehensive analysis.
Balance and Performance will be always the issue, not even talking about multiplayer part, where it could ruin experience for other players pretty easily.
Even 50+ minions is like 30 too many. There is tons of reasons, why things like these should not be allowed and should be hard capped somehow. I understand for many “summoner lovers” this wont be very popular solution to a problem, but i believe, it’s necessary
