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Giant walls of text that say the same thing over and over will not help in terms of granting an actual vision of what improvement would end up looking like.
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Since you bring up the Abomination a lot, have you actually talked with anyone who uses it in a build? Zeckar’s Abomination Build doesn’t appear to be a minion which is constantly resummoned - it looks like the build was designed for the Abomination to have staying power (although it currently uses the “Bone Curse as minion” exploit which I’m not particularly fond of).
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Would someone like to join the next dev session and ask what they plan on doing to calm Wraiths down so that a 200 Wraith + whatever rest of minions build doesn’t feel mandatory (and I’m sure plenty of good Necro minion builds could do all content with permanent minions without having to go Wraith, but I know once people see an OP skill, they feel like it would be mandatory, so it may just end up being a nerf to the Wraith skill specifically to bring it to line with the other minion skills)?
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Dread Shade does have an option to simply Poison your minion instead of inflicting %Max Health, which can be mitigated by minion Poison resistance. Perhaps this was a way of helping the permanent minions like Skeletons have an advantage over temporary pets like Wraiths which were meant to die anyway and thus shouldn’t have this compounding effect on them.
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If certain skills do feel like they’re mandatory because they factually grant the largest stat increases, then that’s what balancing is for and numbers could be adjusted. Once there are no longer 200 Wraith builds and their numbers are more manageable, then a better discussion can be had on which skill falls more in line with the Necro vision of a minion army and which skills feel more like tedium and pointlessness.
I’d say more, but you’re hinging so much on hypothetical scenarios and pointless jabs at the devs that it’s hard to even begin with figuring out what to do with it. I think you mentioned you played the Necro and around Level 70+ you felt like massive Wraiths had to be necessary. Did the Skeletons damage fall off at that point? Would a pure Skeleton build (+ Golem) be able to handle Empowered monos (I know Boardman has a Cold Skeleton build but I don’t know much about the specifics)?
Let’s figure out the Wraith discussion first, then we can handle whether things like Infernal Shade and Dread Shade add enough to builds to make them interesting or whether they’re arbitrary, but mandatory stat sticks which make the builds play better, but you feel worse for being forced into the situation.