Let's talk about False Cost and Arbitrary Loss mechanics

[Zarono]

(Yes this is another post about Necromancers, what can I say, I’ve played all 3 available minion classes to high level, and this one has the most issues)
So, a topic that I’ve seen floating around these last few days in the other various threads on topics like minion decay mechanics from abomination, to wraiths, to dread and infernal shade got me thinking, “what is even the purpose of these negative mechanics?” which brings us to today’s post on “false cost” and “arbitrary loss” for Necromancer minions (and anything else which may implement such mechanics in the future)
To begin with false cost, we look at dread shade and it’s interaction with your minions. simply put, it kills them for no reason. like, there are going to be people out there “but killing your minion is the cost of the skill” except it’s not, because dread shade has no cooldown, so you’ll just cast it again as soon as the minion dies (or even earlier), and minions can be summoned with no cooldown, so you’ll just re-summon the minion. you paid no price for this power, the power simply has a baked in inconvenience that you’ll have to put up with periodically. and before someone tries to make the argument “but…but, the mana cost means you get 1 less wraith.” firstly: you probably already have too many wraiths for that to matter, secondly, if you need to justify the mana cost, it would make the same difference if dread shade was a simple toggle that consumed mana each second (proportional to it’s current mana cost, of course, let’s not get crazy) so that at the very least, you could DECIDE when you needed to use it and when you didn’t rather than being in the current situation where naturally you will go for 100% uptime, since you’re allowed to and there’s no REAL cost to doing so, and then you just have to put up with the periodic inconvenience the devs set before you under the assumption that this mechanic is deep and meaningful.

Now for a brief intermission rant on the abomination, since it suffers from both sides of this coin (which likely contributes to why it’s so unpopular) because not only does it have the false cost of eating your minions (since you’ll just re-summon them while the abomination is out) it’s just an incredibly inconvenient skill by virtue that it takes an extremely long time to summon (so long that, by the time you actually do so you could have just used your now temporarily dead minion army to kill whatever it was you summoned the abomination for) and on top of that, it will eventually just kill over, because you’re not allowed to have nice things. again, this spell has no cooldown, you can just re-summon it whenever you want, but it’s so overwhelmingly inconvenient to do so and downright dangerous to even try while in an area where enemies might show up during the 2.5 minute channel time (this is hyperbole, but it is still like a solid 20 seconds without the talents that sacrifice damage potential for what should have been a QoL assist baked into the skill itself) there’s no real cost to this spell, and you’ll lose it for no reason (and unlike wraiths, which you can have hundreds of, you can only ever have one abomination, so giving it a triple edged sword renders it basically a meme at this point)

Now to close off on the tangent of arbitrary loss (which I seem to have accidentally already explained in the abomination tangent) why do our minions (that aren’t wraiths) need to die? and naturally, I’m not talking about enemies dealing damage to them, but rather our own spells that are like “This will give you x,y,z, but it will hurt your minions by a lot” (naturally sacrifice is excluded from this list of skills, since blowing up the minions is sorta the point of that, and i can accept that philosophy as it fits there) outside of circumstances like the golem retaliation mechanic (which serves a purpose for it being hurt) it just feel like the devs are telling us how to play their game, and then calling it player choice. like, I don’t want to use dread shade ever because it’s crammed full of pointless tedium, but if I don’t, then it means i’m going out of my way to nerf my minion army, since i know beyond a shadow of a doubt that dread shade would factually give me the largest increase in damage, and since my personal preferred playstyle for the Necromancer is “biggest army possible” this means i’m also forced to use wraiths, minions who are guaranteed to die, but will also make up 90% of my army at a given time (which at this point, even some of the naysayers are starting to agree that this is a problem, but i’ve already made a dedicated wraiths post, so i’ll move on) Why are there mechanics that serve to punish Necromancers? no other class has to deal with this self-harming philosophy, and necromancers aren’t even that strong (outside of unlimited wraith works) but we’re still being punished for existing. at least give us a reason for the punishment, hell, make dread shade last only 10 seconds, with a 30 second cooldown, and it’s guaranteed to murder your entire minion army and prevent you from casting spells for 3.5 hours, but during that 10 second window, you become god on earth and destroy all realities and twist the causal dimensions of fate to your whim, but just don’t make it random tedium to punish us for being a class people want to enjoy, please.

[Anuwiel]

I didn’t bother to try abomination yet (i just tried to cast the skill vanilla). I like the fantasy of sacrificing my other minions to make another stronger and bigger one that might even have all their abilities.

But the micro management it brings, making me resummoning my entire army every time i need it, and its cast time is killing any incentive i would have had to try the skill.

I think the main EHG’s thinking was that they wanted to try a new take on the necromancer class. It’s kinda hard to make an original class that has such a strong “fantasy” attached to it.

I’ve read about the bones ressource in the other topic : It is nice that people try to think outside the box, but I think this solution is as artificial as the additionnal cost we already pay for the skills. (And one pleasure one might have in those games is to break the limits, especially how many minions you can have at the same time with a necromancer. but that’s another topic.)

They need to come up with something else. Great feedback by the way, i agree with it.

[Zarono]

@Anuwiel

I’ve read about the bones ressource in the other topic : It is nice that people try to think outside the box, but I think this solution is as artificial as the additionnal cost we already pay for the skills

In defense of the bone idea, abomination would still have to be reworked. It was a breath away from being dead on arrival if not for the emergency tuning to at least make the damage usable, but not really worthwhile.

As a sort of aside, I’ve noticed a trend in d3, and that trend is starting to leak into this game, that people just don’t have a reason to play a slow build when faster builds are just as strong and far less tedious, but that’s a topic for another day as it doesn’t necessarily apply to minion classes

[Tree]

1. 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.

2. 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).

3. 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)?

4. 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.

5. 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.

[Thraal]

@Tree

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.

I use Everlasting Poison for meta ice crit archers. Once I tested 75% poison resist with 8/8 Cling to Life and 9/10 Rotting Army. It still built up to the same max tick number, just marginally slower. And this was with Dread Phalanx/Archmage. But they never died even with 0 resists if I let them crit the dummy. Of course, they don’t attack so well when you’re zooming through monos, and the dummy doesn’t attack back. Ice crit zombies aren’t like PoE Redemption Sentries that 1-shot everything that dares to be in the same screen as you.

But you, the necromancer, are basically the same squishy caster in both games. The combination of these is what actually prevents high-level AFK gameplay (e.g. Blight); you literally just die. Inconveniences affect me when I’m already between the chair and the keyboard. I don’t even think of them as inconveniences if they’re flavorful/make sense. It makes sense that you “decide” when and where to swing a sword or cast a fireball. But minions, by their nature, already make that decision on their own.

“Get stronger” isn’t a decision because it’s always optimal to get as stronk as possible. You don’t really want to go there; it’s like Chroma in Warframe. Most people used him exclusively for his 2 damage/defense buff abilities in both squad (Eidolon hunts) and solo (Arbitrations) play. The other ones (breath fire, spawn a mini dragon) had nothing on a modded+damage buffed weapon.

[Zarono]

I suppose i’ll go ahead and respond in order

@Tree

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.

it’s not as if the devs talk to us, so how do we know that we are heard? furthermore, while i have personal evidence in the past that they read every post, i do not have evidence that they read all of the comments, which is how a lot of these big “walls of text” tend to start, so i want to make sure each idea has it’s time to be focused on.

@Tree

Since you bring up the Abomination a lot … doesn’t appear to be a minion which is constantly resummoned … although it currently uses the “Bone Curse as minion” exploit

I believe you just made a self defeating argument there, sir. (skills which only become viable through exploits are not viable) also you missed the point (and clearly haven’t been reading my comments on other posts that you also seem to have already complained about) but that the abomination will EVENTUALLY die means it has to be re-summoned, and the argument that “yeah but you can make it lasts 3 whole monoliths means it’s okay” means that it is specifically NOT okay, if the negative mechanic can be made functionally arbitrary, then that means it isn’t necessary to the skill.

@Tree

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

I’d just like it if the devs talked to us, that there are common complaints like wraith and some other things that are being met with radio silence suggests that either: they don’t think it’s an issue (which is a problem), they do, but aren’t sure how to fix it (which telling us at least that would get idea’s brainstorming), already plan on fixing it, but for some reason don’t want us to know. it could go a few other ways, but i’ve had enough experience with blizzard betas to be suspicious of devs who don’t communicate. (as a brief aside, i’m not suggesting that the devs need to comment on every post with an elaborate “here’s what we think about this.” post, but once they see the same post topic for the third time, a simple “We know.” would go a long way to reduce forum clutter, as after that we’d have good people like Llama and Heavy to comment on repeat topics to say that the devs know, as they would have told us that they know.

@Tree

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.

there are 2 problematic things with this statement:
dread shade shouldn’t be just viable with wraiths.
dread shade shouldn’t have negative mechanics at all if there’s no purpose behind them, like i said in the original post, you’ll just cast it again and re-summon whatever minion died, so why bother making it kill minions at all? it’s mindless tedium at that point, which isn’t a character choice, it’s just random punishment for punishments sake.

@Tree

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

This is, of course, assuming that they intend to nerf wraiths, which I think you’d agree most people think is necessary, but also something that i don’t believe they’ve actually addressed (again, they don’t talk to us)

@Tree

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.

not sure what you mean by hypothetical scenarios, people HAVE gotten to 300 wraiths, the abomination WILL eventually die, dread shades cost is arbitrary as it has no functional long term/ build changing effects, these are not hypothesis, these are historical facts and observations (which you would expect should be on the “feedback forum”
as for the jabs at the devs, yeah, we are all here buying a product, we all have a vested interest in making sure that the product is as good as it can be, holding the devs accountable for content which feels bad, or is forcing a negative choice onto the player arbitrarily is rule 1.

@Tree

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?

i don’t know if the issue was with wraiths scaling wierdly, or the permanent minions just falling off, but i noticed around level 70 that my regular army of 19 minions ( maximum possible before wraiths) was being out-dps’d considerably by my level 60 beastmaster, other level 70 forge guard, and even my level 50 sorcerer whom i stopped playing after i reached the end of the story quests, since i have a vested interest in minion classes and not much else. at one point, i took a crack at the level (65?) monolith shade of orobyss when i was at 79 i think, and after about 88 seconds (a minute and a half or so) i got clipped by an aoe because i had the audacity to try and re-summon one of my archers that had begun to die to all the rampant aoe, and since the game doesn’t auto kill your minions on death i had a moment to actually see how close i was to killing him (since i had to spend all the time prior to that running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off to avoid the aoe spam while my minions did their thing) and he still had a solid 75-80% of his hp remaining, at which point i knew that my necromancer was basically dead in the water, and i havn’t really been able to play her since. meanwhile, my forge guard was able to kill the same level shade in about 3 minutes, while being practically immune to damage the whole time (it did take 4 attempts, because i kept getting unlucky and getting clipped the moment my retaliate barrier fell, but it was way better than the necromancer, who even had better gear) so something fell off and went wonky (do note that i only had wraiths for the first 30 seconds of the fight or so, once i had to start running i really couldn’t stop to summon as many wraiths as i would have needed to do significant damage)

@Tree

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

at this moment in time, wraith and the shade spells don’t seem to have some sort of exploit together, so either you’re suggesting you know something i don’t, or you’re suggesting the devs can’t multitask.

[Albinosaurus]

False Costs and Arbitrary Loss is basically what makes respec in this game feel shitty. There’s not actually a good reason it has to be this shitty, but people will defend it anyway.

As for the summons, I read the skills and decided it wasn’t worth the headache to play it. Early on in ARPG history when minion builds were first made viable, minions just stayed out until they died on their own (in combat, not from degen nonsense). Soon after, devs decided this wasn’t an “active” enough playstyle, so started baking in these temporary summons, summons that degen, or have ludicrous requirements. As a result, I usually don’t enjoy minion builds and very rarely play them in this genre. It’s bad enough having to scale them with my own equipment, but having all these half-baked and arbitrary inconveniences just makes it a waste of my time. Why play a pet build where I have do deal with all that (and rely on questionable AI!) when I can just play a high mp cost skill with high base damage, scale its crit, and just run around 1-2 shotting everything myself? I spend less mana overall, have less to worry about, gearing is easier, and I don’t lose all my damage just because bosses do a lot of aoe.

[Zarono]

@Albinosaurus

Soon after, devs decided this wasn’t an “active” enough playstyle, so started baking in these temporary summons, summons that degen, or have ludicrous requirements.

I remember back in D3 when Mauraders was changed because it wasn’t “active” enough, blizz got a lot of flak for that decision, and even when the set got overtuned, people still hated it. once a developer has made the choice that a summoner ‘has’ to be interactive, they’ve now dictated to the player how to play their game. like, sure, an active playstyle should be an OPTION for those that WANT that, but being forced to sit back and spam spam spam out your infinite wraiths, keep track of which minion is about to die to your mandatory buff so that you can instantly re-summon them and re apply the buff with no cooldown, don’t even bother using permanent minions because they make up such an irrelevant portion of your damage output, keep an eye on the ground since everything in the game past level 60 one shots you, keep bone curse up on all enemies so you can exploit the abomination bug, and generally hate your life because you don’t actually get to watch the cool spell effects your minions are doing, the big numbers that might be popping up, the enemies exploding in a shower of gore before you, because you’re playing wraith sims, now with extra requirements.

/rant over, but i did think of a funny analogy earlier for dread shade, it’s like:
Devs: Hey, we’ll give you super powers, but first, you have to cut off one of your legs.
You: I see, so what you’re saying is that i have to weigh the value of those super powers against the value of my leg?
Devs: no, because as soon as you have the super powers, you can just grow your leg back.
You: but won’t i lose the super powers if i do that?
Devs: not at all, you get to keep them for a while afterwards, but when they do run out, you’ll need to cut off your leg again to get them back.
You: but you just said i could grow my leg back, and keep the powers for a bit?
Devs: yeah, pretty cool isn’t it?
You: so like, why do i need to cut off my leg if you’re just going to give me the power?
Devs: because your leg is the cost for the power.
You: but i’m just going to grow it back, yeah? so can’t we just skip the cutting off the leg part?
Devs: No, because reasons.

[Shrukn]

I hate the Necromancer in this game, ive tried over and over and just hate it and I play virtually ALL summoners in some form

The only feedback I can say is… Manifest Armor/Spriggan are the best pets in this game

[Zarono]

I’ve been sitting on a builds idea for beastmaster that I’ve been calling beastmastern’t, basically you have to have beastmaster for one of the upper talents that buffs solo pets (not to be confused with the lower talent that does the same thing, but a little different) but once you have that, points into Druid until spriggan form is unlocked, then shaman to buff minion spell casting, then run around as a spriggan with a really big spriggan waifu pet and wreck the world with the power of forest love.
I’d have tried it out already to see if it’s viable, but whole class respecs are cancer and I’ve been focused more on the necromancer issues.
The only beef I have with forge guard (which isn’t really much of one anyways) is the lack of explanation for how the “forge armor gains x% of the stats from (armor piece)” talents, like if it gains 150% from my gloves, and my gloves have 100% minion health on them, will it gain an extra 150% on top of the 100%? Or since it’s a minion stat, would it be trying to buff the forged armors minions, which don’t exist?
It just needs some clarity, but it’s mechanically one of the superior minion classes right now.

[Shrukn]

@Zarono

Druid until spriggan form is unlocked, then shaman to buff minion spell casting, then run around as a spriggan with a really big spriggan waifu pet and wreck the world with the power of forest love.

Yeah…but thats arguably better as a Druid than a BM. I have a 99 Spriggan/Vine build ive had for months

@Zarono

The only beef I have with forge guard (which isn’t really much of one anyways) is the lack of explanation for how the “forge armor gains x% of the stats from (armor piece)” talents, like if it gains 150% from my gloves, and my gloves have 100% minion health on them, will it gain an extra 150% on top of the 100%? Or since it’s a minion stat, would it be trying to buff the forged armors minions, which don’t exist?

It multiplies the stats on your gear and gives them to the Armor without the stats you get nothing, he punches without the weapon node, he is slow without the boots node etc

I have a Lucerne with 19% base crit, I only need Solarum Gloves with a crit roll and decent implicit to hit over 100% crit rate…with 1 item whatever the % is you multiply by that

Bronze Helmet implicit is up to 25% crit multi…x 3 = 75% from 1 piece. Sulorons Step gives up to 90% multi…for example

Also if you have a chest piece/helmet with ‘Bleed duration/Physical damage’ the armor receives the increased damage bonus 3-4x,

The ones im unsure of is ‘Health%/Health+’ because I have a chest with 16% hp, unsure if thats actually 48% hp or so, and if some stats double dip - however if you have zero points in that it gains nothing, 48% hp is good but ‘Minion HP’ is simply stronger

basically Manifest Armor is pretty complex minion and you can get to be relatively creative but its extremely point heavy. I have 22 and want 24 points

Manifest Armor is basically a weaker less annoying version of Abomination that can be resummoned instantly as long as he doesnt die within 8 seconds (he cannot die until Corruption 250+ for me. 310 corruption Orobyss can only kill him with 1 attack that sustained DoT meteor screw thing). Still pumps out 250k crits on the dummy and about 30k on 100 content

oh and FG receives 3% armor per hit recently. Ive seen 210 stacks before which was 12,000 armor and I have 4 different layers of dmg reduction. its common to take no damage in corruption 300 if the mobs have no mods

[Tree]

I believe, but am not entirely sure since I can’t test it, that the devs are more responsive to questions on Discord than on the forums. Additionally, there are dev streams where people ask the devs questions and you get a direct answer from them.

Anyways, I only have a Level 55 Necromancer, so I’ve gotten around to testing the various minion skills, including the Abomination. With practically no optimal gear outside of making my resistances sound, here’s my thoughts about the minion skills:

• Skeletons appear to only be viable when they’re all Archers and nothing else. Makes sense
  having a lot of Warriors just clumps them right where the monsters’ heavy AoE attacks strike, and Archers easily avoid that while their ranged combat assures that they all hit the same target.

• You definitely need a lot of minion regen affixes on gear to get anywhere near the crazy exploits like 200 Wraith builds that are posted. With no regen affixes, the Wraiths practically go poof with no chance to give them crazy uptime.

• Abomination / Golem / Bone Curse definitely helps keep the Skeletons alive through taunting and allowing you to maneuver them through crazy AoE nonsense. Yeah, I’d like the Abomination to live for longer before you summon it again, but again, I’m running with practically no good equipment, so this is to be expected.

If you look through the various Necro builds already posted, there are plenty of viable builds like Zeckar’s Fire Archers + Mages build where the Skeletons live through everything and the only inconvenience is summoning the Bone Curse + Dread Shade, which makes sense since you’re constantly moving and the Bone Curse are grounded minions.

Overall, since there are very few ways to heal the minions outside of minion regen and crit leech, the minions are likely to die to AoE assaults anyhow, so I don’t see the difference between choosing to kill and resummon pets when I want to and having the minions eventually die to monster assaults.

[Zarono]

@Shrukn

It multiplies the stats on your gear and gives them to the Armor without the stats you get nothing, he punches without the weapon node, he is slow without the boots node etc

Yeah, but like, how does that work if the item he’s gaining stats from has a minion stat on it? Does it do something? Or nothing?

[Llama8]

Any minion stats on your gear would affect the Manifest Armour. Any minion stats on the gear that the Armour gets via the various nodes would apply to any minions the Manifest Armour could summon.

[Zarono]

which is none, got it. (this is why i think it’s unclear)

[Llama8]

Yeah, it certainly doesn’t double dip (because the Armour is not it’s own minion). But I’m not surprised that people might think it would since the Armour is a minion, it is kinda complicated/nuanced.