Minion Unique item ideas (From the designer of PoE's Unending Hunger Jewel)

Before I get into my ideas, I’d like to say my ideas are probably going to seem extreme, or maybe pretty far out there, but as someone who loves minion builds, especially niche minion builds, I rarely find minion uniques in ARPGs fun if they just increase damage/life of minions, or other stats you see everywhere else. I’d also like to say the ideas I will be putting here are very unlikely to be “balanced”, the main point in this is to get the “unique” idea/concept into the view of the devs and the community so that new minion builds can be possible and existing ones can be improved. Balancing the ideas here should obviously happen if any of them are considered by Eleventh Hour Games. I also encourage anyone reading this to provide feedback or thoughts on my ideas and ways to balance them or to improve them. I would like to know if any of these ideas are ones you like and would want in the game as well.

With that said, let’s get into it;

1 - Base item: Any Acolyte specific item.

  • All of your minions now summon every minion you can summon (meaning each individual minion you had out could summon it’s own army which would be identical to yours), one every 5 seconds, with the same number of maximum minions you have.
  • The maximum number of minions you can summon for each type of minion is halved.
  • You can no longer summon minions that decay.
  • You can no longer benefit from the passive Mania of Mortality.
  • All sources of Ward gain or generation provide 50% less Ward.

2 - Base item: Any Mage specific item.

  • When your Mirror Images die or expire they cast every spell on your skill bar except Teleport and have a 10% chance to leave behind a copy of themselves that will also cast every spell on your skill bar except Teleport when they die or expire.
  • The damage your Mirror Images do is now based on your stats and tripled.
  • You deal 50% less damage.
  • 50% increased minion life.

3 - Base item: Required Level 60+ Two-Handed Melee Weapon (Not class specific).

  • +150 Melee Physical Damage.
  • 50% increased attack speed.
  • Any time you would create a minion you instead create an animated copy of this weapon that fights for you and takes 10% of it’s maximum health as physical damage per second that cannot be mitigated or reduced in any way.
  • Animated copies of this weapon have one third of your base health as it’s base health, move half as fast as you, and taunt enemies on hit.
  • Every 6th time you would create an animated copy of this weapon all currently living copies of this weapon merge together to form a tornado of weapons that travels randomly heavily damaging enemies in it’s path for 5 seconds before exploding into a nova of shrapnel.
  • You can no longer deal damage yourself.

4 - Base item: ???

  • Whenever you use a non-movement skill you instead create a copy of yourself that uses the skills on your skill bar and lives for 10 seconds. Copies of yourself cannot use movement skills or create minions but benefit from minion stats and modifiers.
  • Maximum number of minions is 4.
  1. Base item: ???
  • Skills that chain now deal 50% less damage but chain between all of your minions, dealing damage to enemies in it’s path, before chaining to the nearest enemy of the last minion it chained to beginning it’s chaining from there as if you had just cast it.
  • Skills that do not chain now deal 50% less damage but originate from your minions and target the enemy closest to them.
  • Your minions can no longer take damage.
  • Your minions can no longer deal damage.
  • You cannot create minions that would decay by default.
  • 50% less maximum minions for each type of minion.

6 - Base item: ???

  • 50% chance to reanimate normal or magic enemies on kill to fight for you for 30 seconds.
  • 7% chance on hit when hitting rare or unique enemies to randomly summon one of the last 5 enemies you reanimated to fight for you for 20 seconds.
  • Allies created from this item do not benefit from minion stats or modifiers but have the stats they had when they were alive.
  • You cannot create other minions.

7 - Base item: ???

  • Whenever one of your minions would die from enemy damage it instead heals to full health and creates two duplicates of itself that live for 20 seconds and do not follow you. This effect can only happen once per individual minion you created.
  • After reaching your maximum number of summoned minions for any type of minion you can create you cannot create more of that type of minion until you no longer have any of that type of minion alive.
  • Minions that decay by default now always decay and decay 10x as fast.

These are some of the ones I’ve thought about multiple times in the past. If I have more ideas I will add them in a reply to this thread. Thanks for reading!

2 Likes

Yes and yes to rest.

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This isn’t PoE, we do not have such powerful items here, the only one here that doesn’t immediately sound broken is 3(depending on how good the summon is) . Even with those downsides you would just be begging OMGItsJousis to make a forbidden build and break the game with 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 or 7.

As stated in my original post in this thread I would like suggestions on how to “balance” my ideas rather than non-constructive criticism that doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Do you have any suggestions in that regard?

The issue with most is with the mechanic they would create, so my suggestion is changing them on a fundamental level.

1 makes your minion count go exponential, half of exponential is still exponential - as some minion skills have no limit it would quickly generate infinite minions. It would be better to limit minions to summoning themselves, with a limit of one. Even this would be way above the curve of other items, as there are relatively few items that effect your summon total.

2 has a similar issue, you can summon 4 of them per teleport and even if they only casted ONE of the skills on your bar(specifically the left-most one) that could be 4 glaciers all going off at once. Keep in mind that a similar skill(transplant) can cast 3 rip bloods on use, rip blood is nowhere near as impactful as most of the big mage spells. If all it did was a single spell it would be a chase unique, but with the triple mirror image damage it goes from very powerful to one in almost every build.

4 is more of an issue with the fact that you can effectively get quadruble your dps with it, in addition to the fact that you do not need to stand still to keep a skill being used on an enemy. It also sounds worded as if you would be able to double-dip on stats, by getting lots of lightning damage, then making a copy, the copy gets the damage, then they also get your minion damage. Limiting it to one copy per skill instead of the maximum minion number and making it based on character stats only would likely fix the issue.

5 may seem like it doesn’t do much, as it just bounces between the minions, but you must realise that this can be 5 or so extra chains, any on impact effects would occur with every single minion, thus instantly causing the entire screen to become an explosion, even before it gets redirected towards an actual target. Just remove the chain effect and make every spell come from your minions. Also as I assume that each individual minion casts the spell you should have the damage of them divided by number of minions instead of just halved.

6 is too powerful, after killing a small mob pack you would already have 5 allies, as you end up killing enemies insanely fast in late game this could easily spiral into 50 or even 100 minions tagging along. I see no way to fix it.

7 has a problem called “summon waith”, as those minions die anyways and have infinite maximum, essentially tripling the summons, if you get the 7 total at a time from the skill tree and stack cooldown reduction you would summon 21 in one press, add in the “chance to apply damned on death” and they autodie 3 times over, due to the increased decay. This turns the skill into a nuke. I know you tried to balance it with the decay increase, but all that did was tell me to make a explodes on death setup.

  1. What minion skills have no limit? And exponentially more minions would be the point of the unique and I don’t see how it would be OP with half the minions and your minions not being able to summon “unlimited” minions. One of the mods for this unique idea says “You cannot summon minions that decay” which would carry over to what minions your minions could summon.

  2. This idea is mage specific so acolyte skills are irrelevant. The damage of spells that would be triggered when Mirror Images die wouldn’t be triple the regular damage but would start out with half their regular damage and that would be the number that gets tripled. I would also like to point out it would be difficult to spam the spells due to them only being triggered when a Mirror Image dies or expires.

  3. This would not quadruple your damage because you wouldn’t be the one deciding where or how often to use the skills. Either way an easy solution would be to make it so they can only use a skill every 5 seconds or something.

  4. I guess I can agree on this, especially since you offered a suggestion to improve the idea while keeping the unique concept and functionality.

  5. So all that would need to change here is make it a smaller chance to reanimate normal/magic enemies like 10%, and have them only last 10 or 15 seconds. Otherwise I don’t see how it could be over powered.

  6. I don’t think you saw where I stated “would die from enemy damage” or “minions that decay decay 10x faster”. And either way it could just be changed to say “doesn’t apply to minions with no maximum number of minions”.

Summon Wraith has no hard cap, the only effective cap is based on how much hp & hp regen they have. It’s not too difficult to get up to 60 wraiths. So each of my 60 Wraiths could have 60 of their own Wraiths. With Rip Blood already being able to get up to ~150k-200k ward from minions, you could get into the millions of ward. If your pc lets you get above a couple of seconds (or minutes) per frame. Summon Wraith already has a node that summons 3-6 per cast with a 6-4.4s cooldown, so yes, your idea as it is stated would summon less (maybe up to 20), but that’s still 60x20 wraiths (1,200). That’s neither good for balance nor fps.

And what about the Acolyte’s minion cooldown reduction on idols? They could get up to 4x 35%, up to 58% cooldown on their minion’s skills, which would include this unless it was not coded as a cooldown.

If the “you do half damage” is included in the “they do triple damage” that would help. The max you could get your teleport cooldown to is 2.9s (20% cdr from the Sorcerer passive Recollection & 17% from a t7 cdr helm roll) & there’s currently no way of the Mage getting Inspiration (an additional 20% cdr), so maybe that wouldn’t be too bad, but it would probably be a bit much, since you could put a load of high mana/cooldown skills on your bar & teleport offensively to get them all to cast at the end of their 8s (with 2 points in Uncontrolled Duplication) lifetime. Probably with Ele Nova as a spell to spam while you’re waiting.

Probably best to make this a helm so you can’t also take the helm that makes Ele Nova cast at the target. Still feels a bit OP though.

It probably would since they would cast your skills as often as you can & with your stats. You may not be able to control what skill they use, but since most builds use 1-2 DPS skills, a movement skill & some defensive skills, that sounds pretty effective to me. If I have a high cast speed Void Knight that uses Devouring Orb on cooldown, every ~1.4 seconds (since I can get Inspiration for an additional 20% CDR thank you very much!) I could have a copy of myself which was casting Devouring Orb every 1.4s on the target, and those DOs would be firing Abyssal Orbs every ~0.8s hitting everything in somewhere around 1/6 of the screen. So that’s ~28 Devouring Orbs (with a 40% chance for a second DO every cast, so anywhere up to double that) and ~35 Abyssal Orbs per second (with a 40% chance for a second DO every cast, so lets up that by 40%, on average to 49 Abyssal Orbs fired a second). Every hit would proc a Future Strike after 2 seconds on every single mob hit by those Abyssal Orbs.

I really want that item. It’s bring my PC to it’s knees, but it’s make a Void Knight caster an absolute beast at DPS. You could limit a bit by having the clones be stationary, but you’d still have them up on bosses all the time, which is where you’d want it.

Well, for the duration you’d have whatever % of mobs you killed fighting for you as minions distracting mobs, so it would be a bit defensive as well as offensive, the faster you kill, the stronger it gets since you’d be able to build up a bigger army. Feels a bit OP, but smaller chances & duration would make it less effective/powerful.

The issue is that these are 5-10 times improvements on a build, sometimes more
most uniques in this game are 1.5 to 2 times improvements, where they are generally either slightly better or slightly worse than a perfect affix piece of gear.

1:It may sound like a fair point to have a unique based on minion count, the main issue is that it is extreme power creep, I am not aware of any other unique that goes exponential, most are around a 2 times improvement on the build. Even with the Minions summoning one copy of themselves, where you have half minions, you would still have a scenario with endlessly respawning minions that you do not have to maintain. letting them summon 2 minions and you already have 1.5 times your minion count. The point of your unique may have sound good on paper, but that is only in a game that has already undergone extreme power creep.

2:I referenced the acolyte skill as a comparison. 1.5 times damage on 4 glaciers is still the damage of 6 glaciers, also as the devs add more uniques there will be ways to have the mirror images die off quicker. So the entire bar going off 4 separate times and being multiplied by 1.5 would just be too extreme

4(you wrote 3 by mistake):To not control the spells being used or how often they are used would make the item annoying to use because they are not being used as fast as possible. Annoying is worse than being broken in my eyes. The 5 second cooldown is even worse. Just give the item a slight downside to make up for the benefit.

5(you wrote 4 by mistake): That would probably work, there is most certainly a percentage at which it would cease to be run by all builds but would still be run by certain ones.

6(you wrote 5 by mistake):I missed the “from enemy damage” part of the proc, I was treating the decay as an upside as a result. The rest seems ok, if a little overtuned compared to everything else in the game. Though it still suffers from a possible explode on death setup in the future via low health minions and possible new skills/uniques that may be added.

I have no concrete criticism here for any of your ideas but just one general point: If you need like 5 lines to explain, what special ability does, is bad design in my book.

IMHO, it’s not hard to make complicated effect when you play with like 5 different variables. But I think smart simplicity, like take one variable and change in a way, which can lead to new builds, it’s always preferable over this way of modifiers.

Don’t get me wrong, I see there is quite a potential behind your ideas, but I would not vote for any of these - not in this form.

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