Looking at necro tree with all the changes to threshold passives and how the tree is moved around it looks like a pretty substantial nerf. Undead legion node now requires 3 points, tyrant legion now requires 3 points, Discipline of necromancy also 3 points. Looking at how they also spread out effects so points dont hit multiple things now it all looks like a pretty big nerf to minion builds, especially zoo builds…
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I dont think its a nerf, but it certainly isnt strictly a buff.
And they basically left zoo out to dry on necro by doing nothing to touch on them.
Abom also looks to be nerfed, but more interesting. Abom should be more fun to play and plan a build around, but it wont be the big 1 slap machine anymore as it lost quite a bit of multipliers and scaling vectors by having the minions it can eat limited.
There is however some interesting stuff floating around. With the set shield from sinethias you can either make a rare/exalted shield or just use the set shield, and the 40% respawn on tree, its now possible to hit 100% chance to respawn skeletons. So in theory there is a skeleton loop somewhere.
There is also quite a bit of crit available generically, so maybe that helps out some minions a bit. As well as a ton of new DoT scaling, I dont think it will be enough to make poison minions real, but its what I plan to try.
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There are also a lot more leech/heal sources, so your minions don’t die as often. For example, there’s a passive where all your minions are healed for 20% of their health when another minion dies. Which, if you’re using zombies (and all zoo builds use zombos), is all the time.
I personally hate zombies, sacrificial minions are not my thing and zombies are not typical of a zoo build, its usually skeles, mages, golems, and depends on the last one. While the life thing is meh at best its honestly useful only for the damage reduction even if it is to low. Sadly you are being forced to put about 20+ more of your scarce few points into the tree. It looks like they shuffled the stuff around forcing more points to achieve the same things, gutted the minions because of snapshotting when they were already sub par. To be honest the whole “fix” for minions looks like it wasn’t for necro at all. The garbage trap nodes in the skill trees didn’t change so all in all as i said it is a net negative. I am really hoping that the skills change from what is posted, otherwise it really is just kicking them in the junk.
It certainly is mixed. I see it as a net positive but only if you really need run a zoo minion crit build.
If you have a true zoo build, you only have minion skills. That is the purpose of it. It’s a walking simulator where you do nothing and your minions do everything.
There are only 3 permanent minion skills, with wraith having the possibility of also becoming permanent.
So you always needed a 5th minion and that would always be a sacrificial one.
Zombies were the most used because of the kill threshold and their ability to apply a bunch of ailments on enemies.
This means that these builds, that only ran minions, are actually better now because they survive better, you have tool to always revive your skellies, as well as improvements on their damage.
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only downside with revive after 3 seconds is iirc they revive where they died, so they might be in some random ass location instead of where you need them lol.
That should be fixed with the new change where a minion that is too far away from you will teleport to your location.
Although that change (if you opt into it) will make LE minions look like PoE2 minions (and not in a good way 
).
Who the heck wait 3 seconds to see if their skelly will come back or not? seems borderline usless as nearly anyone will resummon.
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Unless you’re summoning other minions. Or you’re in a tight spot and have to evade stuff for a while.
Agreed but 3 seconds? This needs to be one sec max. Otherwise you will assume its not coming back.
I assume this node is only worth taking if you also use the new unique that will bring this to 100% chance.
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but we HAVE to take it for the extra skelly for alot of builds. Frankly I had to drop a skelly in my zoo build because the passive point cost for +! skelly is 9 points with the 3 nodes needed in 1.3. When the passive tree actively nerfs a zoo build that’s a problem.
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In those cases it’s just an extra bonus that can sometimes trigger and you won’t notice it.
its no bonus when you have to pay 3pts for the skelly you actually need.
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All extra skellies now cost 3 points. They apparently decided that was necessary for balance. 
but i cant understand why? Where skelly builds owning the boards? You would have a hard time showing me any zoo necro build making it to 1000c. This is a nerf to a build that needs buffs.
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I couldn’t tell you why. You’d have to ask Mike that.
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It’s possible that both the extra points necessary to summon more skellies, and the resurrect after 3 secs, are because of Abomination builds.
You see, the abomination gets more damage the more minions it can absorb. And, when it absorbs a skeleton, the skeleton “dies” and can that can proc the resurrect, allowing the abomination to absorb another minion, increasing it’s stats. Perhaps they were afraid this would make it too strong, so they make you use more passive points to get it?
But whatever the reason they did this, I agree it’s a big nerf for zoo builds, at least ones that use Skeletons.
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I expect you could do that with Wraithlord as well. Although 3s seems too short and he’d spend more time absorbing minions than actually dealing damage.