Necromancer issues - 400 corruption player

Acolyte
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Hi,

I just want to say I really am enjoying your game, I’m playing LOTS, way more than any other game in a long while, this may end up rivalling the amount of time I’ve spent playing PoE (7000+ hours).

With that being said I have some core issues which are really disruptive/infuriating during my play, I’ll list a few of them below.

I have the Dread Shade ability point which puts it on an 18 second cooldown, why is this able to be cast with no minions available to cast it on? This then places me on an 18 second cooldown if I have accidentally pressed it without my minion alive, when I then instantly re-summon my minion realising my mistake, I cannot do ANYTHING for 18 seconds as I’m relying on the 10x damage from from Dread Shade, this happens to me a lot, I’ve even tried to move the key a mile away from the others I use and I still make this mistake :expressionless::sweat_smile:- A simple fix here would be to disable the CD if has not been casted upon a minion?

Secondly, the AI on the minions appears to be shockingly poor at times, from what I can gather it appears the developers have given them coding which rubber bands around the player, this can be so bad sometimes that they will circle you for 3-4 seconds while 50-60 mobs are trying to kill me, what usually happens is my minion will die before it has a chance to start shooting and leeching again.

This problem appears to happen because the minion is trying to get to my side rather than on top of me, this is what can cause a rubber band issue, I can actually prolong this indefinitely using teleport and running in circles, REALLY BAD! This has made me so angry before that I’ve just quit the game completely, I lose hard maps because my minion is AFKing running in circles.

There is also another problem where the minion will run up slowly build up speed to catch up to you, speed up to a high speed and then begin to slow down, then they will repeat this process unless you actually stop or run into them, this can also create a similar scenario as described above where your minion will just die unable to leech and leaving you vulnerable to death…

Other than these few core issues I’m really enjoying the beta version of the game, of course there are plenty of things I would love to see implemented such as high scores, ability to view other high ranked Necromancers to get ideas, and possibly some system similar to levelling beyond 100 (prestige system perhaps). I can already tell the devs are active and are listening to the community, hence why I felt the need to write a post (and hope it will be read by the relevant people).

My biggest want from this would be for the devs try to work on the minion ai, I play exclusively minion builds on every single game I play, I can provide much more information and advice on this topic if someone would like to hear more of what I have to say.

Game is great fun and I’m thoroughly enjoying it, keep up the good work.

Regards,

2 Likes
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What I want to see is that you should also be able to use Dread Shade on the minion symbols in the top left. If you have more than 1 minion of that type it will randomly select one of them. This would fix the problem trying to get it on your Abo (or any other minion you’re only having a single one of) while you also have other minions. The fact that namelock doesn’t really work in this game can make it nearly impossible to get it on your Abo if it is surrounded by your other minions.

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A great suggestion, thanks for replying.

Another thing to add to my list of minion ai issues, while doing the Gaze of Orobyss boss or the timeline boss, your minion will not engage unless you are nearly directly on top of the boss, for example I like to play as far away as possible, however if the boss teleports away my minion will just sit back on top of me, rather than attack the boss in the very far corner of my screen, barely visible.

I usually resolve this by teleporting on top of the boss, but again a risky move that shouldn’t be needed if the minion would detect enemies at a larger radius.

Also an unrelated note, but the physical bone throwers (Undead Wengari) are insanely strong compared to other ranged mobs, if I see them in my map I have no choice but to walk really slowly throughout the entire map, no teleporting as it’s just too risky and leaves me open to a one shot, maybe they need a slight adjustment? This also ties into my initial minion ai issue with the rubber banding, while dodging the bones but also trying to get your minion to attack them before you get one shot by the endless barrage of bones is incredibly frustrating, then I’m sat looking at the death screen knowing that if my minion was actually doing his job this wouldn’t be an issue.

I hope I’m describing myself well enough, any questions please ask.

Cheers

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Doesn’t the minion attack button (A button by default) work for you? Usually I take nodes for minions movement speed (Golem got a really good one for allies for example) and then guide my pet army by pressing ‘A’.

2 Likes
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Another thing I’ve also noticed is that because there are tons of enemies on the screen and you can’t tell which minion has agro on them and when, and because the range your minions want to stay from you is very short, your minions will get agro and point an AOE attack towards you without you realizing it in time to dodge it very frequently. You really have to dance around in a circle a lot just to lower the probability that an enemy attack is facing you, which gets tedious.

I can’t think of a simple way to fix this without making the game significantly easier. Maybe just having a visual indicator for which minion major enemies like ogres or saboteurs are currently looking at would be helpful. That would at least show you which way they’re actually facing when there’s few enough of them to see it. Maybe it could also present a little arrow from off screen so you can kind of tell what they’re doing even when you can’t see them. Anything to take a little bit of the guess work out of it would be nice.

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Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try this and come back to you! :+1:

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I am playing a Necro right now and one thing I really do not like is repetitive summoning…I really like the Abomination, but I don’t even like the summon rate with all the slower decay nodes and having to get non channel node really gimps the skill if you ask me…I love everything else about the class from looks to skills. Every time I log in lately though I am always questioning whether I can stick to the class long term.

I don’t like wraiths decay either. Been playing them with the 2 limit no decay node. A shame. I feel forced out of using a lot of cool skills due to redundancy of play style.

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You can spec both Abom and Wraiths not to decay. I especially like how this works with Aaron’s Will. Lategame you get a lot of options for only resummoning things you want to, or not at all for the most part.

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Yes I was using that with wraiths as I said, but after I set things up to not summon much it just seemed bland. It sort of forces you to take the node in my opinion which I don’t like. We will see I will probably level it up higher and see if the health increase to minion as I level makes it better.

Right now though I switched to a Lich and I am having a blast. I feel I can be far more creative with my builds. I can’t wait to see warlock.

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Awesome suggestions.

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The problem with this is that you also lose 80% or more damage from specing into no decay wraith, the wraiths themselves are horrible and were only decent when you could summon an absurd amount of them. They scale the worst out of any non decay minion with a hard limit of 2 so basically anything else is better…
wraith int scaling 3 health 4% damage with 3 health per level
skele int scaling 5 health 4% damage 5 health per level
skele mage 5 health 4% damage 5 health per level
bone golem 20 health 4% damage 20 health per level

add in the fact that you are burning 3 points just to make them non decay… if they are going to scale health that badly and limit you to only 2 then it should be more like 8 - 12% damage as they are so squishy, they are a glass cannon without a cannon at the moment

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I haven’t had any issue with them dying. If you summon the fire ones, not only do they get bonus damage but they’re stationary while firing, which means they’re usually not standing in any enemy AOE’s. They hit for 2-3k per attack and attack fairly rapidly for me. Just need to stack up enough bonus minion fire damage for them to matter and then make sure you force them both to be fire wraiths before you start a dungeon or echo’s. (Which is a little annoying, sure.) 99% of the time they will survive, so resummoning them is a nonissue. As being just two of like 17 minions I have out usually, they don’t have to deal insane damage to justify slotting them though. The other option is taking Abomination, and Abomination doesn’t really deal any fire damage, so there’s not really a good reason to take it over them.

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2-3k per attack vs say my death knights 6-9k up to almost 20 on a crit, or my golems 15k up to 50k on a crit, i can have 5 death knights and they are by default non decay and always up in an enemies face. They have to justify having a slot on the bar, me wasting points putting into them. right now they are fighting for postitions vs my deathknights, my non decay abom, my bone golems or the normal skele that im forced to spec into to sacrifice to the abom and support the multi golems through aarons will then also the buff spell dread shade to support all of that… they just dont justify a spot at the table with how they are at the moment. This problem gets worse once you pass 250-300 corruption.

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Yeah I haven’t had any luck using abomination as much more than an extra decoy. In this build, abomination hits for almost nothing because you’re specing minion fire damage, not general minion damage.

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yeah, ive kinda focused my minions into all phys and armor shred although i did have the question if they also did fire damage through the nodes does that damage stack with the physical?

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I’m not sure because I know you probably shouldn’t lose damage for taking the node that makes them hit for fire damage. But it’s not explained in the tool tip. Would probably have to test just by having them hit an enemy and then take off a bunch of physical damage and see if they hit for the same amount. I might test that at some point if I get an opportunity. Good question.

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