Passive Node Ideas - Acolyte

Acolyte
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Hi, i’ve played a fair bit of necromancer/minions on last epoch and some other games, and i have some suggestions below that i think would make the necro and minion playstyle more interesting.

(i) Passive(s) Point(s) that buff your minions but adds a debuff proportionally to the amount of minions you have. — There are a lot of skills that reduce the number of maximum summoned minions in exchange for more powerfull individual ones. The ideia is really nice, but in my opinion the numbers aren’t quite there yet to justify picking a few powerfull minions over a high amount of them. By giving strong buffs the lesser your minion count is, is a great way to improve this style.

(ii) Teleport your minions to yourself ----- Create anything that make this happens. The way it its right now, even with the most recent patch, the minions are still to slow and unreliable when i need them the most. Not to mention, is practially impossible to avoid any kind of aoe damage. The primalist “minion leap” specialization was the closest to this, but it was fairly unreliable.

(iii) general buff to minion’s projectile speed and aoe ---- In general, the game is too slow in my opinion. I think the monster density is low and sparse , and adding slow projectiles and aoes that only hit two or three enemies is really bad. Adding more aoe and projectile speed to all minions would be a great way to improve this (by all means, i also recommend improvements to the monster desinty and pack distribution).

(iv) graphic improvements to minions’ skills ---- This may be a bit of topic, but i think it must be mentioned as it’s really one of the things that bugs me the most. There are many visually good looking skills in the game, but minions (specially skeletons, skel. mages, and the bone golem) lack in this department. Slow moving minions and projectiles/skills with barely any visual appeal make them lack lusting and boring to use, as “nothing” happens on the screen to make me hooked. I think that giving the minions more clear speed and aoe would be a good start to solve this.

In general, i think the game is annoyingly slow paced, getting boring fast. It must be improved is this regard, specially for minions, which, in my oponion, are curently the most slow paced ones.

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For the Lich class: Swift death 10% movement speed and 5% or so base crit while welding a two handed weapon.
Or!: after not damaging an enemy for 2 seconds gain 20% move speed and 10% base crit or higher. while wielding a two handed weapon.

It’s extremely hard to get high crit chance with a two handed weapon and the Lich lacks any significant movement bonuses.

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you can get high crit chance on a two hander but you sacrifice too much base damage in pursuit of those mods.

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NECROMANCER

Mad Legion 0/2:

1% increased minion movement speed per active minion.

The brighter the flame 0/3:

15% increased minion movement speed
Your minions take 8% increased damage

All for One 0/6:

  • Whenever a minion dies, gain X armour up to a maximum of Y.

Enduring Undeath

  • Lose X armour per minion

  • Minions gain Y armour per % of missing HP

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Execution

Passive from the Deathknight node in the Skeletal Mage skill tree. Replaces their dual wield with a large 2H axe and locks out hungering souls. (taking hungering souls also locks out this node).

20% slower attack speed for deathknights (Multiplier)
+6% base critical hit chance and +100% critical hit damage multiplier for Deathknights against bosses with less than 35% health. Divided among all your Deathknights.
1% chance for deathknights to instantly kill bosses with less than 25% health on hit. Divided among all your deathknights.

Undying Legion

Passive for all skeletal mages in the skeletal mage tree.

All skeletal mages has +5/10/15/20% more (multiplicative) armor and +3/6/9/12% to all resistances. But they move 5/10/15/20% slower (multiplicative) and have -0.5/1/1.5/2% base critical strike chance. Critical hits against skeleton mages has 15/30/45/60% chance to be downgraded to a regular hit.

Simulacrum

Passive skill after Archmage node in Skeleton Mage tree.

Instead of summoning a single Skeleton Mage, you instead make a perfect replica of yourself. Which has access to - and uses - all the skills on your skill bar including their passive tree upgrades. The simulacrum has your stats and the bonuses from Archmage only, but not other passives from the Skeletal Mage tree itself.

You and your Simulacrum both deal -35% damage (multiplicative). The Simulacrum can not create minions itself, has a 6s CD on all abilities, and all damage taken by you and your simulacrum is split among you. Using Transplant on your Simulacrum heals you to full, but you lose control of your character (which is taken over by the AI) for 5 seconds - as turning your replica into your real self causes temporary confusion and existential crisis.

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Sacrifice
Turns into Corpse Explosion. Only works on corpses on the ground but does X% more damage.

Bone Curse

Bone Prison now can be used to trigger Corpse Explosion. Corpse Explosion triggered this way does NOT get the X% more damage.

Summon Skeleton

You can summon 5x your usual amount and it works as an aura now, consistently refreshing your summons. They are however, considerably weaker.

Wandering Spirits

Enemies killed while Wandering Spirits is active turn into Wandering Spirits themselves.

Lich Form

Instead of keeping your bar of skills, much like Bear form, you get a wealth of new skills. This is of course a separate passive, so it needs to be taken to get this form. Much like Bear Form, other skills are linked to this form through skill passive trees and can trigger those skills or passives if you have also gotten those. The skills acquired being overly edgy hybrid melee and range stuff. Like a gigant scythe for AOE or something.

I have no idea how you’d balance this stuff. Honestly, I was just thinking of my favorite builds from other ARPG’s I’ve liked. As for Lich Form, I enjoyed Bear Form and would like something similar.

Oh also, Death Seal. I hate that skill. I hate how it’s almost always mandatory on Lich. So if they could be changed in some way, that’d be amazing. Or maybe I’m alone in this?

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Why not just have the node that removes the degen also get rid of the cheat death part? Maybe make it a flat mana degen instead (not increasing over time) and have swap the form end condition to mana instead.

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Hey there and welcome to the LE community.

Just for your information, this thread is primarily meant for Passive Nodes within the Passive Tree

Maybe we can bring your suggestions to another seperate thread and talk about them, because I think you brought up a lot of ideas that are worthy to talk about.

I opened a new thread about it:

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Hey there Elvenchakra,

just for full tranparency. Shtrak, the person you replied to has passed away a month ago.
Just wanted to inform you, so you don’t wait for an answer for a more active discussion on this, since you replied with a question.

I don’t have any opinion on your particular suggestion but just felt the need to inform you about this, especially because he was a very well knwon and respected member of the community and I am 100% sure he would very gladly start a discussion with you about that suggestion you made.

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I heard about them passing away, but didn’t notice that that was who had made that post :frowning: . Wasn’t necessarily expecting a response from them anyway; just wanted to continue the discussion about reaper form.

1 Like
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Quoting myself, because I said a lot of this in another post; while I was talking about Reaper Form in specific, that thought holds true throughout:

Additionally, replacing Wands of the Fallen and Symbol of Decay with Melee-focused nodes would also help the feel of Harvest and Reap being proper melee skills, not gimmicks.

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Agreed on Reap, other than being a very good movement skill, there is nothing you can do with it.

But did you just called Harvest a gimmick?!

Not sure what your definition of gimmick is, but Harvest is most certainly not one :smiling_imp:

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Gimmick is probably the wrong word - but a skill unlike any other in the toolkit (i.e. the only Melee Skill for Acolyte, excepting Reap, which has it’s own problems), that is self-contained doesn’t feel right. Not being able to scale Melee Damage, and minimal Attack Speed or Movement speed within the generic mastery tree for Acolyte, and even Lich specifically, makes it feel wrong.
I’m all for having more Melee skills in Acolyte - I miss my old Deathknight days, and Dark Knight from FFXIV more recently - but it’s currently out of place.

Theory time: If Reaper Form had nodes to make it a skill that defaulted us to Low Life (perhaps as a trade off for no longer forcing us out except by being hit really hard…), and Reap became the default “Finisher Skill” for a Melee Reaper (gathered from it’s high-damage, high-leech on-hit effects from the current Reaper Form tree), then Harvest would need to fill the role of the middle-ground skill. While it has plenty of Critical Hit, damage versus Cursed Enemies (noting that tree needs reworked…) and even Health Recovery, it has minimal options for adding Increased Damage as an axis - beyond a couple affixes on a weapon, that are directly competing with any other method of dealing damage within Lich. (+Melee Necrotic/Physical Damage and %Increased Necrotic/Physical/Melee Damage; which, if I understand the way Harvest does Intelligence scaling correctly, you want %increasedMelee and %whicheverElementYouPicked)

And if Harvest wasn’t meant to be a middle-ground damaging skill, then what was? That skill would be missing (or Reap needs some serious reworking…) in order to make that build flow feel better. And yes, I tried some Harvest Lich builds - it feels amazingly fast, but erratic. It’s almost like it has two competing Finisher skills, a myriad of on-kill effects that don’t help with bosses, and too much leech to benefit from having low-life.

Probably not the right space for this rant, but anyway - let us have Deathknight Lich!

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And how about +5% attack and cast speed per mastery point (max +40% from a 8 mastery points spent node) when recently casted a curse, for Warlock?

And how about add a Elemental Frailty curse, as Warlock curse skill, to reduce elemental/fire/cold/lightning resistances, for a level 10 Warlock mastery skill?

You know, Warlock needs more love.

(Can someone else also further suggest skills and nodes for Warlock be at game, please?)

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Acolyte used to have Mark for Death as a skill with a skill tree but it wasn’t very interesting so they got rid of it. I’d be surprised if they added in a less powerful version of it.

Warlock needs to be created and released…

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Ok.
We need to brainstorm until devs create and release Warlock.
And we need devs to also create and release Falconer and Runemaster aswell.
Do you have some suggestions to share in regards of what active and passive skills Warlock should have, as an advanced mastery from Acolyte who relies on curses?

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Yeah, that’s fair and given the description of the Warlock is that they’re curse-based, her having more curses is reasonable, I’d just think that they should be more interesting than Amp Damage (unless you can come up with an interesting tree for it).

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With MP around the corner, I don’t think a curse focused mastery would feel as weak as pre 0.9.0. Being able to slowdown a boss, or to increase the damage it takes will be better the more player are in-game. If you’ve ever played Monster Hunter, think Hunting Horn : atrocious clear speed solo, but in a 3-4 squad, one buff can increase everyone’s damage by 25% (on top of what you were dealing yourself).

Aside from that, I could see a sort of gameplay for Warlock where you can stack different curses, but also stack the same curse on top of itself to improve its effect (like basic → minor → major → …) and use a purge-like ability that deal damage based on the number of curses/their tier for a big burst in damage. The flow of combat would be interesting as a nerfed boss would suddenly go back to its full power at the cost of you dealing serious damage.

2 Likes
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Agreed.

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I really like passives that offer alternate ways of playing and have multiple uses. One potential one that I think can be used in multiple ways is as follows:

Acolyte Passive, linked to “Mania of Mortality”/“Unnatural Preservation” (I think this could benefit all three classes and obviously fits with the theme of these passives):
(7/7) Death from Life - Immediately after using a potion, lose 10% of current health (per point); (5 point bonus) 35% of Potion Health Converted to Ward

This lets you nuke up to 70% of your health on a potion use and could enable many different playstyle benefits:

  • Low Life. One annoying thing about playing low life is you REALLY need to get some “Potion Health Converted to Ward” otherwise accidently running over potions hurt you. You can pick this up on equipment/idols and I’d usually aim for 50%+ to feel good. The 5 point bonus is on par with a T5 prefix roll making this passive not a full solution, but easing gearing requirements. The health damage is also helpful.

  • Hybrid Regen Based Vessel Of Strife. Vessel of strife regen builds can benefit off of this because it will give them a ward boost while allowing their regen to kick in on the life. Vessel of strife builds have great recovery when damage is large enough to remove both ward and health as you double dip on the regen; if the damage only removes most of your ward, they become more vulnerable as they lose the advantage. This lets you use potions in a tactical manner when you lose a lot of ward but not health.

  • Lich Build Damage Boost. This lets you use a potion to give you an on-demand damage boost. The ward gained could also better support the lich ward passives which I think are today heavily underutilized.

  • Death Seal Enabler. While the ward is completely useless here, this passive could allow you to basically set your health to a lower amount and be fairly tunable by how many passive points you invest in it. There is the deadlock passive in the Death Seal tree, but this gives an alternate way to play potentially letting you invest in other ways in the Death Seal tree. I think 7 passive points for saving the Death seal passives is probably a fair trade off.

  • Ward builds that rely on combat. There are some builds that rely on getting their survivability from combat (e.g. Sacrifice Skeleton Mages). They can be fairly squishy prior to engaging in combat like a boss fight. This node would give you a tactical potion to pre-buff you defenses before the boss.

  • Ethereal Revenant or Damage Based Procs - If you make the health loss count as “damage” you might be able to use it to reliably proc the Ethereal Revenant nodes and build around it. You could even link the passive to the Ethereal Revenant as an alternate build path to this passive.