It is absurd that a very highly geared zoo build puts out 1/3 the dps of a mid gear single minon build. I have to put so much more into crit chance and minion defences. And the affects of Dread Shade and infernal shade are so large. Dread shade more than doubles the dps of a target, so you never take a minion spot over dread shade ever. The balance is wayyy off.
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I think its okay that dreadshade is strong.
I think it would suck if the go to meta is âmore minions = more betterâ
However I dont think zoo really has a problem with dps imo.
Archmage does 130% more, or 2.3x damage, and then dreadshade gives it auto crit and 40% more damage, 2.3 * 1.4 = 3,22 so dreadshade archmage is equal to about 3 or 4 mages depending on how much extra damage affixes we get by not needing crit.
The reason solo minions are meta isnt because they do more damage really, its because they dont die. Minion defenses are a meme imo, I really think minions having life bars in 2024 just isnt good design.
Even if zoo had 3x the damage of solo minion, id never run zoo if they are harder to keep alive then solo minion or however you wanna call it.
Ive run a âZooâ style build recently, but I didnt use the traditional minions. I ran a golem, a archmage, two perma wraiths, deadshade, and dreadphalanx skeletons. its 100% less damage then normal zoo, but with less minion count to summon means less headache on minion death, and more hp to chip through before needing to revive them etc.
If minions didnt have health, and instead were just considered permanent dps auras, you could rebalance their damage and do away with all those stats and balance necromancers better.
I really think more games need to think about minions as just another skill type. with less micromanagement and stat bloat. Deleting minion health as a concept frees design space imo.
I also wanna see necro get more interesting ways to buff minions, the two core ways right now are the shades, which can stay. But give me even more tools that are less clunky then chaos bolts and rip blood.
Currently totems have tons of ways to buff them, and playing a totem build can be done in quite a few ways, with quite a few different ways to buff the main totem or all totems etc.
Id love to see abom rebalanced around being a powerful temp minion that is easier to use in addition to keeping its perma build.
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Stats dont lie, the wraith lord, the abom, the roid skelly builds all blow nec zoo out of the water. I think I run a very high dps zoo build and itâs not 1/4 the dps of wraith lord maybe 1/2 the dps of Roid Mage. The issue not just dread shade, its dread shade mlutiplying infernal shade and dread shade giving free 100% crits even combined with blind rage which is supposed to half crit chance in return for 40% increased cast speed. Not having ot worry about crit chance means tons of ways to stack even more damage atributes, having only one minion to resumon means you dont have to worry about minion defences either.
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You do still need minion defenses for roid mage, but yeah you can def skip them on abom.
Ive seen zoo builds with insane dps, they just usually dont get to show it off on high corruption targets cause the minions die lol.
I am confident if minion hp/defense wasnt such a meme zoo would be competitive.
Blind rage is half crit chance, but crit chance in this game is silly a bit. What dread shade does is not âalways critâ it adds +100% base crit, despite its wording of âalways critâ so if you get 100% inc crit chance, your 100% base crit becomes 200%, then cut in half to 100%.
But yeah I do think zoo needs help, but I disagree on the way to fix it. I think they just need to fix minion defense as a system rather then nerfing the solo minions.
(edit: other then wraithlord, that item is wild, its crazy they just love tapped it, and let it still run wild, Atleast abom sucks ass at clearing monos rofl)
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Dread shade no longer gives 100% crit to a single minion (maybe instead give flat crit or more crit chance), but all minions are heavily buffed, also add more sources of base crit for minions (for example on passive tree or weapon prefix/implicit). Problem solved 
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But a huge part of the issue is that you only have to resummon 1 roid mage instead of 5 regluar mages, + summon wraiths and zombies and resummon dead warriors⌠The mana and casting time is WAY larger with a zoo, esp when boss ground effects one shot your entire menagerie.
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There is a way to save zoo but it is not popular and dmg is not as good as needed - Scales of Lemniscate
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QWZ3yR2A
Max corruption - 414 abom + harb. But pretty good for t4 arena farm. 31-39 waves in afk mod with only crab n 1 skel dead
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Nice build!
But it kinda proves my point, 414c is not that high, roid mage runs into 1k corruption. Wraith lords into 1.4k.
I have looked and looked at Scales, but cant find nor nemesis one with more than 1lp. and giving up an off hand is tough.
Here is my build I have it at 820c right now, but I have been hammering this build since before 1.0.
Should also probably buff zoo Beastmaster, I just donât see much synergy to ever try mixing Beastmaster minions.
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