TLDR Sacrifice and Dread Shade are frustrating to use due to targeting issues.
I’m running a Blood Specter build where I summon 6 skeletal archers, transplant onto them to trigger sacrifice, which chains to spawn 6 Blood Specters (aka wraiths). Then I cast Dread Shade.
There’s a couple of problems.
The first is that in order to make Transplant cast Sacrifice (which I’m using to bypass the mana cost), I have to take a node that makes a Bone Minion. I don’t really want to sacrifice the Bone Minion, because the skeletal archers give me mana and ward when I sacrifice them, and the Bone Minion doesn’t. However, Sacrifice often chains to the bone minion, leaving me one Archer.
That would be a minor issue, except that I want to put a Dread Shade on one of the freshly spawned wraiths. However, Dread Shade seems to strongly prefer skeletal archers over wraiths. This makes some sense, in that the wraiths are going to expire quickly, but the wraiths are going to run forward and the archer is going to hang back, so the wraiths are going to run out of the area of Dread Shade.
I could switch from skeletal archers to warriors, but the whole reason to use archers is that they hang back and can be selectively targeted by Sacrifice. If I accidentally transplant onto my wraiths, they get sacrificed and replaced with new wraiths, which puts me deeply into negative mana, because they don’t give me mana when they die.
I’ve also tried using Bone Golem. Since he lasts a bit longer than the wraiths, I can put a long-duration Dread Shade on him, and that works quite well at keeping the buff near the wraiths. It’s a bit difficult to reliably target him in the middle of the pack of wraiths with dread shade, and it feels pretty bad to instead accidentally put Dread Shade on a wraith that’s about to die.
Also, it’s really hard to avoid sacrificing him. In theory, I can summon six archers, and as long as I wait for them all to show up (the delay on the subsequent skeletons took me a while to get used to), then transplanting onto them should reliably sacrifice just those six minions and not the bone golem.
Unless the bone golem happens to charge through that spot right when I go to transplant. Or unless I’m fighting in close quarters, and there’s no room to summon a backline of archers out of the way of the bone golem.
I keep stubbornly resummoning him, because I really like the big stompy guy and he makes a great Dread Shade carrier, but it takes a huge amount of mana to resummon him and that costs me a lot of momentum.
In short, Sacrifice and Dread Shade are frustrating because they often don’t do what I intended and wanted them to do.
The simplest and most idiomatic solution would be skill tree nodes that allow fine control of the targeting. There’s a thread from 2021 which asked for Sacrifice nodes which would make it no longer target or chain to Bone Golems. That would work; I don’t know that my build could afford it, but I’d probably feel better knowing that I could and that there’s a clear intended tradeoff to be able to use sacrifice safely with bone golems around.
What I’d like is a UI that allows ordering the target priority for Sacrifice and Dread Shade. Let me just tell the game that I want to sacrifice skeletons first, then bone minions from transplant, and never ever bone golems. Let me tell the game that Dread Shade is supposed to go on the bone golem.
Or, let me target skills using the minion icons at the top left. If I dread shade with the bone golem’s portrait targeted, that should dread shade the bone golem. That doesn’t really solve sacrifice, where the chaining is the issue, but targeting via portraits would be much more widely useful. Primalists would probalby love to target Eterra’s Blessing via companion portraits, for example.