So far the Abomination for the Necromancer while a cool concept just feels underwhelming because you can’t really keep it alive for very long on top of tons of setup time.
The fact that to get the most out of it you have to use Dread Shade with All For One (The one that gives buff to only one minion) which makes it decay even faster.
I know there are people complaining about Dread Shade as well because it’s been made mandatory on all minion builds but I’m not going to focus on that.
My question is if the Abomination should just come strait with no decay whatsoever. Couldn’t this at least be tested?
A few iterations in mind:
Abomination starts to decay if you have other minions out. (Possible skill node that increases damage or something but does this.)
Abomination commander - Empowers other minions.
Abomination can be healed by the Necromancer by casting the Abomination spell on the Abomination.
Abomination heals itself when enemies or minions die around it.
These are just a few off the top of my head and they can be mixed and matched with others.
Bottom line I think Abomination needs to feel more like a permanent minion like a Bone Golem rather than trying to keep an extra strong Wraith alive.
At the very least it should be played around with.
They already buffed the health decay, to be slower with 082, because Abominations is probably one of the more unpopular skills.
I personally am not a big Necromancer Fan, but this skill alone is the reason that i enjoy playing a “summoner”.
It is so statisfying, if you setup everything and see this thing slaughter everything.
You can easily make Abomination last for an entire Echo in MoF with no investment… you cna make it last 2 Echoes with some investment.
My Abomination Build is already at the point where i can do 2-3 echoes with one abomination, i iwll probably reach the point, where i can do 3 echeos with one summon.
Regarding Dread Shade: Use Pernicious Poison, which deals ways less damage.
Also take enough HP Regen and/or Leech and Abomination will simply heal it self against most damage until it reaches a point where the decay is just too big (which takes a long time).
Getting more Minion HP also helps prolong the lifetime alot.
There are also less health decay nodes in it’s skill tree.
I think Abomination is perfectly fine.
It’s definitely a skill that you can’t just slap on any build and make it work, it has to be the center point of the build, which is fine.
I agree with poster. I think the whole idea of the top tier skill tree ability for any class that summons pets minions for their top pet to e a decaying health pet is ridiculous. i was so disappointed when they came out with this skill. i hope before live they either come out with soemthing that slows all minion health decay as a blessing or something similar or move the skill down and gives us a new top tier necro skill. maybe a multi buff skill with a different buff for each of the minion types or a new permanent summon skill. my 2 cents other than that i love playing necro my first and main class always every game i play.
I respect your opinion but I’m not agree with you.
I understood what you’re saying, but I’m still thinking it’s still a unpopular skill. And, if it’s a unpopular skill maybe there is something wrong or doesn’t fit with something.
In my opinion the skill doesn’t fit with my play style. I don’t have a problem with degen HP, my problem are we have to take one or more skills together to made one single skill.
Ok, you can recast the other minions again, but for me it’s doesn’t fit on my play style.
Let’s see if other players say about the skill play style.
i don’t think this is the argument you think it is, this is akin to saying “Yeah, it’s fine that the tires on my vehicle explode every 300 miles, because the dealership covers the cost of towing it back and they even replace the tires for free, so there’s no cost to me!”
like, if the health decay can be made mostly arbitrary, then it only serves to waste our time periodically, and thus should be removed.
in my opinion it should become a permanent minion, should only be able to consume permanent minions (because wraiths are problematic enough already without contributing between 0 and 20,000% increased damage for this thing) and the tuning should be redone such that it is more powerful for only being able to consume permanent minions (than the minions it eats, not than current power) and while it’s out, the permanent minions it ate can’t be re-summoned.
That is partly the reasoning people have been complaining about Dread Shade in how it will kill a strong minion but at the same time it’s a lot harder with Abomination since it takes a lot more time to re-summon one since you need to consume other minions.
Even with Bone Golem it’s just one button press to re-summon one if you’re doing a Bone Nova build with it. With Abomination it’s a lot more work.
That certainly gets into the synergy issues as well. Sure every build has necessary skills to take to synergize with what skill you’re focusing your damage on but with Abomination it seems weird that those skills effectively become unusable if you’re not allowed to summon them after using Abomination.
A few different ways to do it I already suggested but here’s another one I just thought of:
Abomination absorbs any additional minions summoned to empower itself up to a cap which is lost over time. This is in addition to it’s base power upon creation.
This could basically be an opposite skill node to the Abomination commander suggestion I gave in the original post. One which compliments a giant army and the other empowering your personal beast of a titan.
Here’s a few other ideas which might work better than the current way of doing it:
Instead of Abomination being assembled from current minions summoned it is instead summoned by channeling for 2 seconds. It’s power is instead already massive but can be increased by taking things such as the consume summoned minions skill node.
The abilities granted from certain minions instead is granted as long as you have that minion skill slotted in your action bar. For example if you took the Skeletal Mage Abomination skill node you would only need to have the Skeletal Mage skill on your action bar to gain the benefits of it.
Doing this you could still have your powerhouse single Abomination with awesome abilities and all you have to do is feed it wraiths instead of having to summon more costly minions.
This is obviously just one way of doing it and I think could work quite well if done right. Certainly better than the current way of doing it.
P.S. A new skill node for the Abomination should be for the Volatile Zombie where the Abomination radiates explosive fire damage.
what we really need is just to have dread shade converted into dread commander, a wraith like minion (in that it is temporary due to health decay) that has the shade aura around it by default, most of the talents wouldn’t have to even change, and it would better fit the necromancer theme in my opinion, since instead of murdering one of your good minions, you’re summoning a minion whose purpose is to die after buffing your other peeps for a bit.
I’m also not a fan of Abomination. I want to like it. I think the core concept - a massive, strong dude that you smash together your other small dudes to create - is really cool. The reality is not.
These are my pain points:
Overcoming the health decay takes a lot of investment specifically for that one purpose. Not only does that investment not carry over to Skeletons and Mages because they have zero need for regen, but it actively makes them worse by taking investment away from stats that make them strong. Wraiths do benefit, but that ties in with the next pain point.
The Abomination is a melee minion and so suffers heavily when other minions exist. His hitbox is enormous and he collides with things (including and especially other minions) constantly, slowing him down or stopping him outright from reaching mobs. This makes it very difficult to sustain him using leech effects if other minions are in play, and makes him mostly useless when running a Wraith heavy build that would also benefit from the regen investment to keep him alive.
It takes far too much setup time with anything other than Bone Prison. Talents that speed up consumption (or the resummoning of the minions you ate to create him) seem to be intended to be a QOL thing, but they all just feel like a waste to me because of what I sacrifice to put points in them, which is not justified by what I gain in return.
Abusing the Bone Prison doodads’ classification as minions to bulk him up feels really, really stupid. I haven’t checked for confirmation but that interaction feels unintended. If this goes away (and I think it should), we’re going to be left with…
Investing three skill specializations (Skeletons, Mages, Abomb) just to have one of them suffer from the above usability issues sucks.
I’ve only seen Abomb be effective when used with Bone Prison without other minions. I’ve tried several other ways of using him and they all were a wash because of one or more of the things I said above. So, my current perspective is that there is only one way he can be used, and I think that is a very bad situation for such a high tier skill to be in.
Other way to “improve” it’s when you summon abomination, you can’t summon other minions.
Okay that a massive change. But maybe it’s can help.
So the necromancer will focus only in one minion. (Crazy idea I Know.)
Ah that does sound better than it does now. Fits more thematically too. Not sure what’s to be done about the One-For-All and All-For-One skill nodes but the idea has merit.
Just be sure to post that in a separate thread if you want people to brainstorm more about Dread Shade. I think there might be a recent one or you could start your own.
Although I wouldn’t say it’s not related since I did bring it up first in the original post. I could see it being reworked alongside Abomination so there’s that.
I don’t think that would be feasible. It would have to come with an extremely high level of power for it not to feel terrible to have 2-3/5ths of your skills locked off.
A better way which I posted earlier was similar but as a skill node. The example is:
Abomination absorbs any additional minions summoned to empower itself up to a cap which is lost over time. This is in addition to it’s base power upon creation.
I’m sure it could be tweaked but you get the idea where you can still span wraiths without having it be clunky to use as it is now. Whether there is a cap or not I think is up to testing but if there is then you can do a different route of support for your abomination.
Well yeah… that’s sorta the point of the skill, it wouldn’t justify making him permanent with no health decay if you could just resummon his materials. The abomination on its own should be about 33% stronger than the sum of its parts (as the abomination skill itself takes up a skill slot) and naturally should exclude wraiths, both for mechanical reasons and because they’re heckin’ ghosts, and you can’t make big zombie out of ghosts.
That doesn’t really address what I said, though. The proposition is fundamentally to lock the player out of 2-3/5 skills so the 4th works. +33% is nowhere near enough bonus power to make that stop being a really stupid feeling experience. That’s just baseline.
On top of the damage, there can be a lot of advantages to having it coming from 15 minions instead of X + 33% coming from just one. Massive armor shred stacks, projectile blocking, splitting aggro are all examples of that. And you’re also giving up the advantages of ranged minions for a melee one.
then don’t use abomination? like, you could make the abomination one shot god every 2 seconds, but then, like wraith, you’d enter into a situation where everyone is forced to use it, because the entire class would be balanced around that.
let’s say (philosophically) that each spell slot available to you constitutes 20% of your overall damage potential, the Abomination, which (as you say) would lock you out of those spell slots while it’s active, should constitute a proportional amount of your damage, thus, if you run all 3 of the permanent minion skills (skeletons, mages, golem(s)) then the abomination should be doing 80% of your total damage potential, the last spell slot being either wraiths just to have more bodies, or dread shade to boost the golem (in theory) past 100% of your damage. (i say in theory, because at the end of the day, you can only do 100% of the damage you do, and if that damage only comes from one source, in this case the abomination, then naturally it is doing 100% of your damage) the only argument to be made here is that: should the abomination be tuned such that it does more dps that the sum of the ~19 permanent minions that you feed it (i only know how to get 19 right now, that being 12 skeletons, 5 mages, 2 golems) which even if it only did the damage of 20 permanent minions, it’s still technically a net gain, even if only minor, and thus would justify the investment.
