Yes, that’s exactly right. A skill that locks you out of most of your skill bar, by design, is a skill that people are not going to use unless it’s extremely powerful - where “extremely powerful” is defined as “a level of power that no dev in their right mind is going to grant because of the balance problems that come with it”.
Thank you for walking yourself directly into my point.
your point is that you are asking for something unreasonable for the sake of it being unreasonable. you understand the alternative is that you have skills that buff your minions on your bar, which are effectively “locked out” anyways, by virtue that they only do the thing you’re complaining that minions who give power to the abomination would do, only in your version, you want to be forced to do more work than in mine, and if needless busywork is what you want out of a pet class, you might just be playing the wrong class my dude.
More that That bronco is saying if you can summon 19 minions (excluding wraiths) without abomination doing something insanely stupid it cant compete with giving up 19 minions + all the shred/bleed/poison/ignite/frost that they bring.
if on a scale of power 1-10
skele 4 * 12
mage 7 * 5
golem 6 * 2
abomination power even if you gave it a power of 30 or heck even 50… while 1v1 vs any other minion is leagues beyond them, you have to sacrifice way to much to feed it and lose damage in the process, in addition you lose out on valuable slots for skills that are basically locked completely out. In effect it is costing you a massive power loss to summon something. The only time people were using it was when it was completely broken because of a bug.
I’d be able to more accurately rebut this if the game actually had a viable way of determining the dps of minions, but something I will comment on is an observation that I started making around level 70 is that ailment focused builds start to fall off as enemy health begins to scale into absurdity. This might change later, but for the time being, the game seems designed such that you focus on pulling out individual big hits rather than a great many tiny hits after a certain point.
Thank you for walking yourself directly into my point.
On one hand, my best guess in making it decay is that it prevents “snap-shotting,” where you spend 30 minutes summoning an ungodly amount of minions, then siphoning them all at once and then having to balance the Abomination’s power around that. Especially compared to other builds where the strength is there right from the onset. Nobody wants to play a skill where you have to start every session with the massive buildup.
On the other hand, I can’t actually enjoy collecting shards and inspecting loot when I play because I know I’m only a few seconds away from the Abomination disintegrating and having to start the process all over again.
I love the Abomination’s design and I love how it is a fundamentally different skill from something like Skeletons where you simply stack numbers + stack flat / ailment chance. I also like the Abomination’s ability to use multiple different attacks based on what it consumed (I’m currently using the Wraith Necrotic Swipe where the huge AoE helps with the body-blocking problem and the Double Strike makes it attack a lot faster than without the ability). I don’t like the sense of constantly having to look at the health bar and missing out on checking out the loot.
In that sense, the Primalist is much better both damage wise and playability wise.
IMO this is only a problem for wraiths due to being uncapped (which most people agree is an issue) and an exploit that should be fixed either way.
exactly, especially since the cost, both in time and minions, isn’t even real cost, since it can be summoned in perfect safety before entering an echo, can be made to last the entire echo (thus making it’s decay arbitrary and pointless) and doesn’t prevent you from re-summoning it’s materials, and thus no power trade is actually being made.
see the above point.
But anywho, this conversation is a few days old now, so i’m going to summarize what i believe are the relevant grievances with the skill:
1: The abomination, due to gearing, can be made to last multiple echoes on one summon, and thus it’s health decay mechanic is completely pointless and just there to inconvenience the player.
2: the abomination has a truly abominable start-up time, with a line of talents to remedy this that should have just been included in the base design instead of making us give up power for convenience.
3: The abomination doesn’t benefit from one minion over another (like, it doesn’t gain more stats from a golem than it does from a skeleton) and thus the optimal way to feed it (without relying on the exploit) is always going to be wraiths. (and the talents that give it abilities based on consumed minions only requires 1 minion of that type, as the ability gained stops scaling afterwords)
4: The abomination doesn’t prevent you from simply re-summoning the materials used for it, making it a completely false cost skill.
5: it’s just downright inconvenient to use.
this argument is moot, since the abomination doesn’t gain stat weights based on the value of minions, just feed it 50 wraiths and it’ll be 150% stronger than if it ate your entire permanent army.
no one is arguing that wraiths are basically an abuse bug. The cost for the abomination us not moot because the time it takes to summon all the minions is the time where you could have run 1-4 monoliths. Even if you can do this in safety that is a massive pause to actually playing the game just to summon a minion that will last at most 2 monoliths.
The argument that I was making is that you will already be building all of your gear towards minion stats to take advantage of you using a big minion, the problem as you pointed out is that it does not gain stats based on what you sacrifice. This ends up being a massive loss in power, even giving it 50 wraiths the thing comes nowhere near doing the damage of those 50 wraiths you just sacrificed to it and is still much less damage than your perminent army (base damage increases + effects+ poison bleed whatever)
the skill itself just needs to be reworked.
in fact, most of the mastery just needs to be reworked, between abusive bugs, poor minion weights, arbitrary cost skills, and false choices, it’s going a long way to not please as many people as it can
I had an idea a while back. Keep the health decay and make the Abom spell a quick cast with a relatively cheap mana cost. When its cast it consumes a non-Abom minion and either summons an Abom or gives health to an existing Abom. This health is based on the max health of the consumed minion, not the current.
This would create a baseline play cycle where we summon minions and occasionally feed them into the Abom to keep it going. Would work even with the wraiths as you’d want to be casting them then feeding them to the abom before they die naturally.
It opens up synergies like a skill node in Abom that makes minions that die for any reason near the Abom have a chance to be consumed so we could use the Zombies or sac skeles or whatever we like.
2 problems with that:
1: the abomination decay speeds up over time, so the rate at which you’d have to feed it would go from nothing to too much within a certain window that would be different for every player (and would likely be incredibly short, since once the decay overcomes it’s natural regen from items/effects, there’s no stopping it’s imminent death)
2: how would you tune the damage of that? like, if you have one abomination that’s eaten 500 minions over the course of 15 minutes, should it one shot everything in the game>?
I stopped caring about Abomination when I realised Manifest Armor got buffed
Ive posted a few times about Abomination HP decay and the fact there should be some gear choices to remove the HP Decay, and the cost of other minions etc etc but you either get no real response feedback or someone just telling you how good the decay is…
Its quite simple, if the skill doesnt change I wont ever look at it again. it doesnt work late game and its extremely tedious to play. so im not really fussed whats done to the skill at this point - buffs/decay update/remove the skill from the game. i dont really mind
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