They really ought to be able to cast the same skill as their master rather than just using the base skills. It basically makes the those nodes unusable.
I imagine there was some technical issue that prevented this from being done on release of Necromancer so I hope this gets updated soon.
This is the intended behaviour afaik. Because the minions cast the spell, it’s their own spell and scales with minion stats.
And it doesn’t make the nodes unusable. Indeed I use sacrifice on wraiths or skeletons frequently on a necro. The big pro is that all this stuff scales of your minion stats that you are already pushing as a necro. Minion damage and minion spelldamage as well as minion crit chance and multiplier all apply to the sacrifice skill of skeleton mages.
If it would use your characters sacrifice, you would have to skill your own spelldamage and that would need you to build a hybrid style necro. Hybrid will always be weaker than going 100% for a certain branch.
This is how it’s intended to work, since your minions aren’t you so don’t have access to your skill trees.
I understand the damage scaling would be tied to the minions and such but the other stuff not so much. The fact I can’t have my Death Knights use the same kind of Hungering Souls I could spec into where I can have it scale with the amount of minions I have just seems mean. Not to mention other stuff.
I see all that potential where I can have an army of Death Knights mowing down enemies with flaming skulls and I weep that I can’t do this right now.
It’s a design decision. If they did use your skill tree then their Sacrifice/Hungering Souls/etc would be affected by two skill trees (the minion’s as well as yours) which would make them significantly stronger than you would be able to make them if you cast them due to having a bunch more “more” modifiers.
If that’s really an issue then they simply could do something like “Sacrifice cast by Skeletal Mage deals 50% less damage” or something to that effect.
We’re aware of this and we have been planning to rename all those pet abilities with similar names to player abilities, to eliminate confusion.
Okay. Thanks for the clarification. Still disappointed that I can’t have my army of Death Knights shoot flaming skulls at my enemies.
Because this tends to be a recurring theme, I wanted to share this tidbit in case people aren’t aware:
The best way to check if a skill has synergy with another skill in the node tree is to press the ALT button while hovering over the node. For something like Volatile Zombie’s Sacrifice node, if you hold the ALT button, it brings up the Sacrifice skill including the “DPS” monitor.
Other skills like Bear’s Ice Thorns or Skeletal Mage’s “Sacrifice” does not have anything highlighted when you press the ALT button. That means that even though it has the same name, specializing the skill won’t work with the minion skill.
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