The Abomination needs to go

[Zarono]

As promised in my other post from earlier today here: "If I were a dev..." *Necromancer wish-list* I promised a post detailing exactly why the abomination is beyond saving, so here it is.

in order to even begin, i will need to cite my argument from a different post on the value of spell slots:

@Zarono

I feel the need to articulate a certain idea behind spell value in Last Epoch, this idea being that we are all limited to 5 spell slots, and 5 specializations (naturally the assumption being that the 5 spells we keep on are bar are the ones we have specialized, but some nonsense builds have skirted around this idea in various ways) but we often overlook the value of these individual slots. To elaborate, we are only capable of doing 100% of the damage that we do, and are only capable of being 100% as tough as we are, this is a statement of obvious fact that shouldn’t really need explaining, but in the context of the 5 spell slots it takes on a particularly new meaning, as those slots represent the sum of our potential actions as a player. so with this in mind, prior to selecting any spells, each slot represents equally 20% of our ability to deal damage and to survive. so in a world where all things are equal, the distribution of power around these 5 spell slots must always remain consistent with this idea, even if one slot ends up representing 50% of our total damage, the remaining 50% of our damage must be distributed in some way between the remaining 4 slots.

This review brings us to the Abomination, and the main problem being that it is a parasitic spell.
To explain what i mean by this, the Abomination DOES NOT WORK until you have at least one other specific, per-requisite spell in order to initiate it’s function (which is any consumable minion) Because of this, the abomination has an effective base power of 0, as the spell slot that it occupies is initially incapable of producing it’s own damage until it is combo’d with another spell slot, which leads us into problem 2:
The Abomination isn’t picky. the value of a minion that it eats is the same for all minions to the abomination, a skeleton is equal to a golem is equal to a mage is equal to a wraith is equal to a vanguard, and while I’m sure this was much easier to code, it creates an ultimate disparity when sheer volume does not relate to the actual loss in value of each unit.
Going off of the base portions for a necromancer (since the mastery grants baseline extra summons), minions ought to be treated as if 4 skeletons were equal to 3 mages, 6 wraiths, or one golem, and if the abomination were to be balanced around this idea, then it should gain power from a golem equal to what it would gain from 4 skeletons or 6 wraiths, but it doesn’t, so right away the abomination is inherently incapable of covering both the value of it’s own spell slot AND the value of the spell slot that it is removing power from, which brings us to problem 3:
The Abomination CREATES power.
there’s nothing inherent to the abomination skill that prevents you from simply re-summoning the materials used to create the abomination, so although it initially takes power from your other spell slots by means of consumption, that power is almost immediately recuperated WHILE THE ABOMINATION IS STILL THERE. thus it has “created power” by covering the value of it’s own spell slot just by being summoned, but then by gaining power from the sheer volume of minions it consumed, without those minions actually being gone, because of this, the abominations potential for power is directly correlated to the sum of all possible minions controllable by you at once, but placed onto a single spell slot without (at least rationally) interfering with your other abilities. and due to this, it has been initially so under tuned as if to compensate for this, but even in a fair-trade system, this cannot work.
Problem 4: the fix is actually the worst case scenario.
If the abomination were to be completely re-tooled such that it gained exactly as much power as the minions it consumes would have otherwise provided, and those minions cannot be re-summoned so as to not “create power”, then you would enter into a gameplay loop where there are no buttons you can press to engage with the gameplay without inherently limiting the abominations potential. and what i mean by that directly relates to the same issue wraiths had until a few days ago: you can always have more wraiths, so they constitute the entirety of your focus at a given moment in time, only in this case it’s “you could always have a stronger abomination if you just consume more minions.” which is an argument that goes all the way until all 5 spell slots are occupied by minions to feed the abomination that you can no longer summon without reducing the power of the abomination. or to put in other words: if the abomination was balanced, then there would be no point to using it.

In summary: The current system by which the game functions does not allow for a skill of this type to exist in balance with the rest of the game-play loop, the abomination is such that it can only be under-powered or overpowered, but unlike other skills that face this issue, it’s too versatile to force into a niche without defeating the original purpose of the ability itself. the abomination is an all-rounder minion that consumes your other minions, and either “creates power” or reduces it by virtue of poor scaling logic, and even if that were fixed, it could only be as powerful as your other collective minions, and thus cannot justify it’s own existence. Perhaps there is a version of this skill that could exist in an ARPG like this, but the amount of systems that would need to shift in order to make it feasible would constitute the complete ground-up redesign of the necromancer class itself around the very skill in question, and I’m pretty sure nobody actually wants that (or at least, nobody would reasonably expect it to actually happen) so it would be better off if the spell got cut and those resources were used more productively.
This has been my Ted Talk on the Abomination.

[Kotli]

Lets see:

1. Yep I agree here.
2. I agree here also.
3. Disagree here it not really a problem as all skill created power and if they didn’t it be pointless using them.
4. The better solution is to drop the ideal of it consuming minions altogether unless it a node upgrade that consumes targeted minion to do something like reduce the cost or to reduce the cast time.

[Deadduck]

I don’t understand what you problem with abomination is, you seem to be saying it will either be too powerful or too under powered which is a subjective statement.
Also saying “Abomination is beyond saving” sounds like exaggeration giving less weight to your argument.
For any skill the bar is:
Can it clear content?
Is it fun?
ease of use?

I think Abomination may have problems in ease of use, however I find it fun and I know it can clear content. I think 8.3 Abomination is alot better the previous versions and I don’t need to summon 100 wraiths to get stupid damage .

Overall I like new Abomination.

[Rageharder8]

I think the new abomination works perfectly.

[Zarono]

@Deadduck

I don’t understand what you problem with abomination is, you seem to be saying it will either be too powerful or too under powered which is a subjective statement.

it’s not as subjective as you might think, and this mostly relates to point 2: the power of a single minion isn’t universal, but the abomination treats it like it is, so even if the initial modifier on the theoretical “base stats” of the abomination (which don’t technically exist since it can’t be summoned until it has at least one sacrifice) is a gain in power for one type of minion, it may still be a loss in power for a different type of minion (if i knew all the numbers that existed behind the scene, i could make a graph to demonstrate this idea)

for the time being, this problem doesn’t particularly matter to a leveling player, but once the game goes live, and the end game follows a leaderboard, it will begin to cause unsolvable problems, which is why i assert that it ought to be cut now in favor of avoiding those problems.

[Zarono]

@Kotli

Disagree here it not really a problem as all skill created power and if they didn’t it be pointless using them.

i think you misunderstand, it’s not to say that a skill shouldn’t become more powerful over time (this is the purpose of skillpoints) but rather that, as a base, the abomination deals it’s own damage based on the sum of all your other minions, which should mean that it represents 100% of your minion damage, but at the same time you still have all your other minions. to cite the big argument in the box at the top, you should only be capable of doing 100% of the damage you do, even if that number gets higher over time, it’s still the case, and the abomination screws that up in a way that no other class is capable of (i.e. it isn’t balanced) and you only need to cite the other issues to see why trying to balance it isn’t inherently possible without removing the purpose of using the skill.
TL;DR, there is a difference between “Gaining power” and “Creating power”

[Tree]

Not to be completely blunt, but a good reason why your walls of text go unnoticed is because a good segment of your rants are filled with 100% unactionable gibberish. The stuff about creating power and 100% skill potential is useless when we’re talking about battlefield scenarios, and that’s exactly what the devs want to see so that they can feel the pain we’re feeling when it comes to using it in battle.

I divide the Abomination into 3 separate functions:

1. Summoning the Abomination
2. Using the Abomination’s unique abilities
3. Combining the Abomination with other minions

Response to #1

Summoning the Abomination on the battlefield feels really bad. Without any invulnerability while channeling, having to stop your movement, channel the skill, and risk having a telegraphed attack kill you on the spot right there and then makes the proposition a non-starter. Which honestly sucks, in my opinion, as I thought that was a really cool aspect of the Abomination in the first place.

That means practically, the only way to get the Abomination onto the field is summon as many creatures as possible in a safe zone to get the Abomination to its fullest strength potential and then have to resummon it every Echo or so, and you’ve already pointed out how much that sucks from a QoL perspective.

I have long advocated for having the Sacrifice skill happen for every minion that’s consumed while being invulnerable while channeling. That way, you can Sacrifice front-line Skeletons to inflict a lot of damage on something like a Siege Golem who’s going to destroy the Skellies anyway (plus get the Ward on minion death effect for more survivability); have the Abomination finish it off; and then re-summon the Skellies once you know they’re safe from imminent harm. I also think it’s a miss that the devs didn’t consider giving the Abomination a damage buff if it consumes a minion under the effects of a Shade, as it can lock in the damage increase that the Shade provided while providing more stability to prevent the effects from only applying for a second or two.

Response to #2

The abilities are mixed depending on which type of minion it is. The Arrow Nova from consuming Archers feels like it’d be the worst, as you can already specialize in having only Archers, and they have a cooldown ability that multiplies their damage, something the Abomination would not have access to. The Hungering Souls looks like it’ll be weak, especially as it involves a single projectile that’s unspecced (since it’s the pet’s ability, not the players). I’ve used the melee Necrotic Reave attack from consuming Wraiths, but having a single big arc attack every X seconds feels lousy since it’s decaying all throughout the time. I know that Double Strike effectively is double the melee hits, but I don’t know what’s the best combination of moves to increase the overall DPS.

Tail Slap was a great addition; Volatile Zombies are more pin-pointed AoEs, so having the Tail Slap works as an extended AoE that may finish off stragglers while complimenting VZ’s more single-target focus. How effective it will be depends on the minion AI and what the cooldown is expected to be for this attack.

Response to #3

Now for combining all of these together - having so many melee minions leads to pathfinding and body blocking, so saying that X skeleton warriors or melee Wraiths is equivalent to X% potential damage is a misnomer. The advantage of having many melee minions is that their basic attacks are directly correlated with attack speed, while the Abomination appears to be more of a cooldown-based large AoE attacks. Additionally, if you have a secondary focus on Penetration or DoT’s, each hit is an additional application of these debuffs (assuming the minions are not blocking each other), something the Abomination can’t make up for in added effectiveness. What the Abomination gains in increased total health to handle AoE’s better, it loses by naturally decaying - even more so if you want to apply Dread Shade to it.

Here’s what I’d like to experiment on before giving any concrete conclusions:

1. What’s the difference between non-decaying Abomination + Dread Phalanx + Arch-mage compared to simple Skeleton Archer + Mage Fireball spam?
2. How does the Abomination’s unique abilities make up for the lack of penetration / DoT application that having more minions would provide?
3. Will the Abomination’s unique abilities be given a power check to make sure they’re actually contributing to the battle instead of being a useless animation + cooldown that doesn’t make up for the constant delay?

I am of the crowd that agrees that way too many nodes are dedicated to the damage + decay paradigm while taking away from giving it damage + abilities that make you actually want to use the Abomination in the first place. And please, give us invulnerability while channeling the thing so that we have a way to actually use the skill in battle.

[Zarono]

@Tree

Not to be completely blunt, but a good reason why your walls of text go unnoticed is because a good segment of your rants are filled with 100% unactionable gibberish. The stuff about creating power and 100% skill potential is useless when we’re talking about battlefield scenarios

that is because I’m talking about leaderboard scenarios, the only place where balance actually matters, since outside of that is more reliant on how something feels vs how good it is, on a leaderboard, no matter how tedious or cumbersome something is, if it’s the best, then it’s what’s going to be on top.

@Tree

I also think it’s a miss that the devs didn’t consider giving the Abomination a damage buff if it consumes a minion under the effects of a Shade, as it can lock in the damage increase that the Shade provided while providing more stability to prevent the effects from only applying for a second or two.

this sounds like you just want them to buff shades, which honestly i’m pretty sure everyone wants, but making that buff reliant on a third skill when it was already reliant on a second to even work would be problematic.

@Tree

I know that Double Strike effectively is double the melee hits, but I don’t know what’s the best combination of moves to increase the overall DPS.

i think it would go a long way to making the abomination feel better if it just gained the abilities by default when eating the appropriate minion, and the skill tree allowed you to specialize in buffing one particular ability over another, but that’s not the case and it sorta hurts the fantasy that my abomination eats one archer and 5 mages and 2 golems, but it’s out here spamming arrows in all directions and nothing representative of the mages or golems.

@Tree

having so many melee minions leads to pathfinding and body blocking, so saying that X skeleton warriors or melee Wraiths is equivalent to X% potential damage is a misnomer.

the melee minion thing is an entirely different argument that more people than just myself have mentioned on these forums in the past few days. i personally avoid using melee minions because it’s always been an issue, and really they just need to reduce their hitbox size so that they can slightly clip into each-other, or increase the hitbox of every enemy up to a minimum threshold so that the minions can at least fully cluster around it, but somehow i don’t see them making either of these changes.

@Tree

Here’s what I’d like to experiment on before giving any concrete conclusions:

1. What’s the difference between non-decaying Abomination + Dread Phalanx + Arch-mage compared to simple Skeleton Archer + Mage Fireball spam?
2. How does the Abomination’s unique abilities make up for the lack of penetration / DoT application that having more minions would provide?
3. Will the Abomination’s unique abilities be given a power check to make sure they’re actually contributing to the battle instead of being a useless animation + cooldown that doesn’t make up for the constant delay?

already tested 1: you lose so much damage that you’d actually gain damage by not summoning the abomination at all. (and on top of that, archmage and dread phalanx are a net loss in damage to their own skills, which itself is not made up by the abomination as it has less minions to eat)

a side response to 2: the abominations strength generally lies in the skill nodes that become available just after the ability nodes, as they usually take the node to 11, or give grotesque modifiers to the abomination itself like 150% attack speed, 120% damage, 60% taunt and damage reflect, and so on. the abomination is designed to make sure you get as few of these bonuses as possible.

3: i’m not sure what you’re asking here, because it sounds more like a direct question to the devs, so i have no additional comments.

[Tree]

@Zarono

already tested 1: you lose so much damage that you’d actually gain damage by not summoning the abomination at all. (and on top of that, archmage and dread phalanx are a net loss in damage to their own skills, which itself is not made up by the abomination as it has less minions to eat)

This statement is completely incomprehensible. Are you saying that taking full-number Skeletons + another skill (you already mentioned Necro is lacking a lot in terms of good skills, but that’s beside the point) is better in terms of empowered mono + arena than limited Skeletons + Abomination? Because if you’re not summoning the Abomination, you’d just… use another skill. If you’re not going to stick with the number limit, you’d just have a normal, decaying Abomination, which would be better off specced as a different build entirely since you’d be building around that limitation.

Also, I would think the whole point of these “get fewer, but larger pets,” is that you’d have pets with significantly more Health which would survive higher waves of Arena / Monos that the regular Skeletons wouldn’t pass muster. Which means the Abomination being weak is more of a DPS issue than anything (which I agree on - I think the Abomination attacks too slow and the granted abilities have too large a cooldown)

@Zarono

that is because I’m talking about leaderboard scenarios, the only place where balance actually matters, since outside of that is more reliant on how something feels vs how good it is, on a leaderboard, no matter how tedious or cumbersome something is, if it’s the best, then it’s what’s going to be on top.

As long as you can cleared the Empowered Monos and get all the blessings, anything leaderboard-related is irrelevant in terms of what’s going to get buffed / nerfed. Going to the top requires perfect synergy with skills, passives, and gearing, and some gear is going to be more synergistic with classes than others. You mentioned in your earlier thread that putting an unspecced skill in the hotbar is nonsense, when multiple uniques are designed entirely around passively casting one of your specced skills (Boardman’s Melee Skeleton Necromancer uses an Axe that casts Rip Blood when he uses Harvest, so there’s no reason to have Rip Blood on the skill bar).

[Zarono]

@Tree

This statement is completely incomprehensible. Are you saying that taking full-number Skeletons + another skill (you already mentioned Necro is lacking a lot in terms of good skills, but that’s beside the point) is better in terms of empowered mono + arena than limited Skeletons + Abomination? Because if you’re not summoning the Abomination, you’d just… use another skill. If you’re not going to stick with the number limit, you’d just have a normal, decaying Abomination, which would be better off specced as a different build entirely since you’d be building around that limitation.

if you want actual numbers, here’s the testing:
1 full power abomination = 26 minions consumed + those 26 minions, since it doesn’t prevent them from being re-summoned (the 26 minions in my test were 11 skeletons, 5 mages, 8 wraiths, and 2 golems. technically you could get slightly more from swapping out golems for volatile zombies, but i felt that this would be inconsistent in any real-world scenario, so i opted for permanent pets and wraiths only), this amounts to a damage bonus of 780% for the abomination (it gains a flat 30% damage per minion eaten).
Just making it permanent, but changing no other factors, reduces the amount of consumable minions from 26 to 16 (about a 40% loss in damage) on top of being unable to summon skeletons anymore, as 5 mages are more powerful than any combination of skeletons. in this case, you’ve lost 40% of your abominations damage and 100% of your skeletons damage in a scenario where you can’t swap out either skill for something else, as they are both required to make this happen at all.
if you convert your skeletons to dread pahalanx and mages to archmage, then your abomination goes from 16 consumable minions to 7 (an overall 75% loss in damage over the original 26 minions) and you can resummon all but 2 of your skeletons, in this scenario you’ve lost 75% of your abominations power, ~ 35% of your skeletons power, and the archmage is only about as strong as 3.5 mages normally, so also 35% of your mage power, all just so you don’t have to press a button every few minutes to re-summon the abomination.

it’s worthless.

@Tree

anything leaderboard-related is irrelevant in terms of what’s going to get buffed / nerfed.

is… is this your first ARPG?

@Tree

You mentioned in your earlier thread that putting an unspecced skill in the hotbar is nonsense, when multiple uniques are designed entirely around passively casting one of your specced skills

I also mentioned in that same thread immediately after that statement that there were nonsense builds that still did what you’ve described, i’m not entirely sure what your point is?

[XLVI_carpo]

Hey there!
I’m with @Tree here. Your posts are written in a complicated way. This all sounds smart, but that doesn’t meant it’s all correct.

You call the Abomination “a parasitic skill”. Propably because you saw Josh Strife Haze’s video on parasitic game design. Now you think you can just put that logic onto everything. By that conclusion 90% of the game mechanics are parasitic.

• Increased damage? Does nothing without base damage → parasitic
• Skills consuming mana? Without mana skills won’t do anything → parasitic
• Proccing smite on throwing attacks? Without the idols smite won’t do anything → parasitic
• Consuming ignite stacks on Rive to turn it into increased physical damage? Won’t work without ignite → parasitic
  …

The Abomination consuming minions is nothing more than using a resource (like mana/hp, rage, combo points or whatever) for a specific action.

This concept is unique on a minion skill. If you don’t like it, it’s not necessarily a design error, but maybe just a matter of different flavour. I’m not defending the design decisions here. But rather than saying things like “it’s parasitic” or “skill needs to go” I say “using this skill feels clunky, atm. I’d wish for a easier way to res my Abomination on the battlefield.”

The principle is that you use other skills to enable the power of that specific skill. You do this on so many other builds in LE (and other games). You can use Swipe as a low/medium damage mana generator for hard hitting and mana consuming skills like earthquake. You buff attack speed and damage. Or you can build it for damage.

With Abomination its nothing different. You use your other minion skills as a resource and to buff the abomination. This way you sacrifice the power of your other minion skills to empower your main skill. This is a core game design in ARPGs and by no means a parasitic design.

The issue with Abomination is that it just doesn’t feel right. The skill is working. You can make the Abomination extremely powerful so that its oneshotting everything. But the playstyle is something that isn’t really fun.

Here again I agree with your general criticism of the skill, but not with your solutions or suggestions.

Boardman made a good thread a while ago and there were some nice suggestions in it.

I made the following suggestion:

New Mechanic Idea For Abomination/Infernal Shade To Make It Feel Better

I like the Abomination idea. The only problem is, that you need to kill some enemies first. The summoning of LE I always found better than D2 because you do not need corpses. If you’re running a pure minion build you might have problems at the start of the map. Or you need to port to low level areas to summon your Abomination. But the Abomination then could continue consuming corpses of fallen enemies to expand its lifespan. An idea for the minion skills I had recently: What about locking min…

I’m a huge permanent minion fan so I’d like to have a way to have my skeleton army with my Abomination. This is my most desperate wish for Abomination.

So the new permanent branch doesn’t fit together so well, imho:

I get more damage for consuming more skeletons with the bottom branch where also the new permanent node is located. So I want to have max amount of mages and skeletons. But to prevent my Abomination from decaying, I’m just allowed to have 5 skeletons active after summoning the Abom. This absolutely doesn’t fit together.

This is counter intuitive for me. Everything I put into my skeleton and mages skilltree feels like a waste (besides the nodes that increase minion limit), same for the passives that increase the number of skeletons/mages.

The fantasy I had, when I firs (mis-)read the announcement on the forum was, that I would have an Abomination alongside my skeleton army. My expectation was to have an alternative or enhancement for my golem. But the skill now wants me to invest points into skills I can’t use after the summoning. This doesn’t feel good.

I could leave the skeletons and mages unskilled and live with the loss of damage. What else is there to summon? Wraiths and Golem and Zombies. These skills add nothing to the Abomination because it cannot consume them anymore if it is permanent. And in top I now have the inconvenience to have to switch skills on my bar for summoning the Abomination - skeletons and mages - and switch back to skills I have specialised in.

For me it seems that speccing into a permanent Abomination is not in a good spot.

What I’d wish for:

Get rid of the limitation for resummoning the skeletons and mages. If you think the permanent Abomination would be a too powerful skill in addition to a max number skeleton army, reduce the effectiveness of the damage multiplier for “number of minions consumed” for perma Abomination.
It will result in more preperation time for this setup, but it would be ok for having a permanent Abomination in reward.

But to be honest, I don’t think that this is needed. With the perma Abomination I already can’t have max damage output because it can only consume skeketons/mages and nothing else. So no additional damage for wraiths, not for the additional number of consumed minions nor for additional type of minion. So theres already a huge damage loss with the decision for permanent Abomination. Not being able to summon the rest of my army is hurting me twice. Building a decaying Abomination is still the best way to scale damage and on top it currently looks more convenient to me compared to the permanent option.

[Zarono]

@XLVI_carpo

You call the Abomination “a parasitic skill”. Propably because you saw Josh Strife Haze’s video on parasitic game design. Now you think you can just put that logic onto everything. By that conclusion 90% of the game mechanics are parasitic.

congratulations, you’ve managed to articulate that you didn’t even bother to read or try to understand my post, since, according to you, every human on the face of the earth who uses a particular word in the english language is referencing a particular obscure youtube video on game design.
Check your assumptions at the door because you also followed it up with an incredibly bad argument.
mana is not power until you USE IT
rive can still do something INDEPENDENT of ignite stacks.
get out of here with your false equivalence, because minions (unlike mana) actually DO SOMETHING before you feed them to the abomination, and unlike rive, abomination CANNOT BE USED until you have at least one other minion.

the point of the entire post wasn’t even a crusade against the abomination as a concept. I liked the idea of the skill, hell a few months ago, i suggested an almost verbatim version of it before it was even announced. but this post isn’t a statement of my opinion, or on how the skill feels, it’s about how the skill MATHEMATICALLY cannot be balanced. with the current way in which the abomination skill has been mechanically constructed, there is no universe or version of reality in which simply changing a number can make it balanced, because it is inherently, mechanically unsound.
but you don’t care about that, you just came here to stir up nonsense that you know nothing about.

[XLVI_carpo]

Again, just hyperbole and exaggerations. You are on a crusade for making the Necromancer better. That’s ok. And I will support this as I am a big fan if Necro, too.

But since a few weeks when you became vocal here on the forums you try to convince everybody that the Necro is utterly broken. And you seem to think that you are the only person who cares and can solve the problem. You are posting essays and essays about how to “fix” skills and stuff. And when somebody disagrees, you play the “oh… you don’t understand what I’m saying… get out of here” card. That’s sad.

Let’s just for a moment think that all your pseudo intellectual stuff about parasitic design would be correct: what do you want to proof? If a skill does nothing and needs at least one other skill to do anything… what’s the point? Do you ever have less than 5 skills on your hot bar since you are out of the first few chapters? This whole part of your post doesn’t do anything to amplify your arguments you bring later. Because its unrelated. It’s just to show off how smart you are and how deep your knowledge of game design is. And by calling the skill “parasitic” you give it a negative flavour. “Oh… the skill is parasitic? This is bad. Because parasites are bad. So the skill must be bad, too!”

@Zarono

I liked the idea of the skill, hell a few months ago, i suggested an almost verbatim version of it before it was even announced.

Yeah.

Rogue concept design part 3 (Bladedancer)

I assume the post you are referring to is this one, which does nothing to suggest that we don’t consider community suggestions (why would we have a forum section for them?). The post merely clarified when we started working on one of the skills in our game. As the creator of a number of threads which have been replied to, I am sure you’ll be familiar with the notifications our forum sends when this occurs. You might remember this post in one of the threads that I created. I spent several hours…

[KissingAiur]

I am keeping an eye on this thread because it is getting little too heated. Please keep discussion on game topics constructive and non-combative, we all have the same goals here.

Thanks.

[Zarono]

@XLVI_carpo

Let’s just for a moment think that all your pseudo intellectual stuff about parasitic design would be correct: what do you want to proof?

math isn’t psuedo science.

@XLVI_carpo

Again, just hyperbole and exaggerations.

math isn’t hyperbole.

@XLVI_carpo

“Oh… the skill is parasitic? This is bad. Because parasites are bad. So the skill must be bad, too!”

this is a personal attack, and downplays the actual argument being made by corellating it to an assumption.

here’s a homework assignment for you. produce numbers. any numbers you have to, that will make this skill balanced WITHOUT a mechnical change. do this and i will concede to you that i was expressing an opinion.
but you won’t be able to, because it isn’t possible. the mechanics of the ability prevent it from being so, but i’m sure in your eyes i’m just not finding the right imaginary numbers to make it work as is.

[Tree]

@Zarono

1 full power abomination = 26 minions consumed + those 26 minions, since it doesn’t prevent them from being re-summoned (the 26 minions in my test were 11 skeletons, 5 mages, 8 wraiths, and 2 golems.

Note I didn’t say calculations, I said TESTING. Yes, you can create a build that focuses on nothing but permanent pet abilities, but I doubt you’d be able to survive well in Empowered Echoes with no defensive abilities or mana regenerators. Then the question becomes: “how well can you use your other skills to enhance the Abomination, and is it worth it compared to the Necro’s other skills?” So you either use your Abomination, load up its damage, and have to put with re-summoning it every other Echo, or you use something like Dread Shade and beef up Skeleton Archers’ + Mages’ Damage, or you use something like Bone Curse or Rip Blood and you compare the skills.

You rightfully noted that the Shades are clunky skills to use, and the Necro has few other skills that provide a decent boost to survivability (the Drain Life to create Wraiths was a neat interaction, but no multiplayer game server is going to survive multiple players with 150+ Wraiths each).

On one hand, no dev wants to create overpowered, brainless walking simulators that kill enemies a screen away, whether it’s flying electric orbs or multi-arrows or pets. On the other hand, the gear synergy for Necros is extremely lacking compared to other classes, especially as other classes can abuse the low-life aspect just as well as the Necro can.

Yes, testing for this class is going to be rough and complicated, because the devs are trying to answer the same question, “how do I get as many pets out as possible while not making the other skills useless?” Without the possibility of 150 Wraiths, what stands out from them being just reskinned Mages (assuming you’re doing the projectile route)? How do you keep the Abomination from effectively being a re-skinned Bone Golem, only obtainable 50 Levels later. Are the unique abilities worthwhile to use in battle compared to simply using the points for MOAR damage? I wish there were more open-ended dev discussions on “just what exactly were you hoping to get out of this skill,” and if they implemented or not implemented changes, what are the technical issues that prevent that?

[Zarono]

@Tree

I doubt you’d be able to survive well in Empowered Echoes with no defensive abilities or mana regenerators.

you mean those things that necromancers don’t have? who do you think we are? mages?

@Tree

“how well can you use your other skills to enhance the Abomination, and is it worth it compared to the Necro’s other skills?”

the abomination only synergizes with 2 types of abilities, buff skills (which has like, 3 options that give anywhere from a ~20% increase all the way to a near 120% increase, but it kills the abomination in the process) and minion skills, if we knew the actual base numbers that the abomination scaled off of i could actually make a flow chart for you, but this information is secret and i’m not in the mood to divine it from hours of conditional testing. but the answer is probably that the golem isn’t worth sacrificing over a buff skill, and mages may or may not be depending on if the 150% additive damage the abomination gets is comparable to the actually increase in base stats over a buff skill, but skeletons and wraiths by sheer volume probably amount to a more significant boost than buff skills. either way, it doesn’t alter the mechanic underlining all these factors that prevent the abomination from being balanced by simple virtue that our other minions aren’t equal, but it treats them like they are.
as for how the abomination impacts the other minion skills, outside of the health degen removing skill node (which, as we have discussed, is a comically terrible nerf to your overall damage) it sorta doesn’t, it’s just a tremendous inconvenience every few minutes by virtue that you have to resummon everything.

@Tree

On one hand, no dev wants to create overpowered, brainless walking simulators that kill enemies a screen away,

Cough Diablo cough (although in fairness, that’s more of a spinning simulator nowadays)

@Tree

How do you keep the Abomination from effectively being a re-skinned Bone Golem, only obtainable 50 Levels later.

funny you should mention this, because as it turns out, you actually sorta can’t if the skill is made balance-able, since in order for it to be considered “Balanced” it would need to gain dynamically as much power from each minion it eats as that minion represents, the only factor being specific to the abomination being it’s own base stats, which would naturally have to be nearly identical to the golem, as it is the only other minion spell that only allows you to have 1 by default (although i imagine it’s base stats would be slightly squishier in exchange for more damage, but either way they’d be proportional to the golem) the only benefit of this is the single minion synergy with buff skills like dread shade, in exchange for the loss in synergy with on-hit debuffs like poisons and armor shreds and such. so i suppose it could have a small niche in that regard, but if they made it gain any more or less power than the minions it eats, then it would either be worthless or mandatory. there really is no in between, either way, this still can’t happen until they change the base mechanic of it treating all minions as the same value, but i imagine that once this impacts a leaderboard in a way that actually matters (i.e. right before release) it’ll either be fixed for real at the cost of resources, or just nerfed to be a gimmick spell for those who are just really into the fantasy.

[Tree]

Before I address the following, I’d like to ask the following question:

"Abomination does not decay until you have 6+ Skeletons / Skeleton Mages. If the number of Skeletons drops to below 6 Skeletons, the Abomination’s Decay does not stop.

Who in the everloving realm of ideas thought this was a good idea to implement? Why, oh why, couldn’t it be that if the player goes from above 6 Skeletons to below 6, the Abomination stops decaying? If Skeletons are dying, that means there’s a lot of damage out there that’s killing them, and that’s the absolute worst time to have to worry about another minion dying on top of all that.

I thought the 6 Skeletons idea was alright as long as you can stop the decay process to heal the Abomination up (with leech, probably), but this was precisely the worst way to manage it. Please, if absolutely nothing else gets done about the Abomination, make it so that going below 6 Skeletons stops the decay process so that you have a way to actually stop the Abomination from killing itself if you want to go the “Abomination only eats Skeletons” route.

[Zarono]

@Tree

Please, if absolutely nothing else gets done about the Abomination, make it so that going below 6 Skeletons stops the decay process so that you have a way to actually stop the Abomination from killing itself

If nothing else gets done but that, I will be incredibly disappointed.

[Shrukn]

Zarono I respect your attempts but I would just give up at this point. on all of this.

EHG want their Necromancer different to others games traditional summoners to the point they are just bad to play, ie Dread Shade. Even PoE has some awful sustainable minions to play but reward you with something else - Dancing Dervish for example. Permanent Cyclone/Warpath Swords who cannot die who will aggressively attack everything but desummon if they dont hit something after 10 seconds and need hits to stay alive…thats true Risk v Reward as a summoner since they can de-spawn mid boss battle if you arent careful

Basically if you want to provide feedback, DO NOT post here. just message the devs if you really care as theres no point arguing with forum warriors who dont play Necro.

Also the other factor is NOBODY has posted a 300+ corruption Necro build…because as far as I can see it doesnt exist as it wont work there, which is an even bigger issue imo

Also just give up on Necro and play Manifest Armor Forge Guard who is actually much less hassle to deal with