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”
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:
- Summoning the Abomination
- Using the Abomination’s unique abilities
- 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:
- What’s the difference between non-decaying Abomination + Dread Phalanx + Arch-mage compared to simple Skeleton Archer + Mage Fireball spam?
- How does the Abomination’s unique abilities make up for the lack of penetration / DoT application that having more minions would provide?
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
is… is this your first ARPG?
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?
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:
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.
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.
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!”
Yeah.
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.
math isn’t psuedo science.
math isn’t hyperbole.
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.
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?
you mean those things that necromancers don’t have? who do you think we are? mages?
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.
Cough Diablo cough (although in fairness, that’s more of a spinning simulator nowadays)
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.
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.
If nothing else gets done but that, I will be incredibly disappointed.
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
shame that this happens to be the FEEDBACK forum.
do you think i have their personal phone numbers or something? this forum is how i message the devs, if i could make a private post that was garanteed to get dev feedback then i would, but that’s not how the system is structured.
In a way, I’m trying to make up for this with my big lengthy posts, since they clearly aren’t getting any actual server data on this class, so identifying the problems is part of the challenge towards balance.
i have a forge guard, he’s a higher level than my necromancer because he’s actually playable, i don’t post about him because he doesn’t really have any problems due to his minions actually benefiting from his personal power stats, and thus he isn’t squishy, and he actually deals his own damage. in other words, he’s already the perfect summoner, so why would i bother making posts about him?
(for reference i also have a high level beastmaster, i play anything with a pet focus, their issues are more build staleness and itemization, since their pets don’t gain from personal power stats, and thus they have to become squishy and worthless to make their pets do anything, just like the necromancer)
While I agree that arguing on the forums isn’t productive, this is the perfect place to provide feedback.
We have read the suggestions on this thread and have taken it into consideration. We do not plan on removing the abomination at this time. We appreciate that it is not a perfect skill and are open to suggestions to improve it.
Well now I have a second post to make when I get home, but if you could do me a favor, to keep the conversation as productive as possible, could you explain what exactly your goal with the abomination skill is? Because if you’re aiming for something balanced, I’ve already detailed a rational argument on why this isn’t possible in its current structure, and if you just want a fun gimmick spell, I can give insight in that direction too, but without knowing what it is you want, I can only run in circles around the idea of the abomination.