Macabre Waltz - Skeletal Mages can cast Sacrifice on your Wraiths.
More Info: Skeletal Mages will only target melee Wraiths.
Suggested:
Macabre Waltz - Skeletal Mages can cast Sacrifice on your Wraiths, Volatile Zombies and Corpse Parasites*.
More Info: Skeletal Mages will only target melee Wraiths and Volatile Zombies.
*Volatile Zombie talent that creates little temporary minions.
This would make complete sense to do and I assume it was simply forgotten about.
Obviously they blow themselves up and their exploding damage would be added to Sacrifice but it’s the thought that counts.
Maybe this isn’t possible or necessary as it would be better to cast it yourself but it would be cool.
It would probably be a positive change, but there are difficulties with the AI.
We don’t want skeletal mages to sacrifice your minions when they’re just standing in the middle of nowhere, far from any enemies, and doing distance checks from every eligible minion to every enemy is too computationally expensive. Our solution has been to have the mages only cast sacrifice on a minion that is currently using a melee attack, because if they’re using a melee attack they’re probably in melee range of an enemy. This works well for melee skeletons and wraiths, but volatile zombies don’t use melee attacks, so it’s not simple to include them in this node.
Oh wow. Didn’t expect a developer response. Thanks so much.
That AI workaround for skeleton mage Sacrifice cast is pretty clever. Whoever came up with that should be commended.
I can’t think of anything clever though for zombies as like you said they don’t have a melee attack. Even if you could just check for enemies damaging them not every enemy is melee and in melee the zombie would probably already blow themselves up before a skele mage could do it. I guess there is a small pause though so there’s a small window to Sacrifice them but just not with tracking enemy attacks.
If I think of something I’ll try to remember to post it here.
All I want for Christmas is to have the Sacrifice in the Skeletal Mage tree to use our Sacrifice tree and have the Mages use our beefed up Sacrifices. I hope that’s in the works because even with a lot of “on minion” effects, having the Mages use a weak Sacrifice just leaves players with less pets.
Outside of the Blood Wraith, the Sacrifice tree could use more reimagining, but that’s for a different topic.
There are Dread Shade abilities that increase the effectiveness of Sacrifice. What the talents are I can’t remember off the top of my head and I don’t want to open the game right now and the wiki is outdated but they are there.
I didn’t know that the Skeletal Mage casting of Sacrifice wasn’t talented. Seems kind of weird. Hope it’s fixed.
Could call it the Sacrifice update where they change stuff to work better. Could even add some Volatile Zombie talents or something to synergize with Sacrifice.
Okay I just thought of some things and it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to pull off. Wouldn’t even need to tweak anything on the Skeletal Mages if you didn’t want to.
It would/could be a talent that is locked behind Vile Force which is the Corpse Parasite talent.
Kamikaze - When a Volatile Zombie dies it is also under the effects of Sacrifice. Corpse Parasites now only last two seconds and are also under the effects of Sacrifice when they die or expire.
This is the simplest way I thought of that accomplishes the same thing and is probably just better. Kind of like how you replaced Corpse Explosion with Volatile Zombie in the first place. I’m sure the wording could be different but I hope I conveyed the idea well enough.
It doesn’t need to be locked behind Vile Force but could still keep the effect if people want to add them.
If you still wanted to allow Skeletal Mages to attack there’s a couple different ways that might work.
During the slight pause before exploding you could have zombies deal a melee attack that does 0 damage and isn’t even displayed.
Zombies attach themselves to their victim before exploding. Not in a literal way but in the background. You already have something that attaches to enemies and that’s curses. You might be able to adapt the coding there and have the zombies “attach” to an enemy in the slight pause before they explode.
That attaching could signal the Skeletal Mages to cast Sacrifice just like with melee attacks.
Not sure which one would work better but it’s an idea for if you would like Skeletal Mages to be able to cast Sacrifice on zombies.
Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing both the talent and skele mages able to cast Sacrifice.
P.S. Still need Skeletal Mages to cast your talented Sacrifice rather than just base skill.
P.P.S. Could probably just make this as part of the Sacrifice improvement patch like Tree was talking about in this thread.
That’s a design decision for minions to use their own versions of skills, otherwise their version of Sacrifice would be buffed by two skill trees (Sacrifice plus Skelly Mage’s damage mods). Which would make them too powerful.
Meh, you’re giving up the ability to have more maximum pets for the ability to make larger explosions. I wouldn’t say that’s too powerful, I’d say that’s just powerful. You can always shift nodes around so that if you want to have a Sacrifice Mage build, then you have to focus a significant amount of resources into it so that you can’t have the best of both worlds.
Right now, the best Necro pet builds involve getting 100+ pets on the field spamming projectiles everywhere. My PC has nowhere near the processing power to have that many pets, so I was hoping for stronger Sacrifices to make up for having fewer pets.
Better that than getting multiplayer going and partnering with Necros with huge minion regen sustaining 100+ Wraiths at a time and bringing the servers down to a halt.
