Why do Skeleton Vanguards exist?

Minion builds are near and dear to me, and always receive a lot of extra attention as I play through ARPGs, and one thing about our Acolyte has been tugging at my brain: why do Skeleton Vanguards exist?

Of all the minion skills, they’re the least impactful, have no skill tree of their own, and feel like an afterthought. They’re only Slightly more damage absorption than regular skeleton warriors, but we don’t get nearly enough of them, and when consuming random minions from other nodes, we cannot maintain their uptime to be available, so we have to slot other minion skills, anyway. As icing on a cake goes, they’re too basic to be exciting.

While Warlock may bring them more in-line with other minions, I have another proposal for their source nodes - cast a randomly selected active minion skill instead. Obviously the community would prefer these random selections to be selected from their bar, but even if it wasn’t, there would be some unique spice to getting a random skill cast in kill (or minion death).

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The Vanguards are more of a gimmick than a real big thing you can base you build on. I usually take them with me because they provide additional debuff potential with armour shred or ailment stacks because its 3 more minions with all the attack speed stuff you can get. It’s a minion you don’t have to invest or sacrifice a lot. It wont carry your build but also not gimp your power by taking it either through passives or procced with skills.

I’m mostly annoyed by their attack animation. They wield a spear but use it like it was an axe or sword. instead of stabbing they slash. That’s weird and freaks me out :grin::wink::v:

Pretty much what raw said.

They are just an extra body that does not need investment that can suck up buffs like dreadshade or bleed or poison etc.

You can also blow them up with sacrifice, but the whole “Minion bomber” playstyle is a bit harder to pull off currently because sacrifice has really high mana cost so most people opt to play something like skelemages that cast it instead.

I made a full skeleton necro and use them because they were extra dps for free. The fact that I get 3 extra minions without needing to spec another skill is great. I’d like it if gear affixes that boosted skeletons also boosted them, like the crit affixes.

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