Eventually you'll want to get a helmet with minion damage as a prefix and then you can use melee physical damage as well for even more damage. Empower isn't very good on zombies if you're not trying to push them to level 30 so you can swap that for more damage, meat shield, elemental army or feeding frenzy. Aug 22, 2019 The Feeding Frenzy aid gem would make supported minions aggressive, raising the range that they’re going to seek out out enemies. In addition, it offers hits from your minions an opportunity to provide you the Feeding Frenzy buff, granting additional minion destruction and elevated minion attack, forged and motion pace. Imagine you are half asleep with a 1 million damage build. You do 500k damage. Imagine you're on Adderall with a 710k damage build. You play like a god. While 40% more would put you at 1 million, you're still doing around 700k damage. That is how different the ai is.
Making a post about this because these are pretty big things that won't be able to be accounted for just off the info we have now and are getting based off of the posts that are left. Which makes planning awkward.
Also, the first one is a bit of a complaint and probably something to be addressed before league start.
Is Zombie Slam cooldown getting buffed at all to make up for the loss of 200% CDR? EDIT: Answered. It is 4.0 seconds now.
With Violent Dead being gone, it's impossible to get them to permaslam now (which required multistrike as well anyways). What this means is that if you multistrike for more slams, the zombies are gonna have awkward moments of multistriking a default attack which is really rough.
If the cooldown doesn't go to 2.5 or even 3, I cant see anyone using them offensively, as that's how they got anywhere close to decent clear. (It also wouldn't do much of anything for people in standard, you'd still probably want multistrike in the end)When do you get a 3rd spectre from the Spectre gem? At the point of having 4 spectres total (1 from tree) spectres will be fine, but it's important to know when that 3rd spectre from gem level actually happens. (And, if possible, 4th -- but I'd imagine that might be hard to get)
Base numbers on Carrion Golem will be really helpful, but more than anything the cooldowns on Carrion Golem's abilities will be important as that's something that's much harder to judge and makes planning around how many Primordial Harmonies on a carrion golem centric build you'll want easier. (obviously we'll get flat damage on minion buff with the 20/20 gems, but I don't think base damage would show..?)
Feeding Frenzy Vs Minion Damage Game
Other shorter questions: Whats happening to the +1 spectre on Delve Chests? (I'm assuming its changing to +1 spectre gems)
Midnight Bargain and Queen's Escape/Decree are keeping their +1 max spectre since they weren't mentioned in the patch notes, right?
Feeding Frenzy Play Free
If any other minion base damage numbers changed at all it'd be nice to know -- though I suspect they weren't changed.
EDIT: I forgot, we still don't know what the numbers on Feeding Frenzy are... gem release didn't help.
The Zombie Slam stuff is the only problem I see with the changes, everything else provided the 3rd spectre from gem level isn't too hard to get looks good. Minion life in general is good, regen could use maybe slight buffs to make dropping clusters more viable as it makes it really hard to drop the clusters that have minion regen in them. Damage looks good as well. But zombies as a build rely on the slam hard, and losing all that AoE and reliability would be brutal.
External link →Feeding Frenzy Vs Minion Damage 1
Sure am glad they finally added a way to scale minions like they promised, rather than just blanket nerfing spectres by over 30%, which overperformed on low levels of gears but did not even approach the strongest levels of power on high levels of gear. Seriously GGG, just add a way to scale minions so that they can be balanced with low levels of gear while still being good with more investment and actually worth investing into. For clarification, using data from poe.db, risen vaal advocates (basically lightning solar guards with no beam cannon) with feeding frenzy support now deal 1480 base damage at the level of 78, while they before did 2164 base damage at the level of 82. (due to changes to the gem, spectres are now level 76 at gem level 20 rather than level 80, and feeding frenzy no longer gives 14% more damage at level 20) Given that there is still no way to scale minion damage with the same magnitude as what any other builds (attack, spell) have in terms of %increased damage and critical stats, minions need to be given changes that are not just blanket nerfs. In the past few leagues, minions have massively overperformed with little gear, due to the fact that minions are at base extremely strong, but have incredibly little in the way of gearing choices to increase damage, which is why summoners gear so heavily towards defense and utility. It's not because minions have too much damage and players don't want to gear for more, it's that they literally don't have enough options to scale their minions like other builds do. Please give minions that option to scale like other builds, otherwise they can never be balanced at all levels. There's no powercreep here. Creep implies it's slow and could be overlooked, this is a full out sprint. Last edited by cpurdy777 on Mar 11, 2020, 2:37:38 AM | Posted by cpurdy777 on Mar 11, 2020, 2:36:53 AM |
They should just remove those gems that change minion behavior and make something like Grim Dawn did, simple yet effective way to control your minion stance and movement... I guess animated weapon is the way to go this league for summoners... What is even worse for spectres is that they were dying in the fights with Sirius, Elder Slayers and Metamorphs, now not only you will lose damage but the spectres will die more often... and since re-summoning spectres is impossible mid fight they are not even worth considering anymore... Last edited by Johnny210 on Mar 11, 2020, 3:14:31 AM | Posted by Johnny210 on Mar 11, 2020, 2:53:10 AM |
' Ya, its almost like they forgot it was only skeletons that were the ones that beat sirius early on, and that spectres and zombies almost always were dead before being able to do anything in the fights. Seems to be another forced meta, where now they want you playing temporary minions like AW, or herald minions stacking the new cluster notables. But who knows, maybe one of the new monsters was just broken as a spectre, and in typical GGG fashion they nerfed all spectres so that the few powerful ones were the only balanced ones, rather than doing any sort of individualized balancing. There's no powercreep here. Creep implies it's slow and could be overlooked, this is a full out sprint. | Posted by cpurdy777 on Mar 11, 2020, 2:58:00 AM |
' This is what I suspect. Which is just the WORST way to go about doing balance changes. Nerfs to the Baron and skeletons were necessary, but the rest was the kind of overkill we've come to expect from GGG. I'll be leaving summoners alone for a while now. At least Dominating Blow and golems are still good. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. | Posted by demon9675 on Mar 11, 2020, 3:10:19 AM |
' Individual balance takes effort, meta shifts and buffing boss hp and damage (because streamers killed them too quickly) does not. Ascendancy should not be locked behind lab. If there are people who enjoy running this abomination of a content, all the power to them, but this should not be required for completing a character. Would it be fun if all passives from quests would be gated behind similar 'content'? | Posted by MECHanokl on Mar 11, 2020, 7:36:11 AM |
Yeah the spectre nerf hit very hard, perhaps harder than skeletons. 4 levels is huge for damage AND survivability. | Posted by trixxar on Mar 11, 2020, 5:30:39 PM |
' cyclone + CwC + spirit offering prevented that for me...but spirit offering is useless now. well...trying out spellslinger anyways | Posted by Tyrion2 on Mar 11, 2020, 5:57:56 PM |
' GGG should just remove spirit offering too... no one is going to use it now that it's total garbage... My guess is that they gave necros the option to use those new 350 spectres but didn't want to waste time to balance them out... So you just over nerf to avoid super strong spectre build and to make the other players feel good about minions getting nerfed... Instead what will end up happening is that all necro players will go skeletons, zombies or animated weapon... since they are still good and reliable builds that you don't need to waste gem slots (for aggressive AI) and are easily re-summoned unlike spectres... | Posted by Johnny210 on Mar 11, 2020, 6:53:55 PM |
' That's ggg in a nutshell. They don't have the slightest clue. Nerfing spectres while skeletons were op is exactly what I expected. German saying: Schönheit und Funktionalität in Sekundenschnelle zu ruinieren, ist dem wahren Dilettanten keine Herausforderung! torturo: 'Though, I'm really concerned, knowing by practice the capabilities of the balance team.' top2000: 'let me bend your rear for a moment exile' | Posted by 666lol666 on Mar 11, 2020, 7:38:46 PM |