No core profession should be balanced around an optional elite specialization.
Granting a new life to minion's active skill
Hey there! It’s a long time idea that I’m suggesting here : Granting a new life to these skill that are not so used due to a wide variety of issue depending on each gameplay.
The principle would be pretty simple, making a trait (most likely a GM trait to balance this out) that would just remove the “minion part” of the skill and allow the summoner to use the skill in place of the minion. Each and every time, it would become a gamedefining trait.
Necromancer :
Trait : Flesh of the abomination : The necromancer can’t summon any minion, minion active skills are available to the necromancer.
Taste of death : heal the necromancer. CD 16s
Rigor mortis : The necromancer shout 2 projectiles that damage and immobilize it’s foe. CD 50s
Haunt : teleport the necromancer to it’s foe, blinding it. CD 20s
Necrotic traversal : Break stun in a blast that poison foe around you. CD 32s
Putrid explosion : hurt the foes around you with a powerful blast. CD 16s
Charge : the necromancer charge it’s foes. CD 40s.
Would be a very interesting trait, though it would require a lot of the skills to be fixed. Haunt for example is great for the Necro until you realize it takes 3 seconds to activate. Also Rigor Mortis would be difficult to transition, seeing as it immobilizes the minion for 4-5 seconds while it fires off up to 2 volleys of 2 projectiles, each individual projectile immobilizing for 2s (its 8s of immobilize which people don’t notice).
Really cool idea though.
I’d like the opposite. Minions should be short lived summons as baseline with a low cooldown. You summon them, they charge/aim at the targeted enemy, do their active plus some good damage, and finally die. Instead minionmancers should get a trait to make their summons permanent (until they are killed off).
Suddenly they are usable by any build without investing in Death Magic, and with a slight rework of their actives they can bring great utility to every spec.
Note that shifting a good chunk of the damage to the active, while lowering the minions auto attacks damage of the “permanent” traited version, may partially solve the AI problems for MM since the player is in charge of the active.
(edited by Charblaze.6958)
hahahahahaha. This is such a troll suggestion, I love it!
Minions are so bad that if we had minion skills that actually worked, they don’t look so bad.
Hey look, a working blast finisher! Actual working teleport without annoying precast! A working CC elite on reasonable cool down!
The class is fixed!
#24 leaderboard rank North America.
What I’d much prefer is if the minions activated their abilities on their own.
Bone minions explode when they are within 240 range of an enemy. As long as the cool down timer for resummoning is complete. Then automatically recasts themselves. If the codown timer had not reset, the minions will continue to fight until they reach the threshold of 25% health and kill themselves in an explosion. If this occurs, players must manually resummon the minions.
Shade: Teleports to enemy target as soon as I begin attacking that mob, instead of slowly getting lost and spinning in circles for two minutes before deciding to attack (which is basically what it’s behavior is now). As it pops to the enemy it blinds them and draws Aggro from surrounding monsters.
Undead Devourer: Automatically activates its ability any time the caster is standing still for more than 3 seconds. Or if the targeted enemy mob is between 900-1200 range from the caster. (Cool downs still apply)
flesh Golem: Will actually attack the monster the caster has targeted, unless the caster is not attacking. Then it will target whichever mob is attacking the caster. It will automatically activate its ability of the targeted mob is uskng a skill with a charge up time. Teach the darned thing to swim!!!!
All minions:
1. when at 10% health will run to the nearest enemy monster in range and die in a death nova (If that trait is chosen)
2. Automatically Recast themselves in combat. When outside of combat the player must summon manually.
(edited by Derenek.8931)
To ensure this isn’t too powerful a system, minions must be summoned from the corpses of enemies like in GW1
Also if the summoned creatures died before their cool down timer completed, the player must manually resummon them.
What I’d much prefer is if the minions activated their abilities on their own.
This is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard other than flat out nerfing MM. This removes all the skill of playing the build, it makes absolutely no sense.
The minions are super glitchy right now. Commands given only occasionally work. So instead of wasting our skill bar with glitchy skills on unresponsive minions, just let them take care of things on their own. Instead the Necromancer would be watching the enemies, counting the numbers of corpses.
That wouldn’t change anything, glitchy minions won’t magically be fixed by the minions using their actives. Why would you take control away from the one part of the kit that has no glitches (the player) and put it on the one with all the problems? The active skills always work, there are no bugs there.
The active skills definitely do not always work. There is some sort of communication or parsing error happening between pressing the button and the minion performing the action. By removing the interface/communication requirement and reprogramming their behaviors entirely in a set of defined if/then statements it would clear up a lot of the minion’s behavioral problems.
By linking the skill button to summoning alone, it couldn’t interfere with the AI, which is obviously struggling to balance predefined behavioral systems with the unpredictable behavior of a human user.
Then all the AI would have to track is:
1. XYZ coordinates of the player and monster
2. Target designations of the player and monster.
3. Internal skill cool down times.
This would save on the processing lag time between packet transfer between all players, the server, each player’s coins inputs, then monster reactions. The minions once out of the box could act on their own without waiting for outside input. This hang time obviously causes serious behavioral issues with the critters.
The active skills always work, I know the build extremely well. There are delays involved in certain skills, but they always activate.
’I’ve played Necro a lot, because I like it. However, I do remember MANY “WTF?!?!?” moments, where the minion skill didnt activate, or the minion ran off in some direction away from the battle and then activated it, or just stood there ignoring the action and died before the skill proc’ed
@Derenek: Yes, your active skills may fail if the minion was kittening at the time. That’s why you should check your minions before using their actives. If your golem is glitching, and you use the charge anyway, you can’t complain if it charges away from the enemy. Currently you can at least save the active until the minion works again without wasting the cooldown.
Sorry, but Bhawb is right and your proposal won’t work.
So what you’re saying is I should check to see if my minions are being dumb or glitchy prior to activating my skill button?
How about, the minion AI is improved so they aren’t acting so glitchy to begin with?
Every other class is able to deactivate the majority of skills immediately upon cool down completion. Only the Necro has to wait until their skill decides to join in the fight, attack the correct target, and not get lost or stuck before the skill can be activated. This delay will inherently decrease the Necro DPS relative to any other class and also cause longer periods between skill activations in which any damage was done.
It’s simple,
Bone minions don’t blow themselves up in their activated ability until they run to within range of the target. Otherwise, you just wasted a skill and added additional cool down time for no good reason.
The Devourer: It’s ability is to inflict cripple. This is useful for enemies coming at you or running away. Any mob between 600-900 distance is going to be doing one or the other. So instead of randomly firing every ten seconds, make this useful by adding the range modifier to the assessed target.
The shade: It is slow and does weak damage. It would be of much greater use of its teleport/blind skill was activated upon Successful skill one attack. That’s when the ins is best used anyway, as the opening move into a group of enemies.
Flesh Golem: This minion is glitches all around. Anyone who has played Necro knows how dumb this minion is. It’s like he’s a anti-war protestor the way he stands around and seems to intentionally miss his target with the activated ability. Knockdown should be activated directly as it is now, but he shouldn’t actually activate it until he runs into Melee range of the chosen target.
Every other class can aim their skills with precision. Only the Necromancer has to hope that their skill will land anywhere in the vicinity of an enemy.
The wurm minion is absolutely useless and needs to be replaced with something that serves a purpose.
(edited by Derenek.8931)
So what you’re saying is I should check to see if my minions are being dumb or glitchy prior to activating my skill button?
Yes, that is literally what playing MM is all about, paying attention to your minions.
Bone minions don’t blow themselves up in their activated ability until they run to within range of the target. Otherwise, you just wasted a skill and added additional cool down time for no good reason.
That just flat out isn’t true, that isn’t how Bone Minions work. But at least we’re clear about your opinions, you just don’t understand MM at all.
The Devourer: It’s ability is to inflict cripple. This is useful for enemies coming at you or running away. Any mob between 600-900 distance is going to be doing one or the other. So instead of randomly firing every ten seconds, make this useful by adding the range modifier to the assessed target.
Once again, not how this works at all. It isn’t randomly every 10s, the cripple is applied on an enhanced AA with a 10s CD, the same to how the active works. The enhanced skill passively activates and approximately doubles Bone Fiend’s damage plus adds cripple, but otherwise is functionally the same as a normal AA from him, which occurs every 3s.
The shade: It is slow and does weak damage. It would be of much greater use of its teleport/blind skill was activated upon Successful skill one attack. That’s when the ins is best used anyway, as the opening move into a group of enemies.
Only problem is his active has a 3s delay, which yes makes it slow. Lowered to 1s it would be great.
The wurm minion is absolutely useless and needs to be replaced with something that serves a purpose.
This is just stupid. Wurm is one of the most used Necro skills period, it has use on almost every single build.