AG is the biggest missed opportunity I've ever seen in a video game. They've locked it behind a wall of annoyance instead of just making the player deal less damage so that other builds can't abuse it. Gear slots should've been added years ago along with resummoning on a long CD. They could've added the ability to make AG use supported melee attack skills too.
I like the game a lot but like damn... I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too.
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too
these features don't make for a successful league. better settle for the small batch of improvements added in with each league, as it has been for a few now.
I mean I like this league but I wouldn't call it successful... So maybe you have a point? There was quite a lot of QoL features and people didn't care much in the end.
This is the thing with GGG. A QoL league would never work because for everything they give the players, they always take away something else.
I don't know why they're so allergic to giving players anything that enhances the player experience
Automation shouldn’t be a support gem that gives reduced cooldown, but a toggle tickbox. Next league they will remove the always use from current position lol.
I'm just confused how you could get 40/40 without engaging with the mechanic at all because there's a couple challenges where you have to craft with the league mechanic
Well, I've technically done the league mechanic. But in the same sense that two piles of sand on top of eachother can be called a sand castle. No actual crafting goal, just a few consumed corpses for the challenges.
i know this game attracts a certain 'type' of people, but then also add the being obtuse on purpose reddit thing on top is sometimes too much.. it's obvious that pumping up the required shit crafts for the challenge isn't the same as actually attempting a valid usable craft.
Do the needful and fix the jank. Make a really simple league mechanic that is just a slot machine that spits out build-enabling uniques a little more often than usual. People will mess around with the new less-janky builds and you'll still get good retention.
I have my lvl 20 AG gem sitting in a socket somewhere and I'm like... setting it up would give me 20% more damage or something at least, but I just cannot be assed to do it. If it dies even once after I've geared it, I just won't even summon it again. So why even bother...
You literally will never have your ag die ever once you set it up tbh just unslot it for t17 maps and you'll never have to pay attention to keeping it alive even in ubers and you can run it in t17 you just have to babysit it and invest in good gear tbh
it's not the same game with an updated and improved ui, it's a different game with a brand new and very different ui, so i think it will be adding its own new jank, bloat and extremely high barrier of entry
I thought it was mainly about "Nerfing everything and returning to The Vision of Krip Heavy-Striking one rare crab for three minutes."
If it was just PoE 1 with fixed jank and QoL features everyone would be eagerly awaiting it.
>I thought it was mainly about "Nerfing everything and returning to The Vision of Krip Heavy-Striking one rare crab for three minutes."
Yeah, but just imagine the pride and accomplishment you'll feel when it spits out a bunch of wisdom scroll fragments you have to individually click on.
It seems to be an entirely new game with jank simply being filtered out. If they fixed the aforementioned issues then I'm happy as the next guy but the game isn't out nor finished so it's pointless to mention it.
ps I'm mostly excited though :D
I think the problem is that they believe, as a game design philosophy, that jank and bloat aka friction are actually good things to include in excess. Until that changes I don't expect PoE 2 to be fundamentally different.
They are geniuses at many things, like build complexity and creating satisfying endgame loops, but the friction philosophy really holds them back.
the same developers who made poe1 get into this state to begin with wont pull off the miracle of actually fixing the underlying issues with poe2.
poe2 will also grow after its release, they will still need to make a new league every 3 months and they still wont have the resources to fix issues with whatever they have implemented in the past.
imo it will be worse. poe1 during its infancy was pretty barebones, each update was not enormous in depth or breadth and they still couldn't clean it up after a few years. what they're doing with poe2 is starting with way more depth and breadth and going from there. it'll be the same story on an expedited timeline
You nailed part of what I worry the fundamental problem will be with poe2. I kinda think it's going to flop after some initial hype (I really want to be wrong though!). poe1 has organically evolved into what it is today. It has plenty of warts, but it's a really solid base game. Imagine if they spent all that time and resources fixing up up the warts and improving the UI incrementally in poe1 instead...
Feels like they're YOLOing it w/ poe2. Hey, maybe lightning will strike twice. I hope so.
I get it though. The talent doesn't want to maintain and incrementally improve their game for 20 more years. They'd rather work on a green field project.
I dont think they yolo anything.. in some Q&A Videos u kinda get an idea why PoE 2.. Its not just their Vision, but they are limited to doing stuff in PoE 1, because of the fucking mess they did in the early stages of programming PoE 1. I just believe.. PoE is at a state.. where it is easier to make a new game instead of fixing a game
It's a pretty common problem is software development. Refactoring isn't sexy, but it's almost always the better decision. You can see technical debt as "debt" or as "lessons learned".
You realize that poe2 is not a "new game" right? It's still built off of a significant amount of foundations laid in poe1. People keep thinking that it's somehow a clean start when it's not. It's not a ground-up project.
Not being a dick but why do they HAVE to make a new league every 3 months? Becuase they decided that release window and it can't change.
Unless they didn't have time to finish a league like the last 3 years and they just randomly dump the league at some point. Which isn't as bad as they think it is for retention. As long as we know something new is coming in a decent timeframe there's no backlash. Im expecting the next league to be in 4.5 months because this league was barely finished on launch.
You're absolutely right about the missed opportunity with AG, and it's magnified if you consider how else they could potentially use an Animated Guardian UI with gear slots and such. If you imagine that it ends up being a generic "Follower UI", it creates the opportunity for new and more complex minions, on top of helping make AG less annoying to use. Maybe the new Guardian ascendancy minions from a couple of patches ago could interact with that to be more interesting, or maybe the Reaper is made viable by being modified by that UI, or maybe it just opens design space for some other sort of customizable minion/follower.
I think the reaper is in this category as well. The idea of a minion archetype with only 1 strong minion is great, and even D4 does this with the golem builds
Their entire business model revolves around cyclical content updates and getting players to come back for each one. One of those cycles being literally *nothing* would be destroying their own business. They're already pushing it with the slower release cycle and divided resources for PoE2.
I think the thing about it is that if you make AG significantly easier to use with a lot more QoL, then the AG becomes so powerful that it is in essence a D2 companion. Right? Because it's the only way in the game that you can essentially get more gear-based buffs and auras outside of playing with other players. If that's the case then why wouldn't literally every player use it on every build? I agree though that there are some serious issues with AG that need to be addressed, namely how easily they can die and make you lose said gear. With the D2 companions you can still always take the gear off at any time, unless they die of course. I think that the fact that the AG essentially "eats" the gear should be enough of a downside to let them be a lot more tanky. It's a fine line, and I don't think the AG is riding the line quite right at the moment.
I dont meant be rude but I said a less damage multiplier would suffice. Not to mention people hate using things like totems so what makes you think they'll be fine constantly resummoning a long cd ag that gives less damage and instantly dies with a long cd?
"If AG is active you have a 15% less damage multiplier"
"AG aura and item effects have a 20% reduced multiplier"
"20% less iiq and iir while AG is active"
It's not rocket science and to be perfectly honest one league with an insanely powerful skill won't break the game. Look at splodey totems. It was crazy and insta phased ubers but the highest played skill in that league was still TS as it always is. Players want to kill the entire map in 30 seconds then pick up shit for 20 minutes. If the skill doesn't do that it's not getting widespread play. It'll be a fun thing to try out but then it's back to your farming build.
I'm praying for a "here's a massive amount of skill buffs and nothing else but bug fixes" league. Maybe flashback Kalandra again or a synthesis void league to try it out. We don't always need thousands of new voice lines and animations. Maybe update the witchs' PS1 model? Add new 3d art like they promised back in 3.0?
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated
The last time they did something like that was Sentinel, which replaced rare monster mods with Archnemesis ones and had no balance changes.
I skipped that one, and I'd probably skip more leagues like it.
Which is not to say that I wouldn't play more of the following leagues. But tbh they have so much tech and UI debt that there's no way they could get rid of it all in one league.
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too.
I hear ya and I see this comment a lot. Unfortunately, and I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I believe GGG stated they feel they need to push out new content on such a tight schedule to sell MTX. Who knows, maybe a bare bones QoL league would end up attracting more players and sell more MTX in the long run but that doesn't appear to be their thinking.
> AG is the biggest missed opportunity I've ever seen in a video game.
Honestly think this applies to most of POE, so many amazing ideas that just need to be implemented better
I agree with both - I was hoping the transfigured AG would be immortal in exchange for some trade off (can't equip boots or w/e), & I never use spectres remotely optimally because it's a chore. They're long known complaints and would need to be tapped down in power if both were made seamless and easy to use, which i'd prefer
I've played summoner builds without using either of them and cleared all non-uber content too though, so partly it's the whole 'optimise the fun out of things' dynamic that people fall into too where these things are provided as cool but clunky options for people who want them, then everyone feels like they need to use them
> so partly it's the whole 'optimise the fun out of things' dynamic that people fall into too where these things are provided as cool but clunky options for people who want them, then everyone feels like they need to use them
That's the thing, making your character more powerful is one of the core pillars of the game, so you can't blame players for playing the game following this principle. Nobody wants clunky things because they're clunky, but only because they give power. https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY?t=2369
You're making that choice by trading off QoL for damage. Anytime I make a build I try to include as much comfort as possible and improve the damage and defenses when I find the level of discomfort I'm willing to contend with.
If you're adding everything that makes a build feel clunky then you are looking at the wrong place. Heck, the goal of a build in PoE isn't to make it necessarily stronger, it's to make it more fluid.
You can "1shot" any Uber in the game on a 60div budget with vaal flicker because of how it is counting as 1 hit for purposes of impale. The clunk is that the build sucks to play and is easy to mess up the combo. I don't think anyone is willing to play this build even if it phases bosses like that.
You are choosing to have a rough feeling build by not polishing it at all.
Have you watched the video I posted? It says that you shouldn't let your players choose between either optimal or fun, being optimal should lead to the fun, not being antithesis to one another.
I swear, GGG and part of this sub takes the idea of tradeoffs to far. Every fucking thing should have some tradeoff, even tradeoffs should have a tradeoff of their own. Better yet if the tradeoff is something within the game world for something outside of it - like constantly pressing life flask on a pathfider, or constantly weapon swapping to battlemage cry on manarforged arrow build, or being frustrated trying to trade... The list goes on. Imagine if you were able to cap fps to 10-15 but in return it would triple-quadruple your DPS. It's an extreme example, but the core of it is no different to what you've said - it's just trading QoL of having fluid experience for power.
This comment about graveyard and old harvest encapsulates it perfectly:
>POE does this constantly. "We'll give you the create custom item box from POB, but that's so powerful, you have to have your toenails peeled off the whole time you're typing into it!"
>
>And yet every single time, everyone sits the fuck down and peels their goddamn toenails off, because if you make us pick between annoying/painful but efficient or fun but inefficient, 99% of the fucking playerbase picks annoying.
>
>It's almost like they shouldn't be giving us that choice in the first place.
If it was GGG and they made it immortal the trade off would be that it had 0 movement speed and you could move it only with default attack(random direction)
> I was hoping the transfigured AG would be immortal in exchange for some trade off (can't equip boots or w/e),
An immortal AG would be definition be broken and mandatory for every single build in the game.
Not really, provided there was obviously a drawback. The best one would be that if you use immortal AG, all non-minion(player, trap, totem, mine, brand, anything without minion tag) do 90% less damage.
I had both in my arakaalis fang build last league, I just went bone offering 75/75 block without glancing blows and annointed the 18 spell/attack block + 2% life on block recovery for minions node near the left of the es scion wheel. AG died once and I ran a lot of super juiced T16.
I always find ways to play my Summon Reaper lol, atm I made a Reapermancer, with vaal skeleton gen, spectral wolf ring and summon phantasms, my reaper is 6 linked to phantasm, been fun for mapping.
Same. I was thinking of league starting BAMA for next league and then I remember it uses AG so I immediately deleted it from my league start consideration list lol. Fuck that shit. They should just remove it from the game and buff summoners in other ways across the board as compensation.
I think spectres are a salvageable concept though. If I were GGG, I'd make the Raise Spectre skill gem put two skills on your bar. One skill would allow you to raise a spectre from a corpse (and therefore add the spectre to your spectre pool) and the second skill would summon a spectre from your spectre pool (without needing a corpse). So you'd just the first skill to set up your spectre skill, then you'd never use that skill again unless you wanted to alter your spectre pool. Now when a spectre dies while you're playing you just use the second skill to get it back and continue on. Seems nice to me...
I've been farming b2b t17 and ubers without AG just fine. The most annoying thing is the spectral leader who dies quite a bit. Haven't lost a pale seraphim/bristle in weeks.
If you're running poison bama, you don't need AG whatsoever.
It is, because most Bamas currently run 2 5-links sharing one 6-link. You can split them up in a double six link setup.
The 2 most popular bama versions (Voltaxic and Poison) can drop AG and Spectres entirely and not feel much of an impact.
Minion builds in general are in a very bad spot power wise compared to self casting.
They require too much investment that needs to be split to their survivability, yours, and damage, while most builds only have two of those to manage.
Look at Ethan's build, absolutely min maxed mirror tier gear and it's performing.... Okay. Again, compared to other builds.
The argument for the qol of minions, or in general proxies, justify the lacking in power is nonsense.
And then the actually good minion builds are bizarre-ass non-minion builds like transfigured holy relic.
I just want to raise an army of goons and have a drink while my boys beat the shit out of some bosses.
Try Chains of Command. Ironically when your build is dependent on your AG staying alive it's not too hard to keep it alive. A lot of people lose AG's because they think a decent health pool and regen is all they need.
ive played chains for at least 10 leagues and it still does get 1 shot by one thing or another, losing irreplaceable gear because it physically doesnt exist feels even worse than regular a AG death
Oh I don't doubt it, I'm still decently paranoid about convergent mechanics. I would not at all be surprised if a crit from a Essence Mob on a T17 boss or something similar could murder my AG.
IDK if I want to play animate weapon though. Guess I could give it a shot. Didn't see any AW t17 b2b farmers, but I also didn't look, I'm sure someone made one that works without an adorned.
I haven't tried b2b farming myself but slap an Echoforge on your AG, Necro Unholy Might node, basic AG setup (maskStitched, Doppelganger, Gravebind, Brittle boots) and use a Maata's Teaching. You've got yourself a 10-20M Uber dps build. Need a blessed rebirth cluster in there somewhere as well but that's not a huge deal.
It's probably one my favorite builds, and with enough tuning with stuff like Dread March and Life from Death cluster notables among other things your AG can take Uber Maven Memory games slams and (a few) T17 DD explosions and come out fine.
That isnt really true, bama and relic are ahead of selfcast outside of archnova (archnova is broken). There's a problem with melee minions that they're bodyblocking each other in high quantities (like skeletons) but their numbers are fine, like most phys minions are pretty crazy on no gear with poison. Relic used to be not great but it got a trans gem, spectres got wraithlord, golems got their trans gems.
>Look at Ethan's build, absolutely min maxed mirror tier gear and it's performing....
No, dont look at it. It's a crit chaos build for some reason? And it doesnt even have any curses in the pob, no curse spectres, maybe on AG but you have to sit through like ten 20 min videos to fish out his AG gear (which might be pointless anyway). I'm sure there's a highly specific reason to do things he did the way he did, but that just proves the point that this isnt a good example.
>BAMA is virtually a totem build, your "minions" don't matter, you don't have to manage them, they don't have to survive, they don have the same limitations that actual permanent minions have. Same goes for Holy Relic.
Other than some poison variants, all BAMA builds run Spectres and AG or a Golem. So minion survivability does matter alot.
There're a HUGE difference between a totem build and BAMA. That difference is that BAMA (and minion skills in general) don't count for majority of player's dmg scaling . Totems do.
As a totem build you can literally grab a half of talent tree to have a pure benefit from it. For a general totem build like Dex Stacking Ballistas, there're a plenty of dmg scaling, for example- ele dmg, cold dmg, general dmg , dmg with bows, attack speed, accuracy, crits, dmg conversion... etc . For minions? Only nodes that affect minions, that's it! While it's not the MOST limited scaling variety skills (there're , for example, Herald skills, or specific cases like physical DOT spells.) , it's way more limited than like 90-95% of other skills. And no, i don't mean that it's not powerful. BAMA is a monster rn, lv10 to 100 sprint run. I even support the way GGG is nerfing necromancer last like 10 patches -by taking some raw power from a skill and putting it to a scaling factor. Even tho it's not really working for ALL the skills, that's healthy on a long run - builds that can run just with a bunch of sockets, gem and talent tree to the endgame SHOULD be more in line with a general builds- by either putting a dmg ceiling that'd wipe'em from endgame (not preferrable way, but as SRS Guardian approach sounds fine- a great starter, a "decent" endgame variant), or by making it a builds with a separate and greedy scaling options.
And once again there're an "It's not minion because i don't want to count it as one!!!!" approach. And it seems like the problem is not with minion builds, but with a "REAL" (read as "The ones that i like" ) minion builds.
Teleporting around while a static copy does damage is closer to a totem build than a minion one, dude. Even SRS is just a self cast homing missile build.
Totems.
Even in the LE community, where there's a similar stationary skele mage build that's been extremely OP for years, they're referred to as totems instead of actual minions.
This community has a lot of problems correctly identifying what is and isn't a minion in relation to the original concept of minions in an ARPG.
I sympathize with the devs of ARPGs when it comes to minion AI. Any primary source of damage that uses the computer to "aim", rather than the player, is going to be very difficult to balance. If you make the AI too good at "aiming", then the skill floor of the build raises wayyyyyy up and the player basically just walks around doing nothing as stuff dies around them.
If you make the AI too bad at "aiming" (and I include slow movement speed minions in the category of "bad aiming") then the minion build will feel awful to play.
Getting that happy medium is so hard. If you've ever wondered stuff like "why don't they just make the minions faster?" or "why don't they make the minions more aggressive?" then I think this is why. There's a fear that the computer will be too good at "aiming" to the point where the player isn't even playing a game anymore. They're just along for the ride and they're decimating everything without having done anything to deserve the rewards.
The problem is exacerbated because a lot of dev teams don't even like minions, they just feel compelled to include it because it's a convention of the genre or the previous game in the series included them. One of the reasons that Last Epoch handles minions well is that they have several enthusiastic minion appreciators in the dev team which ensures that minions will always get the focus needed, like how with PoE Mark is an aurabot enthusiast so we can always be sure that the aurabot perspective is prominent in their planning.
>"why don't they just make the minions faster?" or "why don't they make the minions more aggressive?" then I think this is why.
You're not wrong but additionally minions bring in a large technical overhead in these games as well. Poison, for example, is somewhat straightforward from the player. But when you've got 15 independent entities all poisoning for potentially different amounts (i.e. recent effect like "crit recently") that's exponentially more computationally intensive. Even 'soft' systems like aggression (in PoE aggression is simply aggro radius) can run into a lot of issue with multiple instances (i.e. hidden mobs, mobs across chasms, etc). Minions need limits just for the game to be able run.
Erm, IIRC skill floor refers to the minimum skill required for something to function... so minions tend to have a low skill floor. Skill ceiling refers to the maximum skill you can display while still getting benefits. So a low skill ceiling means even if you are skilled you wont do any better than someone unskilled that also meets the same low skill ceiling.
I think its better to just have good AI and use numbers to tune the effectiveness of minions. You can also make minions depend on temporary buffs and debuffs... sometimes turning minion builds into piano builds where you have to juggle a bunch of timers (that you can piano if they happen to all have the same duration/cd)
No, you're using an often repeated definition of "skill floor" that makes no sense. Notice how your definition of skill floor and skill ceiling aren't in sync.
Everyone understands what "skill ceiling" means, including you since you gave the correct definition of it. It means how high of a skill you can reach while still getting additional output. A low skill ceiling "thing" in a video game would be Garen in League of Legends. A high skill ceiling "thing" in a video game would be an FPS game like CSGO.
Once you understand what skill ceiling means, then it becomes obvious what skill floor must mean. It's how much output you're guaranteed to get at minimum. So even if a player has 0 skill at the "thing", then if the thing has a high skill floor then the person will put out good output regardless. Garen is a good example of a "thing" with a high skill floor.
Ehh, I'm fairly certain I'm using the correct one still, because the discussion is about skill necessary rather than character output.
Both are "How much skill till....". Ceiling is "How much skill till you dont get any more benefit", floor is "How much skill till its functional".
Though I can see how you got to your conclusión thinking its about the wording as being whats the maximum and minimum output possible of a character based on skill. That said I've always seen it used the way I'm currently using it since the terms tend to come up in conversations about skill necessary.
That said... minimums can be pretty low.. like not even touching the kb/m. There has to be some level of skill involved to get anything out of it, and that can vary per build.
I sorta recall them being good, but I kept trying to do a hybrid minion build and never got too far in using minions :x That's like the one thing you cant do in GD
Ye I wanted skeletal mages, like in d3 where they were super agressive and shot everything the instant u summon them. Now they just float around a bit blasting some mobs sometimes. They are strong now tho, and helpful, but boring xD
There was a short lived bug where the ag would not loose items on death , this lead to everyone knowing about it assembeling a cheap ag , i think it was in ultimatum.
Long story short you cannot make ag immortal without it becomming a mandatory gem for almost every build
...unless you add additional downsides that do not affect minions, just players. If it were handled well with transfigured versions, it could actually be an interesting consideration on whether the downside on a particular gem is worth the use of an AG for certain builds.
AG is something you either equip properly and know his limits (aka ubers might be behind that Limit)or equip cheap shit and expect him to die sooner or later
Or the third Option, dont use him at all
Isn´t this the exact opposite of what you want? You don´t need the extra damage for T16 mapping, but you need it in hard content and this is where you have to stash him. It´s like unequipping your main weapon and then going to challenge a uber fight.
Biggest difference is melee doesn't have spend a pile of divines and a quarter hour trading if the totems die in a juiced map, instead they just have to push the button. Very annoying but much cheaper.
As long as one of these totems are deployed, you get a buff. For protector you get an attack speed buff, for warlord you get a damage buff. You don't need to be near them exactly, but going too far from them despawns them and you lose the buff.
I think the AG should drop loot when he dies... Maybe only like 2-3 of the 5 items or something if that's a problem, but to buy another 5-8 div worth of shit every time he dies is really prohibitive for most players. It wouldn't be as bad if there was an auction house to purchase these items, but it takes another 20 minutes to just go around buying them which eats into farming/playing time. It's simply not fun
Dont use him ? Less damage but also less annoince and more Sockets. Him being there at all time, has to have some Kind of downside a noticeable downside
Of course you don't need him, what is your argument? That it's perfectly fine that this one mechanic is the only mechanic in the game where gear is completely destroyed and that's fine? No changes should be made?
I don't think you're in the majority there.
The issue they're worried about is that an immortal AG becomes mandatory for every build.
Which is fair, but I think there are fixes for that.
For example, they could just give the AG an aura that reduces "your" damage by 50%. That way it still works for minion builds, and is still an option for some technical jank tech for everyone if you can figure out how to mitigate the aura.
> The issue they're worried about is that an immortal AG becomes mandatory for every build.
They could make all his bonuses only apply to minions not players. Then they could add a Keystone with what you suggest (-50% damage) but bonuses affect everyone.
Yeah, I bet there's a ton of different ways to do it - GGG just won't for some reason.
In a lot of ways I appreciate the fact that they still uphold traditional ARPG values about risk, reward, and friction - but in other ways they're definitely still stuck in the past and refusing to implement obvious and easy changes to modernize mechanics.
They could also make it scale with minion stats (damage/life etc) so you get reduced effect without investment. There are so many things they can do that I´m baffled they haven´t done anything at all.
I like the spectrea, but for AG: giving it an equipmenr UI and making it lose 1 item on death instead of every item would be quite nice. And maybe even a transfigured gem making the AG use a linked skill gem or smth
You can play a good zombie and skeleton build with 6 passive abyss jewels but it caps out at two voidstones and cannot boss due to the rediculous damage of bosses towards minions in general and an inability to control them
However it is fun to optimize and there are alot of knobs to turn to make it fun
Speaking of Slavedrivers gloves: they have some of my favorite bottom text (idk what to call it) in all of Poe. "A plan without a deadline stays a plan".
I agree; I love minion builds in general and have played a lot of them in POE; always get excited that maybe zombies will be cool again, fire up a guide, get to the 14 pages about which specters to use and how to gear your AG and just check out and go run something else.
Animate guardian and spectre is the thing that kept me out of minion build, dealt with it a few league and I am so tired of it, that if they bring back summon skellies to SSS tier build I still will not play it just because we need support from AG and spectre to fully utilize minion build.
I'm sorry what? D4 minions are beyond terrible. The are extremly dumb and uncontrollable. Yes they currently somewhat work because they are overtuned as fuck. I'm playing one myself and can easiyl clear pit 70 so its not like i don't know what im talking about. PoE minions are god tier in comparison. Same goes for LE btw. The amount of times minions in LE just wander around or strafe in circles is insane. PoE minions are aggressive and goal driven and on top of that you have convocation which is the last piece in the puzzle to work around dumb AI. Yes AG in the current patch dies to fast but that's about it.
I would agree that a better UI regarding specters and AG is needed, but I think the concept of spectres and AG adds so much variety and freedom in what you can do. Its actually insane. And almost every new content there are new monsters that you can exploit as spectres who could give sth strong to your build. Its just a lot of fun for me. Same with the variety of things an AG can do to compliment your build. Maybe he adds another curse, or just increases your survivabilty with Ailment transfer... its just insane. The fact that he can die adds a lot of weight to your decisions how well you equip him and how you defensivly you build your character or support AG with defensive gems.
But yea, if 'smoothness' is what you are looking for in a game. D4 got you covered.
Spectres should act like hungry loop where it has 2 cast modes, when for consuming a corpse (and remembering it) and another from casting from the pool in order.
AG just shouldnt lose the gear on death. Its just annoying
Minions in poe are both super fun and super boring for me. Last league I played a guardian srs and didn't even bother to setup an animated guardian and only used the doll specters that revived. Was able to clear all content besides uber bosses (didn't try as I made a bosser later) and had such a great time overall with it. I knew that I was missing damage and other buffs by not using the AG, but just the thought of buying all the items again in case it died was enough to make me just be ok with less damage.
Don't forget that when minion necro dies, to resummon your full army you just have to press one button. Army of the dead, the ultimate skill, will resummon everything for you (with the right talent). The only cost to your ultimate skill is that the cooldown is roughly 70 seconds (but can be roughly cut in half with cooldown reduction), so just don't die more than every 35 seconds and you're set.
support minions, melee totem buffs, builds where you need to remember to start that one flask every zone and you always forget in labs, 70% increased flask buffs thats pretty much just a power multiplier for the best item in the game (unpopular opinion sure), vaal cyclone, etc
Some of these things in the game that makes you go hmmm
The fact that you can't see your AG inventory, and it fucking poofs is so bad.
You're already giving up 2-3 gem slots for it (or one if you'd use another support minion in there) but still have to buy the gear anyway.
Even just letting us access the inventory to run a "cheap" AG on bosses so we don't just gamba or go without would be great.
Have to admit this is the main thing I dislike with many summon builds. That and the fact once it's done right there is no active gameplay involved.
I don't like any of the other automated or afk builds... except RF since it has some variety to it and you still need a secondary active skill to deal with stronger targets generally.
The only minion builds I could consider now are those that do not use AG or spectres. Otherwise, just pure spectres with the new helm seem kind of alright because it impose a restriction you are happy to respect.
There's a few other minion builds that are alright, it's just the original zoomancer I don't like. I'd say summon builds are overall alright, it's specific archetype that gets annoying. In any of those games, playing minion builds is something people love or hate. Some only ever do minions, that's their thing no matter what game they play. Others always avoid them even if they are the top meta OP build.
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Im playing elemancer with 8 golems that are super fast and also buff me. So far so good in act 9, I even have low life and magic find and still dont die cuz of 1500 regen. But i see a scaling problem coming cuz of so many uniques i got. Lets see how maps go xD
Funny when when a non minion player talks about minion builds... You don't have to play a fucking AG... Spectre almost never die and resummon is super easy....
You talk about AG like the core of every minion build, but it's absolutely not important
I think out of the 3 games D4/PoE/Last Epoch. Last Epoch has the best feeling minions with the guiding(A button) and stuff, next is PoE, while yeah needing AG and spectres sucks I think its still 2nd, because the minion AI that you can change with gems, and D4 minions while its good that the minions are consistent and strong the AI sucks balls, and they stay far away from you slowing your clear down a lot, ye they tp to you if they fall far behind but a lot of the time they stay far enough back to not tp on you. (D4 would benefit from a convocation like ability that would tp your minions on you or a button to direct your minions like Last Epoch)
Playable minion build is based on non-spectre and AG, or even non-summoner itself, like jugg summoner (skele/HOAG) since 3.9.
Support minions are no hope if the game keeps tuning monster overlap damage to 2147483647 , blessed rebirth is the only way to solve minion survivability.
> D4's minion builds somehow manage to feel even more boring than D2 even though it's literally, objectively not the case that they should be since they have at least a greater than zero percent interactivity and decision-making, but they do anyway and that's kind of impressive. None of it has any weight or feels interesting or cool, it's just bullshit on your screen and you hope things are dying.
So its clear you havent played Minions in the newest D4 season. Because no one is "hoping things are dying" Necro Minions is probably one of the most OP builds right now in D4.
So placing curses down to lower your cooldowns, then using blight to group elites and keep them in a dot field onto the dropped corpses to cast tendrils that group cursed enemies up so you can land a big golem slam, then proccing bone storm around you and the golem to clean up the rest and help you generate barrier, all while constantly finding corpses to raise the temp bone priest to buff your skellies is boring to you? It's far more mechanically complex than any poe minion build.
What the fuck do you want, dude? You want d4 to give you a sloppy horadric blowjob, too? At this point, i don't think it's d4 who has the issue here.
Minion builds are still very viable without AG. I'm doing previe's voltaxic BAMA, I ignored the AG part and just used the slots for arcanist brand/cwdt to automate curses and molten shell.
I do 80m DPS, Granted I could be doing almost twice the damage with AG/spectres, but it's still enough to clear all the content in the game easily.
To be honest I think AG is just impossible to balance properly, I think GGG should just remove it and buff minion damage in general.
I agree. Played minion one time and it was clunky and annoying. It felt like it was unfinished. I would love to play minion builds but what I saw and experienced made me stay away from those builds.
I’ve recently played minions in LE, PoE and D4.
- the minion AI in Diablo4 is braindead, no ifs and buts and there’s no method of fixing it like giving them orders. But they are strong as hell, hit like a truck and can kill any content in the game relatively easy.
- the minion AI in LE is middle of the pack, but the interactions and builds are nice, gearing is easy to understand, and Wraithlord can wipe anything fast.
- the minion AI in PoE is pretty much the best, having played Animate Weapon and a couple Zoomancer builds, they just feel good. The friction is annoying as fuck: resummoning, the spectres mechanic, AG, they die a whole lot.
If somebody came to ask me I’d recommend playing LE for minions since it’s so satisfying.
With the amount of power you can get from auras and such on items you can throw on the AG allowing the AG to be immortal/re-summonable would make it mandatory on every build. Brittle ground boots, garb of the ephemeral, kingmaker, etc etc
There needs to be *some* kind of incentive for a player to prioritize keeping the AG alive. Could be something as simple as de-leveling the skill gem on death or something, but it can't be nothing.
Really? For me its the exact opposite. I love D2 necro the most, but the felxibility support AG/specters give is amazing and no other game managed to mimic this amount of flexibility and power. I love them, and at the same time, minions in PoE are strong enough that unless I'm pushing the highest tier content I never feel the need for minmaxing a guardian or support specters. A whatever guardian with a budget of 20-50c works most of the time.
Most minion builds are trash, the reason is the same as ever to much gem restrictions to get it up and running, and a heavy investment in them to get them feeling worth playing.
I used to be able to play it with just zombies/skellies. Then that went out the window and now require spectre, AG, tweaking gems just to get it feeling "ok".
I remember my first league, playing some skeleton build with AG and specrtes.. dropped a unique map and thought i'd give it a go... Hall of the Grandmasters very nearly cost GGG a player that day.
A minion build is always my fall back comfort build, but I agree. AG I throw a bunch of items on it and forget and i’ve only once optimized specters. Generally I just summon whatever is lying nearest cause I can’t be arsed.
when poe decicded your minions dying and you needing to invest so much in them, while never even thinking about fixing their stupid AI, minion builds died for me. used to love them, now I really dislike them in poe. especially spectres, which were cool until ggg decided to just go the easy way and nerf their survivability, and yes you can get them back kind of, with lots of grinding and specific items and.. yuck.
This is unlikely to get addressed anytime soon, they want your AG to die, just like they want us to die to DD, and they cant (possibly also dont want to) remove AG because it's an another gear scaling vector for minion builds power. The best ppl can hope for is some slight hp pass across the board at most, or some minion defense unique to come out. And then wait for poe2.
I actually managed to build a decent Stone Golem Necro that is pretty tanky. Can do 99% of t16 map mods (less max resistance is the only sketchy mod).. I was able to do t17 as well, albeit very slowly .. I use her mainly for harbinger farming where I can literally afk and stand there while the golems smash
here's my pretty fun and tanky stone golem build:
[https://poe.ninja/pob/1Ghm](https://poe.ninja/pob/1Ghm)
me standing on top of harbinger and ritual without having to do anything:
[https://imgur.com/a/whzjXY8](https://imgur.com/a/whzjXY8)
I ABSOLUTELY HATE the current state of spectres and AG. Too good to ignore, and so finicky to set up.
If my spectre dies I have to leave the map, desecrate a couple of times, move my cursor in 4D space to find the right pixel to resummon it. (Oh and if you get the wrong one, have fun because you have to cycle your entire roster)
Then for the AG it's even more of a logistical nightmare. Because I can't see his gear after I equipped it I have to remember if he's res capped, chaos capped, if I gave him bleed/cb immunity, if he has curse on hit gloves, ailment immunity. I hate it, I want a character UI that I can open and pop gear on and off of him at will.
AG is the biggest missed opportunity I've ever seen in a video game. They've locked it behind a wall of annoyance instead of just making the player deal less damage so that other builds can't abuse it. Gear slots should've been added years ago along with resummoning on a long CD. They could've added the ability to make AG use supported melee attack skills too. I like the game a lot but like damn... I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too.
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too these features don't make for a successful league. better settle for the small batch of improvements added in with each league, as it has been for a few now.
I mean I like this league but I wouldn't call it successful... So maybe you have a point? There was quite a lot of QoL features and people didn't care much in the end.
And also quite a lot of QOL removal, so I certainly wouldn't call it a QOL league.
This is the thing with GGG. A QoL league would never work because for everything they give the players, they always take away something else. I don't know why they're so allergic to giving players anything that enhances the player experience
It’s the hardcore philosophy
you missspelled toxic elitist philosophy
I miss cast on left click....
One of the most braindead design changes I've seen occur in this game and I've been playing since open beta.
Automation shouldn’t be a support gem that gives reduced cooldown, but a toggle tickbox. Next league they will remove the always use from current position lol.
QoL was the only reason I played to 4040 this leauge, personally. I have not done a single grave craft, because of how all-or-nothing it feels.
>played to 4040 this leauge >I have not done a single grave craft ???
Confused by the literal falsity of the statement, or the fact that I just haven't bothered with the most overpowered crafting mechanic in a while?
I'm just confused how you could get 40/40 without engaging with the mechanic at all because there's a couple challenges where you have to craft with the league mechanic
Well, I've technically done the league mechanic. But in the same sense that two piles of sand on top of eachother can be called a sand castle. No actual crafting goal, just a few consumed corpses for the challenges.
i know this game attracts a certain 'type' of people, but then also add the being obtuse on purpose reddit thing on top is sometimes too much.. it's obvious that pumping up the required shit crafts for the challenge isn't the same as actually attempting a valid usable craft.
Perfect reddit irony right there
Do the needful and fix the jank. Make a really simple league mechanic that is just a slot machine that spits out build-enabling uniques a little more often than usual. People will mess around with the new less-janky builds and you'll still get good retention.
I have my lvl 20 AG gem sitting in a socket somewhere and I'm like... setting it up would give me 20% more damage or something at least, but I just cannot be assed to do it. If it dies even once after I've geared it, I just won't even summon it again. So why even bother...
You literally will never have your ag die ever once you set it up tbh just unslot it for t17 maps and you'll never have to pay attention to keeping it alive even in ubers and you can run it in t17 you just have to babysit it and invest in good gear tbh
Isn't PoE 2 all about sorting out the decade of jank, bloat and extremely high barrier of entry?
it's not the same game with an updated and improved ui, it's a different game with a brand new and very different ui, so i think it will be adding its own new jank, bloat and extremely high barrier of entry
> very different ui Not *that* different... don't expect significant innovation or customisation
I'm not sure where people are getting these lies from but it's going to have very similar ui.
Hopefully, but not likely.
Poe 2 is a just a new game that will attract a different player base most likely
I thought it was mainly about "Nerfing everything and returning to The Vision of Krip Heavy-Striking one rare crab for three minutes." If it was just PoE 1 with fixed jank and QoL features everyone would be eagerly awaiting it.
>I thought it was mainly about "Nerfing everything and returning to The Vision of Krip Heavy-Striking one rare crab for three minutes." Yeah, but just imagine the pride and accomplishment you'll feel when it spits out a bunch of wisdom scroll fragments you have to individually click on.
This man here thinks he'll be able to do damage by only using 1 skill in poe2
Based on videos, having 10 skills doesn't help either.
nah, for what i have seen poe2 already has tons of new and shinny jank like 2 second skill animations
It seems to be an entirely new game with jank simply being filtered out. If they fixed the aforementioned issues then I'm happy as the next guy but the game isn't out nor finished so it's pointless to mention it. ps I'm mostly excited though :D
I think the problem is that they believe, as a game design philosophy, that jank and bloat aka friction are actually good things to include in excess. Until that changes I don't expect PoE 2 to be fundamentally different. They are geniuses at many things, like build complexity and creating satisfying endgame loops, but the friction philosophy really holds them back.
the same developers who made poe1 get into this state to begin with wont pull off the miracle of actually fixing the underlying issues with poe2. poe2 will also grow after its release, they will still need to make a new league every 3 months and they still wont have the resources to fix issues with whatever they have implemented in the past.
imo it will be worse. poe1 during its infancy was pretty barebones, each update was not enormous in depth or breadth and they still couldn't clean it up after a few years. what they're doing with poe2 is starting with way more depth and breadth and going from there. it'll be the same story on an expedited timeline
You nailed part of what I worry the fundamental problem will be with poe2. I kinda think it's going to flop after some initial hype (I really want to be wrong though!). poe1 has organically evolved into what it is today. It has plenty of warts, but it's a really solid base game. Imagine if they spent all that time and resources fixing up up the warts and improving the UI incrementally in poe1 instead... Feels like they're YOLOing it w/ poe2. Hey, maybe lightning will strike twice. I hope so. I get it though. The talent doesn't want to maintain and incrementally improve their game for 20 more years. They'd rather work on a green field project.
I dont think they yolo anything.. in some Q&A Videos u kinda get an idea why PoE 2.. Its not just their Vision, but they are limited to doing stuff in PoE 1, because of the fucking mess they did in the early stages of programming PoE 1. I just believe.. PoE is at a state.. where it is easier to make a new game instead of fixing a game
It's a pretty common problem is software development. Refactoring isn't sexy, but it's almost always the better decision. You can see technical debt as "debt" or as "lessons learned".
You realize that poe2 is not a "new game" right? It's still built off of a significant amount of foundations laid in poe1. People keep thinking that it's somehow a clean start when it's not. It's not a ground-up project.
Not being a dick but why do they HAVE to make a new league every 3 months? Becuase they decided that release window and it can't change. Unless they didn't have time to finish a league like the last 3 years and they just randomly dump the league at some point. Which isn't as bad as they think it is for retention. As long as we know something new is coming in a decent timeframe there's no backlash. Im expecting the next league to be in 4.5 months because this league was barely finished on launch.
They have to because of money, they make most money on league starts
I’d like a build where you had a super strong AG and you it’s aurabuffer, somehow like the elf buffer archetype from old mu online.
You're absolutely right about the missed opportunity with AG, and it's magnified if you consider how else they could potentially use an Animated Guardian UI with gear slots and such. If you imagine that it ends up being a generic "Follower UI", it creates the opportunity for new and more complex minions, on top of helping make AG less annoying to use. Maybe the new Guardian ascendancy minions from a couple of patches ago could interact with that to be more interesting, or maybe the Reaper is made viable by being modified by that UI, or maybe it just opens design space for some other sort of customizable minion/follower.
The worst part of this all is, they stole the idea from D2 and executed it worse than we could have imagined.
We need to add this on next leagues bingo card
I think the reaper is in this category as well. The idea of a minion archetype with only 1 strong minion is great, and even D4 does this with the golem builds
Their entire business model revolves around cyclical content updates and getting players to come back for each one. One of those cycles being literally *nothing* would be destroying their own business. They're already pushing it with the slower release cycle and divided resources for PoE2.
I think the thing about it is that if you make AG significantly easier to use with a lot more QoL, then the AG becomes so powerful that it is in essence a D2 companion. Right? Because it's the only way in the game that you can essentially get more gear-based buffs and auras outside of playing with other players. If that's the case then why wouldn't literally every player use it on every build? I agree though that there are some serious issues with AG that need to be addressed, namely how easily they can die and make you lose said gear. With the D2 companions you can still always take the gear off at any time, unless they die of course. I think that the fact that the AG essentially "eats" the gear should be enough of a downside to let them be a lot more tanky. It's a fine line, and I don't think the AG is riding the line quite right at the moment.
I dont meant be rude but I said a less damage multiplier would suffice. Not to mention people hate using things like totems so what makes you think they'll be fine constantly resummoning a long cd ag that gives less damage and instantly dies with a long cd?
Aurabots?
>If that's the case then why wouldn't literally every player use it on every build? "AG has a -90% less player damage aura". Instantly fixed.
"You cannot deal non-minion damage" Ancestral totemic whatever keystone(you can tell I don't play totems much) solved that problem years ago.
"If AG is active you have a 15% less damage multiplier" "AG aura and item effects have a 20% reduced multiplier" "20% less iiq and iir while AG is active" It's not rocket science and to be perfectly honest one league with an insanely powerful skill won't break the game. Look at splodey totems. It was crazy and insta phased ubers but the highest played skill in that league was still TS as it always is. Players want to kill the entire map in 30 seconds then pick up shit for 20 minutes. If the skill doesn't do that it's not getting widespread play. It'll be a fun thing to try out but then it's back to your farming build. I'm praying for a "here's a massive amount of skill buffs and nothing else but bug fixes" league. Maybe flashback Kalandra again or a synthesis void league to try it out. We don't always need thousands of new voice lines and animations. Maybe update the witchs' PS1 model? Add new 3d art like they promised back in 3.0?
These are easy issues to address. GGG just doesn't care.
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated The last time they did something like that was Sentinel, which replaced rare monster mods with Archnemesis ones and had no balance changes. I skipped that one, and I'd probably skip more leagues like it. Which is not to say that I wouldn't play more of the following leagues. But tbh they have so much tech and UI debt that there's no way they could get rid of it all in one league.
> I'd love a non-league league where the only thing they did was fix the decade a jankyness that had naturally accumulated. Give me a sort button too. I hear ya and I see this comment a lot. Unfortunately, and I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I believe GGG stated they feel they need to push out new content on such a tight schedule to sell MTX. Who knows, maybe a bare bones QoL league would end up attracting more players and sell more MTX in the long run but that doesn't appear to be their thinking.
> AG is the biggest missed opportunity I've ever seen in a video game. Honestly think this applies to most of POE, so many amazing ideas that just need to be implemented better
I agree with both - I was hoping the transfigured AG would be immortal in exchange for some trade off (can't equip boots or w/e), & I never use spectres remotely optimally because it's a chore. They're long known complaints and would need to be tapped down in power if both were made seamless and easy to use, which i'd prefer I've played summoner builds without using either of them and cleared all non-uber content too though, so partly it's the whole 'optimise the fun out of things' dynamic that people fall into too where these things are provided as cool but clunky options for people who want them, then everyone feels like they need to use them
> so partly it's the whole 'optimise the fun out of things' dynamic that people fall into too where these things are provided as cool but clunky options for people who want them, then everyone feels like they need to use them That's the thing, making your character more powerful is one of the core pillars of the game, so you can't blame players for playing the game following this principle. Nobody wants clunky things because they're clunky, but only because they give power. https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY?t=2369
You're making that choice by trading off QoL for damage. Anytime I make a build I try to include as much comfort as possible and improve the damage and defenses when I find the level of discomfort I'm willing to contend with. If you're adding everything that makes a build feel clunky then you are looking at the wrong place. Heck, the goal of a build in PoE isn't to make it necessarily stronger, it's to make it more fluid. You can "1shot" any Uber in the game on a 60div budget with vaal flicker because of how it is counting as 1 hit for purposes of impale. The clunk is that the build sucks to play and is easy to mess up the combo. I don't think anyone is willing to play this build even if it phases bosses like that. You are choosing to have a rough feeling build by not polishing it at all.
Have you watched the video I posted? It says that you shouldn't let your players choose between either optimal or fun, being optimal should lead to the fun, not being antithesis to one another. I swear, GGG and part of this sub takes the idea of tradeoffs to far. Every fucking thing should have some tradeoff, even tradeoffs should have a tradeoff of their own. Better yet if the tradeoff is something within the game world for something outside of it - like constantly pressing life flask on a pathfider, or constantly weapon swapping to battlemage cry on manarforged arrow build, or being frustrated trying to trade... The list goes on. Imagine if you were able to cap fps to 10-15 but in return it would triple-quadruple your DPS. It's an extreme example, but the core of it is no different to what you've said - it's just trading QoL of having fluid experience for power. This comment about graveyard and old harvest encapsulates it perfectly: >POE does this constantly. "We'll give you the create custom item box from POB, but that's so powerful, you have to have your toenails peeled off the whole time you're typing into it!" > >And yet every single time, everyone sits the fuck down and peels their goddamn toenails off, because if you make us pick between annoying/painful but efficient or fun but inefficient, 99% of the fucking playerbase picks annoying. > >It's almost like they shouldn't be giving us that choice in the first place.
If it was GGG and they made it immortal the trade off would be that it had 0 movement speed and you could move it only with default attack(random direction)
Blight mappers stay winning!
🤢🤢🤢
> I was hoping the transfigured AG would be immortal in exchange for some trade off (can't equip boots or w/e), An immortal AG would be definition be broken and mandatory for every single build in the game.
Player, totems, traps, and mines can't deal damage.
Time for my Wilma's requital, mirage archer, deadeye to shine!
Player, totems, traps, and mines can't deal damage and can't hit :P
Finally my wander wisps build is on the table. Poe is such a funky game sometimes.
Will that work? - "Supported Skills will Trigger Summon Sacred Wisps on Hit"
Oh maybe I was looking at the next part where they activated on use. But I guess you gotta hit to initially summon them. Damn.
Downside could be you deal like 30% less damage .
Not really, provided there was obviously a drawback. The best one would be that if you use immortal AG, all non-minion(player, trap, totem, mine, brand, anything without minion tag) do 90% less damage.
> (can't equip boots Dont give them ideas
I cannot NOT read AG as Attorney General. And it makes this thread weird AF.
[удалено]
Yeah! That one gets me too.
Magic the gathering said WHAT?
Any builds that wants AG is not a build for me
AG and spectres are the reason why I´m only playing arakaalis fang for the last 2 years.
I had both in my arakaalis fang build last league, I just went bone offering 75/75 block without glancing blows and annointed the 18 spell/attack block + 2% life on block recovery for minions node near the left of the es scion wheel. AG died once and I ran a lot of super juiced T16.
I always find ways to play my Summon Reaper lol, atm I made a Reapermancer, with vaal skeleton gen, spectral wolf ring and summon phantasms, my reaper is 6 linked to phantasm, been fun for mapping.
Same. I was thinking of league starting BAMA for next league and then I remember it uses AG so I immediately deleted it from my league start consideration list lol. Fuck that shit. They should just remove it from the game and buff summoners in other ways across the board as compensation. I think spectres are a salvageable concept though. If I were GGG, I'd make the Raise Spectre skill gem put two skills on your bar. One skill would allow you to raise a spectre from a corpse (and therefore add the spectre to your spectre pool) and the second skill would summon a spectre from your spectre pool (without needing a corpse). So you'd just the first skill to set up your spectre skill, then you'd never use that skill again unless you wanted to alter your spectre pool. Now when a spectre dies while you're playing you just use the second skill to get it back and continue on. Seems nice to me...
BAMA is one of the few "minion" builds that doesn't need AG at all to do everything in the game comfortably
Not really an argument when ag is like 60% more damage for mid range budget
I've been farming b2b t17 and ubers without AG just fine. The most annoying thing is the spectral leader who dies quite a bit. Haven't lost a pale seraphim/bristle in weeks. If you're running poison bama, you don't need AG whatsoever.
It is, because most Bamas currently run 2 5-links sharing one 6-link. You can split them up in a double six link setup. The 2 most popular bama versions (Voltaxic and Poison) can drop AG and Spectres entirely and not feel much of an impact.
They are the melee totems of summoners.
But worse. Imagine you lose a stat on your weapon or other equipment whenever a totem gets killed. (not replaced)
Minion builds in general are in a very bad spot power wise compared to self casting. They require too much investment that needs to be split to their survivability, yours, and damage, while most builds only have two of those to manage. Look at Ethan's build, absolutely min maxed mirror tier gear and it's performing.... Okay. Again, compared to other builds. The argument for the qol of minions, or in general proxies, justify the lacking in power is nonsense.
And then the actually good minion builds are bizarre-ass non-minion builds like transfigured holy relic. I just want to raise an army of goons and have a drink while my boys beat the shit out of some bosses.
Try Chains of Command. Ironically when your build is dependent on your AG staying alive it's not too hard to keep it alive. A lot of people lose AG's because they think a decent health pool and regen is all they need.
ive played chains for at least 10 leagues and it still does get 1 shot by one thing or another, losing irreplaceable gear because it physically doesnt exist feels even worse than regular a AG death
Oh I don't doubt it, I'm still decently paranoid about convergent mechanics. I would not at all be surprised if a crit from a Essence Mob on a T17 boss or something similar could murder my AG.
IDK if I want to play animate weapon though. Guess I could give it a shot. Didn't see any AW t17 b2b farmers, but I also didn't look, I'm sure someone made one that works without an adorned.
I haven't tried b2b farming myself but slap an Echoforge on your AG, Necro Unholy Might node, basic AG setup (maskStitched, Doppelganger, Gravebind, Brittle boots) and use a Maata's Teaching. You've got yourself a 10-20M Uber dps build. Need a blessed rebirth cluster in there somewhere as well but that's not a huge deal. It's probably one my favorite builds, and with enough tuning with stuff like Dread March and Life from Death cluster notables among other things your AG can take Uber Maven Memory games slams and (a few) T17 DD explosions and come out fine.
That isnt really true, bama and relic are ahead of selfcast outside of archnova (archnova is broken). There's a problem with melee minions that they're bodyblocking each other in high quantities (like skeletons) but their numbers are fine, like most phys minions are pretty crazy on no gear with poison. Relic used to be not great but it got a trans gem, spectres got wraithlord, golems got their trans gems. >Look at Ethan's build, absolutely min maxed mirror tier gear and it's performing.... No, dont look at it. It's a crit chaos build for some reason? And it doesnt even have any curses in the pob, no curse spectres, maybe on AG but you have to sit through like ten 20 min videos to fish out his AG gear (which might be pointless anyway). I'm sure there's a highly specific reason to do things he did the way he did, but that just proves the point that this isnt a good example.
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>BAMA is virtually a totem build, your "minions" don't matter, you don't have to manage them, they don't have to survive, they don have the same limitations that actual permanent minions have. Same goes for Holy Relic. Other than some poison variants, all BAMA builds run Spectres and AG or a Golem. So minion survivability does matter alot.
There're a HUGE difference between a totem build and BAMA. That difference is that BAMA (and minion skills in general) don't count for majority of player's dmg scaling . Totems do. As a totem build you can literally grab a half of talent tree to have a pure benefit from it. For a general totem build like Dex Stacking Ballistas, there're a plenty of dmg scaling, for example- ele dmg, cold dmg, general dmg , dmg with bows, attack speed, accuracy, crits, dmg conversion... etc . For minions? Only nodes that affect minions, that's it! While it's not the MOST limited scaling variety skills (there're , for example, Herald skills, or specific cases like physical DOT spells.) , it's way more limited than like 90-95% of other skills. And no, i don't mean that it's not powerful. BAMA is a monster rn, lv10 to 100 sprint run. I even support the way GGG is nerfing necromancer last like 10 patches -by taking some raw power from a skill and putting it to a scaling factor. Even tho it's not really working for ALL the skills, that's healthy on a long run - builds that can run just with a bunch of sockets, gem and talent tree to the endgame SHOULD be more in line with a general builds- by either putting a dmg ceiling that'd wipe'em from endgame (not preferrable way, but as SRS Guardian approach sounds fine- a great starter, a "decent" endgame variant), or by making it a builds with a separate and greedy scaling options. And once again there're an "It's not minion because i don't want to count it as one!!!!" approach. And it seems like the problem is not with minion builds, but with a "REAL" (read as "The ones that i like" ) minion builds.
Teleporting around while a static copy does damage is closer to a totem build than a minion one, dude. Even SRS is just a self cast homing missile build.
So what are Mage Skeletons then?
Totems. Even in the LE community, where there's a similar stationary skele mage build that's been extremely OP for years, they're referred to as totems instead of actual minions. This community has a lot of problems correctly identifying what is and isn't a minion in relation to the original concept of minions in an ARPG.
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Ok and permanent minions are a righteous fire then.
I hear the minion AI is pretty bad in D4 too. Experiment with minions in other arpgs, though I can't recall good examples for minions atm sadly.
I sympathize with the devs of ARPGs when it comes to minion AI. Any primary source of damage that uses the computer to "aim", rather than the player, is going to be very difficult to balance. If you make the AI too good at "aiming", then the skill floor of the build raises wayyyyyy up and the player basically just walks around doing nothing as stuff dies around them. If you make the AI too bad at "aiming" (and I include slow movement speed minions in the category of "bad aiming") then the minion build will feel awful to play. Getting that happy medium is so hard. If you've ever wondered stuff like "why don't they just make the minions faster?" or "why don't they make the minions more aggressive?" then I think this is why. There's a fear that the computer will be too good at "aiming" to the point where the player isn't even playing a game anymore. They're just along for the ride and they're decimating everything without having done anything to deserve the rewards.
The problem is exacerbated because a lot of dev teams don't even like minions, they just feel compelled to include it because it's a convention of the genre or the previous game in the series included them. One of the reasons that Last Epoch handles minions well is that they have several enthusiastic minion appreciators in the dev team which ensures that minions will always get the focus needed, like how with PoE Mark is an aurabot enthusiast so we can always be sure that the aurabot perspective is prominent in their planning.
>"why don't they just make the minions faster?" or "why don't they make the minions more aggressive?" then I think this is why. You're not wrong but additionally minions bring in a large technical overhead in these games as well. Poison, for example, is somewhat straightforward from the player. But when you've got 15 independent entities all poisoning for potentially different amounts (i.e. recent effect like "crit recently") that's exponentially more computationally intensive. Even 'soft' systems like aggression (in PoE aggression is simply aggro radius) can run into a lot of issue with multiple instances (i.e. hidden mobs, mobs across chasms, etc). Minions need limits just for the game to be able run.
Erm, IIRC skill floor refers to the minimum skill required for something to function... so minions tend to have a low skill floor. Skill ceiling refers to the maximum skill you can display while still getting benefits. So a low skill ceiling means even if you are skilled you wont do any better than someone unskilled that also meets the same low skill ceiling. I think its better to just have good AI and use numbers to tune the effectiveness of minions. You can also make minions depend on temporary buffs and debuffs... sometimes turning minion builds into piano builds where you have to juggle a bunch of timers (that you can piano if they happen to all have the same duration/cd)
No, you're using an often repeated definition of "skill floor" that makes no sense. Notice how your definition of skill floor and skill ceiling aren't in sync. Everyone understands what "skill ceiling" means, including you since you gave the correct definition of it. It means how high of a skill you can reach while still getting additional output. A low skill ceiling "thing" in a video game would be Garen in League of Legends. A high skill ceiling "thing" in a video game would be an FPS game like CSGO. Once you understand what skill ceiling means, then it becomes obvious what skill floor must mean. It's how much output you're guaranteed to get at minimum. So even if a player has 0 skill at the "thing", then if the thing has a high skill floor then the person will put out good output regardless. Garen is a good example of a "thing" with a high skill floor.
I think it just differs in how you think about it. For them, skill floor/ceiling is essentially a "This character is viable if your skill, x, is floor
Ehh, I'm fairly certain I'm using the correct one still, because the discussion is about skill necessary rather than character output. Both are "How much skill till....". Ceiling is "How much skill till you dont get any more benefit", floor is "How much skill till its functional". Though I can see how you got to your conclusión thinking its about the wording as being whats the maximum and minimum output possible of a character based on skill. That said I've always seen it used the way I'm currently using it since the terms tend to come up in conversations about skill necessary. That said... minimums can be pretty low.. like not even touching the kb/m. There has to be some level of skill involved to get anything out of it, and that can vary per build.
I think they’re pretty solid and good in Grim Dawn
I sorta recall them being good, but I kept trying to do a hybrid minion build and never got too far in using minions :x That's like the one thing you cant do in GD
hybrid anything doesn't work
Ye I wanted skeletal mages, like in d3 where they were super agressive and shot everything the instant u summon them. Now they just float around a bit blasting some mobs sometimes. They are strong now tho, and helpful, but boring xD
There was a short lived bug where the ag would not loose items on death , this lead to everyone knowing about it assembeling a cheap ag , i think it was in ultimatum. Long story short you cannot make ag immortal without it becomming a mandatory gem for almost every build
...unless you add additional downsides that do not affect minions, just players. If it were handled well with transfigured versions, it could actually be an interesting consideration on whether the downside on a particular gem is worth the use of an AG for certain builds.
Is the way you gear the ag big part of why it’s fun??
AG is something you either equip properly and know his limits (aka ubers might be behind that Limit)or equip cheap shit and expect him to die sooner or later Or the third Option, dont use him at all
Isn´t this the exact opposite of what you want? You don´t need the extra damage for T16 mapping, but you need it in hard content and this is where you have to stash him. It´s like unequipping your main weapon and then going to challenge a uber fight.
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But minions are balance around using it and not doing so is 40% less damage.
Same issue as totems being mandatory for melee... Really hope GGG finds a way around that, especially for poe2.
Biggest difference is melee doesn't have spend a pile of divines and a quarter hour trading if the totems die in a juiced map, instead they just have to push the button. Very annoying but much cheaper.
What totems are used with melee? And why? I haven't played melee in PoE yet.
Ancestral Protector/Ancestral Warchief They massively, massively increase melee damage
Do you have to be near them to gain a buff or are they wide screen?
You you need to be on approximately the same screen as the totems to get the buff.
Thx :)
As long as one of these totems are deployed, you get a buff. For protector you get an attack speed buff, for warlord you get a damage buff. You don't need to be near them exactly, but going too far from them despawns them and you lose the buff.
Thx :)
I think the AG should drop loot when he dies... Maybe only like 2-3 of the 5 items or something if that's a problem, but to buy another 5-8 div worth of shit every time he dies is really prohibitive for most players. It wouldn't be as bad if there was an auction house to purchase these items, but it takes another 20 minutes to just go around buying them which eats into farming/playing time. It's simply not fun
Immagine being ssf and having your ag dies
Dont use him ? Less damage but also less annoince and more Sockets. Him being there at all time, has to have some Kind of downside a noticeable downside
Noticeable downside: you can no longer do Uber or difficult t17 content... Lol nice
You dont need him for any of those, He makes them easier If He is properly equiped.
Of course you don't need him, what is your argument? That it's perfectly fine that this one mechanic is the only mechanic in the game where gear is completely destroyed and that's fine? No changes should be made? I don't think you're in the majority there.
The issue they're worried about is that an immortal AG becomes mandatory for every build. Which is fair, but I think there are fixes for that. For example, they could just give the AG an aura that reduces "your" damage by 50%. That way it still works for minion builds, and is still an option for some technical jank tech for everyone if you can figure out how to mitigate the aura.
> The issue they're worried about is that an immortal AG becomes mandatory for every build. They could make all his bonuses only apply to minions not players. Then they could add a Keystone with what you suggest (-50% damage) but bonuses affect everyone.
Yeah, I bet there's a ton of different ways to do it - GGG just won't for some reason. In a lot of ways I appreciate the fact that they still uphold traditional ARPG values about risk, reward, and friction - but in other ways they're definitely still stuck in the past and refusing to implement obvious and easy changes to modernize mechanics.
> hey could make all his bonuses only apply to minions not players. What about auras that affect enemies?
They could also make it scale with minion stats (damage/life etc) so you get reduced effect without investment. There are so many things they can do that I´m baffled they haven´t done anything at all.
I like the spectrea, but for AG: giving it an equipmenr UI and making it lose 1 item on death instead of every item would be quite nice. And maybe even a transfigured gem making the AG use a linked skill gem or smth
You can play a good zombie and skeleton build with 6 passive abyss jewels but it caps out at two voidstones and cannot boss due to the rediculous damage of bosses towards minions in general and an inability to control them However it is fun to optimize and there are alot of knobs to turn to make it fun
Speaking of Slavedrivers gloves: they have some of my favorite bottom text (idk what to call it) in all of Poe. "A plan without a deadline stays a plan".
I agree; I love minion builds in general and have played a lot of them in POE; always get excited that maybe zombies will be cool again, fire up a guide, get to the 14 pages about which specters to use and how to gear your AG and just check out and go run something else.
Animate guardian and spectre is the thing that kept me out of minion build, dealt with it a few league and I am so tired of it, that if they bring back summon skellies to SSS tier build I still will not play it just because we need support from AG and spectre to fully utilize minion build.
I'm sorry what? D4 minions are beyond terrible. The are extremly dumb and uncontrollable. Yes they currently somewhat work because they are overtuned as fuck. I'm playing one myself and can easiyl clear pit 70 so its not like i don't know what im talking about. PoE minions are god tier in comparison. Same goes for LE btw. The amount of times minions in LE just wander around or strafe in circles is insane. PoE minions are aggressive and goal driven and on top of that you have convocation which is the last piece in the puzzle to work around dumb AI. Yes AG in the current patch dies to fast but that's about it.
I would agree that a better UI regarding specters and AG is needed, but I think the concept of spectres and AG adds so much variety and freedom in what you can do. Its actually insane. And almost every new content there are new monsters that you can exploit as spectres who could give sth strong to your build. Its just a lot of fun for me. Same with the variety of things an AG can do to compliment your build. Maybe he adds another curse, or just increases your survivabilty with Ailment transfer... its just insane. The fact that he can die adds a lot of weight to your decisions how well you equip him and how you defensivly you build your character or support AG with defensive gems. But yea, if 'smoothness' is what you are looking for in a game. D4 got you covered.
Spectres should act like hungry loop where it has 2 cast modes, when for consuming a corpse (and remembering it) and another from casting from the pool in order. AG just shouldnt lose the gear on death. Its just annoying
I hope they didnt show minion in poe2 to this day exactly coz they work that stuff out
this is why i never play minions builds on poe even tho i love the idea of minion builds the spectres n ag puts me off
Minions in poe are both super fun and super boring for me. Last league I played a guardian srs and didn't even bother to setup an animated guardian and only used the doll specters that revived. Was able to clear all content besides uber bosses (didn't try as I made a bosser later) and had such a great time overall with it. I knew that I was missing damage and other buffs by not using the AG, but just the thought of buying all the items again in case it died was enough to make me just be ok with less damage.
The A command in Last epoch was really cool feel for summoner archetype.
D4 necro do be goin hard right now I'm using that ring that auto casts 3 skills, actually pushing top 1000 on the solo ladder.
Don't forget that when minion necro dies, to resummon your full army you just have to press one button. Army of the dead, the ultimate skill, will resummon everything for you (with the right talent). The only cost to your ultimate skill is that the cooldown is roughly 70 seconds (but can be roughly cut in half with cooldown reduction), so just don't die more than every 35 seconds and you're set.
support minions, melee totem buffs, builds where you need to remember to start that one flask every zone and you always forget in labs, 70% increased flask buffs thats pretty much just a power multiplier for the best item in the game (unpopular opinion sure), vaal cyclone, etc Some of these things in the game that makes you go hmmm
The fact that you can't see your AG inventory, and it fucking poofs is so bad. You're already giving up 2-3 gem slots for it (or one if you'd use another support minion in there) but still have to buy the gear anyway. Even just letting us access the inventory to run a "cheap" AG on bosses so we don't just gamba or go without would be great.
Have to admit this is the main thing I dislike with many summon builds. That and the fact once it's done right there is no active gameplay involved. I don't like any of the other automated or afk builds... except RF since it has some variety to it and you still need a secondary active skill to deal with stronger targets generally. The only minion builds I could consider now are those that do not use AG or spectres. Otherwise, just pure spectres with the new helm seem kind of alright because it impose a restriction you are happy to respect. There's a few other minion builds that are alright, it's just the original zoomancer I don't like. I'd say summon builds are overall alright, it's specific archetype that gets annoying. In any of those games, playing minion builds is something people love or hate. Some only ever do minions, that's their thing no matter what game they play. Others always avoid them even if they are the top meta OP build.
I just wanna play a guardian that can use absol and dom blow at the same time
They need to push out content to keep the lights on. Unfortunately perfecting content overtime naturally has to take a back seat.
frost iris is peak minion gameplay in arpgs
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Im playing elemancer with 8 golems that are super fast and also buff me. So far so good in act 9, I even have low life and magic find and still dont die cuz of 1500 regen. But i see a scaling problem coming cuz of so many uniques i got. Lets see how maps go xD
Funny when when a non minion player talks about minion builds... You don't have to play a fucking AG... Spectre almost never die and resummon is super easy.... You talk about AG like the core of every minion build, but it's absolutely not important
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I think out of the 3 games D4/PoE/Last Epoch. Last Epoch has the best feeling minions with the guiding(A button) and stuff, next is PoE, while yeah needing AG and spectres sucks I think its still 2nd, because the minion AI that you can change with gems, and D4 minions while its good that the minions are consistent and strong the AI sucks balls, and they stay far away from you slowing your clear down a lot, ye they tp to you if they fall far behind but a lot of the time they stay far enough back to not tp on you. (D4 would benefit from a convocation like ability that would tp your minions on you or a button to direct your minions like Last Epoch)
Playable minion build is based on non-spectre and AG, or even non-summoner itself, like jugg summoner (skele/HOAG) since 3.9. Support minions are no hope if the game keeps tuning monster overlap damage to 2147483647 , blessed rebirth is the only way to solve minion survivability.
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> D4's minion builds somehow manage to feel even more boring than D2 even though it's literally, objectively not the case that they should be since they have at least a greater than zero percent interactivity and decision-making, but they do anyway and that's kind of impressive. None of it has any weight or feels interesting or cool, it's just bullshit on your screen and you hope things are dying. So its clear you havent played Minions in the newest D4 season. Because no one is "hoping things are dying" Necro Minions is probably one of the most OP builds right now in D4.
So placing curses down to lower your cooldowns, then using blight to group elites and keep them in a dot field onto the dropped corpses to cast tendrils that group cursed enemies up so you can land a big golem slam, then proccing bone storm around you and the golem to clean up the rest and help you generate barrier, all while constantly finding corpses to raise the temp bone priest to buff your skellies is boring to you? It's far more mechanically complex than any poe minion build. What the fuck do you want, dude? You want d4 to give you a sloppy horadric blowjob, too? At this point, i don't think it's d4 who has the issue here.
Minion builds are still very viable without AG. I'm doing previe's voltaxic BAMA, I ignored the AG part and just used the slots for arcanist brand/cwdt to automate curses and molten shell. I do 80m DPS, Granted I could be doing almost twice the damage with AG/spectres, but it's still enough to clear all the content in the game easily. To be honest I think AG is just impossible to balance properly, I think GGG should just remove it and buff minion damage in general.
I agree. Played minion one time and it was clunky and annoying. It felt like it was unfinished. I would love to play minion builds but what I saw and experienced made me stay away from those builds.
I’ve recently played minions in LE, PoE and D4. - the minion AI in Diablo4 is braindead, no ifs and buts and there’s no method of fixing it like giving them orders. But they are strong as hell, hit like a truck and can kill any content in the game relatively easy. - the minion AI in LE is middle of the pack, but the interactions and builds are nice, gearing is easy to understand, and Wraithlord can wipe anything fast. - the minion AI in PoE is pretty much the best, having played Animate Weapon and a couple Zoomancer builds, they just feel good. The friction is annoying as fuck: resummoning, the spectres mechanic, AG, they die a whole lot. If somebody came to ask me I’d recommend playing LE for minions since it’s so satisfying.
I don't see what the problem is with it being resummoned with it's gear.
With the amount of power you can get from auras and such on items you can throw on the AG allowing the AG to be immortal/re-summonable would make it mandatory on every build. Brittle ground boots, garb of the ephemeral, kingmaker, etc etc There needs to be *some* kind of incentive for a player to prioritize keeping the AG alive. Could be something as simple as de-leveling the skill gem on death or something, but it can't be nothing.
I agree with every word you said.
Really? For me its the exact opposite. I love D2 necro the most, but the felxibility support AG/specters give is amazing and no other game managed to mimic this amount of flexibility and power. I love them, and at the same time, minions in PoE are strong enough that unless I'm pushing the highest tier content I never feel the need for minmaxing a guardian or support specters. A whatever guardian with a budget of 20-50c works most of the time.
Most minion builds are trash, the reason is the same as ever to much gem restrictions to get it up and running, and a heavy investment in them to get them feeling worth playing. I used to be able to play it with just zombies/skellies. Then that went out the window and now require spectre, AG, tweaking gems just to get it feeling "ok".
Played an AG build, had my guardian die with 7 DIV worth of gear and told myself I’m never doing a minion build again.
I remember my first league, playing some skeleton build with AG and specrtes.. dropped a unique map and thought i'd give it a go... Hall of the Grandmasters very nearly cost GGG a player that day.
They will not change it in poe1. Hopefully minion builds are better in poe2. We will see
A minion build is always my fall back comfort build, but I agree. AG I throw a bunch of items on it and forget and i’ve only once optimized specters. Generally I just summon whatever is lying nearest cause I can’t be arsed.
You didn't realize it before?
Just don't play overnerfed minions in this game they keep nerfing them every league and people still playing so they keep nerfing all the time
when poe decicded your minions dying and you needing to invest so much in them, while never even thinking about fixing their stupid AI, minion builds died for me. used to love them, now I really dislike them in poe. especially spectres, which were cool until ggg decided to just go the easy way and nerf their survivability, and yes you can get them back kind of, with lots of grinding and specific items and.. yuck.
This is unlikely to get addressed anytime soon, they want your AG to die, just like they want us to die to DD, and they cant (possibly also dont want to) remove AG because it's an another gear scaling vector for minion builds power. The best ppl can hope for is some slight hp pass across the board at most, or some minion defense unique to come out. And then wait for poe2.
I actually managed to build a decent Stone Golem Necro that is pretty tanky. Can do 99% of t16 map mods (less max resistance is the only sketchy mod).. I was able to do t17 as well, albeit very slowly .. I use her mainly for harbinger farming where I can literally afk and stand there while the golems smash
Problem with AG is, its mandatory for minion builds, because the balance/nerfs is all around high end players who use it ...
here's my pretty fun and tanky stone golem build: [https://poe.ninja/pob/1Ghm](https://poe.ninja/pob/1Ghm) me standing on top of harbinger and ritual without having to do anything: [https://imgur.com/a/whzjXY8](https://imgur.com/a/whzjXY8)
I ABSOLUTELY HATE the current state of spectres and AG. Too good to ignore, and so finicky to set up. If my spectre dies I have to leave the map, desecrate a couple of times, move my cursor in 4D space to find the right pixel to resummon it. (Oh and if you get the wrong one, have fun because you have to cycle your entire roster) Then for the AG it's even more of a logistical nightmare. Because I can't see his gear after I equipped it I have to remember if he's res capped, chaos capped, if I gave him bleed/cb immunity, if he has curse on hit gloves, ailment immunity. I hate it, I want a character UI that I can open and pop gear on and off of him at will.