Simple post where I was hoping to garner some information on opinions regarding followers. Right now, followers serve one purpose, they are your unity combo provider with their cannot die trinket, giving you 50% damage reduction.
As a community, is this all we want of our followers? Do we want more?
I was personally thinking that we should have "Follower Sets". These sets would be specific to each follower (Enchantress, Templar, and Scoundrel). I have not hashed out any ideas as to what these sets would do, but I think it is time to make followers a little more relevant than a 50% damage reduction, which is boring gameplay.
They had a purpose as relevant assistant damage dealers and cc providers some patches ago (what, 2.1?), but they lost all their other purpose, except the one you mentioned. Time for a change, especially as part of a little further closing of the gap between solo and group play.
The gap is closing between solo play and groups. This is not the time to implement any follower changes. That being said sets don't make sense since they can't use anything but jewelry and weapons. The last thing I want is to add more jewelry to the drop pool. I have a hard enough time getting decent rings. If the want to create an amulet I would be tolerant of this. >90% of all builds benefit from a 5th passive.
To beat a 50% dmg reduction imortal follower ? it will need so much. I even bothered to try LoN on them, do they do some dmg ? If at least we got a Crushing blow or something else. U know what i'm saying.
1- I like the idea of having "linked" sets with your follower and yourself as a 7pc bonus.
2- I get your viewpoint Shapookya, but I wonder if your view is shared or personal, I get the feeling most think the opposite of you. What I do 100% agree with is that the trinket should simply become baseline, if in fact they do not make any additions to the follower. This would open up the use of either of the three trinkets assuming they add a new power to replace the cannot die feature.
3- Banishedbr, I do not think it needs to replace it. It could be simply that the set is a weapon and their trinket follower item slot.
4- CrazyZ1430, Even with the gap closing, groups will still progress faster, and you have to admit that followers lack any true importance other than to those lucky enough to get two unity within a season. Outside of season, it serves one purpose to everyone, 50% damage reduction. I feel that is extremely boring.
5- Doomscream, I would approve of crafting it, but maybe make it out of mats that you need to gather in a "follower" dungeon? That way it is more unique to the follower, gives you more of a story?
I hope this great discussion carries on, would be a possible addition in 2.5 or 2.6!
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Hey all, here with another suggestion, this time addressing Single-Player concerns (Lower overall productivity compared to MP), through the buffing of followers! This consists of a 4-part suggestion which addresses a few problems.
First Suggestion - Remove the Follower Limit. Thats right, make it to where you can have ALL 3 followers with you at any time! Beyond the decent control/damage/survival boost this will bring, it can also bring a number of little improvements to a few other areas, as follows
Roleplay - When you are doing MP, you can listen to your 3 followers banter with each other, and occaisonally get a laugh from it. Just imagine the banter that would occur with all 3 followers in your party! When you get a windfall of gold from a chest, when Kormac says "Treasure!", Lyndon could say "Yes, but none for you", with a follow up by Eirena with a innocent observation stating that the Nephalim takes all the gold anyway. Questions by a follower towards the Nephalem could include a witty remark by another of the followers, and the inter-personal banter while AFKing could be quite charming indeed!
Future Expansion - While I am not a developer, and do not know the design process behind followers, I can see a design problem in the current iteration of followers, that being that any new followers will not see anywhere near as much use. Not only would existing players have to gear up new followers, they would only be able to use one of them, leading to 3+ going unused instead of the current two. Removing the follower cap will ensure that NONE of the followers are forgotten!
Progression - You've geared up, you can do TX, you got yourself a few high lvl gems, you can do GR 55, and you've gotten most of your Kunai powers that you ever wanted, so all you got to look forward to are more ancients, the paragon grind, and reaching higher GR levels. With the ability to use ALL your followers though, you get a new form of progression in gearing up your followers! Having all followers unlocked gives you an additional form of progressoin, as you need to equip not just your primary follower, but ALL your followers. And as you equip them, your own solo progression will increase, allowing you to do higher GRs and other things!
Closing the MP gap - Its a well-known fact that MP is just miles ahead of SP for progression - Assuming that the other 3 players do NOT speed up the rate at which you kill mobs, you get a baseline 30% more xp, magic find, AND gold find! And if you run with some XP mates, that XP bonus could easily double your own XP acquisition. Finally, unless you are carrying up to 3 mates, your rate of killing mobs will GREATLY increase in comparision to SP, further increasing your gold, XP, and legednary acquisition rate. There is also the side benefit of mobs focusing on players besides yourself, indirectly increasing your toughness/survivability. Allowing all 3 followers to be with you at any one time would go to great lengths to closing the gap - You get a sizable damage boost with all your followers, mobs will have additional targets to focus on, AND you can benefit from select XP/Gold Find/Magic Find pieces on your followers gear!
Now, some higher ranked players would say "But Even with this 3 followers, it wouldn't matter to much at higher GR levels! Followers have an inherit damage cap and their damage quickly becomes obsolete at higher levels, and without the death-immunity token on the followers, they would die in a single melee swing!". This is where I will get to my second suggestion, as follows:
Followers Inherit the Nephalim's Primary Stat and Vitality.
As we know, Followers get damage and defensive bonuses from Str/Dex/Int, and 2000% more of that to boot! of course, the 2000% bonus is neccesary as Followers can only have 6 pieces of equipment, if that. And, sadly, Followers get very, very little in the way of toughness, often capping at only 8-9 million toughness unless you get some excellent rolls for defensives. And even then, followers lack healing for their toughness.
Of course, the Nephalim will have quite a large amount of their Primary stat, easily going above 15k at the higher end. This, of course, can be fixed by either adjusting the bonus granted by the primary stat, or by only allowing followers to inherit a smaller amount, say 20% of the Nephalim's primary stat. I feel that Vitility should be inhereited in full though, as Followers cannot get anywhere close to the amount of Armor/All-Res and healing that players get.
This change would also solve the problem of being pigeon-holed into the Death Immunity token - With more toughness, your followers will be able to take a large number of hits before dieing. This would also have a good effect on unity, as currently for Single Player, the most important gear is double unity+death immunty token, as that outright doubles your toughness at a cost of only 1 ring slow on the main character. Allowing followers to fully benefit from the players stats would also have little effect on the Unity combo, as players would still be essentially double their HP pool with double Unity, and they could further increase their HP pool with triple, quadruple, or, in the future, 5x Unitys!
And of course, should Blizzard decide that this makes followers unbalanced, it has an easy way to fix as all you have to do is lower the amount of stats the Followers inherit from the player.
Of course, theres still the issues that no matter what, a Follower will NOT be able to equal the damage output of a fully equipped dps, and, in that regard, they shouldn't. My aim with buffing Followers, beyond making the fantastically fun, is to only bridge the gap between SP and MP, and NOT to make SP as efficient as MP. Having multiple followers should, imo, only grant a +10-15% efficiency boost per extra follower, as compared to the, at minimum, 30% efficiency boost by adding extra players. With that being said though, while the above suggested follower boosts increases your efficiency clearing time, and your survivability, it does very little to boost your XP, Gold, and Magic Find efficiency, which brings me to my third suggestion...
Remove the Diminished Return on Follower Bonus XP, Bonus Gold Find, Bonus Magic Find, and Bonus XP per monster kill. While this made sense back in 1.0 and such, it doesn't make sense anymore. Magic Find is a very rare stat to acquire on gear today, and even if you somehow managed to acquire Magic Find on EVERY piece for your follower (You Won't), it would only give you, the player, 30% extra magic find, or 3% more legendary find. Since the only pieces that tend to have Magic Find in the game are rings, thats closer to 12% magic find, or only 1.2% extra legendaries per follower. The bonus XP no longer makes sense given the 2.3 XP change, which causes ALL players to benefit from ALL sources of bonus XP in the group. And finally, with the... was it 2.1 Gold Find change? That 30% more Gold Find becomes 30% more gold overall, assuming no other gold find bonuses are available. Using gear, a follower can provide you with, at most, 10% extra gold find, which is pitiful!
For the Bonus Xp, this would actually bring a more interesting decision in combination with all of the above changes - That is, Damage or Bonus XP. With the above stat inheritance suggestion, the value of Rubies on a follower's weapon would be immensely increased due to the huge bonus Followers get from primary stats, which directly affects weapon damage. On the other hand, you could instead pick the Gem of Ease, which is almost never used beyond boosting Alts. Thus, you could choose either increased XP, or increased damage.
Thus, imo, the diminished returns on Gold Find, Magic Find, Exp. Bonus, and Exp on Kill should be removed, as the reason that it was implemented in the first place was made redundant.
Finally, I have my own personal suggestion, more for fun/utility, and not something that I expect to see implemented, but just want to suggest.
Allow Followers to equip and use Legendary Gems, so you could, for example, equip your Templar with Wreath, causing him to deal AoE damage and get a speed boost, or equip your Scoundrel with a frost-damage weapon and Iceblink, causing him to slow enemies with his attacks and give them a crit debuff.
Also, grant Followers the ability to use their own Kunai's Cube leg bonuses. Thus, you could, say, give Eirena the Strongarm Bracers perk, allowing 100% uptime of the debuff on a small group of enemies, or give Lyndon Promise of Glory so that you have a steady supply of Nephalem Glory, or even just multiple Unity or Arcstones. The possibilities become many!
Literally all I want is for followers to convert core stats to their preferred type. For instance, It's really frustrating to gear out an Enchantress as a Demon Hunter. Granted, it's much easier now with the cube, as all you have to do is farm up some mats and level a Wizard to 70, then re-roll the item until it suits your needs, but even that just feels like an unnecessary time-sink. The odds of me finding the optimal gear for one are low enough as-is, (especially something like a Thunderfury with IAS and CDR...) much less getting ancient versions of them.
That said, I would LOVE if the "Cannot Die" relics weren't mandatory. It just feels so pointless have the other two options considering they just instantly pop no matter how decked out they are. I understand that they shouldn't be as powerful as players, and that they'll never be anywhere close to as powerful as their D2 counterparts, but I'd still like to have options. While we're at it though, Blizzard really needs to update the info tabs for followers to include CDR. We all know it works, so why isn't it present? Silly
Wow, 53 votes and a lot of comments, thanks for taking part everyone!
A lot of good ideas and opinions, was very pleased with the results and manner of discussion, hopefully we continue this forward until Followers are made to be more important!
No, there aren't enough slots for followers to use a set and something else. You want even LESS diversity on followers?
I thought exactly the same ^^
Ah, the typical, it doesn't work based on how things "currently" are approach. Not sure I understand your logic, sorry
Assuming change based only on present results in no improvement from any feature of any game or any event ever. Through discussion, maybe we get followers to innately not die anymore? Maybe we get more follower equipment slots, matching our own amount of slots? Maybe we get all 3 followers at the same time?
None of those are possible based on the "current" game, but they certainly are if they "change" some things.
To be honest, I think a complete follower revamp would be cool instead of just giving them sets. Like, allowing them to equip the same stuff as us AND have their own sets to use? (I'm not a hypocrite I swear) the possibilities are endless. Useful followers, give us them!
I think my biggest reason for not wanting extra sets for followers is that I don't want to find stuff specifically for followers. Imagine a set ring drops, you're getting hyped and then you see it: it's a follower item.
That's like a punch in the face.
What if the drops were in "follower dungeons" somewhat like the prison for Lyndon, but at a difficulty worthy of a challenge? They could be made somewhat like the Set Dungeons in that the follower will give you clues as to where this place is, and you need to find it, and for helping them, you unlock the hidden treasures they have kept since the beginning of your journey together?
I think my biggest reason for not wanting extra sets for followers is that I don't want to find stuff specifically for followers. Imagine a set ring drops, you're getting hyped and then you see it: it's a follower item.
That's like a punch in the face.
What if the drops were in "follower dungeons" somewhat like the prison for Lyndon, but at a difficulty worthy of a challenge? They could be made somewhat like the Set Dungeons in that the follower will give you clues as to where this place is, and you need to find it, and for helping them, you unlock the hidden treasures they have kept since the beginning of your journey together?
Well that seems like a lot of effort to make something for followers, which again means: Their manpower would be better used if they made something for characters, which then improves singleplayer AND multiplayer.
You gotta keep in mind that they do not have unlimited resources.
They are using about 70% of their resources, and a system designed on a follower mechanic is going on 15 years old now, most of these suggestions are well within reason.
I get your argument, but then why not just remove followers? Is that the stance you have?
What you guys want is something like a pseudo-multiplayer. Well, go into a group if you want other characters to fight with you...
When I know I will have free time (like for sure no outside influence) I join MP games, however, being a father of 2, and having a wife with the additional home stuff associated with that, I most of the time play solo - since that gives me option to pause the game and quickly tend to family matters. With something like mentioned XP buff or similar on followers it would be a nice addition.
However, I'm aware that would encourage botting even more, so, yeah there is hardly any chance we will see improvements in that regard.
Why remove something that clearly works right now? The design philosophy of followers is that they give buffs, not that they kill stuff for you. There are minor things that can be changed ("cannot die" as baseline, to have a choice in relics) but followers are "working as intended" right now.
What you guys want is something like a pseudo-multiplayer. Well, go into a group if you want other characters to fight with you...
For one, most do not have time to wait 30-45 min to get a group in place, and pug games are terrible.
Next, followers do not work as intended, the goal stated by the game is to have "choices" not to "farm for YYY item to win". Any solo build REQUIRES double unity with follower does not die trinket, so there is a clear problem. My end game would be to add elements that become nearly as effective as that 40% damage reduction for solo players.
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Hey everyone,
Simple post where I was hoping to garner some information on opinions regarding followers. Right now, followers serve one purpose, they are your unity combo provider with their cannot die trinket, giving you 50% damage reduction.
As a community, is this all we want of our followers? Do we want more?
I was personally thinking that we should have "Follower Sets". These sets would be specific to each follower (Enchantress, Templar, and Scoundrel). I have not hashed out any ideas as to what these sets would do, but I think it is time to make followers a little more relevant than a 50% damage reduction, which is boring gameplay.
Thanks in ahead for any discussion and responses!
+1
They had a purpose as relevant assistant damage dealers and cc providers some patches ago (what, 2.1?), but they lost all their other purpose, except the one you mentioned. Time for a change, especially as part of a little further closing of the gap between solo and group play.
An additional thought would be linked set pieces between you and the follower in the vein of unity.
Could be some interesting stories around items bound by multiple wearers.
Example:
Immortal kings eternal follower:
7p bonus
While followers is wearing the ring, army etc turn the follower into the ancient of abc doing XYZ. Your ancients now deal 50% more damage while active
And so on
The gap is closing between solo play and groups. This is not the time to implement any follower changes. That being said sets don't make sense since they can't use anything but jewelry and weapons. The last thing I want is to add more jewelry to the drop pool. I have a hard enough time getting decent rings. If the want to create an amulet I would be tolerant of this. >90% of all builds benefit from a 5th passive.
To beat a 50% dmg reduction imortal follower ? it will need so much. I even bothered to try LoN on them, do they do some dmg ? If at least we got a Crushing blow or something else. U know what i'm saying.
Thanks for all the responses so far
To touch on a few points:
1- I like the idea of having "linked" sets with your follower and yourself as a 7pc bonus.
2- I get your viewpoint Shapookya, but I wonder if your view is shared or personal, I get the feeling most think the opposite of you. What I do 100% agree with is that the trinket should simply become baseline, if in fact they do not make any additions to the follower. This would open up the use of either of the three trinkets assuming they add a new power to replace the cannot die feature.
3- Banishedbr, I do not think it needs to replace it. It could be simply that the set is a weapon and their trinket follower item slot.
4- CrazyZ1430, Even with the gap closing, groups will still progress faster, and you have to admit that followers lack any true importance other than to those lucky enough to get two unity within a season. Outside of season, it serves one purpose to everyone, 50% damage reduction. I feel that is extremely boring.
5- Doomscream, I would approve of crafting it, but maybe make it out of mats that you need to gather in a "follower" dungeon? That way it is more unique to the follower, gives you more of a story?
I hope this great discussion carries on, would be a possible addition in 2.5 or 2.6!
Hrmm. Personally, unless theres a number of different sets for each Follower, it would just be "pick this for BIS". I posted a suggestion for the followers over here at http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/19022402519?page=1.
Quick copy/paste of the article
Posts: 642
View profile
Hey all, here with another suggestion, this time addressing Single-Player concerns (Lower overall productivity compared to MP), through the buffing of followers! This consists of a 4-part suggestion which addresses a few problems.
First Suggestion - Remove the Follower Limit. Thats right, make it to where you can have ALL 3 followers with you at any time! Beyond the decent control/damage/survival boost this will bring, it can also bring a number of little improvements to a few other areas, as follows
Roleplay - When you are doing MP, you can listen to your 3 followers banter with each other, and occaisonally get a laugh from it. Just imagine the banter that would occur with all 3 followers in your party! When you get a windfall of gold from a chest, when Kormac says "Treasure!", Lyndon could say "Yes, but none for you", with a follow up by Eirena with a innocent observation stating that the Nephalim takes all the gold anyway. Questions by a follower towards the Nephalem could include a witty remark by another of the followers, and the inter-personal banter while AFKing could be quite charming indeed!
Future Expansion - While I am not a developer, and do not know the design process behind followers, I can see a design problem in the current iteration of followers, that being that any new followers will not see anywhere near as much use. Not only would existing players have to gear up new followers, they would only be able to use one of them, leading to 3+ going unused instead of the current two. Removing the follower cap will ensure that NONE of the followers are forgotten!
Progression - You've geared up, you can do TX, you got yourself a few high lvl gems, you can do GR 55, and you've gotten most of your Kunai powers that you ever wanted, so all you got to look forward to are more ancients, the paragon grind, and reaching higher GR levels. With the ability to use ALL your followers though, you get a new form of progression in gearing up your followers! Having all followers unlocked gives you an additional form of progressoin, as you need to equip not just your primary follower, but ALL your followers. And as you equip them, your own solo progression will increase, allowing you to do higher GRs and other things!
Closing the MP gap - Its a well-known fact that MP is just miles ahead of SP for progression - Assuming that the other 3 players do NOT speed up the rate at which you kill mobs, you get a baseline 30% more xp, magic find, AND gold find! And if you run with some XP mates, that XP bonus could easily double your own XP acquisition. Finally, unless you are carrying up to 3 mates, your rate of killing mobs will GREATLY increase in comparision to SP, further increasing your gold, XP, and legednary acquisition rate. There is also the side benefit of mobs focusing on players besides yourself, indirectly increasing your toughness/survivability. Allowing all 3 followers to be with you at any one time would go to great lengths to closing the gap - You get a sizable damage boost with all your followers, mobs will have additional targets to focus on, AND you can benefit from select XP/Gold Find/Magic Find pieces on your followers gear!
Now, some higher ranked players would say "But Even with this 3 followers, it wouldn't matter to much at higher GR levels! Followers have an inherit damage cap and their damage quickly becomes obsolete at higher levels, and without the death-immunity token on the followers, they would die in a single melee swing!". This is where I will get to my second suggestion, as follows:
Followers Inherit the Nephalim's Primary Stat and Vitality.
As we know, Followers get damage and defensive bonuses from Str/Dex/Int, and 2000% more of that to boot! of course, the 2000% bonus is neccesary as Followers can only have 6 pieces of equipment, if that. And, sadly, Followers get very, very little in the way of toughness, often capping at only 8-9 million toughness unless you get some excellent rolls for defensives. And even then, followers lack healing for their toughness.
Of course, the Nephalim will have quite a large amount of their Primary stat, easily going above 15k at the higher end. This, of course, can be fixed by either adjusting the bonus granted by the primary stat, or by only allowing followers to inherit a smaller amount, say 20% of the Nephalim's primary stat. I feel that Vitility should be inhereited in full though, as Followers cannot get anywhere close to the amount of Armor/All-Res and healing that players get.
This change would also solve the problem of being pigeon-holed into the Death Immunity token - With more toughness, your followers will be able to take a large number of hits before dieing. This would also have a good effect on unity, as currently for Single Player, the most important gear is double unity+death immunty token, as that outright doubles your toughness at a cost of only 1 ring slow on the main character. Allowing followers to fully benefit from the players stats would also have little effect on the Unity combo, as players would still be essentially double their HP pool with double Unity, and they could further increase their HP pool with triple, quadruple, or, in the future, 5x Unitys!
And of course, should Blizzard decide that this makes followers unbalanced, it has an easy way to fix as all you have to do is lower the amount of stats the Followers inherit from the player.
Of course, theres still the issues that no matter what, a Follower will NOT be able to equal the damage output of a fully equipped dps, and, in that regard, they shouldn't. My aim with buffing Followers, beyond making the fantastically fun, is to only bridge the gap between SP and MP, and NOT to make SP as efficient as MP. Having multiple followers should, imo, only grant a +10-15% efficiency boost per extra follower, as compared to the, at minimum, 30% efficiency boost by adding extra players. With that being said though, while the above suggested follower boosts increases your efficiency clearing time, and your survivability, it does very little to boost your XP, Gold, and Magic Find efficiency, which brings me to my third suggestion...
Remove the Diminished Return on Follower Bonus XP, Bonus Gold Find, Bonus Magic Find, and Bonus XP per monster kill. While this made sense back in 1.0 and such, it doesn't make sense anymore. Magic Find is a very rare stat to acquire on gear today, and even if you somehow managed to acquire Magic Find on EVERY piece for your follower (You Won't), it would only give you, the player, 30% extra magic find, or 3% more legendary find. Since the only pieces that tend to have Magic Find in the game are rings, thats closer to 12% magic find, or only 1.2% extra legendaries per follower. The bonus XP no longer makes sense given the 2.3 XP change, which causes ALL players to benefit from ALL sources of bonus XP in the group. And finally, with the... was it 2.1 Gold Find change? That 30% more Gold Find becomes 30% more gold overall, assuming no other gold find bonuses are available. Using gear, a follower can provide you with, at most, 10% extra gold find, which is pitiful!
For the Bonus Xp, this would actually bring a more interesting decision in combination with all of the above changes - That is, Damage or Bonus XP. With the above stat inheritance suggestion, the value of Rubies on a follower's weapon would be immensely increased due to the huge bonus Followers get from primary stats, which directly affects weapon damage. On the other hand, you could instead pick the Gem of Ease, which is almost never used beyond boosting Alts. Thus, you could choose either increased XP, or increased damage.
Thus, imo, the diminished returns on Gold Find, Magic Find, Exp. Bonus, and Exp on Kill should be removed, as the reason that it was implemented in the first place was made redundant.
Finally, I have my own personal suggestion, more for fun/utility, and not something that I expect to see implemented, but just want to suggest.
Allow Followers to equip and use Legendary Gems, so you could, for example, equip your Templar with Wreath, causing him to deal AoE damage and get a speed boost, or equip your Scoundrel with a frost-damage weapon and Iceblink, causing him to slow enemies with his attacks and give them a crit debuff.
Also, grant Followers the ability to use their own Kunai's Cube leg bonuses. Thus, you could, say, give Eirena the Strongarm Bracers perk, allowing 100% uptime of the debuff on a small group of enemies, or give Lyndon Promise of Glory so that you have a steady supply of Nephalem Glory, or even just multiple Unity or Arcstones. The possibilities become many!
Literally all I want is for followers to convert core stats to their preferred type. For instance, It's really frustrating to gear out an Enchantress as a Demon Hunter. Granted, it's much easier now with the cube, as all you have to do is farm up some mats and level a Wizard to 70, then re-roll the item until it suits your needs, but even that just feels like an unnecessary time-sink. The odds of me finding the optimal gear for one are low enough as-is, (especially something like a Thunderfury with IAS and CDR...) much less getting ancient versions of them.
That said, I would LOVE if the "Cannot Die" relics weren't mandatory. It just feels so pointless have the other two options considering they just instantly pop no matter how decked out they are. I understand that they shouldn't be as powerful as players, and that they'll never be anywhere close to as powerful as their D2 counterparts, but I'd still like to have options. While we're at it though, Blizzard really needs to update the info tabs for followers to include CDR. We all know it works, so why isn't it present? Silly
they dont have arms, leggings,helms, etc ergo they cant have sets
Wow, 53 votes and a lot of comments, thanks for taking part everyone!
A lot of good ideas and opinions, was very pleased with the results and manner of discussion, hopefully we continue this forward until Followers are made to be more important!
No, there aren't enough slots for followers to use a set and something else. You want even LESS diversity on followers?
MeatHeadGaming - YouTube - Twitch - Facebook - Web
Ah, the typical, it doesn't work based on how things "currently" are approach. Not sure I understand your logic, sorry
Assuming change based only on present results in no improvement from any feature of any game or any event ever. Through discussion, maybe we get followers to innately not die anymore? Maybe we get more follower equipment slots, matching our own amount of slots? Maybe we get all 3 followers at the same time?
None of those are possible based on the "current" game, but they certainly are if they "change" some things.
Aside from follower power, what if it was something of a different spectrum like....
"Follower can pick up deaths breath when dropped"
or
"Follower gains a 50 yard 40% all resist aura and 50,000 life per second aura"
Basically to cover the areas of speed farming or help provide more efficient defensive capability when performing glass cannon?
To be honest, I think a complete follower revamp would be cool instead of just giving them sets. Like, allowing them to equip the same stuff as us AND have their own sets to use? (I'm not a hypocrite I swear) the possibilities are endless. Useful followers, give us them!
I get your argument, but then why not just remove followers? Is that the stance you have?
However, I'm aware that would encourage botting even more, so, yeah there is hardly any chance we will see improvements in that regard.
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Actually they are being used in more builds than the templar atm. At least the Enchantress.
Next, followers do not work as intended, the goal stated by the game is to have "choices" not to "farm for YYY item to win". Any solo build REQUIRES double unity with follower does not die trinket, so there is a clear problem. My end game would be to add elements that become nearly as effective as that 40% damage reduction for solo players.