Yes, that word, strong, empowered with passion and dedication...: "hate".
But I also hate lemon ice-cream.
On-topic, one of the things that make my heart cry when I remember how it was in D2, are the pets.
Those amazing little friends that allowed you to just watch the screen and look how splendidly everything died.
Yes, I'm talking about the necromancer. Don't you remember having something close to 20 skellies all around the screen killing everything that moved?. It was amusing.
Now, lets go back to D3. The closest comparison that resembles somehow the skellies are the fetish "army".
First, I doubt the word army is suited for the occasion.
Secondly, they are really bad at killing things, they move like idiots and don't attack anything until they have like 8 seconds left, then they attack twice, at a really low attack speed, and they run a little more, then poof!. Gone.
So, to sum it up:
- Their cooldown is LONG, I mean, 2-minutes-long.
- They are weak, the 20% dmg they took from you does nothing.
- They are extremely ineffective when the time of the "go kill stuff" comes, one Locust Swarm does more than they in terms of damage to more than 3 or 4 enemies in the screen.
- They last 20 seconds.
What are your experiences?, do you want the old school way back of how D2 managed pets?, or do you like this wowish thing that makes your pets.. almost useless?, except the gargantuan, he rocks.
the skeleton army from d2 was pretty epic but it sucked in multiplayer games where the skeletons just got in the way and ruined performance, the summons which the witch doctor has are definitely more powerful individually, but they dont feel nearly as epic and i dont think you can structure a build around them to the same extent as you could in D2
AFAIK, 120 seconds is 2 mins. Sure, there is a rune that reduces it to 90 but, and sure, they last 20 seconds, so one could say that the effective CD is 100 seconds, still, the CD is 2 mins. Am I missing something dear shaggy?.
Not to mention the fact that whenever you used teleport (Enigma) all of your summons got centered ontop of your necro... Summon necros could even do ubers but the gear was really expensive. They were even effective in PVP against BVC's and such. I don't know if these mechanics are translate-able into D3 since they seem to be based on broken game mechanics. I don't know...
Skeletons weren't that dumb as the fanboys are making them out to be to hide the flaws of d3.(I am not talking about the above guys.)
Yes revives were dumb.But not the skeletons.
And i loved skeleton mastery.Not only due to the fact that they improved the skeletons but also their visual effects.Normal skeletons had no armor and broken shields while with +16 points in mastery they would be wearing chain mail and stuff.To show that yes your skeletons are becoming more powerful.Pure awesomeness.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Grinding Gear Games (Company that produced POE): "These are great Ideas, we will use them for sure as they are clearly what the player base is looking for."
Blizzard: "While we agree that this game needs re-working and that these ideas could help the future of this game, we have no plans to listen to our fan-base at this time."
AFAIK, 120 seconds is 2 mins. Sure, there is a rune that reduces it to 90 but, and sure, they last 20 seconds, so one could say that the effective CD is 100 seconds, still, the CD is 2 mins. Am I missing something dear shaggy?.
Well, first off, in your ranting and raving, you never mentioned there is a rune to cut 30s off the CD. Given how big of a hardon you had for the fact that it was a 2m CD, you'd think you'd mention that.
In addition to Devoted Following, however, there are two passives which also reduce the cooldown: Tribal Rites (a flat 25%) and Grave Injustice (1s per enemy killed within your pickup radius + 8).
Most WDs in the post-1.0.8 world probably wouldn't bother with a 2m CD without GI. Monster density has improved to the point that BBV is almost always a sub-60s CD for me. Sometimes I've had it that the CD is up before the 20s duration is up.
Sure someone could take Fetish Army or BBV without GI, but that would be a pretty silly decision. It's a decision you're free to make, but there's precious little reason to given the new monster density and the massive opportunity to make GI give a massive buff to stuff like BBV.
I fully understand that you cannot quantify GI, btw. But it deserves mentioning in this rant against Fetish Army. If the effective CD on Fetish Army is closer to 60s that does change the color of the discussion. I'm pretty sure you don't really want that, though.
Now if you wanted to talk about Fetish Army needing a buff.... I'd be completely on board with you (because it should be buffed, it's a very underwhelming ability... I prefer BBV any day of the week). But I simply don't buy that Fetish Army was ever intended to "replace" a horde of 25 skeletons from D2. I'm pretty sure that Blizzard decided they didn't want the game to crash if ever 2+ WDs ended up in the same game. And I know for a fact that Blizzard said they didn't want summons doing all the work for you. You're yearning for a feature that we'll never see because they want us to play the game, they don't want 30+ summons playing it for us.... unless we outgear something, I guess.
EDIT
What you're asking for - a direct replacement for Necro summon armies - just isn't going to happen. It'd be like asking for Enigma to be put into D3. You're not going to get them to carry over things from D2 which were obviously OP and which were easily abused. It's just not going to happen. If you want WDs to get some kind of "many but weak" summons then you're going to need to focus on why it's not cruise control for EZ mode and make that argument (because it's the only way Blizzard would go along with it). Trashing Fetish Army isn't going to produce the result you want.
-----
I think that a "let's make Fetish Army not suck" discussion is very needed. I just don't think it should be framed as a "let's make Fetish Army replace D2s Summon Skeleton." If you'd like to know the things about Fetish Army that I believe need to be fixed for it to be a reasonable, and useful, part of the WD repitoire... here goes (in no particular order):
Reduce the base CD to 90s.
Change Devoted Following to summon 50% of the fetishes but allow them to do 300% normal damage (20% becomes 60%). This would be for people who want less of the "distraction" aspect and more of the damage aspect.
Improve the AI such that they get on a target quickly and stay on it - the running around is an issue with this ability (and Fetish Syncopants).
Remove the "summon more of X type" runes. They're... err... not working out well. Replace with ONE "summon 1 more of each fetish type" rune. This would satisfy people who are aiming more for the distraction aspect of this ability.
Add a rune that increases the duration of the fetishes to 30s.
Make it such that the fetishes don't routinely die to damage. They're a CD damnit, they shouldn't be immortal, but they shouldn't have massive survivability issues.
Buff the base damage of each fetish. They currently seem very weak compared to BBV, even in solo play.
Shaggy, if you need an entire build set along with the proper items to make them somehow useful, then they are weak.
This thread is not about balancing them, that would belong to the balance class/suggestions forum, is there is one, I can't remember.
This is more a thread that makes a comparison of two different concepts of how to implement minions, and how awesome was back then and how terrible is here.
Sure, the skellies weren't perfect, they had issues too, but they could be REALLY helpful, they only became somewhat useless in later acts in hell, (useless in terms of output damage) but I only needed one dead body, then CE took care of everything in the screen.
Blizz wont change the way minions and pets work, they want them like that, it shows also in how they implemented the followers. They want YOU to make damage, and they to be cosmetic things. It was a bad idea IMO.
Indimix is right.If you have to select certain runes and passives for the skill to work the way its intended to work then the skill is broken anyway.Sadly that's the case with almost all skills.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Grinding Gear Games (Company that produced POE): "These are great Ideas, we will use them for sure as they are clearly what the player base is looking for."
Blizzard: "While we agree that this game needs re-working and that these ideas could help the future of this game, we have no plans to listen to our fan-base at this time."
I loved playing necro in d2, it was the only class that could solo hell without tons of grinding. Just get amplify damage and nothing was immune to physical damage. Any other class would run into packs of mobs which you could not hurt at all.
I'm pretty sure they wanted to move away from the "afk I don't give a crap to what I'm killing or doing in the game, everything is just dying" gameplay style.
Don't get me wrong, my Summoner Necro was my 2nd favorite character after my Sorceress (with a close 3rd Paladin), but it was pretty boring playing with him overall.
The whole theme and playstyle simply don't fit with the more proactive action-focused multi-skill Diablo 3 combat. And I'm glad they moved away from it.
At least with the WD you have to actually use other spells to make pets work (Firebomb or Dart with the summon passive, Big Bad Voodoo timing, defensive spells management). Managed to make my EU one work up to MP 4-5 with really really sub-par gear, 110% focused on summons. I'm sure someone with top gear could make them work even better.
SUmmoner necro was one of the main reasons why D2 was so piss easy. We held competitions and people cleared the entire game with no gear and without spending a single stat point, just by hiding behind their skelletons. With HC chars. Yes, that easy.
Maybe so, however, it was way more fun back then. Now they are only meat shields, and only you don the real damage. Why not make them to actually deliver a good amount of damage?, the Gargantuan is somewhat useful against a bunch of enemies because of his splash attack, but that's all.
I'd love to have at least one skill that does a good damage output, there is no reason to not have one.
I personally would enjoy the original summoning experience in D2 over the one we have now in D3. However, I do understand that this concept wouldn't work in D3, but that's only because D3 wasn't built with this type of thing in mind.
Now, it is true that our summons now are far more powerful than what our summons were capable of before, but the trade-off has been far less to summon, and less variety in our summons. So, really it's not such a bad trade-off, but I personally would perfer the original creature types in summons (skeletons) compared to what we have now (fetishes, dogs).
Speaking of which, Indimix, I think you should check this out.
It's a forum featuring a WD helmet that turns you into a skeleton and summons two illusionary ones. They don't do any damage, but they can snare things with grasp of the dead + break jail effects from jailers, and the effect supposebly procs about 100% of the time. Apparently with the right set up, you can have a reletively large army of creatures when you combine this helm with a few other things and specific skills. Apparently, it's pretty fun and a little OP.
I come across a WD using it in Brawling once, and it was extremely cool, and very effective.
*Edit: Apparently, the helm is also really cheap, another bonus.
Eh. Skellimancer, (Fishymancer, for those who know what's up) while effective, was probably the most boring build I played in D2. Even though I was face rolling with the exploding corpses and curses, you don't really do anything but follow your army around.
Probably, but they could actually kill stuff. Why can't them in D3?, why can't I have pets that actually kill something instead of being merely a meat shield?.
I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Change the damage output of the dogs to 100/120% of your damage per hit. There you go, amazing pets. And they hit slow enough to not become imbalanced. Now.. they hit for 9%.. that is complete trash.
I don't think that they are supposed to be like that, if that's the case, then why make a run that increases slightly their damage?, burning dogs or acid dogs, can't remember exactly, I never use them.
And, yeah, the explosion damage is nice, but they have to die to make it work.
I don't think that they are supposed to be like that, if that's the case, then why make a run that increases slightly their damage?, burning dogs or acid dogs, can't remember exactly, I never use them.
Ground Stomp (Trembling Stomp, Foot of the Mountain, Avalanche)
Leap (Call of Arreat)
Sprint (Run Like the Wind, Gangway)
Ignore Pain (Bravado, Contempt for Weakness)
Blinding Flash (Faith in the Light)
Breath of Heaven (Circle of Scorn, Blazing Wrath, Infused with Light)
Serenity (Reap What is Sown, Instant Karma)
Inner Sanctuary (Forbidden Palace)
Frost Nova (Frozen Mist, Deep Freeze, Bone Chill)
Diamond Skin (Prism, Mirror Skin, Diamond Shards)
Slow Time (Time Warp, Stretch Time)
Teleport (Calamity)
There isn't a single spell categorized as "defensive" that doesn't have at least one rune that gives it an offensive use. Summon Zombie Dogs is not the only one. Can we stop pretending like Zombie Dogs is an offensive ability because it has two runes that increase its damage? That's obviously not how it works.
By that logic every single defensive ability is actually an offensive ability and should be massively buffed because none of them do enough damage.
EDIT
Just as another point, this isn't a D3 vs D2 topic since even the great D2 development team saw fit to nerf the volume of summons. 1.10 (in October of 2003) had a massive nerf to the # of skeletons a Necromancer could summon because... gasp... even THEY thought it was bad to have 50+ minions running around doing *everything* for you. If you had 27 skeletons and 27 skeleton mages pre-1.10 you were left with 11 of each post-1.10.
It was a shitty, cheesy, lazy way to play and even the D2 team saw it and fixed it in time for ladder competitions. DAMN THEM D2 DEVELOPERS!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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But I also hate lemon ice-cream.
On-topic, one of the things that make my heart cry when I remember how it was in D2, are the pets.
Those amazing little friends that allowed you to just watch the screen and look how splendidly everything died.
Yes, I'm talking about the necromancer. Don't you remember having something close to 20 skellies all around the screen killing everything that moved?. It was amusing.
Now, lets go back to D3. The closest comparison that resembles somehow the skellies are the fetish "army".
First, I doubt the word army is suited for the occasion.
Secondly, they are really bad at killing things, they move like idiots and don't attack anything until they have like 8 seconds left, then they attack twice, at a really low attack speed, and they run a little more, then poof!. Gone.
So, to sum it up:
- Their cooldown is LONG, I mean, 2-minutes-long.
- They are weak, the 20% dmg they took from you does nothing.
- They are extremely ineffective when the time of the "go kill stuff" comes, one Locust Swarm does more than they in terms of damage to more than 3 or 4 enemies in the screen.
- They last 20 seconds.
What are your experiences?, do you want the old school way back of how D2 managed pets?, or do you like this wowish thing that makes your pets.. almost useless?, except the gargantuan, he rocks.
Bye.
Troll alert has gone off.
You could at least ATTEMPT to get your facts straight.
Skeletons weren't that dumb as the fanboys are making them out to be to hide the flaws of d3.(I am not talking about the above guys.)
Yes revives were dumb.But not the skeletons.
And i loved skeleton mastery.Not only due to the fact that they improved the skeletons but also their visual effects.Normal skeletons had no armor and broken shields while with +16 points in mastery they would be wearing chain mail and stuff.To show that yes your skeletons are becoming more powerful.Pure awesomeness.
Blizzard: "While we agree that this game needs re-working and that these ideas could help the future of this game, we have no plans to listen to our fan-base at this time."
http://s1332.photobucket.com/user/Tester_3211/media/Diablo3devs_zpscc5fbac9.jpg.html?state=replace
Well, first off, in your ranting and raving, you never mentioned there is a rune to cut 30s off the CD. Given how big of a hardon you had for the fact that it was a 2m CD, you'd think you'd mention that.
In addition to Devoted Following, however, there are two passives which also reduce the cooldown: Tribal Rites (a flat 25%) and Grave Injustice (1s per enemy killed within your pickup radius + 8).
Most WDs in the post-1.0.8 world probably wouldn't bother with a 2m CD without GI. Monster density has improved to the point that BBV is almost always a sub-60s CD for me. Sometimes I've had it that the CD is up before the 20s duration is up.
Sure someone could take Fetish Army or BBV without GI, but that would be a pretty silly decision. It's a decision you're free to make, but there's precious little reason to given the new monster density and the massive opportunity to make GI give a massive buff to stuff like BBV.
I fully understand that you cannot quantify GI, btw. But it deserves mentioning in this rant against Fetish Army. If the effective CD on Fetish Army is closer to 60s that does change the color of the discussion. I'm pretty sure you don't really want that, though.
Now if you wanted to talk about Fetish Army needing a buff.... I'd be completely on board with you (because it should be buffed, it's a very underwhelming ability... I prefer BBV any day of the week). But I simply don't buy that Fetish Army was ever intended to "replace" a horde of 25 skeletons from D2. I'm pretty sure that Blizzard decided they didn't want the game to crash if ever 2+ WDs ended up in the same game. And I know for a fact that Blizzard said they didn't want summons doing all the work for you. You're yearning for a feature that we'll never see because they want us to play the game, they don't want 30+ summons playing it for us.... unless we outgear something, I guess.
EDIT
What you're asking for - a direct replacement for Necro summon armies - just isn't going to happen. It'd be like asking for Enigma to be put into D3. You're not going to get them to carry over things from D2 which were obviously OP and which were easily abused. It's just not going to happen. If you want WDs to get some kind of "many but weak" summons then you're going to need to focus on why it's not cruise control for EZ mode and make that argument (because it's the only way Blizzard would go along with it). Trashing Fetish Army isn't going to produce the result you want.
-----
I think that a "let's make Fetish Army not suck" discussion is very needed. I just don't think it should be framed as a "let's make Fetish Army replace D2s Summon Skeleton." If you'd like to know the things about Fetish Army that I believe need to be fixed for it to be a reasonable, and useful, part of the WD repitoire... here goes (in no particular order):
This thread is not about balancing them, that would belong to the balance class/suggestions forum, is there is one, I can't remember.
This is more a thread that makes a comparison of two different concepts of how to implement minions, and how awesome was back then and how terrible is here.
Sure, the skellies weren't perfect, they had issues too, but they could be REALLY helpful, they only became somewhat useless in later acts in hell, (useless in terms of output damage) but I only needed one dead body, then CE took care of everything in the screen.
Blizz wont change the way minions and pets work, they want them like that, it shows also in how they implemented the followers. They want YOU to make damage, and they to be cosmetic things. It was a bad idea IMO.
Blizzard: "While we agree that this game needs re-working and that these ideas could help the future of this game, we have no plans to listen to our fan-base at this time."
http://s1332.photobucket.com/user/Tester_3211/media/Diablo3devs_zpscc5fbac9.jpg.html?state=replace
Don't get me wrong, my Summoner Necro was my 2nd favorite character after my Sorceress (with a close 3rd Paladin), but it was pretty boring playing with him overall.
The whole theme and playstyle simply don't fit with the more proactive action-focused multi-skill Diablo 3 combat. And I'm glad they moved away from it.
At least with the WD you have to actually use other spells to make pets work (Firebomb or Dart with the summon passive, Big Bad Voodoo timing, defensive spells management). Managed to make my EU one work up to MP 4-5 with really really sub-par gear, 110% focused on summons. I'm sure someone with top gear could make them work even better.
Thank god we dont have such a class any more.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Twoflower-2131/hero/47336841
I'd love to have at least one skill that does a good damage output, there is no reason to not have one.
Now, it is true that our summons now are far more powerful than what our summons were capable of before, but the trade-off has been far less to summon, and less variety in our summons. So, really it's not such a bad trade-off, but I personally would perfer the original creature types in summons (skeletons) compared to what we have now (fetishes, dogs).
Speaking of which, Indimix, I think you should check this out.
http://www.diablofan...-in-my-opinion/
It's a forum featuring a WD helmet that turns you into a skeleton and summons two illusionary ones. They don't do any damage, but they can snare things with grasp of the dead + break jail effects from jailers, and the effect supposebly procs about 100% of the time. Apparently with the right set up, you can have a reletively large army of creatures when you combine this helm with a few other things and specific skills. Apparently, it's pretty fun and a little OP.
I come across a WD using it in Brawling once, and it was extremely cool, and very effective.
*Edit: Apparently, the helm is also really cheap, another bonus.
I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Change the damage output of the dogs to 100/120% of your damage per hit. There you go, amazing pets. And they hit slow enough to not become imbalanced. Now.. they hit for 9%.. that is complete trash.
My dogs rock...when I blow them up.
And, yeah, the explosion damage is nice, but they have to die to make it work.
Ground Stomp (Trembling Stomp, Foot of the Mountain, Avalanche)
Leap (Call of Arreat)
Sprint (Run Like the Wind, Gangway)
Ignore Pain (Bravado, Contempt for Weakness)
Caltrops (Jagged Spikes, Bait the Trap)
Smoke Screen (Choking Gas)
Gloom (Night Bane)
Blinding Flash (Faith in the Light)
Breath of Heaven (Circle of Scorn, Blazing Wrath, Infused with Light)
Serenity (Reap What is Sown, Instant Karma)
Inner Sanctuary (Forbidden Palace)
Summon Zombie Dogs (Rabid Dogs, Burning Dogs)
Horrify (Ruthless Terror)
Spirit Walk (Umbral Shock, Severance)
Hex (Jinx, Angry Chicken, Painful Transformation, Unstable Form)
Frost Nova (Frozen Mist, Deep Freeze, Bone Chill)
Diamond Skin (Prism, Mirror Skin, Diamond Shards)
Slow Time (Time Warp, Stretch Time)
Teleport (Calamity)
There isn't a single spell categorized as "defensive" that doesn't have at least one rune that gives it an offensive use. Summon Zombie Dogs is not the only one. Can we stop pretending like Zombie Dogs is an offensive ability because it has two runes that increase its damage? That's obviously not how it works.
By that logic every single defensive ability is actually an offensive ability and should be massively buffed because none of them do enough damage.
EDIT
Just as another point, this isn't a D3 vs D2 topic since even the great D2 development team saw fit to nerf the volume of summons. 1.10 (in October of 2003) had a massive nerf to the # of skeletons a Necromancer could summon because... gasp... even THEY thought it was bad to have 50+ minions running around doing *everything* for you. If you had 27 skeletons and 27 skeleton mages pre-1.10 you were left with 11 of each post-1.10.
It was a shitty, cheesy, lazy way to play and even the D2 team saw it and fixed it in time for ladder competitions. DAMN THEM D2 DEVELOPERS!