A Realization about "minion classes" and suggestions

[Zarono]

So as a short preface, i began this game as a necromancer, because i like summoners, it’s my jam, however i was swift to also try out Beastmaster (because summoners are my jam) and these two classes became my most played, most powerful builds for the majority of my time in last epoch as the “OG summoners” after a while i decided to give mages a shot and they were alright, but i just couldn’t tolerate sentinels playstyle as the only melee class (since i don’t play my beastmaster as melee)
however recently, upon reaching the mastery select on my third sorcerer (since respeccing is a pain in the ass i just made 3 sorcerers so i could have 1 of each element) i noticed that the mastery ability of runemasters (which aren’t available yet) was called “runic elemental” naturally, i could only assume that this meant it would be a minion class, and i got excited for another summoner option. then i got thinking to myself “wait, rogues have a mastery called falconer, i bet that’s a minion class too…” and it was only THEN that i learned that forge guards are a minion class, and now i have one at level 50 after an all day grind yesterday…

The Realization

All 5 of the base classes are meant to have a minion oriented mastery, and for obvious reasons they are meant to play differently from one another.

We have:
Necromancers: Strength in numbers, Quanitity > Quality

Beastmasters: Individual, more powerful minions with their own baked in abilities.

Forgeguards: Minions that gain power from your power (something i’ve been wanting for necromancer since i started playing, and now understand why that isn’t the case).

and so now i’m anticipating runemasters and falconers to have a unique design philosophy, and will comment on my ideas for those below.

The Suggestions

So for falconer, i’d actually already made a design concept here: (Rogue concept design part 4 (Falconer) - #2 by CaiusMartius) that i stand by (as it accidentally was a unique playstyle from necromancer and beastmaster, which are the only minion classes i had experience with at the time i made that post) focusing on a single, unkillable minion to augment your own abilities rather than playing mindless army or squad commander.

However for rune masters i got thinking: “What would be a different playstyle than those already available?” and after a few scrapped ideas, i came up with one which i felt i could present here: Modular, variable power minions.

now, what do i mean by that? well lets start with the single runemaster ability we know of: Runic elemental
what if it read something like this: “Channel for up to 3 seconds to summon a runic elemental with stats and duration scaling based on how much mana you spent while channeling.”

so that way you could decide “do i want a small army of 10 or so small bois to keep my enemies busy or maximize my minion elemental procs, or do i want a pair of big tanky bois to dish out hurt and hold a bosses attention?”

and then to follow that, what if, perhaps, you had an ability called something like “Runic Armor” and it read something like “Equip a suit of magic armor to yourself or an ally, increasing defenses for a period of time, increased effect on runic elementals.”
and it could have such talents as elemental damage auras which would be larger on elementals, increased life regen (which would effectively increase the duration of elementals) apply bonus elemental damage/ status chance on hit, thus granting it to elementals and so on.

you could then have another ability like “Runic weapon” which would be similar to the armor variant, but could also be used to change up the playstyle of runic elementals, like giving them a bow, granting them access to certain spells, causing them to dual wield and melee attack rapidly, among other things.

Basically my idea with runemasters is: You get one type of minion, but you get plenty of options to deck it out (and yourself) and alter it’s playstyle to suit any situation.

Any thoughts?

[darkdeal]

The falconer having an unkillable falcon that augments your own attacks is exactly what I want it to be. Similar to the hunter in Ragnarok Online.

I could see the Rune Master having a minion similar to that of Animate Guardian in PoE. You would basically be applying runes to equipment to animate them. The equipment would all act together as a single “minion”. You could animate a body armor, sword, shield, helmet, etc. to “equip” the minion. Minion would have base stats that scale with the gear equipped to it.

I could also see Rune Master getting “golems”. Apply runes to big boulders to animate them as golems.

I don’t really want the Rune Master to become a ‘minion’ class though. I would prefer the minions of the Falconer and Rune Master be augmentations to the actual character.

For those who don’t know about Ragnarok Online. Here is an example of the falcon gameplay. Ragnarok Online Philippines 190 MAX ASPD AutoBlitz Sniper - YouTube

Would be cool if the Animated minion of the Rune Master copied your attack. Could even have attacks that specifically require the Animated minion and had a neat combo looking animation. Sort of like Chrono Trigger ‘Tech skills’.

[Zarono]

what you suggested gave me another idea for a potential rune master design (also i’m sorry you feel that way, but i’m pretty confident it’s going to be a minion class, at least, if the devs are consistent with their design philosophy)

like, you get a runic elemental, which just slowly walks around with its own baked in damage aura, but has no other attack of it’s own, and it serves as the “minion core” and you could have things like “animate sword” to create a stationary, turret like minion, that a runic elemental would then PICK UP and proceed to go around attacking enemies with, animate a pair of runic boots that stomp the ground in a stationary location to deal aoe damage, but they’ll attack to an elemental to increase it’s movement speed and cause aoe tremors wherever it walks, i’d also suggest a runic shield to taunt enemies, but then we’re stepping into forge guard territory, which was why i had suggested it to be how it was in the OP.

[Arcades]

I’m picturing the Falconer like Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown – the summoner is an active playstyle with a hovering bird that does attacks/combos. It would be distinct from the other summoners in that the PC is more of a focus, but the minion can still be leveled and plays an important role.

I also think it fits the Rogue better. There may be stealth mechanics that lets the falcon draw aggro, but ultimately rogues are fluid/active playstyles in this genre and it wouldn’t make sense for one to just sit back and let pets do all the work. I think it will play very much like the Hunter class in World of Warcraft – there will be a symbiosis between the human and the minion.

[Zarono]

that’s more or less the idea from the rogue concept i linked in the OP here, if you hadn’t checked it out.