Acolyte stuff

[grimlock9999]

Hi players and developers. Thanks for the game. I’ve been playing a decent amount lately and thought these observations on minions might help:

Intro: I’ve only played to level 30-40 with a few characters. Going past that seems like a tremendous grind, and it looks like the eventual game will be much worse. I’d like to put my vote in that last epoch does not become a grindy, worklike game. POE and Grim Dawn are doing that already, and I’m similarly unexcited about spending days grinding away at them. When the Beta launched, you made XP gain slower. How about just reversing this for the rest of Beta?

Further, there’s an existing thread I agree with, suggesting that if you want players to help more, don’t make it so that it takes us a whole day to find out that a skill is bugged. Allow us to respec easier in beta at least!

1. Items

I haven’t found any minion or acolyte specific uniques yet. Perhaps they don’t exist yet, or only exist at higher levels. I’m also aware that the devs might be balancing around item interactions. Until the wiki gets better or a build planner exists, items seem irrelevant.

2. Skeleton archers:
   I just spent a whole day to find out that the skeleton archers multishot does not seem to work. I see no cone like ability coming from them, at least.

2a) Poison and bleed
Poison skeleton archers looked promising, but it’s hard to get excited about poison, bleed, damage over time, etc. when the information about such things is so opaque. Does a working multishot skill apply multiple stacks of poison on a single target? Can a single arrow apply bleed and poison at once? Do poisons from any source stack, or only from the same source? It seems like it would take 5 minutes of developer time to write a clearer explanation in the skill tree, so I request that please.

3. Skeleton mages:
   Projectile speed is very slow. perhaps a node to increase projectile speed would make a nice trade off between just going for more damage

4. Skeleton warriors
   6 of these, plus wraiths, just clutter up the screen too much. It’s very hard to see what’s going on. Hard to get your cursor on the enemy to see their mods. Hard not to die from minion block. The volume of AOE boss damage means that high health skeletons are the only realistic choice, which means you have to sacrifice damage, which means for high health enemies, you get skeleton warriors and wraiths bashing away, pushing them across multiple screens before they die. There might be an option for skeleton warriors as meathsields, but my foray into pure defensive stats for them saw them still die very quickly. Very unattractive main skill at the moment for these reasons.

5. Curse skill
   The stun increase, fear and chill of this skill have no noticable effect. Enemies never run away as fear suggests, chill does nothing, and there never seems to be a stun animation, which would be hard to see because of the clutter melee minions make.
   The clear specialisations of this skill, which only take half the points, mean that after you take the useful nodes, you are left with duration and aoe nodes that are very unappealing. I didn’t even bother trying the 20 second cooldown option of the bone prison. 20 second cooldown may as well be no skill at all.

6. Wraiths
   The wraiths have low aggro range, which means taking movespeed on them feels useless. They are good meatshields with low damage, but taking actual life or slower degen on them seems wasted as the degen accelerates exponentially, so you get ridiculously low real increase to utility from those nodes.

7. Bone golem
   I love this skill as a walking buff for your other minions.
   As a damage dealer ( tried poison), it was laughably inneffective. It seemed like those nodes would need a hundred times better stats to make them usable. 5 nodes for a 50% chance to poison on a slow attack speed minion, which is now so squishy it dies before it can attack, and if it does, it ticks a tiny amount of poison. No thanks.

8. Spectral things
   It would be nice to have a clearer indication that you have actually cast the spell. There is a delay between clicking and any minion appearing, and there is no way of telling if it is a minion from this cast or a previous cast. At the moment you need to either spam click it, or constantly check the toolbar to see if it goes on cooldown.
   do these guys have any use for minion stats like life or defences?

9. Flame wraiths
   As it is, these guys hit like snowflakes, and there is no tree for them, so I assume there is one coming? Is there any point to using them in their current state?

General:

• The second Epoch is really hard to find the waypoints at the bottom left of screen. You have to figure out to zoom out to realise they are there, then you have to drag screen to get down there to click on them.

• minions sometimes do not join you in a new area, and you have to resummon them all

[magaiti]

I haven’t found any minion or acolyte specific uniques yet.

Endgame viable items:
Doublet of Onos Tull
Reach of the Grave
The Fang
Leveling items:
The Claw
Beast King
Eterra’s Path
Keepers Gloves
Arboreal Circuit

It seems like it would take 5 minutes of developer time to write a clearer explanation in the skill tree, so I request that please.

Implementing verbose skill explanations in game is a lot of work.
Writing an essay on every skill node is only half of the problem.
It is then required to design and implement user interface capable of providing large amounts of textual information in a digestible manner.
Unless you want each node to explode into a tooltip with a wall of text twice the size of a screen.

Skeleton warriors
The volume of AOE boss damage means that high health skeletons are the only realistic choice, which means you have to sacrifice damage

Don’t sacrifice damage. What they need for survivability is not a reserve of health, but an effective way to regain it.
Maximize their health leech and DPS.
Skeletons have nodes for leech, dps, and bleed chance.
The leech nodes allow them to leech from physical damage, which includes bleed.
Necromancer has passives that improve health leech.
Lich has passive that adds bleed chance.
Maximize their health leech rate, and they’ll become self-sufficient.

Curse skill

Stun increase doesn’t scale well, just forget about it.
Chill has noticeable slowing effect, unless something got broken very recently.
Fear does not seem to make enemies flee, but it should also prevent them from using skills (i guess they retain ability to use their default attack, but I hope it prevents them from using high-damage abilities for a short time. Not 100% sure though)
A go-to spec is max area (5 pts), chill(1pt), fear(1pt), increased damage taken (8 pt), mana efficiency (5pt)
20-second cooldown might be too much, but it was added to counterbalance the fact that the prison can be sacrificed into 14 blood wraiths.
But yes, I think it was nerfed too hard by this cooldown.

Wraiths

Wraith can do formidable damage if you maximize the necrotic damage line (2 nodes, 5 points each).
They can also stack poison effectively, due to their numbers and attack speed.
more life and slower degen are useless, I agree.

Bone golem

yep, poison is useless due to low attack speed. Maybe in a dedicated poison build, but even then.
Usually I only find these nodes useful:

• health gain on hit (works off each enemy hit, and their attacks are AoE)
• twins (doubles health gain potential)
• movement speed aura
• aggro (not sure about this one actually)
• Spectral Golem (cool looks and survivability)

Flame wraiths
As it is, these guys hit like snowflakes

Yep, same goes for Blood Wraiths and Putrid Wraiths. They don’t seem to benefit from Summon Wraith nodes.
I expected Blood Wraith to hit like a truck, looking at all those “deal 120% more damage” nodes in the Sacrifice Spell,
but as it turns out, three times zero is still zero. Only useful as body count for Sacrifice.

[grimlock9999]

Thanks Magaiti! A super helpful post.