Necromancer "Summoner" Feedback lvl.80+

[Angry_Roleplayer]

1. No way to survive higher waves. You basically just run around and try not to die. No sustain. No high ward, no high hp. No high armour. No resists.
2. Life regeneration is pointless, base values are too low (Reconstruction passive is useless)
3. Minion life regeneration is pointless, base values are too low to scale with
4. No leech to survive (you actually need to go melee Lich and scale damage for that)
5. Minions are incredibly squishy. They have practically no void protection. When VOID BROS arrive, they all melt them into the void itself.
6. Skeletons melt like snowflakes under the sun. Literally useless in 50+ waves. And very expensive to resurrect, so eventually you have to give up and just summon Wraiths first.
7. Skeleton Warriors are useless as soon as you get Reach of the Grave. You designed them for a reason, so at least buff them to compete with the rest or give them a separate unique!
8. Minion base damage is too low, even with 400% crit multi i barely see 1000+ crits on any types of minions. Now compare that to juicy 30000 crits on melee/spellcaster builds.
9. Golem deals practically no damage for such a huge investment as he is. I mean, he’s a tanky dude, but he occupies a god damn slot! Gotta be more useful than just a walking bag of hp.
10. Wraiths have very poor scaling, they are melee attackers, so they literally benefit nothing from the skill tree or passive tree. Damage they do is actually very poor and only reason why the even kill at all is MASS.
11. Basic Wraiths are still bugged and do not attack monsters AT ALL
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYq-NPfYE0s
12. No real movement skill. Transplant just have no real space on a skill bar.
13. No real way to recover/return except for RIP Blood - Mana Feast

[Nacho_Vidal]

As a +80 necro summoner i fully support this

[Fetznfritz]

I basically agree with all of ur points in comparrison to other classes.
But is it the way we wanna go that every build can run waves 200+?
Really, hopefully, no!

This should not get a Arena only game… so imo other builds need nervs… its ridiculous how easy a even bad geared Warpath Sentinel as Forge Guard and also Void Knight can reach Waves 150+

The bigger problem is, as i leveled up the strongest phase of the Summoner Build was at around lvl 75. Now i m lvl 89, improved the build as much as i could with hundrets of Mats but its getting weaker and weaker.
This said i dont mean Arena. Its my experience in Monolith runs. Its getting harder and harder to do 15+ Runs while u can whirl brain afk and much faster with a Sentinel like forever.

So, the question is whats the way we are going? 15 OP brain afk Superhero Masters or an ARPG wheres a line at some point u cant cross…

Of course we need better balance but in which direction?

[Tozo]

Maybe a skill that shares the damage between the summoner and the minions would help in survivabiltiy, or just put it in the passive tree, like 60% damage reduction max.
Or a high tier passive, that kills all your minions to prevent lethal damage.

[dictan]

While I do agree that necromancer and minions as a whole could use some buffs I don’t agree with all points made:

1. Necromancer is very good at generating ward, as well as maintaining very high armour and resist. My current necro maintains 200-400 (around 40-70% of my health)ward while moving though maps and 400-900+( around 70-160% of my health) ward on sustained fights. I also constantly maintain between 2900-3k+ armour which is about 75% physical damage reduction at level 79. Out of my 400- 500 resistances (40-50% reduction) almost half is from my passives.

Quite plainly necromancer gets a lot of defensive stats. I think the real problem lies with high level scaling being a bit overturned and the fact that passive/skill points need to be condensed. We are being stretched to thin on all of these 8-10-20+ etc passives that would be better suited to be shrunk down to a 1-3-5 setup so we can get more power per point and more skills/ passives we need.

2. Life regen doesn’t feel pointless to me. I currently hover at 100-150 regen which is about 20-25%of my life per second. That’s with only half investment and average gear. Those aren’t bad numbers for a sustain mechanic that was more than likely meant to be supplemental alongside ward or leech. I’m fully confident that at full investment I could get to around 40-50% health per second, but my build current build wouldn’t allow that due my need to use Urzil’s Pride for mana regen.

Points 6.-10.

In general I think the Devs were just being conservative with minions. Its currently very easy to get 30+ minions on screen which can multiply into a very big problem if they were to heavy handed on damage/survivability.

That being said I do think less points sinks on the skill tree ( more points to use and more power per point) and better scaling skill passives would really help. For example every defensive minion skill should have flat defense and % scaling since they can’t dodge well and get hit by everything. Innate AOE damage resistance may also have to be a thing.

13. Wandering spirit mana regen, and Urzil’s Pride + Empty the Graves are actually very competitive for mana regen. Wandering gives you large waves of mana when specced right and Urzil currently gives me 60+% mana regen. If I actually specced for armour it could give me far more. Combined with a t5 wand mana regen affix and mana problems are almost irrelevant.

[Zerondar]

Wall of text (sorry)

1. Yes and NO, You can easely get high HP, armor and resists… as a summoner you usually just choose not to get those stats.
   Summoners are not supposed to be really tanky though, they are supposed to let their pets do the work (or atleast the majority of the work) and avoid getting hit.
   The problem in higher arena waves is usually mixed: Mobs ignoring your 70+ minions and rushing the player while starting to 1 hit kill the necromancer. Minions starting to get 1 hit killed by any random AOE.

2. Yes, you are right Life Regenaration is crappy at the moment (especially compared to Leech). This however is not a necro only problem .

3. While minion life regen is crap (which is a problem for Primalist), Necromancer pets in my opinion should not even get life regenaration (besides Golem). Necromancers are based on throw away pets that you can easely sacrifice when needed. Heck sacrificing them usually makes for even stronger pets.
   Imagine players being able to out HP regen the life drained from Wraith and sacrificed Blood Wraiths… Meaning that near every Wraith and Blood Wraith you summon becomes a permanent npc unless killed by a mob. Er… no thanks.

4. No Leech to survive is not really a valid argument, Leech is too strong right now, because the other ways to regain HP are underpowered. Not every class should be able to Leech HP (though… having a talent that makes all your minions give the summoner HP would be… really great! This could either be % of minions damage leeched or a % chance on minion attack to get xx HP per hit)
   I can understand a design that is based round a master of minions that should avoid most damage and be fairly fragile. But yes i do agree with the base problem of getting hardly any worthwile way to regen HP while being a minion build.

5. (and 6 which is basicly the same thing)
   Minions die to easely from AOE, most games fix this problem by giving pets a talent to severely reduce aoe damage, it is true that watching 75% of your minions die from 1 huge AOE cluster is not fun.
   This is probably a reason why Summoner Necro is “bad” in high lvl arena.

6. For me Skeleton Warriors are more a thing to use while lvl’ing up, afterwards you move towards mages or archers. You use wraiths or Golem to soak up the damage to let your Skeletons Mages/Archers survive.
   But yeah the Skelleton Warriors drop dead from mobs looking at them.
   I am guessing that eventually a unique item will be added that gives more survivability to your skeleton warriors and more damage, in order to not make them overpowered when lvl’ing up.

7. Yes Necro pets do not do huge damage numbers… but seeing you can usually have 70 active pets at any given time… i find it to be normal that they do not do 30k crits. The real problem is minion AI sometimes pushing mobs away so you hardly get minions that are able to attack the mob. Remember 70 (or more) minions doing 200 to 600 damage… is between 14.000 and 42.000 damage. Those numbers are not counting your pets doing 50% on hit bleeds and poison (talent and unique item).
   If talented right summoner necros do not really lack damage potential, huge amounts of small numbers can easely beat 1 huge crit.
   Just minion AOE damage is limited (blood golem aoe is… er well it exists i guess), Skeleton Mages have some nice AOE, meelee minions don’t really have any way to do aoe damage at the moment (besides sacrificing them).

8. Golem is not meant for massive damage. It is exactly that a walking bag of HP which attracts aggro, however this is probably the only pet on the necro side that should get some decent life regen (through talents) to regen it’s HP back to full in a decent timeframe. Golems even could use a talent like “self sacrifice” when the Necromancer takes lethal damage, it instead kills the Golem (can not summon a new Golem for xx seconds after the “self sacrifice”).

9. Wraiths are… probably the most OP minion we currently have, because they are so easely massed, especially because after you get 30+ or so of them and you can start chain sacrificing them into even more pets (Blood Wraiths).

10. Oh, i never even considered that as a bug, to me it’s more “spawn wraiths in a location and they’ll attack anything close to that location”, as they do not really follow your character.
    If you want them to follow you, sacrifice them and change them into Blood Wraiths.
    But yeah… i guess it could be a bug?

11. Saying no movement skill and exactly mentioning the movement skill necros have…
    it’s not because you don’t want to place it on your skillbar that it doesn’t exist.
    It’s just currently not as OP as lunge and teleport.
    The reason is simple… Transplant currently has no skill tree, so it is kind of crappy (especially compared to teleport), so i’m not agreeing to this one because we need to wait for the movement skill to get a skill tree for it.

12. Recover / return and you speak of a mana regen skill?
    If you want mana regen, you also have wandering souls (infusing souls) which gives 2 mana (not much i know) for each spirit that expires, or get more max mana and mana regen from gear.
    Necromancer already has it easy to make 70+minions, but it is limited by mana (regen) and (if talented) the cooldown on Wraiths. Personally i find having 70 minions on screen to be enough. Also do not forget about multiplayer… imagine having 4 or 5 summoner builds… each with 70+ minions running arround… oh my god the horror! My poor PC would probably commit suicide!

My problems with summoner necro:
-Minion AI could use some work, the attack target key is nice, but a move to area key (or stop attacking and retreat to player character) to be needed.

• Minion AI (part 2) Minions pushing mobs arround, making it so only a few (if any) are able to attack the enemy.

• Minions are really squishy vs AOE.
  Minions quickly dying vs single target damage is not really a problem vs some mobs (considering how easy it is to pump out new ones)… but vs aoe it is a problem.

• Minions collision block the necromancer, so … you can easely get screwed by your own minions. This is avoidable by using the necro version of teleport… but that skill isn’t used due to not having a skill tree at this moment in time.

• Mobs running straight past 70 minions to attacking the Necromancer which is really really far away (escpecially in arena)… Bleeping teleporting bears!!!

• Destroying boxes is a pain in the *** if you are using minion skills only.