After testing the pet resistance rework, and looking at other’s opinions for pets, consensus seems to be:
-Skeletons are bit too squishy.
-Some items and devotions for pet are uninteresting and/or bad.
Outside of these 2 pain points, everything seems to be mostly fine now. The foundation seems to be good enough to refine and diversify pets gearing. I do have a few ideas for it, main 2 wishes rn are more ascended stats for pet builds (specifically regular/generic affixes that’s workable as fill-ins); and re-introducing pet resistance in gears, but in small quantity (2-5%) and harder to acquire compared to live version, think of it as the equivalent of max resistance increase for pet. Before listing out more ideas though, is there any more pet changes coming with this playtest or is it saved for the next major patch?
I’m not actually so sure skeletons are too squishy so much as their variant builds could use more cooldown reduction to skeletons.
The latest play test notes have buffed skeleton tankiness through armor, but I really LOVE the necromancer fantasy of overcoming their squishiness by … Summoning MOAR.
Also making them overcoming their pet resilience problem this way gives a distinct identity from other pet builds.
I can’t definitively say they don’t need more tankiness on their endgame items either, I just think more cooldown to resummoning them largely solves the same problem without risk of making their DPS sky rocket because they stop dying almost at all.
Yea I think if I were to elaborate on the skeleton parts, I think it’s that they’re glass cannons, but with currently too much focus on glass part, with the cooldown being too long to actually treating them as expendable. One currently available solution I’ve seen is Ritualist Vitality Skeletons to stack an enormous amount of RR and really bring out the cannon part. Another available solution is Lost Souls set for extra CDR to them much more expendable. Both of these solutions are reliant on classes and sets, so skeletons build without access to either really feel the pain.
I actually don’t want Skeletons to have flat out defense increase either due to, as you said, they would just become cannons with no drawbacks. I did list out another wish/idea from another thread to give us something that would allow us to summon skeletal priests, basically less DPS but can heal.
I personally think we might need to increase the cdr for skeleton in undead legion, assuming that we treat them as fragile minions. Skeletons can deal good dmg, but it happens in some very specific combo such as ritualist. Other variants of skeletons (cold archer, aether renevant, bysmiel lightning, acid, aether using cryptstalker, fire) cannot come close.
There are plenty of possibilities, but I’d like something new. For example, giving Raise Skeletons charges. That way, players would have a specific time window to kill enemies before worrying about cooldowns.
Would love to have a skill that explodes my skeletons (perhaps granted by item or set), then we build cdr, then watch as we have homing TNT! :laughing: This perhaps may solve for frailness of skellies while diversifying minion playstyle/position!
:laughing: This perhaps may solve for frailness of skellies while diversifying minion playstyle/position!