I’m thinking if i do a 2nd playthru once i’m done w/ my 1st char, i want to try a pure summoner.
My build now is a death knight (soldier/necro), and my skelles are being 1 shot’d by beefier boss’s (such as the guy at the end of undercity). Admittedly i havnt dedicated any devo points to pets, but my base summon skill for them is 15/16, which shouldnt make them THAT easy to kill yet (wouldnt expect them to hold up in steps dungeon or late-game boss fights as they stand now, though)
So has anybody gone pure necro yet, focusing mainly/only on your pets as your offense? Does the devo constellations (and of course gear with pet bonus’s) really make that big a diff in their offense/defense capability? Or are they still somewhat weak regardless, and the dev’s need to beef them up in a future patch?
Of course they are going to be weaker than a briarthorn as you can have 9+ of them, thats why the 2nd passive reduces cooldowns and skill cost…so you can resummon them.
Imho hybrid doesn’t work, either its a pet build or its not.
As far as going pure necro, the game is designed around taking two masteries, sure it might work but would be better with a second mastery.
Of course i’m aware that the skellies are not meant to be 100% comparable to the larger single-unit summons.
I was just curious as to -how- effective they were, properly invested into…as opposed to my experience w/ them thus far, being mostly bare-bones (pun intended) summon’s.
And given that the necromancer class basically gives the player a small strike-team worth of summons, if anybody has managed to stay pure necro and remained effective thruout the game thus far.
Given your experiences in testing, could the skellies use a general buff in their offense/defense, especially if you want to take your char beyond vet?
As i stated, my summons are only back-up for this current char, so i havnt thoroughly researched into the devotion system for applicable clusters, but it seems to be that they are severely lacking in elemental defenses, and their dps seems ok against trash mobs, but dont seem to do much against higher-order hero monsters or boss’s.
I was using them as my main/only attack for many, many levels and using Master of Death gives them +OA etc, I’ve got Shepard’s Call on Reap spirit so the skellys (and all pets get the boost from that) and the next skill I was going to add is Call of the Grave for more of a pet boost.
Not gone beyond Vet so I cannot give personal experience, but there have been discussions in testing as to whether the Skelly’s are possibly a touch too powerful in Ultimate, so I cannot see you having a problem
In my limited testing, Death Knight cannot (and obviously should not) match a Cabalist or Ritualist in Raise Skeleton offense/defense. However, I have had some surprising success rolling a Death Knight focused on aether damage and utilizing the Raise the Dead proc in Revenant. In fact, this is the only build besides DaShiv’s that I know of that seems to utilize that proc in any meaningful way.
My biggest issue with Death Knight is the woeful lack of gear support along vitality line. This could just be a failing of my imagination and time invested but even if it isn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if Crate addresses the issue at some point. (If it even is an issue.)
Now, I am on the hunt for something similar to Bonescavenger’s Deathgrips that scales the summons along player bonuses instead of pet bonuses. That would be a great addition to DK.
I would say skeletons just get stronger after veteran. You get more stuff to support them with. More devotions, more skills, better gear. Just played through veteran with cabalist and i gotta say it was probably the easiest playthrough of my 800 hours of gd.
Single target damage is through the roof. Area damage is just same with skeletons proccing flame torrent and blight fiend with blight burst and guardians gaze. And that’s not all, i get more pets through black grimoire and savage relic.
So even tho i haven’t played in ultimate with it yet, i’m pretty sure summoner can handle itself.
