Remove Weapon Damage from Skeletons (Necro Pets) and buff the Pets

[Maya]

I think it’s hard to tell what Crate’s balance team knows about Hellhounds when I’m the only one who’s even posting Hellhound builds in the first place. I know you refer to SR75 as a joke, but even then, numerous Nemesis monsters can get out of hand if you get the wrong mutators (Regen + resistance buff + health buff).

I intend to have a go at it soonTM, will post link here along with the build thread depending on how it goes. This was my original attempt though: Woof - Pet Cabalist (but a lot has changed since then)

With regards to Skeletons and AoE, my experience is that Skeletons are okay with AoE pools as long as you cap their resistances and give them some sort of survivability boost. What really kills Skeletons more than other pets, however, is shotgun pools and other rapid fire attacks. Ekket’Zul at Wave 159 and Korvaak at Wave 169 are most guilty of this, and they are much harder to fight than other potential Nemeses because Ekket has that late arrival animation when all the other bosses are toppled onto you already and Korvaak’s death animation means that you have to focus on 2-3 fast Nemeses while Korvaak has time to do the swirling fireball attack.

I should have specified, when I say AoE, I am also including and non single target attacks and not just pools and such.

Like, if you have 10 pets and they can only die 1 by 1, it gives them safety in numbers.
But if they can all disappear in a second, while also taking much longer to replenish, the quality of quantity is no longer there or atleast not near anywhere as effective as it has to be to compete with other options.

Vitality damage as a whole got hit the worst from the RR nerfs, which would also explain the frustration with Lost Souls set in particular. Super-bosses having 131% Vitality resistance makes using Vitality pets to fight them practically impossible, as you just can’t burst them down with any sort of speed before their most damaging attacks make mincemeat out of you.

I am honestly a bit puzzled with the RR nerf. It feels much worse than it should be given the the RR lost is 5% from a mastery. And I am not even talking about Superbosses, but in general.

Healer mobs however are what has become a pain for me rather than the likes of Ravager and Callagadra.

What I think hampers Skeletons a lot as well is that outside of a few select items, the modifiers to Skeletons aren’t nearly as good as some of the other pets. I will also post my thoughts about other Skeleton builds, as I always feel something is missing when I attempt to build around them in a significant way.

Agreed and personally, it feels more restricting when building around it. Perhaps I should test them ingame more rather than fiddling just in GT, but is kind of hard to make a build that looks like something I would want to make ingame.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I had the most fun with Skeletons when I use the Burning Blade and Ascendant Cowl MI to summon 8 of them at once. I would recommend raising the number of Skeletons summoned as a baseline from 3 to 4, or maybe keep it at 3 and introduce +1 Summon when you hit 12/12 in Undead Legion and maybe +2 at 22/12 (to encourage hardcapping the skill instead of leaving it at 20/12).

Aye, I can accept that they are to be fragile and replaceable, but provided it is just as easy to get them back up as it is to lose them. So more summoned at the same time could work.

I’m going to give Lightning Skeletons a test this weekend, as similarly to complementing Ghol’s, I think having double Ravens provide a lot of AoE DPS will allow Skeletons to do what they do best. EDIT: I don’t have my traditional means to save builds, so I’ll place the Grimtools here: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/62aAeaD2

I was going to cross my fingers and hope for the best, but…

Okay, so I’ve done some preliminary Crucible runs with Lightning Skeletons. Even with 2,200% Lightning Damage (with the potential of adding another 1,500% on top of that), I’m only getting around 4 minutes to beat 150-160, and I’m getting relentlessly swarmed in 160-170, either from Aleksander + the heal bots in Wave 161 or the really tough Shar’Zul + Father Kymon + Alkamos combo in Wave 166. I don’t know how well @Maya’s Will-o-Wisp build does in Crucible, but compared to non pet-builds getting < 6 minute runs easy, Skeleton builds are just not viable in comparison.

Screw it, just give Skeletons a straight flat damage bump. Whether it’s in the base skill or from Will of the Crypt, they’re just not performing for how many skill points you need to make them work.

That is sad to hear, but definitely something I can understand.

That said, none of my builds perform well in Cruci atm time wise. All of them are heavily tuned towards SR and superbosses, so Crucible performance had always been more about Resilience rather than fast clears.

Someone like @Plasmodermic or @sigatrev will need to chime in on how fast Pets can clear Cruci atm. Since 5:04 (Plasmo’s Ghol Ritualist) was the record in 1.1.6.2.

You would even turn Skellies into birbs…

This!
Why not reducing base CD from 18 to 12. Yep! Minus 6 seconds.
With capped Unholy Legion you get to 4.
CDR pushes it to 0-2~~ (% works from base if i recall right)
Spectral Crown (other legs) lets them be spammable even without capped/much CDR
Maybe adjusting CDR items a bit, but letting reach low CD even without any of them. You catch the drift.

So what??
Skellies need to get spamable, simple as that. (only filled with water)

Wouldnt make them overpowered or anything, just finally fun to play.

But imagine if they also had wings and the ability to shoot lightning…

I’ll address the vitality thing first: the high resistance to this damage source has a thematic purpose only to it (seems to be) And as much as I understand it, I also don’t. Changes to it are likely not to happen at this point so oh well.

I believe someone once told me that it was balanced around the rather high Vitality RR provided by Devouring Swarm. Having only a T3 devotion provide -%RR is also odd (Rattosh).

Personally, I would love to see it more homogenized similar to other resistances and RR, but… yeah…

Lowering the cool down could be an answer but I think a different, unique method, like having the skill almost like an aura that spits out a skeleton (Or more) every x period of time and adding a bit of sturdiness through items or some such with something that will help with aggro like taunt might make them reach a point where we can place them in a build where they are the highlight and not just an after though to blightfiends.

Interesting proposal and would be pretty cool to see how it would work out, but given the stage of development in GD, I don’t think we will get something so different from what already is

It is important to point out that it appears there is still some life left to development and small changes here and there over time can get things to a better spot. No one said that Crate has to make huge changes all at one time. There will always be players willing to shell out a few $ (like me) for small content here and there.

I believe that Crate’s stance on this is that there will never be non cosmetic minor DLCs sold like that, which I kind of respect, but in turn would mean that it will be either a free update, or not at all (since a major DLC is not planned atm).

Anyone got a video of a skele centric build go up against a maxed summoned celestial totem? On paper that seems a nightmare. Let alone doing SR 60.

No videos, but SR 75-76 should be pretty doable if you pull 1 by 1, even with the RR nerf.
Before all these little changes, I even managed to take down Crate with it (a hell alot of luck involved with me piloting like my life depended on it + many previous failed attempts).

Imo, the only real thing about totems is that you need to avoid getting swarmed and helps if you have a displacement rune or something on your medal to get out of it if you end up getting surrounded. Kind of wish they would pop up a few at a time rather than all at once, but I am ok with them the way they are atm.

On Grim Dawn I think it can work using the Korvaak/Kupa death mechanic. It go like this: Skeleton lives and happy > skeleton dead and spawn another same class skeleton > newly spawned skeleton have spawn animation that last 5 second(like korvaak) and unselectable until it start attacking > skeleton lives and then the skill cooldown started > skeleton is killed once again and if the cooldown is already up the process above repeats, if the skill is still on cooldown the skeleton is dead permanently and the summon skeleton skill needs to be recasted.

Would certainly be interesting to see, but imo, the CD would need to be much shorter than that considering that Transmuted blightfiends can be Spawned at 3Sec CD and even though you can only have 4 of them at once, they bring much more to the table and with a much better performance.

Reading these walls of text like

I heard you like walls, I so made another wall to add to your collection of walls