Return Raise the Dead (Revenant devotion) back to pet scaling

Proposal: Return skeletons from Raise the Dead back to pet scaling with full effect from flat damage bonuses.

In the recent xpac theorycrafting thread, the community has posted more than a half-dozen pet builds that used Raise the Dead, and there’s already been at least two separate discussions in that thread about the issues and general incompatibility between pet builds and player-scaled pets. This dissonance will continue to grow with the actual release of the xpac, making it now time to reconsider the scaling basis for Raise the Dead.

  1. Thematic:
    To the casual observer, Raise the Dead seems like a natural choice for the Necromancer mastery based on thematic reasons. However, many players will be surprised, confused, and ultimately disappointed when their pets from Raise the Dead don’t actually work with any of their flat damage buffs like Soul Harvest or with their pet buffs like Call of the Grave.

[As of 1.0.1.1, Raise the Dead benefits neither from a player’s own flat damage bonuses/buffs nor from any group flat damage auras, as is consistent with other player-scaled pets. It obviously doesn’t benefit from any pet-scaled bonuses, either.]

  1. Consistency:
    To add to the confusion, the Revenant devotion itself includes 2 nodes with bonuses for pet-scaled pets, which don’t even affect the pets from the proc under its current scaling. This sends a very mixed message about the intended user of the devotion.

  2. Hybrid:
    In the 1.0.0.8 patch notes explaining the player-scaling, “this proc” and “hybrid pet summoning builds” were described as “always been a bit of a niche”. However, considering that the new Necromancer mastery has a pet summon (Reap Spirit) and a pet buff (Soul Harvest) as effects coupled with direct damage attacks, it’s clear that hybrid pet builds are no longer a small niche but are now officially sanctioned and promoted as mainstream. Since 1.0.0.8, hybrid pet builds have also gained far more acceptance and endgame viability within the community due to multiple endgame hybrid pet builds being posted.

  3. “On enemy death” proc:
    Raise the Dead isn’t even a good fit for direct damage builds due to the on-death nature of the proc. This requires that Raise the Dead be bound to the primary damage-dealing attack of a direct damage build, where it would displace an RR or direct damage devotion proc that would increase DPS far more effectively. In other words, Raise the Dead comparatively reduces DPS – especially against bosses – and it’s therefore worse than useless for a direct damage build due to this opportunity cost. Every direct damage build performs better with a more appropriate devotion than Raise the Dead bound to their primary attack, especially with the many new procs available in xpac. It’s no surprise that not a single endgame build posted since the scaling change has elected to use Raise the Dead: player-scaling has turned a formerly niche proc into an almost entirely unused and unusable one.

  4. Reward for build diversity:
    On the other hand, pet builds often bind RR and direct damage devotions to their pets instead of their direct damage attacks (if any). And given how spread thin pet builds already are in skill points, devotions, and equipment (due to having an entire additional page of pet stats to build for), any hybrid pet build that invests enough into direct damage to make it useful will have already made sacrifices in other pet-related areas. Therefore, it’s reasonable to earn a reward for managing to successfully steal kills from their pets using the heavily invested attack to which Raise the Dead was bound.

With the imminent release of the xpac and the reshuffling of everyone’s devotion plans, I believe that now is the best time to update this devotion and solve the ongoing issues with the current scaling setup before it worsens further with xpac release. Thanks for your consideration!

Yes, I think what Crate didn’t understand about Raise the Dead is why the proc was “niche” to begin with. And you just nailed it right here.

It follows “MOBA farming logic”, where you should be extremely precise when to kill a enemy, and with the exact skill. “On enemy death” procs can work, but not like Revenant does. Bonescavanger’s Deathgrips and Judicator’s Signets work because you can proc it with every skill at your disposal, and it’s even worse in the case of the Deathgrips because the chances are 30%, and yet I had a more consistent run with it than Revenant.

I think the best solution would be returning Raise the Dead to pet scaling and making it apply to auras/self-buff skills instead, and make it work with every attack from the player. Proc can be reduced to 50% if you guys fell that 100% woud be too OP for that, but at least it would still be more consistent from what we have now.

I bet you’d want more pets…

The proc is changing to on attack in the expansion patch.

Holy fucking hell yes, thanks so much, I’ve been asking for a change of “on death” for 2 years :stuck_out_tongue:

Also the reason why it is scaling with player stats:

Raisethe Dead: skeletons now deal aether and vitality damage and scale with player bonuses, rather than scaling with pet bonuses. This proc has always been a bit of a niche, but as other options already exist via itemization for more hybrid pet summoning builds, it seemed better to focusRaisethe Dead to be an option for direct damage builds that like the idea of having pets

Yeah, but what also confuses me about that decision is that they did not removed the pet bonuses from the devotion, or at least changed them to player bonuses. That gives a false impression for anyone trying to create a pet build.

Yay! What about the other on death procs, are they changed as well?

Wow, colour me surprised. Very nice.

I wholeheartedly agree Raise the Dead should be pet scaled. The player scaled vs pet scaled celestial summons are skewed towards one over the other as is and at the end of the day it just makes more sense all around considering the rest of the Revenant constellation.

cough

I have no ulterior motive in this stance. :smiley:

No
/10 char

OK, the skeletons’ damage are scaled with player bonuses. But what about its health and resistances? Player or pet or nothing at all?

this is awesome! the proc seems to be designed for non-pet builds but the rest of the devotion is great for summoners. Glad you guys are switching it :D:D

I’m perfectly happy with the way this skill works now (x% on attack) and like the attempt at flavour by making them scale with the player rather than being just another pet. I can also understand the idea that the player needs to raise these directly (as they get player-based damage bonuses), which is why Crate limited the attack spells available to proc the CP.

What I don’t get is why you can’t do anything useful with these guys in a build that doesn’t have pets. They don’t draw aggro, don’t hit very hard (no flat damage bonuses), can’t be protected (resistances, health or DA), you get no benefits other than them triggering ‘on enemy death’ effects (which is interesting rather than powerful [they can proc Grim Fate, for eg, but that does Fire/Chaos damage not Vit/Aether!]), and you basically start every fight with zero of them and can only get a new one every few seconds.

I’m playing an Apostate designed to buff the heck out of Vitality and Aether damage, using Drain Essence to proc Raise the Dead. But 2 things happen:

  1. The build really, really, really needs the Necromancer’s Raise Dead skeletons to stop being swarmed (ie you have to have pets to take aggro, so it would make more sense for the Revenant skeletons to get pet damage bonuses)
  2. Drain Essence does 15 times more DPS to up to 5 targets (and this is at level 51, with Drain Essence at the softcap but with having invested only a handful of points in it [quite a bit of +Drain Essence gear], and with Raise CP at rank 9/20).

Drain Essence wipes the screen in terms of DPS and the skeletons can’t help protect the player character - aka they don’t contribute anything to the build in either attack or defence.

So my question is: what build actually benefits from these things? For them to be good in attack the player character needs huge +% damage, which means the player character does huge DPS all by itself (which begs the question: does it really need these dudes?), and for them to help defensively they need to be around before each fight starts (Crate reduced their ‘uptime’ from 40s back to 20 a good few patches ago), must draw aggro, and must actually be able to survive being attacked (aka they need your resist, health, DA bonuses as well). Even were they the beneficiaries of ADCtH it would be an improvement (in terms of standing in ground effects)!

Maybe Inquisitor Seal being able to proc Raise the Dead, and transfer a huge flat damage bonus to the skeletons while the player character stands on it could be ‘too good’, but as temporary pets these guys are pretty useless. I have an old, pre-expac build that has these guys at max rank and happens to have +1400% Vitality damage bonus - the skeletons only deal 2k vitality in melee, which is really bad for something that doesn’t get to fight very much! Their spawn location and movement speed look a lot better now, so I’ll give Crate kudos for improving them, but I think there is a long way to go before Raise the Dead is actually worth getting for essentially any build. You can’t give them new damage types because they won’t accept flat damage bonuses - even though they are melee “pets”!

I have several ideas: dual weild Grim Fate, Cindertouch (gets player bonuses, but only lasts 8s), Inquisitor Seal (gets player bonuses, but only %all damage and %fire damage do anything), Deathgrips, but the damage types are all over the place and it’s just much easier to make a pet build than find specific gear to convert.