3.14 KING OF ALL SUMMONERS. Zombies & Skeletons & Spectres on STEROIDS! | League-Start to End-Game

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Azrael Djerun wrote:

Would be nice if they would at least give us the +2 to minion gems or the enhanced buffs of power and frenzy charges back. But a bit more minion survivability would be ok too, I guess. Its really a bummer playing my char now, after spending well over 100ex on gear and it just feels like the progress I made in the last month was completely obliterated. Zombies dying on a regular basis now, before the update their health was not moving an inch. And loosing 40-50% of damage in addition to the much lower survivability is hard to bear with.

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Minion survivability is bad even with all the passives (and more) I have allocated to keep them alive. My zombies, spectres die even in yellow maps even though I can clear a T15 map right now in the new league. So normally, I have to retreat just to respawn. I can't waste a portal, because random mob(s) are so overpowered right now and they kill me 3-5 times easily. They are more difficult than the map bosses. Progress is slow, and fast clears are rare. I think I'll be playing a lot less this league, the game is rather unplayable for me at the moment.

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I'm literally walking thru t16 maps doing +3 lvl abyss and farming essences with under 5 divines of gear. I almost never lose minions other than the occasional AW OR zombie that gets stuck by himself or ganged up on by a couple effigies. +max res on tree and shield AND block nodes.

BTW Im running ancient skull with 100% crit chance so they are always hearing whispers and they still live thru 20+ second fights with multpi effigies on kalandra 12-14 diff maps. Once a day or so I lose a chieftan. Maybe.

Currently swapped a few ges and usually run poison chance instead of the srs in my 6 link but feel free to check out my character. Nothing fancy and no +1 minion stuff anywhere. Nothing awakened.

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Azrael Djerun wrote:

I have another question.
I noticed that GGG changed the Essence of Fear and it now gives more damage bonus to minions and therefor my weapon is now sitting at 104% Minion Damage out of 123-144%. Is there any other way than wasting divine orbs? They (GGG) killed every other way of rolling modifiers, am I correct?
Harvest ain't working any longer. Really sucks. Getting a perfect item is so much more difficult by now.

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Consider essence crafting a new one. Use a base with a +1 socket level implicit (like the bow on my character: necrotaku_SEN). Fix the socket colors and links first, that is where I [formerly] used Harvest crafting and eventually Vorici for luxury white sockets. Annul orb what you don't need from the essence craft. So this is a little gambling which is what I always did for every league, the worst I ever did was gamble away 1ex (now 1div) worth of ingredients - annuls and essences). Once you just have only minion damage on the bow and nothing else, use Bestiary crafting to add another +1 socket (farric wolf alpha). Then add an aspect (avian) using Bestiary. Then bench craft "3 mods" to complete it. I never crafted my bow using Harvest during the league (never got what I could have used). The disadvantage of a minion bow is you can't cyclone (and I stopped doing this 8-9 leagues ago), but you can now use a quiver and maybe even a quiver with socket(s). No idea if any of this still works in 3.19 though, but I'll eventually craft a new minion bow for standard to take advantage of the new essence minion damage.

PS. I'm a glass cannon right now. I only have around 3500 eHP, so I keep my distance from the fights. But, I can dish out 5m DPS (for mobs, not bosses) and just used about 2 divs total for gear.