Raise Spectre

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The strength of spectres is in getting to use the monsters' abilities - it can be very powerful, but requires you to pick which monsters are best to raise.

A spell totem will out dps any ranged archer you pick up, also provide way more crowd control than any other caster.

Right now, there isnt any monster with powerful abilities that having a couple of them will drastically change your minion armys power. Not to mention you have to "find" them first.

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Never_nou wrote:

I'm a nearly pure level 60 Summoner and therefore learnt to use them properly. I have no issue at all with Spectres and find them fun and rewarding.

please come back and discuss this skill when you are 70+ and doing maps. You will find how much joke not only this skill but summoner is compare to other well build class.

I have noticed something that I believe is a rather strange bug with Raise Spectre, against the bandit lords if you raise any of the Bandit Lord's allies during the Bandit Fight, the Spectre just stands around doing nothing as it will never attack or move. I've only noticed this on the mobs assisting any of the 3 Bandit Lord's while fighting them, the normal versions of these mobs that you face outside the bandit camps don't have this 'glitch' when raised as Spectres.

My favorite Spectres to raise on my Summoning Witch are ranged attackers that throw out curses, and following that are anything else that uses curses, interesting ranged attacks, or useful aura effects (some of the bears).

There's a few good mobs to raise as spectres, but not that many imo, most of the time I end up getting a random ranged mob(bandit archers, snakes or vaal constructs) which do pretty good dmg so that's decent but I don't feel it's worth it that much unless you happen to have a free slot. Another issue is curse mobs count as your own curses, so they don't stack with your own curses unless you have the 2 curses passive/rare. Not a big problem if you don't have curses but when you do it severely limits the utility of curse casting mobs since most likely you have the best curse possible for your setup. They're also always extremely squishy.

I think for one the health reduction should be lower, it's very annoying to have your spectre die in 2hits from about anything when you can't necessarily get a good spectre in that place. That or giving it dmg reduction or something, I guess the health reduction is relative to the mob original health but the best mobs tend to be the weakest too.

Second I think every spectre should get an innate ability, like a small degen aura, increasing other summons attackspeed very slightly or something of the sort. It'd promote using a spectre even when you can't get a good one. Atm on some maps I don't even bother using it and on a lot of map I only do because I haven't replaced it with a 2nd curse yet, the only ones I like are skeleton mages and vaal constructs, because they have good range. Most of the rest is pretty much trash(due to curses not stacking) and I'd be better off summoning skeletons instead.

I like the idea but I find the skill to be a bit too weak.

:( i tried summoning the bears that do damage to nearby enemies in the waterfall cave. their aura does not work when they are a spector.

I have 4 spectres with TONS of extra life/damage/fire damage/cut through fire resist/speed/ES/all resist. Aside from maps, they never, ever die. This is my favourite skill right now. I like to summon necromancers, bears, and the apes that give charges.

Sometimes they get very lazy/cowardly, but really I don't mind =D

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The strength of spectres is in getting to use the monsters' abilities - it can be very powerful, but requires you to pick which monsters are best to raise.

I would agree. However, the skill's current implementation has several usability issues that make it very unsatisfying to use.

I should say, firstly, that it's obvious that a larger monster pool will increase Spectre's usefulness. I have high hopes for Act III in that regard.

However, as it stands there are only a small amount of monsters whose abilities are worth having. Because of the large penalties to health and damage, especially coupled with the Minion Instability rework that left Spectre with multiplicative downscaling on MI, vanilla spectres are rarely worth raising at all. That's also true of melee enemies, but luckily most melee enemies are vanilla and vice versa.

There are a few exceptions to that, though. Both the Carnal Chieftain and Stygian Ape can frenzy nearby allies and increasing the attack speed/cast speed of 20 or more other minions is very, very strong. The problem is that those creatures are still melee. They insist on charging into enemies, channeling their roars, and attacking.

That doesn't work. Even with 20 other minions, maxed minion life, and leveled defensive auras it's almost impossible to babysit melee spectres effectively due to their reduced stats compared to other high-level mobs. If you luck out and they don't get two-shot by a champion mob they simply can't even hope to avoid the incidental AoE that permeates battles in both acts. It's unbelievably easy to lose spectres. That, coupled with how arduous it can be to track down two or three or four of your desired spectres, makes for a very unsatisfying skill.

It doesn't help that the sketchy corpse targeting makes it difficult to raise them in the first place. I often find myself raising random nearby trash mobs even though I spend time carefully aiming for the correct corpse. This takes up a valuable spectre slot, and since I can't unsummon those trash mobs manually I'm occasionally forced to cycle out a strong spectre in addition to the weak spectre. This is tedious and frustrating, and it only prolongs the search for adequate spectres.

I had hoped that spell-casting spectres, specifically those of the Merveil's Chosen and Necromancer variety, would make up for the mediocrity of every other spectre in the game. Once you get past the first couple of difficulties on a summoner, however, these spectres become increasingly problematic.

Firstly, their curses will never compare to yours. They're weaker. It's a bit disappointing, I guess, but that's not really a flaw on the part of the skill. Best case scenario: it saves you a socket. That's okay, and this (by itself) is no big deal.

If that was as far as the problem went, I wouldn't have brought it up though. The problem is that these spectres actively make it more difficult for you, as a player, to curse enemies. Curses are extremely common and most characters will want to acquire at least one. Witches, Shadows, and summoners in general are especially drawn to curses, though. Minion Instability and the Whispers of Doom cluster are practically adjacent and by debuffing your enemies you are effectively buffing the relative power of your minions. That's good, you know? That's desirable.

Your minion's curses will overwrite your curses. If you have Hex Master, your curses last indefinitely. If a minion curses an enemy that you've already cursed, your permanent debuff will be removed and after 6 to 8 seconds whatever curse replaced it will also expire. The point of the Hex Master ability is to remove the need to re-cast curses. These spectres, practically the only spectres with valuable abilities, completely nullify that perk.

Additionally, once you invest all the way into the curse tree and acquire the ability to maintain two curses, it doesn't get much better. Minions insist on cursing once every few seconds. While you, as the player character, can apply a curse on top of another curse this benefit doesn't apply to your minions. If you curse enemies before your minions get around to it, their curses will still strip yours. You have to manually curse enemies after your minions have used their own ability. Assuming that goes well, once the spectre's curse ends they'll reapply it... thus removing your curse. Again.

Honestly, it feels like I'm fighting against my own minion's AI. If the point of the ability is to reward the player for selecting good spectres, why do the spectres make it so difficult? As it stands, I feel like the only things really worth the effort you put into raising them are boring ranged attackers with LMP or spark. It's not particularly satisfying.

Sorry that this is a bit long, but it's the feedback I've gotten so far. My pure summoner witch is a bit under level 60 and I don't see things improving as I move into the endgame.

was the endurance charge given by a spectre stygian ape's shout re-implemented? I know for a while prior to ladder reset a revived stygian ape's shout would not apply the charge to any allies, was this a fix?

While I'd still prefer to have some more distinct "real" summons (skeleton-warriors/archers, golems, maybe animals...) with special mechanics of their own, but I think the spectres could at least close that gap a little more with some minor changes.

Even without tanky spectres their base mechanic mostly limits them to futility, not even advancing far enough to count in the actual resulting minions.
I'm on paar with the opinion they should be not as tanky if fulfilling other roles like support/utility or DPS. And as there are right now no other ones able to, it would be a waste otherwise.

Right now the spell feels mostly like you had just one thing in mind when creating this it... torturing players... ;)
-> Showing the player how rich on variety play could be with different creatures, without giving them a proper way to do so.

My suggestion for solving this follows a similar track as done in Sacred 2.
One of the few good ideas was the way the Dryad summons were implemented. A special equipment slot for shrunken/voodoo heads, dropped from different enemy types, allowed to determine the kind of summoned spirits.
Of course the way PoE handles equipmentslots (every character has the same) an itemclass for 1 spell would be kinda weird.
But ya could slightly change that fact to match the game.

For example:
-> an enchantment/statuseffect instead of an item, lets call it "captured XXX-soul"
XXX based on the corpse it was used on.
When using the skill a second time without any corpse, it raises the specific spectre instead of setting it up.
The description could look like this:
"Entrap the tortured soul of your slain enemy and call for it to fight for you in battle."
You also could seperate the entrappping from the actual raising using a seperate skill.
Whatever the engine can handle.

Would keep the base mechanics and still give players a way to use them as intended.

Ich hoffe hier besonders auf eine Meinung von dir Mark. :)

try a lmp faster attacks miniondmg spectre tentacle miscreation then tell me how useless spectres are

or the dogs from the docks :)