Raise Spectre

Raise spectre should have the mine mechanic:
- normal cast of the skill on a corpse make it bind to the gem, if you target another corpse the last one will override;
- in order to summon the spectre you have bound you activate (like detonate with D) the skill.
- you won't need to desecrate anymore, the gem you have will always summon the spectre bound to it.

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Zuggtmoy wrote:

Raise spectre should have the mine mechanic:
- normal cast of the skill on a corpse make it bind to the gem, if you target another corpse the last one will override;
- in order to summon the spectre you have bound you activate (like detonate with D) the skill.
- you won't need to desecrate anymore, the gem you have will always summon the spectre bound to it.

THIS! And another very important feature that they should add: level of spectres always equals to the zone level!!! It is such a tedious and stupid process of searching for a certain type of monster in mid tier maps if you ever want to push lvl 13+ map.

Of all the skills I've ever played Raise Spectre seems to be the most deeply coded/interesting one yet.
It's fun experimenting trying to find that one spectre that you will enjoy to endgame.

After several days of endgame (up to act 4 merciless) testing, I've found two annoying problems. Melee spectres are completely horrendous and if a spectre can not use spell echo there is a 95% chance that it sucks really badly. That 5% accounts for Knitted Horrors (because of the raw power of their hit, high attack speed is not an issue) and machine gun titties (self explanatory). I truly thought Rooster demons (archers) in Daresso's dream would be a very potent minion. Quite the opposite. While they do decent damage, it's as if they have built in point blank because they seem to have a line of sight of 5 sqs or something. They will try to get as close to enemies as possible before even attacking :/.

I really did not want to have to use Stygians/Flame Sentinels/Knitted Horrors for merciless Izaro. Poe has too many deadly PvE npcs for there to be only a handful of "great" choices. Stygians were nerfed because they were too deadly as enemies(too many projectiles). A reverse buff needs to be made to Undying Incinerators. While going full suicide bomber is ok as an enemy, when they are spectres they need to lose that ability.Attack based spectres need an outright 30% more attack speed buff or something to keep them in line with caster spectres because faster attacks support comes no where near to the damage output that spell echo offers.

While I find it ok that Spectre damage scales based off the ilvl of the area they are found in, I do not believe the same should apply to their life pool. I thought after the Necromancer ascendancy machine gun titties would be BIS, nope. Still bad, it's as if once they smell damage they die :/. They need to have their life pool scale similarly to golems. Another Quality of life would be to allow spectre corpses to appear on the ground on death. Your build is literally built around them. Once they die that's it. Which makes the mapping process quite difficult.

Archmages from Ebony Barracks are a very nice set of minions. Their single target damage on a scale of 1-10 would be a 7 imo. So to complement them I figured 2x Archmages + 2x Galvanic ribbons would be a good idea. Galvanic Ribbons seem to be so dumb though. They spend most of their time attacking dead corpses and their LOS is so bad when compared to Archmages who will kind of offscreen enemies.

Lastly and somewhat similar to the Rooster Demon issue, it seems not all spectres are created equally. You play with Stygians and undying Incinerators and are let thinking why are these guys so angry/aggressive?? This is a good thing though. However the reason this crosses your mind is because most other spectres are so docile :/. All spectre's need to be this aggressive.

TLDR versatility of spectre is extremely limited without scaling and imprinting

My necro is build around raising as many minions as possible, a good number of these are decent.
Sadly, as mentioned countless times before, the lack of scaling for spectres limits the selection which is a bad thing considered how PoE is marketed on the possibility to do your own thing with the passive tree.

For example, reanimators could have been a decent choice if they could use your zombie skill and benefit from your own zombie limit while synergizing with your passives (instability and necromancer's flesh bind).
However, the zombies summoned by necromancers are a joke and merely act as distraction for your own minions reducing reanimators to a party gimmick curse slinger with a questionable payload level.

Another issue I frequently run into with maxed out spectre limit is the lack of imprinting.
the only reason i still carry a desecrate around is the need to conjure up the randomized corpses in the harvest to be able to get the stygs.

Raise spectre needs to be given special treatment, allowing players to store monsters.
The base skill would be "imprinting", allowing you to store a monster type and a single slot at level one to nine, two slots at ten to 19 and finaly giving you three different storage points at level 20 for you to fill with monster types - even if most summoners will still run stygian revenants with zombies and skeletons as living walls to cage in enemies.

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Taxi_Driver wrote:

And another very important feature that they should add: level of spectres always equals to the zone level!!! It is such a tedious and stupid process of searching for a certain type of monster in mid tier maps if you ever want to push lvl 13+ map.

+1

After a couple YEARS of poe I'm really thinking about quitting. I know some people are tired of hearing about this drama, but this has annoyed summoners since the beta.

The current state of the player not being stored is not a summoner exclusive problem, since anyone with any aura or buff has to recast it everytime they die or log in. That is boring to do every time, ok, but is not ubeareable.

Raising zombies is far more problematic since you need a resource (corpses) that you have to get by killing mobs or using descecrate, and if you have 10 zombies like me this gets pretty boring,a lot of time wasted.

Now, Raise spectre is a hole new level of this shit. To be effective with them you need a certain build with certain gear and certain support gems only to make a specific type of spectre work. That part is not terrible since is part of the gameplay. OFC you could have a wider array of spectre types to choose, but at least you have some. Sure, level cap could be balanced in a LOT SMARTER way, but that isn't unbeareable. It could be better, but is not the end of the world.

Now, needing to have and spend a specific map to farm a couple corpses of a specific type EVERY TIME YOU LOG IN is just... I love necro builds, and they got a lot better with the ascendancy class IMO, but I feel dumb spending 10 mins only to prepare for a simple hunt every time I log in. Doesn't even make sense lore wise. If you stole a soul, why the hell would they disapear suddently?
Recently I had a few connection instability and got disconnected a few times, and EVERY TIME A HAD TO LOG IN AGAIN I WOULD HAVE TO SPEND ANOTHER 10 MINUTES DOING THE PREPARATIONS. I went back to the same place I was 10 seconds ago and I COUD SEE THE SPECTRES BEING DELETED. They were still there. Sometimes I leave my game open for an hour while I'm taking a shower or eating, just because I don't wanna loose my minions.

Another problem is spell echo. I've never heard about any freaking build that had to summon spectres really fast, like, wtf. Having to REMOVE A GEM to farm the corpses THEN PUTTING IT BACK just makes it even worse. Why not make spell echo only work with the minion like spell totem? Why not summon 2 identical spectres from a single corpse? ANYTHING BUT RAISING A RANDOM CORPSE NEARBY!

Seriously, I think I spent more than 30 minutes doig just that this sunday, just because of a few disconnects. This is not fun anymore, sumoners have suffered a lot since the release because of the lack of good gear and small amount of decent nodes on the tree. I've waited so much time for these quality of life changes and they never came.

It's so much pain to play this build since it's already being held back numbers wise, but this pratical problems are just too freaking unbeareable after so much time. My other builds take like 10s of preparing for a hunt, and some don't have any whatsoever, I feel like I'm being robbed of loot and XP because I spend so much time doing something stupid instead.

I'm sorry GGG, I understand this is not a huge company, your time and resources are limited, but so many time has passed and there's not even a promisse of resolving those issues. I know being dramatic like this and being aggressive will not achieve anything but making me look like a moron, I still have to call you negligent towards the summoner players.

How about putting a respawn timer on a spectre when it dies for like 10 seconds so then you don't have to keep finding the mob you want and resummoning it.

I don't mind having to re summon if your spectre dies, that makes sense to me and it separates the good necro players from the bad as the good are able to res cap and protect their spectres, I mapped with some of my guild mates for almost 6 hours yesterday and 1 of my spectres died that whole time playing and I'm not surprised given the boss we were fighting, but when I lose all my spectres that I just got out of our previous tier 10 map cause my game crashed.... That just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. :(

It would be such a huge quality of life change if spectres persisted on log out, we know you can do it as we have animate guardian, so why can't our spectres too? I definitely don't think spectres should be coming back after death that would just make the game too easy, but losing them on logout just forces people like me to have to AFK in my hideout for hours while I sleep or do other things, which adds to the frustration of trade (I make my tabs non public cause I'm a nice guy). This wouldn't just be a quality of life improvement for use the necro players, it would be a quality of life improvement for us and all of trade.

The other option would be to make them like zombies in that their level is based on the gem, of course that would require balancing (and would make empower kinda op for us I think +5 easy or +6 with corruption). This would allow us to get our spectres in solaris, septer of the gods, sewers, or lab and not be punished for getting them in lower level zones.

The first option would be nicer for late game as you could literally log in and go straight into a map cause you would just have to summon your spectres, guardian, and golem in hideout and that would be more than enough damage to kill a few mobs to raise zombies from. The second would be a little slower start up but would mean you could literally level with the same spectres the entire way from act 3 normal.

I would certainly enjoy the first suggestion more as the second would take away that amazing feeling when you see your favorite spectre type in a high tier map or that crushing defeat when one (or especially all) of your spectres die, but the second would be a good alternative if the first can't be done for some reason.

Regardless thank you GGG for the amazing game :)
Back to finding new spectres as my game logged me out while AFK.
-minorthreat

It won't happen in our lifetime.

Maybe our grandsons will enjoy permanent spectres.

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JusJev wrote:

A reverse buff needs to be made to Undying Incinerators. While going full suicide bomber is ok as an enemy, when they are spectres they need to lose that ability.

Incinerators is VERY good Spectres. SpellEcho+GMP+ClusterTraps and they burn whole screen in fire =)