Raise Zombie

Mark, anything to say on the state of early-game zombie health (or lack of it)?

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Aklyon wrote:

Mark, anything to say on the state of early-game zombie health (or lack of it)?

The ramp seems a lot worse than closed beta. There are numerous threads about it. Up until level 40ish crits can still pretty much one shot them and the aoe attacks in act iii can decimate them pretty darn quick. This is with full health support from passives and gems. Focusing on summoning is pretty slow and tedious right now.

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...minion health...

May I argue on behalf of Mark/GGG? :P

IMO, the overall intent of minion balance is around it being very strong in the end-game scenario, which means an army of 9~10 zombies, 3~4 spectres, 12+ skeletons. Their sum-health and DPS is crazy once you add in +150% minion health or so with max resistances. Now that we're in OB, this is something that GGG can no longer adjust.

So, in order to stop the immediate OB ladder from filling up with minion builds over that of other spell-builds, the price is the difficulty to get there. GGG's been trying to get all the different classes & builds within horizon of each other in terms of difficulty, and these changes... have been a part of that.

In practice, you will have a significantly easier time by starting as a hybrid-summon build and transfer into full-summoning in merciless. 18 free respec-points, 6 skill gems in Normal (and only 3 minion gems), availability of near +100% spell damage with gear+passives to your skills of choice, in addition to the fact that the only minion boosters are helm and uniques (they are non-conflicting). Use them well. You don't have to knock your head against a brickwall, please. :)

EDIT: As a stopgap, use a +1minion level helm. It's +40%~60% more minion health, and +% damage, which is like, equal to ~10 passives? Night and day to your minion experience, full stop.

I'll admit you certainly make a good point, zharmad. Its not one that I really like (Zombies in CB were awesome), but it makes sense. I'll give my witch a better spell and fire trap and see how it goes.

I know it's difficult leveling a summoner at the moment. When the changes were being adjusted in alpha early January, several pure-summoners completely brick-walled in Act 3 Normal/Cruel while I made it through essentially because I ran a hybrid mace-templar with flicker+heavy strike trying to picking off all the AoE casters before they could kill my army, and GS to control the biggest packs. The elemental AoE was one-hit/two-hit KO then, so even I went without minions at all half the time... :P
Hence, the innate resistance you now see in zombies is partially because of those feedback plus dev internal testing.

Judging from all of the dev responses I've seen so far in Beta/publicly, I believe GGG would prefer a global balance where all powerful builds are the result of hard-work and investment. That's the game they want to play (and they play).
So, in the end, I doubt any amount of complaining in the short-term will get minions < lvl-40 past the point of surviving long enough for you to do something about it. If not even that's happening, keep making reasonable feedback - playing minions shouldn't be more difficult than, say, a non-ground slam melee-build.

Well, it certainly wasn't that much harder, now that I've focused more on firestorm and just leave the zombies/skeletons to meatshield and probably die. I'd say it was more a reliance on having them do more of the work then they can really do now at around level 15, but that might just be me. Still difficult, yes. As hard as it was when I was focused on resummoning them constantly? Not entirely.

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Vipermagi wrote:

As Mark just explained, simply clicking an area will focus your minions there.

Clicking an area will also move my character, which is a really bad thing to do when I'm a fragile witch relying on my minions to do the tanking.

It's also not true. All my zombies do is hang around me - I want them to charge in to kill stuff, but instead they just... wait. Skeletons don't seem to have this problem, they'll gladly stab people with their sweet swords.

I think a huge part of this problem is that enemy NPCs are much, much more interested in attacking me than they are in attacking my minions. I need them to attack my minions because A) I have very little health and B) my minions explode when they lose enough health. As it is, enemies are waltzing right past my graveyard menagerie and punching me in the face as hard as they possibly can. I need my minions to be higher priority targets!

Zombies also have a remarkable tendency to somehow get stuck on doors. Sometimes I will cast stuff in an area to hopefully entice them to go in - a totem, a spell, a curse, anything - and I'll notice four of them stuck in the door and the other three still milling around me, as if waiting for directions. Could I maybe direct you... through the door?

They get stuck on each other, too. Please give allied minions no-clip through each other (but not enemies).

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soul4hdwn wrote:

hold shift to not move, useful for lightning strike people wanting to use the projectiles instead, this minion "call out" trick, or any ranged skill without accidental misclicks.

Doesn't work : ( A dedicated minion-direction button would help immensely.

hold shift to not move, useful for lightning strike people wanting to use the projectiles instead, this minion "call out" trick, or any ranged skill without accidental misclicks.

48 lvl Witch:
Zombies die to fast. Every elemental chaos or aoe mob kill you minions in 2 seconds this is just stupid. Half fights are just me casting rise skeleton hoping that I can spam them faster that they die.