Summon Skeletons

"

Radonegsky wrote:

With Beacon of Corruption passive, do they create Caustic Cloud when expire? (not when killed)

Yes, they do. It's actually useful.

Decided to try skeletons with the new fated sword. Even with it equipped, SRS is better. Not only because they also benefit greatly from the speed (They move hilariously fast), but because their AI; even in it's nerfed state is disgustingly superior to skelly AI.

Skeletons when summoned next to enemies can stand and scratch their arse before deciding to engage a far-away enemy, dying to projectiles on the way.

The long duration of skeletons is wasted, because they will not follow you around, leaving them to loiter when you move forward.

Also to make it even more sad. My current setup costs 141 mana per cast. Srs with same setup costs 55. Guess which one is easier. 25 vs 10 base cost as of writing. Me being a necromancer I like auras, My mana pool is very limited for high cost spells, which don't allow regen to kick in.

Reduced mana cost, zombie (at least?) or SRS AI, is badly needed. I mean come on.. Current state srs benefits more from a 'build enabler' (queen's escape) than the skellies it was meant for. Due to the crippling AI and mana cost.

Like the general opinion, Skeletons Suck at the moment, all the new skills released since the 1st iteration of the skeletons in POE just turned them into an obsolete skill.

My first ever char in POE about 3 years ago was a summoner, I keep playing summoners from time to time. And just now I revisited the meta with a new summoner on prophecy. Got close to lvl 70 and tried all sorts of combinations with support skills but they don't work, not even as a meat shield.

So I had 2 proposals to maybe improve the skill:

1. Summon more skeletons per cast

like from lvl 13+ you get 3 skeletons per cast, and lvl 18+ 4 skeletons per cast, making the skill a bit more effective I guess.

2. Summon a mix of skeletons:

So not summon just warriors, lvl 1 skill would be 100% chance to summon 2 warriors. but as you get the skill lvl up, percentages change and at lvl 20 the skill would look something like this 70% chance to summon skel warrior, 20% chance to summon archer, 10% chance to summon mage.

3. A combination of 1+2 maybe? I think would make the skill better, but in no way OP.

I hope I helped :)

Mana cost is way to high, this skill gem is already bad and hard to even use but with the insane mana cost you dont even want to use it.

Mana cost is way to high, they do less dps then a single srs, srs have 4 times faster movement speed, have better ai, and not only hit like trucks but have twice as much hp as skeletons

you can only get 1/5 as many up as srs, without heavy investment into jewels and then into skill duration nodes or uniques.


srs is the very definition of power creep when you compare them to summon skeletons

not saying srs is op(kind of is when you compare them to summon skeletons) they are in line with specters and kind of zombies. summon skeletons on the other hand are just clunky to use, take too much mana to summon, are SLOWER then anything else in the game, do less dps then a tiny spirit the size of your hand, have no hp pool to speak of, and on top of it you can barely get enough of them to even matter in the least bit. don't forget that they have a 1 second base cast time(twice as long as srs).

buffs? yes please and to make sure summoner damage don't get out of controller nerf srs a bit(damage wise)

1. make them move faster, when everyones flying through the zones/maps at the speed of light no ones got time for turtle skeletons!

2. there dps is tiny, max summons 6, 0.93 attack speed,988 avg damage max dps with 6 no support max level(20) SS is 5513 dps, srs is max summosn 50, 1.75 attack speed, 556 avg damage with 50 no support max level(20) SRS is 48,650 dps yea yea you cant have 50 spirits on one target most of the time, but still that's 8.83 times the dps of summon skeletons!
1 to 1 SS is 918 dps and srs is 973 dps. even one for one SRS are better, in EVERY WAY, they have more hp they can still take projectiles for you, they are WAY faster, do more damage.
(from my understanding the POE wiki tables seem to be right)

3. make them a bit tanker, lower srs hp(why does a spirit that cant be attacked need 3k base hp?)
4. make them follow the player, if they where as slow as they are now but they teleported to the player and followed the player around like zombies, that would be GREAT and i feel like i would use them WAY more but as they are right now. they are just a worse version of SRS which is sad because i like skeletons more then the tiny spirits

i want to play a summoner, not a SRS'er, sure i can summon them and watch them get one shot or slowly move around the battle field, and i guess that's what i'm going to be doing for a while, but they are pretty useless atm in my eyes.

In a world where SRS exists, Summon Skeletons is just so much worse in every way. They have less hp, damage, and most notably speed (Although can be fixed with Queen's Escape). They just feel so much worse in every way to any other minion/summon.

And if you do put up with their downsides, what do you get? Nothing. There is not a single category where Summon Skeletons is better than Zombies, Spectres, or SRS. Less hp, damage, speed, they don't follow you like Zombies/Spectres or have the speed to make their SRS-like AI worth it. In short, buff them because they are subpar in every way to every other minion skill.

No idea if anyone ever reads this (since it isn't on reddit or any urgent forum like bugfixes) but here goes:

I really wonder what the guys from GGG have in mind with this skill (probably nothing since they most likely forgot its existence and summoner fixes in general are delayed indefinitely)

But to me this skill fell between two stools: It could be a middle ground between Zombies (few and tanky) and SRS(spammable and DPS rush but quickly disappear) but it fails laughably in both categories.

Again, that's what I think it could be, I dunno what GGG wants it too be: actually an offensive gem? or simply meatshield for protection? Either way it's still quite horrible.

I mean let's look at lvl 20 gems between SRS/Zombies/Skeletons. I take stats from poedb.tw, assuming they datamined them correct.

Life
SRS:3253
Zombies:4608
Skeletons:1722

That's already a big offender here imo. SRS, which are *the* spammable skill (meaning if they expire it doesn't mean jack shit), being able to have 50 up at the same time, have almost double the health of a skeleton. Sure, you can spam those as well, but their number is much more limited. It's debatable whether the cost of being able to have 50SRS uptime (castspeed, duration)is comparable to the cost of raising max skeleton numbers, but my point still stands: It's bizarre that minions from a skill which can output more minions faster are more durable than those of one which can't do that. Of course Skeletons actually can aggro monsters, but decoy totems do a much better job at that.


damage/attackspeed/DPS
SRS: 318-741 / 1.75 /926.63
Zombie: 620-1444 / 0.85 / 877.2
Skeletons: 512-1194 / 0.93 /793.29

I assume this are the stats for one SRS/Zombie/Skeleton each, else my comparison falls apart. Anyway damage-wise Skeletons seem to be balanced around being the middle-field between Zombies and SRS, however their attack speed is comparable to the zombie, making them effectively the weakest of the bunch. Considering how squishy they are, that makes it even worse since they might die before getting any attack off.

Also, 2 more things hinder skeletons, making them the worst:

1) Movement speed
They move slow as fuck. This is intended by GGG, the problem is making them move faster isn't rewarding at all since they still fall off damage wise.

2)Skeleton AI
Out of all minions, they seem to have the most passive AI. Often they walk around, admiring the scenery, sometimes attacking when they feel like it. This makes them seem to be more a defensive minion, but as said above, they're squishy so apart from a small distraction (for which Decoy totem does a better job) the don't offer anything. Well maybe they can distract untauntable bosses such as Shaper which would actually make them OP. GGG should look into this and fix it if necessary :^).

Anyhow here's my suggestion to fix this gem (having an offensive utility in mind):
1) make them work with convocation - since they wander off, if you could refocus them that'd be neat. Of course I assume GGG hesitates also partly because with Vaal skeletons, having summoned so many skeletons to one place might lag a bit. Since Vaal skeletons seem to be treated as separate skeletons, you could just make so convocation only works with regular Skeletons.

2)More health - self explanatory. Make it at least comparable to SRS, that's already a great buff

3)buff attack speed: giving them like something in the range of 1.20-1.40. This would put their DPS somewhat closer (maybe higher?) to SRS and you'd be more motivated to make their slow ass move faster. You can argue since you can summon less Skeletons a skeleton should be stronger than a single SRS but with the longer duration (and if buffed, at least comparable life pool)even a comparable damage output would be a start.

4) +%movement speed on gem quality - I know Skeletons are supposed to be the slow ass Minion of the bunch, but even Zombies get movement speed AND life on their quality. Skeletons get +increased damage, but giving them like .5% movement speed per 1% quality (->10% at 20% quality) wouldn't make them OP at all.

5) slightly more aggressive AI - Summoning a bunch of skeletons and have 1/3 wander off wherever sucks, have them a bit more focused, would be nice.

I know GGG is very busy with new content, and rebalancing old gems is quite low on their priority list, but point 2/3 seems to be simply a matter of editing numbers, which would make it already much better than what we have now. Of course point 5 would have a big impact also and point 1/4 would be the cherry on top.

Anyhow since I posted this on the offical forum instead of reddit/bugfixes /whatever gets read by GGG, I most likely wasted like 20 minutes of my life for this wall of text. Oh well.



tl;dr: Skeletons as of 2.4 suck and need a buff

25% damage buff. Yey. Just about every feedback from this thread was ignored, as expected.

Looks like the mana scaling has been changed (15 at gem lvl 11 vs 21 previously.) Is the cast time bugged? Tooltip still says 1 sec and that appears to still be the case... Did I miss something?

Even 0.8 sec cast time feels too slow.

AI is terrible.
The minion meant to be cast on top of enemy, it must try to hit closest enemy, not walk from edge of screen to caster. What the point of 'summoned under cursor' mechanic if AI makes them walk from nearest monster to other corner of room w/o attacking?!