Summon Skeletons

So haven't gotten around making a Skeleton focused build (might make one depending on how much time I have playing during this league) but I already expect it to fall terribly apart.
I was writing a huge text of wall, but on checking poedb.tw I actually saw their attack speed was apparently boosted to 1.15. this is really nice, there's still 2 things that probably keeps them down:
1.health pool (checking poedb it seems untouched)
2.passive AI (people already hate the SRS/Zombie AI)
(3. Movement speed - but there's plenty of ways around that to make somewhat up for it)

the combination of both drawbacks really holds the skill back I imagine - what does more attack power/speed help if the skeleton isn't going to attack or dies before getting a swing off anyways? Especially with the breach mechanic, where enemies rush in relentlessly, huge AoE attacks and all, I don't see Skeletons survive long with their subpar Health pool. And again, the passive AI just enhances (at least a lvl.3 enhance!) that problem further. Also don't get me started on clearspeed, because there's no way anyone's gonna reach a breachlord with a skeleton build. Feel free to prove me wrong, in fact I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.

So yeah I think more health seems kinda mandatory at this point. A tweak with the AI (maybe go to the nearest enemy from where they're summoned) really goes a long way too.

Mind, I haven't tested any Skeleton build of some sorts, maybe I'm completely wrong and skeletons are viable now, I'll edit once I play one. Especially the buffed attack speed seems promising, but I'll wonder how much it will be held back by the abysmal health/AI.

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chopfsalat wrote:

So haven't gotten around making a Skeleton focused build (might make one depending on how much time I have playing during this league) but I already expect it to fall terribly apart.
I was writing a huge text of wall, but on checking poedb.tw I actually saw their attack speed was apparently boosted to 1.15. this is really nice, there's still 2 things that probably keeps them down:
1.health pool (checking poedb it seems untouched)
2.passive AI (people already hate the SRS/Zombie AI)
(3. Movement speed - but there's plenty of ways around that to make somewhat up for it)

the combination of both drawbacks really holds the skill back I imagine - what does more attack power/speed help if the skeleton isn't going to attack or dies before getting a swing off anyways? Especially with the breach mechanic, where enemies rush in relentlessly, huge AoE attacks and all, I don't see Skeletons survive long with their subpar Health pool. And again, the passive AI just enhances (at least a lvl.3 enhance!) that problem further. Also don't get me started on clearspeed, because there's no way anyone's gonna reach a breachlord with a skeleton build. Feel free to prove me wrong, in fact I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.

So yeah I think more health seems kinda mandatory at this point. A tweak with the AI (maybe go to the nearest enemy from where they're summoned) really goes a long way too.

Mind, I haven't tested any Skeleton build of some sorts, maybe I'm completely wrong and skeletons are viable now, I'll edit once I play one. Especially the buffed attack speed seems promising, but I'll wonder how much it will be held back by the abysmal health/AI.

I've always liked summon skeletons but felt they were lacking in quantity and strength, Chop here has explained them perfectly and I'd like to prove however that they can be useful.

https://youtu.be/wzegU2UCpyk

This build is just amazing and quite frankly I'd like to see it in build of the week.
It makes a great point in my opinion, perhaps it is time to change summon skeletons to a channeled skill on its own?

So yeah I'm actually positively surprised.
As Hurgle's Video showed, they're now even shaper viable. Also it's possible to have more normal Skeletons (not counting vaal) than SRS. What a time to be alive.

Anyways, I went with the traditional self casting route of summon skeletons using Queen's escape (basically *the* unique intended for skeletons). My conclusion so far: It needs a lot of currency to really get going, but it somewhat works if you don't go for the full clearspeed meta. That said, my gear is far from optimized yet. It's definitely no budget build and more if you have too much currency and want to do something for shit 'n giggles. But if you're that rich you're better off with the CWC one.

Because I'm using queen's escape, using United in dream is not possible. Still throwing a poison gem in works kinda well, since it's scales with minion dmg (as far as 2.5 goes who knows for the future). Skill setup is Skeletons - Minion dmg - melee dmg -poison - melee splash.I can clear up to t12 quite ok (haven't gotten any higher drops yet) though character is quite squishy and some bosses can screw you over quite hard. But higher tiers should be possible as well, since your minions actually absorb a lot of incoming damage. map mods with +projectile and chaining can screw you over easily since you can't keep up with spamming skeletons.
her some more thoughts:

- leveling with tabula as 5L (6L is a vaal skeleton) works pretty great, pop the vaal ones at bosses and the melt fast. Also good for breaches.
-I haven't really used a true 6L yet (6th one would be empower most likely), but as eirikeiken pointed out in his video, mana cost is quite high (lvl 19 skellis cost 78 at 5L), so using multistrike selfcast is probably not really an option.
- the low health of skeletons gets noticable after t11 as your skeleton start dropping after 1 or 2 hits

boss stuff:
-it's at least normal atizri viable but what kind of build isn't nowadays). It's not a insta kill like AW so you do need keep attention to your positioning.
-I managed to clear all three elemental breaches. The way to the boss is actually quite a shitfest, but it's still possible to push through somehow on these. Afterwards, Xoph & Tul were a cakewalk, Esh with his lightning balls is quite annoying. I reckon Uul with his bleed might be also quite problematic and lol Chaylua not sure if I want to risk wasting my splinters to try running it with this meme build.

so tl;dr if you throw lots of currency at it even self cast skeletons can run (semi) endgame now.
still 2 points that could be adressed:
-lower the mana cost slightly
-buff skeleton health (maybe at least 25-50%?)
This buffs wouldn't make Skeletons OP imo considering how much wealth you have to put in to make them work.

Running Skele build. They lack HP without Empower - at level 28 they have only 7k (while Zombies have around 25k). Without Empower they have like ~3k.
The problem is that a lot of Breach monsters are using massive AoE's, killing big number of Skeletons very fast.

The character is is SeveredInSkeletons.

Without Empower I wasn't able to do even Uul-Netol Domain - not because I lacked damage, but Skeletons were simply dying too much. With Empower it is a walk in the park, including Uul-Netol herself, who died before even doing anything.

Shaper is still a big no-no, because of Skeletons being melee, and fight is simply twice (or more) as hard as for ranged (for no reason). Other T16 bosses are quite easy, tho.

Nothing confirmed yet, but I'm hoping for a rework of the dead reckoning jewel for 2.6/3.0. I love the idea. I like the look of the mages. I LOVE the flavor text! haha however building around this jewel takes you from headache to nightmare. It needs additional utility. You spend all your points pathing nowhere, and end up with neither offense or defense in exchange for...ranged skeletons. Ranged skeletons are legit! Dont get me wrong! For the investment required though, (almost your entire passive tree for 15 mages) the mages need to do more.

With the proposed changes to threshold jewels, "All Threshold Jewels now require 40 of their chosen attribute to be available in the area, and no longer require it to be allocated." This only adds one jewel slot to the current tree for dead reckonings. Unfortunately i do not believe changing the skelemage max from 15 to 18 will have any positive effects on jewel use.


Proposed changes:

Summon 3-4 skeletons per cast in base skill
Each dead reckoning jewel makes 5 mages istead of 3
Change AI to follow and be more agressive
Give mages mini-real spells (fireball, ice spear, arc)
3 unique items that restrict to one mage elemental damage type to build around


My 2c.

edit: ooh theres 2 new jewel spots. Will 21 mages solve the problems we have with 15?

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fiveswords wrote:

Nothing confirmed yet, but I'm hoping for a rework of the dead reckoning jewel for 2.6/3.0. I love the idea. I like the look of the mages. I LOVE the flavor text! haha however building around this jewel takes you from headache to nightmare. It needs additional utility. You spend all your points pathing nowhere, and end up with neither offense or defense in exchange for...ranged skeletons. Ranged skeletons are legit! Dont get me wrong! For the investment required though, (almost your entire passive tree for 15 mages) the mages need to do more.

With the proposed changes to threshold jewels, "All Threshold Jewels now require 40 of their chosen attribute to be available in the area, and no longer require it to be allocated." This only adds one jewel slot to the current tree for dead reckonings. Unfortunately i do not believe changing the skelemage max from 15 to 18 will have any positive effects on jewel use.


Proposed changes:

Summon 3-4 skeletons per cast in base skill
Each dead reckoning jewel makes 5 mages istead of 3
Change AI to follow and be more agressive
Give mages mini-real spells (fireball, ice spear, arc)
3 unique items that restrict to one mage elemental damage type to build around


My 2c.

edit: ooh theres 2 new jewel spots. Will 21 mages solve the problems we have with 15?

Even then, it seems like a gigantic investment to make something somewhat useful. Imagine what those 7 jewel slots could provide otherwise. The resistance mod on the jewels was pretty much rendered useless as well a few patches ago since there are so many other, more efficient sources. Compared with Spirit Guards which now brings 16 ranged weapons with only 2 gems and also increases minion damage it's quite a bad joke.

I think my main beef is with the passivity and the ADHD nature of the skeletons. They are way too easily distracted and I have hard time keeping them on the target I want to prioritize. This is affecting heavily how it feels to use the skill.

To impose more control over what my skeleton army does, would it be possible to have them lock on target if I target a mob and summon them?

Currently when fighting a summoner for example I spawn my skeletons around it and as the summoner raises a mob, the skeletons switch target and the fight prolongs unnecessarily as they are too slow to maneuver successfully. Most ranged mobs also have this flee mode where they reposition if someone is hitting them in melee. SRS deal with this quite well because they move so much fast but the skeletons on the other hand are so slow to move that they most likely find someone else closer at that point. This makes the skeletons feel quite clunky in my opinion and I need to resummon quite often to try to keep them on a priority target.

While I've always wanted this skill to be useful, I'm forced to acknowledge that it is not.
And the Dead Reckoning jewel doesn't really help that much in my experience, as the melee and caster skeletons have very different support gem requirements in order to be functional, and they are mutually exclusive.

All it does is make a difficult to use skill even more untenable. If it had been updated with the rest of the threshold jewels, and say converted all of your skeleton warriors to mages with a single jewel, then I think that would make it worth using. As it is, to make Dead Reckoning at all useful is to have an enormous opportunity cost to get all the jewel sockets for at least 3 of them, more if you have more skeletons.

Or you could just go SRS without jewels and do everything that way, being clearly superior in every way.

Pretty much the only good thing about skeletons is that they have good pure physical dps, mainly single target and on unmoving targets that don't aoe.

They have like a third of the life of zombies and die to any aoe.

Even with bone offering but they still get deleted by white mobs using aoe like cleave bears.

If i summon them directly on a mob they sometimes decide they want to attack something else half a screen away... please don't. I wouldn't mind if their visibility range was 80% reduced, like if every mob was phase running all the time, cuz then I could control them better by placing them on the mobs I want them to cover... Maybe grant 400% more sight radius on Queen's escape for builds that actually want moving skeletons.

I suggest also give skeletons proper weapon range; since they use 1handed (regular) swords at least give them 9 additional weapon range... they suffer from same problem as old melee namelock but amplified like 900% by their movement speed.

Since i am always a small budget player, and instantly decided chayula cutlass out of my price range (at least for a long time),
i am using this garbage (bloodlust)



since granting 3 frenzy charges by spamming high atk speed/ball lightning into a pack is incredible damage boost for minions (45% increased attack speed especially considering not using flesh offering, 12% and more damage that works with poison)

but I'm thinking it was a mistake not to go necro aegis if only to grant them additional 100 base life and 24-30ish block, i later started use

just to give skeleton a bit more survivability.

Probably just gonna let skeletons be a single target only thing and try to get uber lab as soon as I can for the fat spectre nodes and rely on knitted horrors for clearing... Currently using knitted horrors for some ease in bleeding mobs along with rive

Ideally I want to get a bleed on hit Sai with resist/attack speed suffix.

Of course clear speed sucks, my current knitted horrors clear faster just in 4 link and without spectre ascendency node

I'm around level 55 Necromancer and love the summon skeleton skill. Compared to other games, it allows me to summon around 30 which I feel is the best size and my friends don't suffer any notable performance issues.

Upon hearing the changes from the recent 3.0 minion manifesto, I'm very disappointed in the direction minions are going. It sounds like it's heading in the direction of D3 where the limit is too low to feel like a decent sized unit visibly on the screen. I'm running a pure skeleton-only build and nerfing the passives and existing unique items feels too heavy handed despite the damage boosts to compensate!

With all the money from expensive MTX to keep POE going I'd rather the development team seek alternate means to improve performance than shrink the minion size for the second time to the passive tree and this time around for the skills and unqiues and jewels. It's simply too much for me and I'm losing faith in GGG because of what I read from today's minion development manifesto - https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1876213. I don't want D3's 5 minion auto crap because someone elses machine can't take 30 minions.

@Rory: Please post back here or in the manifesto to hear more of your thoughts. I don't know much about POE's architecture but how about a visual minion limiter for those who struggle with minion performance? Maybe that could allow those who want to see 30 minions on their own screen can. If 60 is great but too high, 15 is simply shit and far too low. At least meet players in the middle with 30!

Thanks,

David