Animate Guardian

My son has succeed in making a very viable animate guardian. It costs him a few Chaos but up to lvl 78 dungeons, almost nothing can kill it if he doesn't ignore it. But if he (the player) dies, even when the guardian is at full health when he releases, it always vanishes and he loses all the items he put on it. I have observed it occur three times.

Is that by design? If so, I feel its not very conducive to enjoyable game-play. The reason I dont use animate guardian on my summoner is because its such a chore to build him up after he dies, and I surely wont put nice gear on him (which is the only way he is really viable) if he is going to vanish even when he didn't die (but the owner did).

I really dont see why the gear has to be lost at all. Why not just put a 5 or 10 second cool-down before you can re-summon if the guardian dies. There are plenty of item sinks in the game, the guardian really doesn't need to be a super annoying one. A cool-down would prevent you from spam summoning him, while preserving his items after death and would encourage more people to try more interesting (and expensive) items on him.

Sorry, I meant up to lvl 68 maps, Not sure if it will still live in 70+ maps.

The Animate Guardian should not die, even when the user dies. I do not notice that behavior.

Animate Guardian should be able handle up to 71 maps or so with trash gear (blue/white gear). Do note that Animate Guardian, like Zombies, scale very well with levels, so you probably want to put him in the +2 minion level helmet.

If you want him to handle stuff like 75+ maps, you probably need some decent gear on him. Also, he is unlikely able to face tank map Piety, map Dominus or some really high damaging bosses. That is until you get him up to high levels.

been doing 70-72 maps without that much trouble but did not attempt torture chamber boss and havent done every map yet. I did struggle with thicket 69(the 60-69 maps are easy but never attempted orchard boss and i was overleveled for most of the 60 maps ) boss with nasty mods and logged out and a couple times that flameblast exile scared the shit out of me and just ran away


my current ag skill is lvl 19 and in a +2 helm has 8770 health

i did rip my ag on a 69 zana map to a lightning exile???(not even sure what happened my minions died so quick) so this was my 2nd ag death on this character but built him again )

i equipped him with queen of the forest this time to make him extremely slow with no move speed boots. So far i like it because its harder for him to run off quickly

Is there any particular reason why a Guardian can't equip jewelry? I feel like having a Stone of Lazwhar or Anvil would help your average Guardian a lot. I think it'd be an interesting change to reduce AG base HP by 10%-15% or so but give them the option to equip rings/amulets/belts. That way you're encouraged to give the Guardian more defensive options from gear.

Well it did happen again, he died to a box explosion, pet was at full health, he released, pet was dead when he came back. All his specters were still alive. We saw it walking around and there were no enemy monsters alive.

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Well it did happen again, he died to a box explosion, pet was at full health, he released, pet was dead when he came back. All his specters ere still alive. We saw it walking around and there were no minions alive.
Last edited by orionsky on October 24, 2014 9:03 PM

I run a fairly successful animate guardian build, but one thing bugs me. I will die, and then he randomly disappears, and i can't resummon him.

This is the fourth time this has happened. He was clearly alive before i respawned, and the spirits (quarter the health and defensive stats) survived and respawned with me. At first i thought it was that he died, but now i am sure its bugged.

When the badass boss fights happen, my spirits normally die instantaneously to that large damage - so i know its not a case of them surviving some crazy burst that he couldn't (despite his high health and defenses).

I have pulled this guy through scenarios where everything but him dies, and he can facetank most mobs and bosses with consideration to my aura/curse and regen totem combo (in which case if I'm not doing that he will definitely die).


For crying out loud, i put a bunch of cash into this dude and into my gear to make him viable, but when i die for whatever reason and then respawn only to find that he mysteriously disappears is total crap. Now i have to spend a bunch of time looking for the gear to rebuild him instead of just continuing where i left off.

All in all, i know hes basically a money sink, but would it kill to make him respawnable, with a cooldown timer or something?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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orionsky wrote:

My son has succeed in making a very viable animate guardian. It costs him a few Chaos but up to lvl 78 dungeons, almost nothing can kill it if he doesn't ignore it. But if he (the player) dies, even when the guardian is at full health when he releases, it always vanishes and he loses all the items he put on it. I have observed it occur three times.

Is that by design? If so, I feel its not very conducive to enjoyable game-play.

Nothing in the game code kills the Guardian on player death - it's quite possible for it to survive and kill the monster that killed you.
If it's dying quickly after the player dies, this may be because the player is running defensive auras that it can no longer benefit from, thus reducing it's tankiness.

It will leave the instance when you do, so clicking the resurrect button quickly after death should pull it from the instance quickly, and thus hopefully before it dies.

I will admit that this is what I thought was happening the first couple of times it happened, and i can't really think of any other way to explain it, but he just dissapears - no animation, no damage done, etc.

I was convinced that it might be bugged when the spirits(who normally die with or without auras in similar circumstances to the animate guardian under the same conditions) are reviving with me. I can verify, especially in the most recent case, that I had all my minions next to me, as i had just convocated. Then the boxe had a delay on teh corpse explosion i wasn't paying attention to that i insta-death'ed to(oh well) where i could still see my all my minions are just fine. Clicked respawn - and he's gone.

I think the Animate Guardian should be able to be re-summoned.

Would it be possible to treat him like a Vaal skill, with only one soul that can't be regained in that instance? I know that in a PvP arena, you can summon an Animate Guardian once per round. What if we could summon the Animate Guardian once per instance? That would prevent abuse, and enable players to invest a little more into the skill.