Animate Guardian

I absolutely love this skill gem. Its a ton of fun. Now about allowing some slack on the "EVERYTHING YOU INVESTED IN THIS IS GONE" part of this gem.
He is easily one of the most powerful minions in the game if you focus everything in your build around him and take the time to figure out how to set up his gear to be effective.
This is where there is a HUGE downfall with that particular, you need to invest in good gear to make him kick ass, but if he ever dies (corrupting blood is a big one, as well as oddly scripted damage on some mobs) you effectively become worthless and unable to do anything, and you can't continue UNTIL you rebuild him

I spend several chaos to build him every time he dies, and that's using this setup


I also use Necromantic Aegis with this shield:

And the rest of my setup is based off this gear:

Using this, I can spearhead level 70+ maps pretty efficiently. The only difference between my summoner build and every other one is A) I can't continue after I lose my minion, I am pretty F***ed at that point since he is half my damage and my primary tank (this dude loves to facetank map Kole and map Vaal) so a soon as a lose him to some dumb nemesis mob that only kills him via corrupting blood or something similar (because hey, the minion AI does not understand bleed stacks or map-empowered burning damage) I pretty much have to drop the map altogether, due to the fact that my build rotates around that AG. I have Zombies purely for cannon fodder, and specters to back him up. But those things i can resummon on the fly, and have no need to stop what i'm doing when he dies.

As i understand it, a big inspiration for the Animate Guardian was the old Diablo 2 Merc's that you could hire and ended up being a big help. They would take any gear with them if they died as well, so i can see some relation to that mechanic, but a big difference here is you don't need to go out and refind the gear you put on him when you resurrect him, you just pay the fee and get your dude back.
How about putting that function into the game, Your animate guardian dies, you have to go to town and pay 1 alch or 1 chaos or something to revive him. Or we could go for the idea that he goes on a long cooldown timer after he dies. Just something different so I, and anyone else using animate guardian, doesn't need to stop playing to rebuild the thing they spent so much time crafting and putting together, something NO OTHER BUILD HAS TO DO.

Hell, it's already forced to have one gear set, making it difficult to do some map mods with due to the fact i can't simply change out his gear for that map without making my previous investments pointless and/or worthless. I can't carry around two different ones to switch out in case we run into a specialized mob like a lot of people can choose to do with their gems and gear, why must this one be so different?

Like I said, I love this gem, and I love playing this build, it's a lot of fun to watch my little dude go out there and beat things in the face while I juggle the minion aggro with decoy totems and zombies. GGG would you please take out this "item deletion" mechanic and replace it with something more entertaining and less time consuming. I love to play this game, and while trading has its interest, I prefer to watch Kole and Brutus get their face beat in with what looks like the top part of a flag pole by the hollow man. I can tolerate mystery damage and non-retrievable items if i can resummon him through different means without having to stop playing, or perhaps a nerf and allow us to move gear around without losing it forever.

There's my rant. Please throw us a Bone GGG. or a new guardian, seeing i had just lost mine again to another corrupting blood mob. Back to TRADE CHAT i go!!!

Why not change the quality to read "x% increase of all buffs / stats" this would make everything you put into him x% better from passive nodes, to support skills, to his gear and even auras. This would make his quality gem better and. The other alternative is making a unique that could give this buff. In therms of him dying you could purchase from a master a shrine that when rezzed it follows that masters model.

Not sure if this was posted (its an extremely long thread at this point and I did not read it all) but if GGG created uniques that allowed you to have more than one running Guardian or add it in the passive tree. Along with the workbench mod that allows you to recover the gear when the minion dies, this could be a nice powerful build.

I've avoided this skill gem completely due to the loss of items on death.

Now, I'm going to try it and give it some feedback prior to playing with it and afterwards.

Pre-build Feedback (as of 4:13pm 5/31/2015):


Post-build Feedback (7:00pm 5/31/2015):


My AG RIP'd in the Slums sewers to the leap slamming unique, but it was extremely strong against any opponent/unique monster prior to that.

I'm done with it until things change or people throw AG uniques at me which isn't going to happen.

Bonus Quips:

"

DexterMorganBHB wrote:

Hey, I know we're in combat and this is crazy, but let's stop fighting and hand gesture, maybe?

"

Moose65 wrote:

He already resurrects in PvP. I don't see why he needs to always be in a Hardcore League while PvE'ing with you.

Honestly, the skill should just reserve life/es or mana. Keep all items on death. Problem solved. The AI of the minion is what holds it back. I can't imagine why GGG made the skill like this to begin with, were they afraid it would have nado-shot-like clear speed? Just a lack of thought on their part.

How about the items just fall to the ground on death? I don't consider that OP. You still lost the guardian.

Why are the items consumed on death anyway?

I have one question for you Mark.
If i'm crafting the mod from master that drops items on the ground when the guardian dies, and if i equipe the chest directly on the guardian (not me)

Does he still drop items ? or are they lost because i have to wear the chest myself in order to make the mod working ?

thank you kind of sir :)

Alright. So, while this minion can be powerful... getting there requires alot of effort. And time. And most likely that isn't a reasonable use of players time, because of course, he dies very easily in the end.

Let's say you do put alot of effort to building one, he still isn't much more survivable than say, your average zombie. The question comes from effort; even if he deals, 2x, 3x even 4x damage than your average zombie.. gearing him may still not be worth it. Even if you could make him deal 20x DPS(that's probably unreasonable to ask, and im not asking that), I don't think most people would still go over the effort of gearing him, simply becuase you cannot build him 100% bulletproof against incoming threats. His average EHP is probably around 2-3 more survivable than a zombie, maybe a bit more in max gear, wich is not really alot.

As such, aside from using him to farm lower-level content quicker; he has very little use, both in high end content and leveling, wich sucks. I don't think the sole purpose of a gem should be to just increase your farming speed. Animate Guardian should be useable in all kinds of content that PoE has to offer, not just farming, similarly to zombies. There are things like high end bossing, or doing maps, all of which an animate guardian summoners could benefit from, if animate guardian only was a viable skill.

Now, to the problems. One of the biggest downsides is his AI. It drives him recklessly among enemy packs and he is often headfirst there, even before zombies. He cannot use jewellery and belts, wich severely handicaps him during leveling, but also leaves him more suspectible to bosses. When a normal player could get resistances or survivability from jewellery, and equip it for a Merveil fight, Animate Guardian can't. Furthermore, because he doesn't have interface like a player, he can't swap gear around like player does(cold res equipment for Merveil, then back to your usual gear setup afterwards). You'd be forced to regear him and re-equip him everytime you do a certain boss, wich isn't really a reasoanble use of players time.

I was forced to unequip my Animate Guardian skillgem in Merveil normal because Mervel normal was dealing way too much damage for him to handle - despite me gearing him pretty decently and already having stuff like Necromantic Aegis. There is just no way Animate Guardian will be able to survive against that much damage early on, unless I spent hours and hours of time of just farming gear for him, when I could be farming higher level content and leveling instead. Long story short, it's simply not a feasible to except players to be gearing him in this way

There should be some kind of way Animate Guardian could survive against bosses and other threats early on. Health bar increase early on is be the bare minimum, say 250%-500% more HP, so he is at least much better than your average zombie is. You could, of course, also increase it's baseline armour/health/resistances, or perhaps simply benefit from those stats more than your average zombies do, so as to give you more time to handle the threats before the threats do you. In any case, he needs dramatic buffs to his survival make up for it's lackluster AI, lack of jewellery option and the obvious drawback of losing all items when he dies. Otherwise, he simply isn't worth the effort.

Another thing that should to be concidered that, despite being a strength gem, there are actually no specific strength nodes to support a "Animate Guardian build" around the strength area. This is in contrast to intelligence character and their minions who have a ton of nodes to to support them and their amount of minions all around the intelligence node areas tree. This means that a typical AG summoner wouldn't be able to make it work with pure strength nodes only, let alone playing AG simply as a "sidekick" to the player with no other minions around, similar to D2 mercs.

Thus, what I would like to see is nodes, specifically for Animate Guardian around the Strength starting area. These nodes would work only for AG and would not work on your other minions. It could be just one cluster like the Gravepack cluster is for intelligence users, but since they would only buff one ability and it's survival, but they would be more substantial, such as 2x 50% life, 2x 50% damage, 2x 50% resistance, and 50% more ES/Armour/Evasion nodes, with a special node(like, Animate Guardian gains a 100% benefit from your equipped weapon and shield stats, for example) in it.

just popping in, as long as he loses items on death , he will not be viable ...

this because this mechanic explicitly goes against a core aspect of poe , which is no matter what you do.. there will always be something that can kill you.

there will always be something that will kill the guardian. this is not a possibility this is an inevitability.

and because there is always something to kill the guardian it is unreasonable to invest in said guardian because if you do so and you lose the guardian well then your build is effectively ruined until you buy the gear and make a new one.


no other skill in the game has the potential to literally break your character just because a minion died.