Animate Guardian

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

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.

maybe a resurrection fee like for mercs in diablo 2?

So, he's still completely useless even in the expansion. Funny how he still carries this crappy lose all items mechanic on death for fear of him being an auto inclusion in builds, when pretty much 1 of the 3 golems are basically that now.

There's little reason to not include a golem in your build because of the buff it provides, yet somehow an animate guardian running around with a leer cast and dying breath is to be feared (because lets face it, no matter what awesome gear and 6L setup you use on him, literally anything else you could do is gonna outdps his sweet auto-attack).

Other than summoner builds, I don't know too many builds that are gem slot starved that they can't simply include a golem + minion life into their build to receive a free almost 100% up-time buff.

Simply slap a golem tag on animate guardian, put a lengthy cooldown (on death, something like 30~60 seconds), and be done with it. Skill will remain useless until then.

Edit: Playing with the new golems makes me very disappointed that Animate Guardian is still in the current shape that it is.

Hi everyone!
so I've read a LOT of this post and I want to keep it ALIVE.
we all agree-
A. let the AG drop items on death (not through the master-augmentation. it's too expensive)
B. let him USE SKILLS!! (a dude that goes around and... melee's them? why?)
B.i. either by putting a skill AS A SUPPORT on your item
B.ii. or by animating an item (could be excluded to weapons only) that has the skill-gem on it.
C. split AG to 3 different AG's! like the totems.. do a melee\ranged\spell AG's!!
...why not? is an AG archer too OP? dun think so.
D. but if we want to CHANGE his gear? we don't want to loose the other item.. so -
D.i. as suggested, let it be like D2 merc - with him having his OWN INVENTORY WINDOW!!
D.ii. be advised, that this may cause you to drop AG as a skill gem - and just let us have a COMPANION which we can adjust.
E. about his LIFE - in the expansion he really dies A LOT LESS. still - in case he WILL die - we need the items ;>


I think that quite sums it up -

what do you think friends?

the game sometimes have heavy spikes of crazy dmg > animate guardian dies > items gone

hakus mod isnt viable for unique items.

i think this animate guardian has potential but in its current itteration its not worth to look into at all.

thats my 2 cents :)


hope it gets some love in the future :(

Attack gems linked to Animate Guardian can not be used by you. Instead they are used by your guardian if it has the appropriate weapon. I think this would make the gem viable and interesting.

I also think that putting a notable or a keystone somewhere on the passive skill tree that causes animated weapons and animated guardians to drop equipment when they fall/despawn would also alleviate some concerns over the permanent loss while forcing people to devote skill points rather than currency to get the Haku effect.

Making the Gaurdian require more sockets is, in my opinion, not the way to go. I think a better alternative is to have the Guardian use different attacks based on which type of weapon he has equipped, e.g. give him a staff and he sweeps, give him a dagger and he viper strikes, give him 2 weapons and he dual strikes etc.


On an unrelated not, while he can wear and benefit from a Bringer of Rain and a chest piece at the same time, the same bug doesn't apply to the Goddess Scorned. Wanted to try scorned with a Dyadus xD

Got the gem and for the first 5 minutes i was quite interested - something different.

Then it died.

After all the time you go through to click on diff items to equip- even white trash, it was weak vs mobs of the same level range on cruel...
Not even worth the time to identify magic or rare to equip it.

I let it attack one ape - and it took ages to kill it, nearly getting killed himself.

Summoned Ice Golem survives way longer, does more damage, got buffs and doesn't need gear.


Death is one of the biggest issues since it wipes all gear. And unless you specialize in summons - you cant heal him really. That's if he doesn't die too fast in the first place.

Even if it did more damage or had skills - you can bother wasting time equipping magic rare gear all the time that you need to identify.

Would be interesting to use but way too bothersome eight now.


Oh and it could have a option or support gem that allows it to "consume" and equip any usable gear on ground automatically (and for the sake of sanity - ignores 5 slot items).
So you can summon, it will seek and pick stuff up to heal or gear up automatically. A decent support/distraction pet.

Why not have the AG skill summon a humanoid form of the AG, nothing equipped.

Add a new skill that equips items to the Guardian just like you do now.

Items persist through death, unsummoning, everything etc.

You can't get the items back, but you can switch them out by overwriting.



Seems pretty simple and effective,

It would be really cool to not lose the items on death, people may invest a lot in them with uniques and such if it was a viable damage source too.

So I recently tried the AG gem and I have a couple of feedback most of which have most likely come up here already.

A: You can not heal the guardian in the hideout at all which is very misleading IMO since you see his health go up but when you go back in a map it's health is back down to the previous amount in my case this was like 5% and since minions don't have grace periods the guardian just died instantly upon re-entering.

B: Losing all gear on minion death is just unreasonable. I feel like either the master mod should be made more global (weapon and helmet at least) or a unique/keynode be made that allows guardian to drop all his gear on death / desummon and go to cooldown instead.

C: No easy way to de-summon. I agree that it would be cool to keep items but seeing the crafted mod and all already implemented it is unlikely. I'd at least like a way to desummon the guardian. Maybe via a gem like detonate mines that we can link to triggers if we want. On a side note a trigger gem that activates when a minion is reduced to low life would be pretty cool with AG.

D: Animate Guardian does too little guarding. Add some pre-built skills to it's move set that protect the user or the ability to animate skill gems on the ground with the animate guardian gem so he uses that skill as his attack instead of auto attack. If you feel like power creep is a problem make the non-minion supports linked to AG only affect his default attack and allow only attacks to be animated.

I don't think that is too unreasonable right?

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Moose65 wrote:

So, he's still completely useless even in the expansion. Funny how he still carries this crappy lose all items mechanic on death for fear of him being an auto inclusion in builds, when pretty much 1 of the 3 golems are basically that now.

There's little reason to not include a golem in your build because of the buff it provides, yet somehow an animate guardian running around with a leer cast and dying breath is to be feared (because lets face it, no matter what awesome gear and 6L setup you use on him, literally anything else you could do is gonna outdps his sweet auto-attack).

Other than summoner builds, I don't know too many builds that are gem slot starved that they can't simply include a golem + minion life into their build to receive a free almost 100% up-time buff.

Simply slap a golem tag on animate guardian, put a lengthy cooldown (on death, something like 30~60 seconds), and be done with it. Skill will remain useless until then.

Edit: Playing with the new golems makes me very disappointed that Animate Guardian is still in the current shape that it is.

Well I got my guardian equiped with leer cast and dying breath and he's giving powerfull aura that buff my other minions and with fortify and minion life he's unkillable he's a good utiligy summon