New Skill Idea - Summon Hostile Monsters! (Active/Passive)

This Suggestion comes in two parts: The first part deals with Active skill implementation. The second deals with Passive implementation ideas.

Why Have a Skill Like This?

I would love to see the addition of a skill like this to the game. The reason being that it covers the weaknesses of some proliferation builds and others (Lightning Arrow etc...) which thrive on larger packs and suffer greatly in 1v1 settings.


The Inspiration Behind the Idea

I've been experimenting with a proliferation build lately and its major weakness at present is single target and Boss fights. Especially high life/highly resistant targets.

So I came up with an idea... I'd love to be able to summon some hostile mobs that I could use to proliferate status ailments to those problem targets.

Of course, summoning plain old white mobs all the time would be extremely OP so I also thought "What if the mobs it summoned were random??" Leave it up to RNG!

Active Skill Implementation

How It Would Work

So, for example:

A number is rolled from 0 - 1000.

For a roll of 0 - 400: A white mob of a random native monster type for the area is summoned.
From 401 - 700: Maybe a Rare with accompanying white mob?
From 701 - 850: A magic mob of some sort (high life magic mobs are more difficult than rares IMO.)
From 851 - 950: A random Beyond mob (still really dangerous if you get Abaxoth or something!).
From 951 - 1000: A random rogue exile.

Balancing

In this way it is a bit of a gamble to use it in boss fights... In fact, it may well be suicidal if the wrong exile or beyond boss pops up next to shrine Piety, but that makes it more interesting! The chances of rolling a good mob far outweigh the dangers of an exile.

Leveling the gem would add to maximum pack size. Quality could maybe slow the mobs?? Or just further increase the pack size. Obviously they would not drop loot.

There should be a timer and a cool-down on the skill in that mobs will disappear after a certain time that increases as the gem levels. The cool-down would be to stop successive summons. Alternatively the skill could just remain inactive until all summoned monsters are destroyed or their timer disappears.

Although I have no experience with PvP, I cannot see this skill being particularly out of balance given the element of jeopardy that comes with its use. Of course; I would be a fool to think that everyone would be happy about it. IMO the players that reject new skills and call for nerfs all the time would always find some game feature or another to be unhappy about. This is not a stab at anyone; game balance is important to all of us. It is merely an expression of personal opinion based on observation. We would all love to have a perfectly balanced game to play in. The problem lies in that everyone's definition of perfection is different!

Passive Skill Implementation

Alternatively, a passive skill that makes the summoner's minions turn hostile would be interesting. Summoned skeletons and zombies would attack the player instead, thus aiding a build that thrives on multiple lower life targets over single target. In a way it's similar to the already existing Minion Instability.

Types of Passive Implementation

The addition of a keystone on the passive tree would be an obvious way to implement this change; however, it may limit the accessibility of the skill to certain classes dependent on its positioning in the tree.

Another option would be to implement it as a relatively hard to obtain corruption affix to jewelry. An obvious case where this would be detrimental to would be on Sidhebreath which make the mobs that you summon more powerful.

Balancing

The passive skill is balanced by the cast time of the player. How large of a mob that can be summoned is wholly dependent on the player's ability to summon new minions whilst under attack. Potentially I can see the use of Spell Totem with Summon Skeletons to continually summon; however, the Spell totem itself would be attacked by its own summons which shortens its active duration. Another route is the use of Vaal Summon Skeletons which is limited by its soul requirement making it useless in PvP and pretty much a single use in sealed boss rooms with few add spawns.

In Closing

I really hope that someone from GGG takes the time to read this and sees its potential as an addition to the game. If you also see the potential in such a skill or even find issues with what I have proposed here, please take the time to comment.

Thanks for reading :)