Raise Zombie

I have tried this skill with a power siphon witch and it has been aggravating in a few areas, for me.

1. The zombies are too weak, especially at lower levels. I have had increased life support gem linked since level 15 but it does not really help as damage from magic and rare monsters go up to way above the zombies max health.

2. Monsters go out of their way to NOT attack the zombies and instead they go for me. My whole plan was to stand back with my witch with ranged attacks while the zombies take their a beating. But I am finding myself running backwards more often then not, the monster chasing me and the zombies chasing the monsters. The zombies stand right next to the monsters but the monsters try to push their way through them in order to reach me. This seems wrong to me and is not fun.

3. Lack of information. Does their armour increase with levels? Do their resistances increase with levels? Do they only deal physical damage? Also, the description says they have high health and I guess this means compared to the other summoned monsters and not compared to the player or the monsters.

On the positive side, for me, they do seem to do appropriate amounts of damage and the new teleportation functionality increases the usefulness of them tenfold.

quick question, maybe i should msg rory.

is mf working with minions as intended?

before this patch, rares dropped left and right, now i'm only getting like 30% as many rares, even with +30% more mf post patch.

i'm at 175/15quan w/ my minions linked to ~+50% qual gems and before rare mobs were generally dropping 1 yellow item, but now i'm getting a ton of no drops or single blue drops from them.

so did mf get scalled down? can someone check that it's working correctly with minion kills (including instability explosions)?

i mean, maybe my luck has just been horrible, but it's seemed pretty dramatic.


as far as the minion powers, i ended up needing 3 more skill points than before (i didn't pre plan, so maybe i could have saved 1-2), but the power seems the same as before. the better targetting makes up for smaller numbers, and the travelling zombies means i'm actually using them (instead of pure skeleton spam). i'm high level so i can't tell anything about the leveling curve.

Zombies are far to weak! They die sometimes Faster as u can Summon them again. And vs bosses like Brutus and Merveil theyre totally USELESS because u cant resummon them in time (before u get Merveil to Phase 2 u will die and run out of Mana because Skeletons die even faster).

The Zombies should get buffed at low Levels! or maybe overall. If u want to look at this Skill in the Character Window u only see the casttime.. do they have Armor and Elemental Resistance? If not add it. Do they benefit from the Characters Crit or do they have their own?

A buff could be like something like this:

Give the Zombies more HP and less dmg.
Or more HP and reduce he max Zombies to 1 + the 5 from the skilltree (It would be pretty Hard to abuse the Zombies again for other classes if they could have only 1 or max 3 if they want to waste alot of Skillpoints).

Zombies definetly need a boost in lower levels. They become very powerful past lvl 15 once you hit the next set of Passives and get Minion Life and so on, but until then they're nigh useless. They die instantly and deal nowhere near enough damage.

Current problem is that right after the initial Witch batch, you have about 8 levels of (at the time) useless Int to grind through.

hi,

I'm afraid I couldn't go along with that. Minions now are realy powerful, I rush through merciless and all kind of maps. my zombies have over 2,5k life, cant say the exact amount of dam they do, but 8 zombies need 5 sek to kill merv (both forms) chamber of sins boss i didn´t even realize hes there. 3 seks for each bandit, oki 10 for oak
he can cast 1 imortal call. Val last for half a minute .. that sounds op for me..

but with aegis .. mark did this work in this patch ? have run some test with diffrent shields. it won't make a difference.

I was using zombies as a defensive concept bwith my lvl 62 shadow before the new patch and it worked pretty well.

Before the patch I had to skill minion dmg to reach the minion health nodes, now I can concentrate only on minion health - big thx for that.


Now I tried the new zombies as a defensive concept for my new lvl 43 Templar and it seems a little bit weird to me:

I combined the zombies with a minion health support gem and took 4 minion health passives. Tanking zombies works against normal mobs if I kill them fast but when facing harder enemies the zombies die rather quickly (e.g. Oak (almost) oneshots my zombies).
I have to add skelettons for bosses if I want to stay alive...

My minions dmg is ok (for additional dmg not as a main attack).
It almost seems that my zombies are offensive as good as defensive without spending any point into minion dmg nodes or using any dmg-support gem/aura.

-> This doesnt feel right imho

=> Perhaps the zombies base dmg should be nerfed and the "minion dmg" and exspecially "minion life" passives should be higher?
Dont know - didnt play a pure summoner yet, a lot of summoners say the new changes feel right.
For me as a hybrid char (only a few defensive minions without 2+ curses and 6+ auras...) it doesnt feel sooo good, exspecially at lower lvls...

"

Tranx wrote:

hi,

I'm afraid I couldn't go along with that. Minions now are realy powerful, I rush through merciless and all kind of maps. my zombies have over 2,5k life, cant say the exact amount of dam they do, but 8 zombies need 5 sek to kill merv (both forms) chamber of sins boss i didn´t even realize hes there. 3 seks for each bandit, oki 10 for oak
he can cast 1 imortal call. Val last for half a minute .. that sounds op for me..

I don't think anyone has a problem with Lategame minions, I sure don't, they're badass. The problem is early game. You have a whole slew of time (lvl 5-14 in my case) where minions are nigh useless. It's especially bad if you don't have anything else to make up for it.

I've tried leveling up a witch around raise zombies and skeletons. Every significant boss fight ends up with my character fighting it alone. Anything that does AOE elemental just wipes the whole group.

The issue isn't about summons being balanced endgame, it's about leveling with them.
Right now, you pretty much have to level with some other spec, then respec into a summoner later. That, or play as a subpar cold, fire or whatever.


It's a matter of scaling and resists, I think. I get the feeling that they just have zero resists or close. Of course, you can shoot for Aegis, but that's not something you can get rapidly.

Sorry one maybe trivial question...
Can Zombie's/Skeleton's/Specter's phisical damage leech mana or life if I get the respective passive skill or support gem?