Summon Skeletons

"

Ragnar119 wrote:

Few tips if you want to use it right.
If your running first in front, cast first ice wall (or how its called), then skeletons.
But best if you want to be sure that monsters dont target you, is to cast them in front of you, then move to them, then cast again in front of you, and continue like that. I'm not having any problems with them. And they are great help outdoor and indoor. Pathfinding could be better, but it's not a big problem because you can cast a lot of skeletons on the enemy.

this is unneeded just travel untill you find a group of mobs a spam skelletons over your self once mobs dont find a path to you they target te skelletons.. altho this is more usefull to a full caster then to a summoner

At first I didn't like them, they seemed far too weak. Now I'm loving them. They are great for dropping some localised damage into the battle, swarming a room while you stand outside, blocking narrow passages (they're like pumping expanding foam into a crack), defending from stray mobs that chase you and getting the first few corpses to raise a more durable zombie horde. The fact they deal decent damage but die easier than zombies makes them a great compliment to your horde. I also kinda like how they wander everywhere, they feel very different to the zombies.

I wish that the time skelly's last would increase as you level up the skill.

Problem with skeletons are they just walk around aimlessly even in combat. I cast them on top of enemies and they still walk around instead of attacking

LvL 30 Witch: Summon-Cold-Curse build

Skeletons work great, i just cast a few in the distance,so that they get agro, and then summon the rest

Witch focussing on minion passives with fireball for damage, cold snap for annoying monsters that keep dodging my fireball (will probably ditch this sometime when I can get some auras in)

My Summoner is a little different, I look at skeletons as walking bombs, I stack minion life to boost their health and use minion instability. This makes boss fights rather hilarious when the boss does AE damage or reflect. I do the same thing with zombies.

Summon skeletons is really lackluster.

Would it be so bad if the timer was removed? I can summon 10 skeletons but they either die immediately because they are so weak or they stand around scratching their rear ends and then go up in a puff of smoke.

If I could summon an army beforehand then I wouldn't mind them being so squishy. But as others have pointed out, casting skeletons as s shield doesn't work since they don't produce any threat.

Zombies work well ONLY because they don't have a timer.

- I think you can start by reversing the movement speeds of zombies and skeletons, so that zombies are slow and longer-lasting while skeletons are fast enough to reach their targets without wasting a quarter of their duration getting there. Fast zombies always seemed strange to me, and there are much more interesting ways to improve them without making them dash around like monkeys.

- It's been mentioned that minions begin to have pathing problems once you have more than a couple of them trying to reach a target. One thing you could do is allow friendly characters to move through each other, and find paths through each other, in order to reach the other side of an enemy or to reach other enemies.

Minions and other moving entities in PoE have a weird tendency to turn and move in the opposite direction even when they have a clear path to a target and no reasonable paths to any other targets. For example, Hillock will constantly path back and forth as long as he's not in melee range. Fixing this problem would go a long way toward improving minions.

- I'm not a fan of the need to spam the skill several times to get to the maximum number, especially considering that having as many minions summoned as possible is the best way to keep them alive. I haven't played a pure summoner yet, but I'm actually less likely to do so now that we have the skeletons because of the added spam.

There are a lot of ways to make summoner gameplay more interesting, and this skill highlights that fact really well because resummoning minions is so UNinteresting. What if, rather than giving skeletons something so jejune as a duration, they simply collapsed after taking too much damage only to reform after a short amount of time? Maybe, having "died" in a previous room, they could burst from the ground under a new group of enemies after that temporary dirtnap? Suppose they clawed at enemies and snared them as they resurrected, as someone else suggested.

- An unfortunate aspect of summoner gameplay in ARPGs is that when things are going well, there's little for the player to do aside from following along and picking up loot. So, give summoners more to do! Rather than just allowing minions to deal enough damage to kill things without any input required from the player, give us skills that prompt special attacks or behaviors from minions. Something like an "Undead Fervor" skill that boosts minions' damage while sapping their health, but causes them to gain health when enemies they were attacking died. You would need to weaken enemies before using it, so now you're looking at other skills that might do that (Poison Arrow summoner witch?!). See, interesting! Synergistic! Situational! Flavorful!

Or, a skill that places a scary rune circle on the ground and buffs minions standing within it, while drastically weakening others. Maybe rather than a circle it's a line or a column. Or a skill that resummons and/or heals minions, but requires the player to channel it and take no other action. Maybe there's a duration of 3-5 seconds and if you move after committing to that, the remaining healing is inflicted as damage over time to the player and minions. Or! A curse that aids minions attacking an enemy but also buffs that enemy.

The Minion Instability keystone could certainly stand to be reimplemented as a skill. Better not use it at the wrong time, because you're going to be vulnerable after all of your minions explode. Maybe it's random; maybe only some of them explode. Maybe it backfires and they take fire damage over time, or the explosion can deal damage to the caster if they're too close. Or, the caster has to run up to the minion and touch it to make it explode, and most or all of the damage is concentrated in a cone facing away from the caster.

I forgot to mention the casting range, which is about half a screen. I hope this is unintended. You should be able to summon skeletons anywhere on-screen. With zombies you can raise any corpse that's on-screen, and this is actually more important with skeletons because you want them tanking things ASAP rather than moving around.

My character is a witch using firestorm, concentrating on crits/damage increases and increased aoe range.

I use skeletons coupled with an increase minion speed supoort skill gem, without any minion passives at all. I have Discipline Aura for myself and supporting the skeletons, that's the only aura I use, since more auras just make it impossible to see anything on the screen happening.

Skeletons are quite overpowered at the moment in anything that is not Chaos. (I'm not in chaos yet myself, but last difficulty before it.)

- You have an endless supply of them
- You can summon them everywhere
- You get many at once

The trick with using skeletons is to summon them before the enemy sees you. This forces them to attack the skeletons instead of you. So, always summon some skeletons before you enter a room, move farther in a larger area, etc. That way, you never get any enemy attacking you at all by playing a bit carefully.

20 seconds is plenty of time to kill everything on the screen with Firestorm or any other aoe skill. Also, an increased minion speed support gem makes skeletons quite fast enough, considering that you'll summon them on top of enemies or near enemies anyway.

This also means that skeletons pathing AI, although a bit annoying (they run in random directions when blocked from reaching the enemy) is no problem, since you're supposed to summon them on top/near the enemy anyway.

This makes any boss fight in the game currently absurdly easy. You summon skeletons on the boss and drink mana potions and cast attack spells until the boss is dead. The boss won't be able to move and can't reach you neither.

The only time I'm in danger is if the timer on the skeletons runs out and I forget to resummon more of them. This is fine imo.

The biggest issue I have with this skill are the targeting problems it gives you. See this thread here. Having 10 skeletons on the screen makes it impossible for me to consistently target the enemy.


I propose the following to make this skill less op:

- 20 sec duration is fine, leave it
- low cast range is ok, leave it
- reduce the number of skeletons possible in total and make more from it come from passive minion skills

Currently I have no passive minion skill point invested and skeletons are still incredibly strong as a meat shield skill. One should have to invest more in this skill through passive points to make it so strong.

While I have lots of fun playing with skeletons, it makes the game very easy. (In anything that isn't chaos, will try chaos later this week.)