Conversion Trap

As apparently 3.0 comes with some "minions" reworks, I have been thinking on some build for it...

So, I have been trying to make a conversion trap build for the last couple of days. It's impossible, let me explain my conclusions:

PROS:

- Ghetto Head Hunter. What else to say?
- Works with talismans.
- The same way that minion damage, trap damage, added chaos/cold/lightning damage support doesn't affect converted enemies, Cluster Traps Support provably don't affect their damage either. But was hard to test so I'm not 100% sure.

CONS:

- 8 seconds cooldown: Even picking a saboteur, cooldown recovery on the tree and the gem lvl 20, it sets to 3,65s cooldown. Simply too much. I understand this was designed to be a secondary skill, all skills have it's ups and downs, this is expected, but it's a big downside AND not the only one.
- Single target. I'm just listing things, not in order of priority. Giving AOE would provably be a mistake.
- Conduit doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that this is a bug. It's stated clear on the description of Condouit (and Ambu's Charge) that is for "party members". But I though that monsters changing to your side (gem description) but not being minions, would count as party members. I'm just saying that to point a way to buff the skill (as you might know, charges on monsters work different and better than on players).
- They don't follow you. Haste + Vaal Haste + Generosity + Writhing Jar can help you to kite your converted enemies to next pack. Good plan, shit implementation. The aggro range is too short and only 1 monster per worm will go. Ranged enemies are incompatible with this strategy.
- What do you do when you only have converted enemies remaining? I'll be straight forward: This skill benefits almost nothing from your tree (trap cooldown, # of traps, skill duration), you invest almost 100% on defences, so your damage is shit. Then you have 8 rare+aura monsters buffed with charges and talisman that turn against you simultaneously. This is troublesome and needs to be addressed. Haven't found any remotely good solution (really, only could think about bonespire talisman + Writhing jar worms, and it sucks).
- Solo bosses. Same as previous point.
- I couldn't manage for converted enemies to take talismans, they only pick them when they're on the offensive (and it's not a particularly high priority...)

If I were a GGG game designer, I would do these changes.

A unique Helmet that:

- Has lvl 20 Conversion Trap -> So effectively will be a 5L
- Converted enemies follow you.
- You can hurt non-player allies. You can't deal damage with skills yourself -> Like ancestral bond. This allows you to kill allies summons. Maybe go full derp and not allow traps or totems if the disadvantages of this unique are too vainilla.
- +50 maximum life

Change conversion trap so:

- Cooldown: 5 seconds -> So, when fully suported, it's 2.28 seconds (3.35 if only supported by the gem).
- Description says: "Throws a trap that, when triggered by an enemy, converts that enemy to your team for a short duration. Does not affect unique monsters or players." -> So Conduit and Guardian's Harmony of Purpose works.
- Converted enemies are more aggressive -> increased aggro radius for easier transitions from pack to pack or kitting with worms.
- IF those changes are too OP (and only if), add: "Converted monsters have Egoism: (40-59)% reduced effect of Non-Curse Auras on it's allies". -> ghetto Head Hunter effect can't be too meta (specially if NOT wearing the helmet).
- MAYBE add Generostiy to the pool of skills that can support Conversion trap -> Specially if the previous point is implemented

Change the monsters' AI:

- Change priorities to go like mad rabbid dogs for talismans and enemy worms. Even ranged monsters will have to go and try to stomp the worms like if those worms ate it's mama alive. TOP #1 priority.
- Improve AI, just like golems. This is provably a titanic task, if it needs to be done monster type by monster type, so super low priority. Don't hold the changes for this.

Thank you for reading this wall of text. When a GGG staff member I would reeeeally like to know what's your impresion of conversion trap: "Too niche but finely tuned" or "the only reason we're not deleting this is because 1 guy uses this once a year and don't want to be dicks. Comparable to Elemental Hit status".

This has been something of a 'dead skill' for the longest of times.
While the core idea is interesting, the implementation is so terrible as to be nigh worthless.
Outside of aura's and AOE buffs, there is no way to scale converted enemies damage as they do not count as minions.

The only thing you can scale is duration, trap number and cooldown.
But since they enemies don't follow you, scaling any of these isn't very useful as the enemies just stand around wherever they were. Amassing an army just isn't possible.

And yet Dominating Blow and Summon Spectre shows that you can indeed have enemy units both count as minions and follow you. And yet this skill does neither of these things.

While I love the idea of this skill, it's functionally useless.

So, since we are having a little something of an upgrade for summoners of all sorts, and since skitterbots work with some of the new gems:
I would like to ask if its possible that Conversion Trap work like a minion of some kind, at least to use with some of the new support gems. Using this skill with Infernal Legion Support and turning a rare enemy into something that can burn all its allies and then explode with minion instability is something that I wanted to do, until i figured out it doesn't work.
Since the skill seems pretty much dead i would like to ask if this is something that could be in consideration for the future, pretty please.

I would love to see Conversion Trap work with Infernal Legion Support just for the LULs

Please add 'converted enemies follow you' and 'cannot convert rare enemies' to divergent conversion trap.

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Rory wrote:

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This skill has been more or less dead for the longest period of time in PVE and whilst it might have limited use in PVP (I genuinely don't know, I don't play PVP), PVP in this game is dead as well.

There would be obvious balance issues with giving this skill a minion tag and issues with setting the converted enemies as minions, but those are problems which can be worked around and resolved over time by essentially treating conversion trap as some convoluted temporary specters. The problem with the skill as is, is twofold. There is nigh on no way to scale the skill itself, you cannot make the converted enemies deal more damage, nor increase their hp (which I expect is the main problem with applying the minion tag to the skill to begin with). Even if you could scale the skill however, it would still be nigh on useless in any form of boss fight, since most of those are devoid of hostiles which can be converted.

From my point of view, whilst it would obviously be a band aid solution, making this skill scale in some way with minion modifiers would at least make it partially useful, even though it would still without a doubt be niche. This skill does have some potential if it could interact with minion modifiers and not just in the form of temporary specters, but it could also have interesting interactions with minion instability.

Made a build using Conversion Trap back in 3.16 (Scourge) just for gimmicks and to see how far I can take it.

Used divergent conversion trap and scaled the damage for the converted minion to deal 2000%+ damage and trap cooldown to around 2.6 seconds. On paper this sounds amazing but in practicality, the converted minion did little to no damage. All I did was scale aura and aura effect. In a T16 map, the converted minions could not even kill white mobs.

The main scaling for the damage was getting as much quality as possible for the divergent conversion trap to scale the increased damage but that increased damage doesn't mean anything if there is no flat damage to back it up and there is little to no source for that as it does not have much tags to scale off of.

I remember back before 3.0, the converted objects (totems/minions) would teleport to you if you moved off screen like any other minion but now they are just stationary so kind of defeats the purpose of even using the converted minions/totems.

Pros:
1. Used to be a nice gimmick skill where converting rare mobs/totems could provide buffs

Cons:
1. No minion tag so converted minions don't scale with minion damage.
2. No real source of scaling the damage besides aura
3. Converted enemies are stationary

Skill really needs an overhaul. Either to be removed or reworked. Since it converts not only minions but also totems, a few tags might be needed and the AI needs to be fixed.