Animate Weapon

love it

i'm new in this game and stuff, but this is how i use AW anyway:
I don't use animate weapons on my way. I save weapons instead in my pockets (what give me time to identify latter), and then I release all at once. It's quite helpful with bosses. when i try it for the first time, against brutus, i did not need to take part in battle at all. (sorry for bad english)

It's far the best i can do at the moment

Needs to be useable on blue unidentified items.

Consider allowing ranged.

And PLEASE get rid of its windup time, weapons lay on the ground for like... 3 seconds after casting before they get up and fight. Thats duration wasted, and time that they can be damaged.

I suggest we can animate range weapon but they have less hp, less damage and shorter duration

Copying over a post I made in a different thread:

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Waves_blade wrote:

I'd be all for buffing it.

People crying "OP!" have to realize something:

-How comparable is animate weapon to other skills? Its clear speed is 100% random, leveling with it is unreliable, ESPECIALLY when zone swapping, and ID scrolls are NOT in good supply early on to carry stuff around. Having to choose between ID'ing an upgrade an I'Ding an item so you can even use a skill is a horrific choice to even think about.

-It is counter-intuitive to running rarity or running with a culler, as you cant cast on un-ID'd weapons, thus forcing the following issues:

A) What other skill besides animate guardian, forces you to waste time picking up, I'Ding, dropping an item, then casting the skill on it? MULTIPLE TIMES, if you want more consistency in the clear speed? Not to mention, while your doing this, you can be in danger potentially, AND while your doing this, other builds would have already been clearing monsters.

AA) NOT TO MENTION, this devours ID scrolls, and if you cast on rare weapons, you lose out on selling for alt/alch shards and augments, weakening your currency over time gain.

B) What other skill besides animate guardian eats inventory space to do the above? Giving you less room to hold loot to sell?

-Animate weapon has an incredibly annoying 'weapon grace' period after casting the spell, the weapon will lay on the ground, fully able to take damage and wasting skill duration, for like 3ish seconds. I've had weapons fully die before they even levitated themselves off the ground.

-How often do you EVER see people playing with this skill? You'd think that with the quantity bonus = more items dropped it wouldn't be bad, except I have NEVER, NOT ONCE, seen someone else in a pub even try this skill. Just because ONE person managed to make it work doesn't mean its viable, or even interesting, for even a fraction of the population.

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KalHirol wrote:

If anything, it would have to be another, separate skill gem.

Just making animate weapon able to animate ranged weapons would break the game.

Animate Weapon is already preeetty strong, making it able to animate any bow and wand i find would not only increase the numbers of weapons you have, it would add to much safe DPS, because you could literally snipe dominus to death.

And if anything even looks at these weapons funny then explode.

Not to mention, why are you even mentioning safe DPS? Ele-buzzsaw is the pure definition of it and would blow away animate weapon builds in safety and clear speed, even with half the screen littered with melee and ranged weapons.

A group of croaking chimera's leaps onto a buzzsaw, the buzzsaw takes some damage, laughs, kills them and moves on.

A group of croaking chimera's leaps into your pile of wands and bows, the weapons die. You no longer can clear anything without your skill and now run away.

Animate Weapon is an interesting skill that I've been messing around with in the past couple of days.

Thematically, it is very fun/hilarious/exciting/cool. I must give GGG where credit is due.

But Path of Exile is not an art expo, or at least, not yet. The in-game balance of this skill is a nightmare.

Animate Weapon is both overpowered and underpowered at the same time.

Overpowered, in that if you get lucky and managed to animate 7+ ish weapons with an aura stacking character around (+aura effect, with wrath,anger,hatred,haste), it is very strong. Linked with melee splash, multistrike, and weapon elemental damage, it is quite a formidable skill.

However, the usage and reliability of this skill needs significant improvement, which gives it a significant disadvantage compared to other skills.
Besides animate guardian (a skill which I have not used at all, and thus I cannot, in good faith, comment on the balancing of that particular skill), no skills in this game require you to spend currency to use it.

Yes, you can animate white weapons, but in parties, with MF gear on, or just plain "bad" luck, you'll always run across the inevitable situation where you're out of white weapons to animate, you'll either have to portal back to town, to spend money/time getting weapons from vendor/stash, portal back, drop each weapon on the ground individually, and animate each one, OR grab a magic/rare weapon off the ground, drag it to a free block of inventory space (if you have any), use a scroll of wisdom on it, drop back on the ground, and animate it. This is ridiculous. Please notify me of counter examples, but I know of no skill(s) where you have to portal back to town to grab stuff out of your stash(snapshotting will be removed in the upcoming mini-expansion) or spend currency and a very long amount of time, in order to have some semblance of reliability. Imagine if you have to spend a wisdom scroll for every five swings from dual strike. You shouldn't have to spend currency to use skills. Yes, spend currency on 5/6 linked items, spend currency on damage boosting items, spend currency on build enabling uniques. But to spend currency to LITERALLY be able to cast a skill? I don't think that is a good idea.


How can we look at balancing this skill?
There is no way to really adjust the skill itself to lower the power level a little bit without making the ONLY viable use of this skill being on/with aura stacking characters. GGG should re balance aura stacking itself to make animate weapon viable on its own.

But, there are many ways to make animate weapon more reliable.

a) Let animate weapon work on unidentified weapons on the ground. Let it work as if it were a white weapon. Just hover over it and click.

a1) If GGG absolutely insists on having to spend currency to use this skill with any sort of reliability, let us animate unidentified weapons on ground like regular white weapons, but have it consume a wisdom scroll from the player's inventory, automatically, instead of making players jump through hoops by picking up the weapon, clearing out inventory space, identifying it, dropping it, and animating it.

b) Increase the duration, and perhaps some additional durability to the weapons themselves. All it takes is a longer than normal gap between mob packs, a teleport back to town, a mob pack with no weapon drops at all, or an AoE heavy mob pack to completely destroy your weapon army. Increase base duration by 20-40%, add some base armor/health/resistances to help animated weapons stick around for a little longer.

c) Let players summon animated weapons (or void weapons) when there aren't weapons around. However to balance this, stopping players from just holding down animate weapon button and summoning an infinite army of void weapons, there should also be a penalty for summoning weapons from the void, as opposed to animating weapons on the ground. Perhaps summoning void weapons is costly, and only for last resort situations. For every animated AND summoned weapon out, the mana cost to summon a void weapon is increased by a given amount, say 15%. Animating weapons on the ground does not incur this mana cost penalty. This allows animate weapon to be used to get an initial weapon pool going at the beginning of instances, rebuilding, or supplementing a dwindling weapon pool between between mob packs, and keeping a character able to go on the offensive after a boss has destroyed a character's weapon pool. Note, since the mana cost increases for each summoned AND animated weapon it would not be wise to summon void weapons when a character already has a decently sized weapon pool going. This allows for animate weapon to retain its current usage, pacing/rhythm, theme and flavor, which establishing a bottom line for the power of the skill.

d) Allow players to animate ranged weapons (wands and bows). (It IS called animate weapon, not animate melee weapon. Unless there is a name change scheduled for this skill.) I was always annoyed when only ranged weapons were left after clearing mob packs. Ranged weapons will have a little more survivability, being out of harms way. I suggest that animated ranged weapons have a %50 less life modifier on them. Balancing should take care of itself. Melee support gems cannot augment ranged weapons, and projectile support gems cannot augment Melee weapons. An all purpose animate weapon gem will either be very melee or ranged heavy, but not both. Unless a character dedicated two items to augmenting two copies of the skill, which is OK, in my opinion. Strength should come with commitment and investment in a given build/skill.

e) Please increase the distance which characters can animate weapons. Currently it is extremely small. It is very irritating having to wade into the middle of combat just to animate a weapon.

f) Also, why is it possible to cast animate weapon on non-weapon drops? This makes no sense whatsoever and is ridiculous since it still forces you to play the casting animation, and pay the mana cost. Consider that drops are often listed on the ground side-by-side, this problem is very common, and irritating.

well death and taxes boss can use range animate so I think ggg will add it soon.

The problem with this skill is the lack of weapons lying around ... sometimes.

What if there is a desecrate-like spell? If instead of corpses, it summons weapons to rain on mobs (like rain of arrows). After which, the white weapons clatter to the ground, allowing you to animate them.

On top of that, like it be AoE, albeit a very small one. So that animate weapons can be supported by increase AOE gem, to allow you to animate a bunch of your weapons (from the above suggested spell) in one go.

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loboSG wrote:

What if there is a desecrate-like spell? If instead of corpses, it summons weapons to rain on mobs (like rain of arrows). After which, the white weapons clatter to the ground, allowing you to animate them.

This would be a source of free wis scrolls. Bad idea.
Jintoboy's suggestion about void weapons is much better. Tried this skill too with my summoner, it is fun but absolutely unreliable (and I didn't ever bother with non-white weapons, knowing that would be horrendously tedious and time-consuming).

I seriously hope the skill's mana cost is reduced otherwise life-based Animate Weapon builds are ridiculously point starved in the tentative 1.2.0 tree.

Having to run 3 60% mana reservation auras for good damage requires every aura node but the ones near Blood Magic, but also a ton of maximum mana nodes and/or mana cost reduction nodes so you can still cast Animate Weapon. This shoehorns one into getting only the essential nodes that make the build possible and a bare minimum of life nodes.

Needless to say, a Chaos Inoculation variant has it easy. Not only can you grab more minion nodes, more mana nodes, and a ton of energy shield nodes, but you can even get all the essential curse nodes. It's kind of ridiculous.

It's not like reducing the mana cost won't make the Chaos Inoculation version better, but it would at least make life versions not have to switch into the build at like level 85 for it to actually work.