Animate Weapon

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sidtherat wrote:

it deals nice dmg (noticeable and free so both are good)

my gtipe with it is the dex requirement. most summoners are witches (and templars). both have hard time getting 100+ dex with classic gear.

quitr sad that animated skills are not int/str..

Seems like the active skills that got added are best utilized by the Scion. Understandibly, the new class needs some skills.

This takes too much time and currency investment to be able to revolve a build around it. At the moment it can only be used as a supplement to other minion skills.

All other minion skills have the required resources available all the time. But for Animated Weapon, it's not like every kill or chest is going to drop a melee weapon.

And even if they do, the animated weapons don't even persist through areas so you need to find more again, or go to a vendor and spend currency on something that lasts 30 seconds.

I really like this skill but in its current state it's not so great. One would be better off using Dominating Blow for a similar effect.

I repeat, do want Spell Totem version that will autoraise not 6S and not 3-4-5-6L weapons.

That will save lots of time.

Will there be a white Wisdom Gem anytime soon?

I don't want to take the time to pick up blue weapons, identify, drop and then animate.

I want to point the item, cast Wisdom to identify, cast animate.

Issues I've had with this skill (Aside from the buggy keybind usage)

1) Very tedious to cast - needing to manually click on each weapon on the ground takes you away from combat. The only other summon that requires you to look away from combat is Raise Spectre - and even then its only once in awhile and on specific creatures you want to utilize. Also the cast range is abysmally low.
Suggestion: Casting Animate Weapon automatically target the nearest non-4/5/6L white weapon on the ground.

2) Completely useless without weapons on the ground. There are almost always enough corpses for Raise Zombie and Raise Spectre - if you don't see enough White weapons you have to waste item identifying to get more.
Suggestion: Let us cast Animate Weapon on unidentified Blue weapons on the ground, even if it reverts it to the base values.

3) Low Duration - 30 seconds is far too low given the above two points. Unless the damage output is incredible at higher levels - taking the time to animate half a dozen weapons only have them disappear shortly thereafter is frustrating.
Suggestion: Either A) Remove the duration and give a cap to the number of weapons we can have out, or B) Keep the duration but let summoning nodes improve it, say 5 seconds for each of the key summoning nodes (+1 Zombies/Skels/etc)

Overall I really want to like this skill, but it just feels incredibly lackluster at the moment.

I wanted to start a Scion based on one of the new animate-spells but as soon as I got it I logged out and put it on halt in hope of some changes.

The spell-mechanics completely don't fit in the game the way it's executed right now. Aside from the apparent bug with summoning the weapons, I hate the way weapons are chosen / treated. You have to WAIT for drops / clump your inventory full with white items to drop infight and then cast on every single one. You don't know about the damage a weapon will deal if you didn't study a weapons stats - if the damage is calculated based on the weapon at all (it's not indicated anywhere). The fact, that the weapons get consumed afterwards makes it even worse. You can't go around summoning rares / uniques because then they will be lost.

I'd suggest changing the spell (same goes for animate guardian) in a way to feel more natural - as in summoning either the supported weapon / armour or the weapon / armour you are wearing. It just doesn't match PoE's playstyle to hope for drops to summon them (zombies are reliable because you know an enemy will leave a corpse) or to run around throwing white items into all directions to summon them.

This way, this spell won't just be a useless niche for any summoner but instead make it viable as primary / secondary spell and maybe even take effect of active changing of your 2nd weapon set infight (summoning the weapon(s) you wear on this set) thus creating a new way to play and think of a character.

Cheers

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NinjaWill wrote:

Issues I've had with this skill (Aside from the buggy keybind usage)

3) Low Duration - 30 seconds is far too low given the above two points. Unless the damage output is incredible at higher levels - taking the time to animate half a dozen weapons only have them disappear shortly thereafter is frustrating.
Suggestion: Either A) Remove the duration and give a cap to the number of weapons we can have out, or B) Keep the duration but let summoning nodes improve it, say 5 seconds for each of the key summoning nodes (+1 Zombies/Skels/etc)

Overall I really want to like this skill, but it just feels incredibly lackluster at the moment.

You can increase the duration of Animate weapon with the increased duration support gem, and possible the increased skill duration nodes under scion starting point. (haven't tested) ...

That means you can have over 1 minute duration on the weapons.

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KiwiHaze wrote:

I wanted to start a Scion based on one of the new animate-spells but as soon as I got it I logged out and put it on halt in hope of some changes.

I don't think you are giving it enough chance.

If someone new to Path of Exile decided they wanted to have a fireball character, I could easily see them quitting after a couple hours because the skill is slow and not that strong. Only when combined with support gems and some passive nodes is the true power of the fireball revealed.

Giving up on animate weapon or animate guardian early on will surely result in holding this opinion.

Though I'm glad so many people are writing these off as crappy skills.. I'm hoping to get a > 10% quality one cheap until people realize their potential.

...

Generally speaking.. When you look at the skills already in the game, does it make sense to think that GGG would add two "throwaway" skills in the 1.0.0 release? It doesn't to me. If I think there is something wrong with the skill, it's probably because I haven't figured out the proper way to use it yet.

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Panda413 wrote:

Generally speaking.. When you look at the skills already in the game, does it make sense to think that GGG would add two "throwaway" skills in the 1.0.0 release? It doesn't to me. If I think there is something wrong with the skill, it's probably because I haven't figured out the proper way to use it yet.

I'm mainly concerned over how tedious the skill is to use. No combination of support gems or theorycrafting will fix that.

The skill is crap for above-stated reasons.

I was expecting to animate items in my inventory. *poof* Animated weapon fighting at my side!

Unfortunately, it works on items on the ground OR items you throw to the ground. The base duration is 30 seconds - you can lengthen that with a support gem, but only to a minute. No items? No point equipping this gem!

Even worse is that the items disappear.

This skill needs to be reworked to be less... finnicky. I'd rather have them animate something from my inventory, have it last for however long a time, then drop to the ground, ready to be reanimated again.

Lose the "animate as many as you want" freedom and restrict it to one item at first. Increase the number of items as the gem is leveled.

The potential for abuse is also there. Bosses will surely become trivial is someone stacks their inventory with daggers or some other melee weapon that takes little room, dumps them all into the boss room (most bosses give you a chance to prep before attacking you), then animates everything and stands back.

Which is okay. I mean, sporker builds are in the game.

The conflict in my view is this: I don't see why GGG allows a hands-off build such as sporker but makes a similar *potential* hands-off build so fucking unwieldy and obtuse.