Animate Weapon

"

Panda413 wrote:

does it make sense to think that GGG would add "throwaway" skills?

i don't think anyone could possibly ever imagine this happening. we are but lowly mortal lifeforms, caught in a living river that only ever inexorably flows in the same direction. the kind of superhuman awareness that would be required in order to look at past events and reasonably discern patterns for the future would probably only be achievable by some kind of divine spiritual being and I don't think any of us would claim to be one of those. I mean, I was surprised when I woke up this morning and discovered I was wearing underwear. I'm sure you can relate.

After using this a whole bunch my opinion is as such: It's not terrible, but it's also so rarely useful that I'd rather save the hotbar slot on better skills. Maybe if it was simply "animate item" so you can get a ton of weak meatshield single pieces of armour running around or bows and wands too?

At least that way there'd be a reason to bother building around this. In the current state it's barely useful and I'm a summoner scion with plenty of dexterity to be able to use it.

"

mucker wrote:

I can't believe people are asking to be able to spam it but not have it target recipe items automatically or high links. Come on. This game is all about trade offs. If you're lazy with your casting you're gonna lose some good stuff. That's like asking for raise zombie not to auto target good spectre corpses. Also GGG likes to sneak recipes into the game time to time, something like that would give it away too easy.

Don't be silly. Things we discussing here are not pushing skill to casuality.
This skill is all about tradeoffs, duration is short, item is destroyed.
So likning it with not manual casting (trigger gems, spell totem) must not apply additional problems. So max sockets/links restriction seems OK.

I've been running this as my main skill supported by Increased Duration, Added Lightning Damage, and Wrath in a full party, farming Cruel Ledge in Nemesis. The 45% increased skill duration from the passive skill tree is pretty helpful. It gives a total of 13.5 seconds to their duration, which is an essential boost.

With all the item quantity bonuses for parties, there are easily enough melee weapon drops for me to have a constant army. On average I can sustain having up to 12 at once. That amount reduces the less party members you have and your clear speed, of course.

What I like to do is pick up all the magic and rare melee weapons, identify them at the end of an instance, and put a few down a the beginning of each new instance or whenever it's convenient. It's pretty fun looking as the animated weapons kill and even more weapons drop, adding to the army.

As for the total damage output, it's pretty good. Minion movement speed is a major plus, because they actually initialize attacks a lot quicker. I think I might switch Wrath out for Haste to see how the animated weapons fare with just Added Lightning Damage for damage, but a lot more attack and movement speed.

All in all I feel a build using this as their main skill is possible, but not when playing solo in the new leagues. Item quantity bonuses are essential in sustaining enough animated weapons. If you can't even stack "increased item quantity" on your gear then there's no way to do it solo unless you keep replenishing an inventory of melee weapons. An alternative is letting ranged weapons be animated, but I suppose that would probably be overpowered.

I'm looking forward to future tweaks on this skill. I'm really enjoying the thought of being morgana and just having a bunch of weapons and armor defend me while my mind saves me from any injury and I make eldritch beasts do my bidding while I take over the THRONE OF CAMELOT!

Pls pls pls add an possiblity to summon unidentified blue weapons. Because i think in late game there are some problems if you got high IR or play in groups.


And who the hell take and use blue weapons !?


It would be nice if this this skill would animate weapons in an area and not only the weapon on your cursor, because its hard when many enemys are on the weapons. Something like with the zombies.


But all in all i really like the skill and i'm trying to get a "animater" witch :)



EDIT: And why do they disappear if you change instance.. and guardian stays until he dies ???

I agree with the whole spell totem giving the risk of animating 6 links/slots is kinda silly animate guardian probably suffers from same issue.

Why not just make it so it doesn't destroy the item but it can only be casted on the item once?
This way it can make use of blues as well and deals with the risk of destroying something you don't want to.

The point is to use up the item. It'd be odd to have the items continue to exist. If they allow that, they might as well just make the spell summon a random floating weapon without requiring any input. Make it have base stats, and boring.

I'd like to be able to consume unidentified items as well. The weapons use up the item anyway, so it doesn't matter if you're letting it equip something that is unidentified, right?

Or is there coding in the background here that is summoning an invisible creature that 'equips' the item and as such it must be identified?

In act 1 normal, Animate Weapon seems underpowered to the extent that it's rarely worth casting. It is clunky to cast and does not last long enough to have sufficient effect.