Animate Weapon

what i do to make use of this is lug around some small white weapons ie daggers or 1 handed swords and drop em when i need extra damage for tough enemies, their damage alone isn't so great however i use a passived up anger to improve it a good deal which makes 5-6 animated daggers a rather nasty addition to the field for a tough enemy ie a boss or rare pack, sure they wont live passed the encounter but hey the encounter doesn't last very long either thanks to the sudden spam of elemental damage.

Don't know how it will pan out at higher levels since I'm still only in a2 norm however any boss I've done this to has lasted all of a few seconds so far.

Anyone tried using Animate Weapon + Spell Totem?

Don't got a character ready to test this.
I'm assuming the range on the totem might be able to cast it long range, but I could be wrong.
If it works, this removes the auto-cast problem.
It shouldn't reduce the damage cause it's totem damage, not minion damage, that is reduced (less). This requires testing.

The other option is Cast on Melee Kill.
I want to find out how many weapons it can animate at one time.
Ex: monster drops 5 weapons on death, only animates one. Testing needed. If this is the case, it's garbage.

The other thing is testing how the skill scales in damage. If I get general melee nodes, general weapon damage nodes, or specific axe / sword / mace etc nodes.

Why this skill is bad:

>You need a resource other than mana for it to cast. If you don't have that resource available it is useless.

>You can't use it on unID weapons, thus making only white items an actual option for animation, hence reducing the usability for the skill even further.

>If you decide to animate a blue or yellow item, it's only for 30 lousy seconds. With increased duration and passives you get it only to a bit over a minute.

>They die really quickly which is a waste, because if they die you can't recast them easily like Zombies or skelletons.

>Key pickup has to be turned off for it not being a pain in the ass to cast them.

How to make the skill better:

>Make it possible to turn unID weapons into animated ones, even if they dont get the magic bonus.

>Duration should last at least 180sec/3min for it to be useful (especially in boss fights)
This also makes it possible for better scaling with passive and support gems.

>Make them more durable so they don't die in one hit.

OR

>Remove their life all together and make them invincible

This should be enough for the skill to be a useful skill.

For now I see it as only a gimmick and not a real skill to be used.
I dropped it around level 30 and went with zombies and skeletons again.

My Scion Weapon Animator is currently level 54 in the Nemesis league and I'm starting to get the hang of using it as my main skill. Hopefully I'll be able to put a video up soon demonstrating how exactly to do it and giving my thoughts on the skill's potential.

The only things that irk me at this point are the upkeep of melee weapons in solo play (without increased item quantity, that is) and the fact that they don't persist after changing zones or logging out.

I still think the best solution to the former would be to let the weapon drop at the end of its duration at the cost of item quality, but still disappear if killed. It would be allocated to you, of course.

The system I imagine to be most effective is a flat reduction of quality per animation duration, and if there isn't enough quality to meet that cost, the weapon disappears at the end of its animation duration.

This means that if you want to have a consistent pack of animated weapons, you need to use Blacksmith's Whetstones. The higher the rarity of the weapon, the higher the cost of consistently animating it is because of the way the currency works. Basically, the more powerful the item, the higher the cost would be to reuse it.

Why can't you animate ranged weapons? That really disappointed me :/

My feedback:
I really hate this skill because in description of this skill is missing part 'consume weapons used for cast'
So my first experience in new ladder was finding rust beak sword [100% dmg on low life]
and my second destryoing it with this new spell... I decided to move back to standard because of this .

I hope that you will add it [or similiar warning] that it destroy weapons so there will be no more sad players .

level 8 scion domination league

but closed beta->open beta->realeased gamer with many 80+ lvl chars and I feel lucky that I did not test it on my better legendary in another league .

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The only things that irk me at this point are the upkeep of melee weapons in solo play (without increased item quantity, that is) and the fact that they don't persist after changing zones or logging out.

I still think the best solution to the former would be to let the weapon drop at the end of its duration at the cost of item quality, but still disappear if killed. It would be allocated to you, of course.

That is why I think the skill would be better off without duration and instead a mana reservation or drain. Of course that means you have a hard limit on how many you can animate, as a function of total mana or mana regeneration, but the benefit is much less tedium.

I do like your idea to only destroy the weapons when the minion is killed. Combine that with a non-duration mechanic and you've got a really neat skill.

I also agree with the others that suggested making the cast an AOE, so you didn't need to precisely pick each weapon from the noise.

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Veta321 wrote:

That is why I think the skill would be better off without duration and instead a mana reservation or drain. Of course that means you have a hard limit on how many you can animate, as a function of total mana or mana regeneration, but the benefit is much less tedium.

I do like your idea to only destroy the weapons when the minion is killed. Combine that with a non-duration mechanic and you've got a really neat skill.

I also agree with the others that suggested making the cast an AOE, so you didn't need to precisely pick each weapon from the noise.

I'm not sure about mana reservation. Mana multipliers from support gems would make any reservation amount too much for multiple animated weapons while still using auras. But I agree that mana drain would be quite interesting.

I don't really think it would be OP if they lasted half the duration but dropped their items when dead so you could re-summon them right away

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anglerman wrote:

I don't really think it would be OP if they lasted half the duration but dropped their items when dead so you could re-summon them right away

yes it would, as you went through an area you'd build up an army of unkillable auto-farmers. The skill is really quite nicely balanced. I used it on a dominating blow build that summoned other minions passively through CoMK and CWDT and even with dominated minions, skeles, zombies, and spectre this skill was still worth using. They seemed to do more damage than other minion types. Anyways, it's a fine skill, much better off than where Animate Guardian is. Simply needs to be easier to use.