[Shackled Souls] keystone, revive Spectres with Flask Charges

Keep Summoners in the action while still paying a price:

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Shackled Souls
Keystone on the Passive Skill Tree

Upon a Spectre's death, its essence tethers to the life force of its Summoner and reserves 5% of the total of their Life and Energy Shield on Energy Shield, with any remainder on Life, for one minute. The Spectre will revive either after this debuff has passed or by sacrificing 30 flask charges when interacting with the essence.

Gameplay:
You get to keep your Spectres when they die, but they are knocked out for a time and this will cost you. Either you endure the danger of some of your life being reserved, or you pay flask charges to get it back immediately.

The amount of flask charges is intended to be balanced against the life reserved. You can generally get more life back from those flask charges than is reserved, but in exchange the Spectre isn't contributing any damage or utility while disabled.


Mechanics:
The essence will continue to follow the player, but cannot attack or take damage. Click on the essence like any other interactable object to spend flask charges that will revive the Spectre. The charge cost is distributed across all flasks.

The reservation adds up your total Life and Energy Shield together, then reserves that amount on your Energy Shield. If you do not have enough Energy Shield, the rest is reserved on your Life. This allows builds who use Chaos Innoculation (CI) to take this passive.


Theme:
With your blood, you've bound the monster with a deeper, soul-engraved contract that surpasses even undeath. They become your 'immortal' servant. The life reservation plays off of "how" Midnight Bargain grants another Spectre.


Visual:
As a Spectre dies, an ethereal chain shoots out from the Summoner and shackles its fading blue ball of ectoplasm. The chain length shrinks over time, representing how close the Spectre is to reviving. As the Summoner moves, the chain behaves like one and tows the spirit essence behind the Summoner.

To imagine how the chain effect might work and look, think of the beam from a Searing Bond totem with a ghostly chain graphic, connected sequentially in a line of five+ invisible, floating 'totems'. Each 'totem' in the link drags the one behind it when it gets too far away, with a slight delay and distance tolerance, and when stationary they drift around slightly. This means the chain could bend and loop as the Summoner moves around relative to the Spectre essence.

The purpose of the chain, other than as an aesthetic, is to visually distinguish the fallen Spectre, both because its function has changed, and to "draw an arrow" to it so you can easily see it among the clusters of minions and monsters to use flask charges and revive it.


Why is this needed?:
For Summoners, losing your Spectres is unforgiving and tedious. It is especially bad in a group, where you don't have the luxury of stopping and finding an appropriate Spectre or going to an area that has the Spectre you need. At high level, you can't just raise any monster in the current zone and have your socketed supports, curses, and build still count for something.

I absolutely adore the Spectre mechanic of raising an enemy monster and modifying it with support gems, as it offers such a vast variety of possibilities that it tickles the imagination. I would love to see the tedium lessened from this otherwise great skill.


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Bump

30 flask charges? Really? That's no sacrifice.

It is in a boss fight, where Spectres are most likely to die.

The distribution of cost across all your flasks means it'll take around 6 charges from each flask, which equates to 6 kills to get them back. Sounds easy, right? Consider a Hallowed Life Flask has 30 charges and needs 10 per use, so it has 3 uses. Take away 6 flask charges, and you can only use it twice. You might have lost only 6 charges, but in reality you lost one whole use out of all your flasks.

Also, keep in mind Summoners usually have multiple Spectres. 30 Flask charges is per-revive, meaning if all your Spectres were wiped out, you will be paying even more charges to get them all back. The average Summoner has 3, with 6 or more possible. To bring back 3 Spectres, you'll need to pay 18 charges per flask. If any of your flasks don't have enough charges, the rest of your flasks have to carry that burden, so you could need up to 90 charges on a single flask. No flask type has 90 charges without the Ample affix.

I like the idea of having the spectre tethered to you which respawn after time has passed.

Though tough luck if you run chaos inoculation.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

Though tough luck if you run chaos inoculation.

I took that into consideration with "...and reserves 5% of their Life and Energy Shield for one minute." In other words, it reserves from all of your effective life, whether your build is life-based, hybrid, or CI. Of course, this would require an implementation of the reservation mechanic on energy shields.

The language used might need to change slightly, since CI normally can't reserve any life and saying "life and ES" implies it'll take life even if you don't have any (well, CI has 1 life). Basically it's 'and/or' depending on what you have, or another way to say it: There's a special exemption from the life reservation if you have CI. Not quite sure how to phrase that both clearly and succinctly yet. I added a quick and sloppy note in parentheses to the original post.

If reserving Energy Shield can be a thing, then here's a way to make the mechanic consistent across all health types:

5% of the total of Life and Energy Shield is reserved on Energy Shield, and any remainder on Life.

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Is Energy Shield reservation too boring?
We can reserve Life and Mana, so would it be too much of the same thing if Energy Shield reservation worked the same way? Here's an idea to spice things up:

The percentage of reserved Energy Shield is subtracted from its coverage, rather than its value.

If you reserve 50% of 1000 Energy Shield, you will still have 1000 Energy Shield, but it will only protect you from your front half. Damage dealt from behind goes straight to health, and the damage from an AOE is split between Life and Energy Shield by the reserved percentage (in this example, 50% would hit your health directly).

To imagine how coverage works, think of a compass at your character's feet. Divide the circle into quadrants, with North as the front, South as the back, West as the left shoulder, and East as the right shoulder. Divide these quadrants further into 5 sectors each, so around your character is a glowing ring of 18-degree blocks (20 blocks total). Starting from the South and working its way evenly on both the East and West, every 5% of reservation would unfill a block. Any projectiles or melee attacks that hit this block's area will ignore your Energy Shield.

To make things interesting, players have control over the direction that the shield faces: It will always face the mouse cursor. If your reflexes are quick, you can rapidly move the mouse back and forth to block projectiles coming from behind.

Though, if Energy Shield reservation worked like this, then CI would have a difficult time with Shackled Souls. So maybe we should keep how reservation works consistent. But, I kinda like this coverage idea of mine. Another way to bring it into the game is as a separate Keystone. Maybe it doubles your ES but only gives you 75% coverage, giving ES players a unique defense mechanism. Oh, an interesting thought to go along with this: You could willingly expose the open end of your ES so it doesn't take damage from small hits, and can thus regenerate.

I have edited the language used to explain the reservation to the one I wrote above. This should make it clear that CI can use this keystone just as well as anyone else without any kind of special exemption.

I think I will transform the coverage idea above into a new type of defense mechanic and post that in a new thread.

Sitting still for one minute for your "penalty" to expire. Ok. That's fun.