Skeleton Mages and why they suck (and how to fix them)

Dead Reckoning-

seems super fun. Gives you a few skeleton mages. awesome. ability for skeletons to not body block each other, and actually have DPS output. good stuff! also fun, lots of potential.

My first experience with this jewel was a bug. When on spell totem, the gem just keeps spawning skeleton mages. Which is awesome, to be honest; it's kind of what I wanted in the first place. But here's the thing:

A. When it's on a totem, the mages spawn directly into the enemy, which is not where you would want to place a ranged mob.

B. Their AI, when near an enemy, is programmed to walk the hell away, which leaves them doing near nothing when they spawn from the totem.

So suddenly, this bug actually REMOVES all of the utility of a skeleton totem, and removes the fun of having effectively limitless skeleton mages unless you clear a pack and said mages are able to continue to exist for a future fight (which we all know skeletons are not designed for).

Outside of spell totem, they have an entire other slough of issues. Namely:

A. Skeletons spawn in packs of two. When you have three mages that you can use, your second spawning is either going to throw a mage into the fray, or have a nearly useless warrior that needs to slowly hobble over to the fight. The mages are fun with Spell Echo as they do cast twice, but without the bug of the spell totem, it basically goes to waste and leaves you hard casting the rest of your skeletons.

B. You can't overwrite your mages until you hit your max skeleton cap, meaning that if you have a couple mages sitting around from an old pack and didn't hit your skeleton cap, you need to know at what point your mages are going to overwrite to place them in the right location. This would not be an issue except that they're not effective enough to justify this level of "hidden knowledge" and micromanagement.

Basically really cool premise, really shitty execution. I feel like there is no "proper" way to use this jewel, even though I'd really love to. As it stands, I'm just going to slap it on a totem and use them with the infinite numbers bug even though they're less effective that way. I wanted to hard cast them by my feet or in a flanking position, but there are so many convoluted interactions with hard casting them that it's just not worth the effort.

I rate this jewel 3 broken skeleton mages out of 10.

Cross posted into this OP from page 2:

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Honestly, here's how I'd solve it;

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Dead Reckoning

Minions have +(7 to 10)% to all Elemental Resistances
With at least 50 Intelligence Allocated in Radius,
Summon Skeletons summons an additional Skeleton Mage at your side when cast.

that way it actually improves the overall strength of the jewel, allows you to tactically place mages with your skeleton totem (or hard casting), and allows warriors to be in place as they should be. It also leaves you with a reasonable mage cap, as it only adds a mage for every two warriors, causing your mage cap to be skeleton cap/3 (so with an Army of Bones cap of 15, would leave you with 10 warriors and 5 mages, which seems fine if your build is designed around skeletons as your summon).

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From the Threshold Jewel announcement page:

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Jewels as Skill Modifiers
[snip]
At this stage we knew:
-They need to be stackable.
-They need to affect a specific skill.
-They need to be worthwhile to at least some specific builds, even if they're niche.

Which causes me to rethink my original solution. The solution I suggested of having it spawn a mage at your feet, if stacked, would spawn two at your feet. Perhaps, instead of giving a 100% chance to spawn an additional skeleton mage at your feet, you could certainly have a percent chance to do so (as a sort of "crit" summon skeletons). And stackable could either mean that the percentages are additive, or that each jewel rolls individually (giving a small chance of spawning two at once).

Your rating is very very generous considering how broken the jewel is.

The skeletons are un-supportable. They're not considered Attacks, Spells, Ranged, Projectiles... nothing. No Support Gem, I think except ones that apply universally to Minions, affects them.

I sincerely hope it gets buffed, I was actually considering a skeleton summoner.

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Zephryl wrote:

Your rating is very very generous considering how broken the jewel is.

The skeletons are un-supportable. They're not considered Attacks, Spells, Ranged, Projectiles... nothing. No Support Gem, I think except ones that apply universally to Minions, affects them.

I sincerely hope it gets buffed, I was actually considering a skeleton summoner.

Spell Echo works with them when linked to the summon gem, so that's something.

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SybilCut wrote:

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Zephryl wrote:

Your rating is very very generous considering how broken the jewel is.

The skeletons are un-supportable. They're not considered Attacks, Spells, Ranged, Projectiles... nothing. No Support Gem, I think except ones that apply universally to Minions, affects them.

I sincerely hope it gets buffed, I was actually considering a skeleton summoner.

Spell Echo works with them when linked to the summon gem, so that's something.

Well, Spell Echo is supporting the summoning rather than the summon I guess.

But... woohoo, twice the amount of useless crap? Honestly, I think it's just buggy. I really hope...

They made such a big deal out of the Threshold Jewels, it would be a shame if this subpar crapfest is actually what they intended.

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Zephryl wrote:

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SybilCut wrote:

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Zephryl wrote:

Your rating is very very generous considering how broken the jewel is.

The skeletons are un-supportable. They're not considered Attacks, Spells, Ranged, Projectiles... nothing. No Support Gem, I think except ones that apply universally to Minions, affects them.

I sincerely hope it gets buffed, I was actually considering a skeleton summoner.

Spell Echo works with them when linked to the summon gem, so that's something.

Well, Spell Echo is supporting the summoning rather than the summon I guess.

But... woohoo, twice the amount of useless crap? Honestly, I think it's just buggy. I really hope...

They made such a big deal out of the Threshold Jewels, it would be a shame if this subpar crapfest is actually what they intended.

It supports the summon also. Link spell echo to your mages and they will cast twice as intended when hard casted. After testing, they do not cast twice properly if linked to spell totem AND spell echo, though. Spell totem nullifies spell echo from interacting with the summon whatsoever.

The easiest and best way to fix this gem would be to have consistency in the summons; either have your skeletons ALTERNATE between mages and warriors, or you could have your warriors spawn with an additional mage (but unfortunately that still leaves the one of the issues with self casting which is both of them wanting substantially different placement)

That's... hmm.

Does that mean they made the conscious decision to make other "spell" affecting things not work on the Mages?

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Zephryl wrote:

That's... hmm.

Does that mean they made the conscious decision to make other "spell" affecting things not work on the Mages?

I am going to guess not. My guess is that the jewel is just a buggy mess, as evidenced by the following:



As you can see, my spell totem spawned far more mages than intended (read: up to my skeleton cap). And on that note, it doesn't seem like the skeleton mage AI interacts with enemy minions properly at all, as I was being attacked by a talisman mob's zombie minion and the mages seemed to be walking away but not firing at him.

This jewel is a wreck and I hope GGG fixes it sooner rather than later.

If you have two of the threshold gem, does it let you summon six mages?

If so, then an even number of them would seem to hit some kind of sweet spot.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If you have two of the threshold gem, does it let you summon six mages?

If so, then an even number of them would seem to hit some kind of sweet spot.

One would think you would hit a sweet spot, but the kicker is that the moment a mage dies you're caught in that weird place again, and would still require that micromanagement. It seems to me that mages are in order of priority, but it's strange as the mages overwrite first once you hit your skeleton cap in order of summoning.

EDIT: I have done some further testing; the logic behind summoning with this jewel is as follows:

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1. After casting spell, summon up to two mages with warriors filling in any remainder if the total number of allowed mages is reached.

2. If the maximum number of skeletons is reached, begin overwriting skeletons in the order they were summoned, including mages.

(this may seem like obvious logic but I was uncertain whether it would overwrite a mage after a warrior died, for example)

And it's possible that a second gem allows you to summon six, but I can't say for certain. I would assume not, just because the wording of the jewel seems concrete as "up to three" (i would assume otherwise it would say "up to three additional" or something). Needs some testing but I don't have a character that it's doable on yet, and quite frankly it isn't worth the time yet given the state of the jewel. And even so, while it would hit a sweet spot for ordinary casting, if you want to really take advantage of them and use Spell Echo, that sweet spot would need to be four or eight.

The cleanest change for this jewel at first (aside from the obvious bug fixes) would be to increase the mage maximum to four, as it would naturally hit a sweet spot both for hard casting and for spell echo.

I think I determined why classic spell supports do not work with the skeleton mages;

I tried Greater Multiple Projectiles, which did not function as it should, and I do think the reason that spell echo did work and GMP did not is because the spell has the Spell tag, and regardless of spawning projectile minions, does not have the Projectile tag. So I think that any spell-exclusive supports will work on the mages as intended, but projectile supports will not (an unfortunate interaction, and I'm not certain if they'll change it).