The ruined king item line

I wasn't really sure if i should post here or in "Feedback and suggestions",since i'm new to the forums but i figured that this post wasn't really a suggestion but more like i just wanted to talk about a few unique ideas i came up, so feedback is welcome


TLDR: Just check the images in the spoilers

All of these items revolve around skeletons and the The Ruined King

Firstly : who is the Ruined king ?
I'm no storyteller so i won't go all crazy about lore and stuff but basically he was once the leader of a vast army and then some granny witch cursed him and his bois and now they can't die but their flesh has long rotten away and they're now just moving bone warriors

The Ruined king can be found as a Unique Boss in the Ruined king's Catacombs map



Since they can't die, all those skeletons no longer care about rare items, hence the reduced item rarity, but they can't get enough of all that juicy currency, hence the increased item quantity and odds of finding currency

The map in itself shouldn't be very hard, if you just have a bit of clear you should be able to melt through the hoards of skeleton no matter how many times they revive, the only potential problem would be the boss being fairly strong and summoning more and more skeletons

Skeletons stop respawning once the Ruined king is defeated

There can be two reasons why you'd want to clear that map :
The first reason would be to get currency since the odds are higher in this map, the second reason would be to get the items from the Ruined King item set which can only drop in this map
Item rarity being reduced in this map you can only really get them by killing the Ruined King who always drops a unique item, but the unique item droped isn't restricted to being a Ruined King item, making those items decently rare, although the odds are higher than for other uniques

Now let's talk about the Unique Items from the Ruined king set
When making those items i had two main things in mind, i wanted the one that wears all those items to feel like he himself became the Ruined King, but i also wanted those items to fair well individually so that a player could just pick up a single one of those to fit his build without needing the rest of them to be efficient

The whole item set concists of 5 items, a helmet, a scepter, a pair of gloves, an amulet and a ring

A restriction that can be found on all of those items is : Cannot summon anything but skeletons, this restriction is there for "aestetic" reasons, since it would feel wrong for the Ruined king to hang around a pile of golems and zombies

You'll also see + 100 strength requirement on every piece of armour and the scepter, that is because the Ruined King is the strongest skeleton and should be the only skeleton able to wield that gear

I'll start with my favorite and work my way up to my least favorite item

Firstly : The Ruined King's Unset Ring



The ring doesn't bring any effective stats to you or your skeletons but it allows a lot of customisation to your skeletons by letting you change what skill they use

A few fun or usefull skills that i can think off would be : Lacerate, Cyclone, Whirling blades, Viper strike, Flicker strike or Leap Slam, but you could also go for an elemental build by changing their attacks to : Molten strike, Static strike, Wild strike or whatever

Second item : The Ruined King's Void scepter



The first thing that you might notice is the lack of Implicit modifier, I removed it cause it felt wrong to entice an elemental build for the Ruined King, when the unique boss himself deals physical damage
Althought it might feel punishing if you want to go for an elemental skeleton army build,I think it would actually be too strong, you could boost your skeleton damage sky high and then double dip with elemental damage for your molten strike skeletons

The physical damage on the weapon is decent, i think it's pretty good for a scepter, but then you have to concider that this scepter uses both hands, making it's damage relatively low

One of the main reasons why you'd get that item on it's own,(expect to get a cheap 6l for your skellies) would be for the interaction it has with life leech, it grants a bit of extra life leech to your skeletons but stops your from leeching life yourself, that can be good if you always have a lot of skeletons to leech life for you (using enduring cry for extra life regen and to keep the focus off your skeletons to facetank everything), but it could also be good if your build makes you stay in the backlines, letting you heal off any accidental hits you take (assuming it doesn't one shot you)

Since the base is a one handed weapon but it disables using another weapon or shield, I made it so that the item always comes with 4 linked sockets in addition to granting the level 20 summon skeleton skill and being supported by lvl 15 minion damage

Obviously that means that you're gonna want to put your support gems for your summon skeleton here

A few interesting support gems i'd put on there could be : Multistrike, Culling strike support, melee splash support, but you could also go for something more crowd control oriented with maim or stun support, a few other fun ideas i thought about were to get a spell totem support on there to keep your skeletons spawning while you facetank everything, you could also have your main melee skill socketed in the scepter and have your skeletons spawning thanks to cast on kill or another trigger but i think a summon totem would be more effective since it lets you 6l your melee skill into your chestpiece and gives more room to boost your skeletons

Third item : The Ruined King's Bone Helmet



This helmet does something very simple but that changes a lot, it increases your skeleton duration up by 100% and their movement speed by 30% but most importantly it makes your skeletons follow you around

A few good things about that is that firstly it really gives you that skeleton army / Ruined King feel but it also makes gems such as convocation work on your skeletons

A good pair with this would be to have this along with a Queen's Escape for insane skeleton movement speed and duration, but at that point i don't think it would matter too much seing as they have a limited Healthpool

There's not much to talk about there but the 40% increased minion damage also helps, obviously

Fourth item : The Ruined King's Spiked Gloves



The point of those spiked gloves is to "lead the pack", to be the army leader at the front dealing the most damage and having your little army by your side, that's why the "minion damage increases also apply to you" so that you can double dip in melee damage and minion damage, i'm not too sure how strong it would be exactly but i think it should be fine

Something that might be worth mentioning is that the support gem : minion damage support, isn't global and only boosts the damage of minions it supports, so it doesn't affect you in any way while wearing this item

You can also see that your increases in melee damage you get from strength also apply to your skeletons to reward high strength with even more skeleton damage

Fifth item : The Ruined King's Blue Pearl Amulet



This item is a bit all over the place, which is why i don't particularly like it, but let's get into it anyway

The first part of that item is dedicated to mana substain, straight and forward

The "interesting" thing about that item, is the rampage part, for those of you who are unfamiliar with rampage you can read about it here

I haven't actually played with it myself, which is why the numbers might seem to strong or too weak, but the mechanics seems very interesting to me

Rampage on this item does a lot of things, but let's talk about the simplest thing first :
Every 30 stacks you summon an extra Skeleton General (Up to 2 at a time along with the one you get from using Vaal summon skeleton)

It also increases your and your skeleton's Healthpool by 2 HP for every rampage stack, giving up to a whoping 2000 extra HP with the full 1000 stacks, when i think about that i tell myself that's way too much and that it might be better to give something like 2 HP for 10 stacks, but then i tell myself it's gotta be pretty hard to get to 1000 stacks of rampage, that's like killing 1000 mobs in a row, i don't think i've ever even seen that many mobs in a single map

Note : When rampage ends you instantly lose all your bonus max HP

Going on big killing sprees also rewards you with an increase in your maximum skeletons, up to 66 bonus skeletons for reaching max rampage stacks, the idea being that the more glorious your army is the more warriors it will attract

The last part of this item, and to be honest i think this adds too much to the item and makes it kinda weird but it adds to the maximum frenzy charges each skeleton can have every 50 stacks, you probably noticed the item gives 30% chance to give a frenzy charge to your skeletons when one of them dies, going along the idea of the bloodlust increasing as the fight gets more and more insane

In itself i don't think you'd often get more than 5 frenzy charges on a skelton since killing more than 150 monsters in a row seems like a bit of a stretch to me (althought i don't know how long the timer is between each kill, if you have like 20 seconds between each kill then it'd probably be too strong since you could just waltz away kill every mob on the map before reaching the boss with 1300 extra HP , 50 skeletons with all of them on like 13 frenzy charges, in that case this part would deffinetly need some fine tuning

All in all i don't really know much about rampage so that's why i don't really like this last item

Welp that's all folks, i apreciate all feedback, specially about the last part or if you think something is too over/undertuned etc

Thanks for reading my novel and have a great day