Minion Wishlist: Machinations, Parasites, Puppets, Animate Guardians

Hi there GGG! Below are some thoughts and requests for the future of The Midnight Bargain and some alternatives for it, Changes to Animate Guardian and several new minion types that would fit well within your universe.


The Midnight Bargain
I've been using the Midnight Bargain for quite some time now as a dedicated spectre player and have held out hope that the item would see more significant changes to make it competitive with current items like the Convoking Wand.

These changes could include:
-Modifying the life reservation of the wands to be affected by reservation modifiers in the tree and items as well as support gems.
-Changing the base type of the Midnight bargain to the Convoking wand to allow interactions such as Mythic orb and to also increase availability of bases since midnight bargains base is not generally valued or highly available.
-Adding the 30% life reservation to the convoking wands base but allow it to roll +1 spectre/skeleton/zombie etc

Fated Variant(lol):
I would also very much like to see a two handed staff version of the wands (Midight Pact/Eternal Bargain) perhaps featuring a modified reservation mechanic involving reserving mana, life or even both PER raised spectre(% based) This item would basically force the user to go after reservation reductions to increase their max spectre count while also eating what would normally be used on aura's or something else.

The item with every reservation node in the tree + a level 4 enlighten + something else i'd like to see resulting in a total maximum of 8 permanent spectres with basically 0 room for aura's.. To be the ultimate spectre master.. Body and Soul given to the void

While im on the topic of reservation
Reservation Mechanics:
It would also be nice to see some more mechanics added that grant benefits and perhaps also detriments for reserving mana/life including but not limited to:

-New weapon base types that reserve life and types that reserve mana by a % but allow more powerful modifiers.
-Items which grant bonuses for reserved life/mana but scaling detriments per-aura-skill

Animate Guardian:
This skill has been reduced to a pretty trivial state as of late being little more than a walking aura support and i feel like this is too much wasted potential just sitting here..

I propose you make animate guardian reserve mana giving it a real cost to work into a build while also adding passives and changes to ascendancy and unique items to allow players to specialize in this minion as well as potentially some uniques with the following:
-animate guardian can use ranged weapons
-a unique chestplate with one socket that if given to an animate guardian enables it to use that skill where as if equipped would give the same effect but limit you to a single guardian(this item would also have very low defenses) same item two uses, putting it on your minion would make it much more likely to die, inversely if you equip it.

The Minion Altar:
Not really sure what to call this but its a bench essentially where you can manage your animate guardians equipment as long as you are in your hideout and the guardian is active it will show tabs(I II III)etc for each guardian you have summoned and when you click on each tab it will show a basic equipment screen with the guardian in questions gear.

This could require the gem being placed in the altar or just the player interacting with the altar, When all of the equipment is removed from a guardian it would be de-animated and the corresponding tab greyed out, The tab could also handle animating the guardian by filling the desired equipment slots and clicking animate.. if the player can reserve the mana required t hen the guardian would animate with the desired equipment.

This altar also functions as a storehouse for corpses from desecrate and for use with raise spectre.


Guardian Ascendancy issues:
As a guardian player for the last few leagues as a sideaffect of using the midnight bargain the guardian offers benefits that are hard to pass up when facing a 60% life reservation but find it extremely difficult to compete with the witch's +2 to minion gems and would like to humbly request that you give the same to guardian or at least +1 which would allow me to untether myself from requiring a permanent level 4 empower in every single one of my spectre builds... This wasnt a big deal during the previously big minion patch but the raise spectre gem was changed in a way that made it require if i recall correctly two more levels.

Incorporate Animate Guardian into Guardian's Ascendancy:
Pretty simple.. Give Guardian some ascendancy passives that boost animate guardian in special ways like:
-Your animated guardians no longer disappear on death instead they re-animate after a delay and consuming their reservation cost worth of mana over 4 seconds
-You can summon an additional animated guardian
-Your animated guardian can use trigger skills
-your animated guardian can use granted skills


Machinations:
These simply put would be the machines we see all around wraeclast and even in some of our skills like Summon Skitterbots.. Taking the Shadows side of the tree further adding in a new dedicated minion type "Machination" which operate a little differently from standard minions.

Machinations would not die in the same way that most minions die as they will go dormant and require mana be re-infused to power them back up, if they are left unpowered for too long they will despawn and require their full mana cost to assemble(75% MORE than powering them up)

As well these minions would be more durable when it comes to physical damage but weaker to elemental damage especially depending on the minion in question where as some machinations would have synergy with elements like lightning creating interactions between the player and machination creating combination skills between the player and the pet.

One machination might benefit from being hit by lightning damage and eventually unleash a shockwave or activate a buff when charged where as another might benefit from fire damage and build up heat in its core enabling its special ability for a period.

In general these would constantly Drain your mana constantly per active Machination in addition to the costs of animating them initially making investments in both max mana and recovery important.


Puppets:
Another new dedicated minion type for the duelist which while being a minion is DIRECTLY controlled by the player with 75% or more of its damage output being from skills the minion can only cast when the player uses a specific skill tied to the minion.

Depending on the puppet in question some may have passive damaging ability's on the lead-up to using its main skill and a follow-up passive damage ability after having used the skill and eventually stopping entirely requiring the user to use the main ability again to keep the dps cycle going.

This could vary from puppet to puppet and some could have slightly more or less autonomy for these brief duration's which the player will use on movement skills or numerous other skills/potions/etc until they must use the puppets skill to keep the loco-motion going, Some of these puppet loco-motion effects could be.
-the puppet can autoattack nearby enemys for 4 seconds after using its skill
-the puppet deals damage over time to nearby enemys after having used its primary attack

Puppets will create a new type of mechanical gameplay(or expand where reaper started) where essentially you're managing two or more characters at once which at a lower level could be very fun while at a very high level would be both exhilarating to personally experience and exciting to watch... Using more than 1 puppet would probably be too much for casual players but i can see one working just fine.

Puppets would in many ways have some mechanical interactions like:
-Switching places with the puppet
-puppet mirroring your attacks
-chaining your attacks with the puppet
-performing specific attacks when you take damage

Movement Skill + Puppets:
Puppet builds would be very mechanical and could have movement skills to support this play style such as:
-add a movement skill that teleports you to the target puppet
-add a recall skill that pulls the target puppet/s to you
-the primary dps skill makes the puppet go/attack at the target location


Parasite Minions:
The parasite minion would be summoned by the ranger much like a zombie as it would be spawned from a corpse at which point it would have a set of basic melee attacks with a small chance to poison on hit, If available the parasites would jump onto low health enemies and for as long as that enemy can stay alive it will be considered your minion but not benefit from minion health regeneration.. While the parasites are attached they will grow in strength as they kill over time leading up to a maximum where they will detatch leaving the dead monster and dealing its melee attacks for a period before taking on a new host.

Parasites would give their host benefits as they grow in size while also enabling the parasites to take over higher HP enemies up to a maximum of 50%? and parasites would scale up to be able to help you fight bosses even if their hosts die which they will inevitably do forever and in fact you would want this as a parasite would/could be enraged by its host having been killed.

Uniquely parasite minions can have another function where the summoner orders them to detach from their hosts and attach themselves to the summoner granting buffs depending on the maturity of each parasite and if it was attached to a host or not when the skill was used, these buffs would start off strong and fade at which point the parasites would drop to the ground lifeless.


Domination:
Please revive the old melee skill which took over the enemies you killed and make it for the Marauder.. This build uniquely would be able to take over rare and magic monsters with some limitations/nerfs to the buffs or strenth of buffs the dominated minions can have also multiplying some things such as a decreased duration per dominated minion.. The more dominated minions you have the faster they die.

The skill should be an aoe & single target combination melee attack allowing the user to kill groups as well as single out enemies to manage their army accordingly.

There could be some interactions that would temporarily slow the decay of your dominated minions via dominating new ones though as your army increases in size again they decay on a multiplier that multiplys itself each time you add a minion to the mix.

All in all this build is about in a sense being a general and choosing your dominated foes wisely, Having ceartain amounts of specific rarity of monster dominated could also have special interactions like for every magic dominated monster you are required to have 2-5 normal monsters dominated to stave off a ceartain portion of their decay rate and so on for rare monsters requiring a ceartain amount of magic and normal monsters to stave off the decay.

Matter over Matter:
A mind over matter alternative specifically for domination builds and perhaps some other niche builds where a portion of your damage is taken from your dominated minions before you multiplied by like 500% ensuring that a hit that would nearly take you out would also severely hurt your minions even at their high hp values.



Alright i might expand this later but im tired and i ran out of midnight bargains. -tbd

Played quite a lot of minion builds myself and is tempted to try Midnight Bargain but never have the guts to try it due to the life reservation. Depending on how much defense left we are given in 3.17, may just try it out. The +1 to 3 minions is really tempting, although zombies drop like flies now.

In 3.16 finally got to using Animate Guardian but albeit equipping only cheap gear, and by cheap i mean a few chaos. As expected, it died several times without me noticing. That is how bad a master i am. However, i feel the Animate Guardian could be made useable for all classes, not just for necromancer/guardian. This would open up some combination play for a solo player. The link skill is along this tune but unfortunately i will not use it because "you die when link entity die" just isn't appealing, especially for the type of overclutter game play in POE. For AG, the bottleneck is its life. With necromancer giving it Minion life+Elemental Army+Bone offering, it can still die so will be pretty difficult for other classes to invest in it.

Minion altar is a good idea and name, and can be expanded to include management of spectres, the spectre bank that every summoner dream of, but may never come to pass since "they" are trying to discourage summoner build?

For machine minions, isn't there already some enemies in Heist you can summon as spectres?

Dominating blow, my hand can only last till white/yellow maps or so. You have to keep hitting enemies to sustain them is just too painful (literally) and clunky. Elementalist auto golem-summoning is exalt-times better.

In regards to Guardian and Necromancer, i guess Guardian is more tanky and is like the melee version summoner class, but I will always pick the witch because of the higher dps and the witch is cute. But i suspect they will somehow nerf summoner AGAIN next league, reduce life, minion dps, maybe even minion numbers, blah blah blah. Disgressing a little, i mean like golems, besides stone and carrion, the rest of the golems are in a sad state right now, not even worth using as a support minion.

"

suitto wrote:

Played quite a lot of minion builds myself and is tempted to try Midnight Bargain but never have the guts to try it due to the life reservation. Depending on how much defense left we are given in 3.17, may just try it out. The +1 to 3 minions is really tempting, although zombies drop like flies now.

One options is to embrace the reservation and combined with a shavvrones wrappings you just reserve whats left after the wands and all of your mana and profit, this is the basic concept behind my guardian version of the build since guardian gets some benefits for reservations.

Recently petrified blood was added and thats an interesting thing that might make some other midnight bargain builds viable.. requires testing.

"

suitto wrote:

In 3.16 finally got to using Animate Guardian but albeit equipping only cheap gear, and by cheap i mean a few chaos. As expected, it died several times without me noticing. That is how bad a master i am. However, i feel the Animate Guardian could be made useable for all classes, not just for necromancer/guardian. This would open up some combination play for a solo player. The link skill is along this tune but unfortunately i will not use it because "you die when link entity die" just isn't appealing, especially for the type of overclutter game play in POE. For AG, the bottleneck is its life. With necromancer giving it Minion life+Elemental Army+Bone offering, it can still die so will be pretty difficult for other classes to invest in it.

it saddens me that the most important aspect for most people in regards to their AG is just its life, most of the items are already decided unless something new comes out, in some cases AG's equipment is more expensive than my own for that slot.

"

suitto wrote:

Minion altar is a good idea and name, and can be expanded to include management of spectres, the spectre bank that every summoner dream of, but may never come to pass since "they" are trying to discourage summoner build?

Yes i knew i forgot something lol and that was at least one of those somethings, I'll be sure to edit that part in.

"

suitto wrote:

For machine minions, isn't there already some enemies in Heist you can summon as spectres?

This is true you can raise a good variety of robots as spectres, but machinations would not function like spectres.. as long as you have enough mana your machination cannot permanently die and in a way frees the summoner to focus on important aspects of the fight when a pet dies knowing it will return shortly.

"

suitto wrote:

Dominating blow, my hand can only last till white/yellow maps or so. You have to keep hitting enemies to sustain them is just too painful (literally) and clunky. Elementalist auto golem-summoning is exalt-times better.

You make a good point on the single clicks.

"

suitto wrote:

In regards to Guardian and Necromancer, i guess Guardian is more tanky and is like the melee version summoner class, but I will always pick the witch because of the higher dps and the witch is cute. But i suspect they will somehow nerf summoner AGAIN next league, reduce life, minion dps, maybe even minion numbers, blah blah blah. Disgressing a little, i mean like golems, besides stone and carrion, the rest of the golems are in a sad state right now, not even worth using as a support minion.

Are you saying the Templar isnt cute? just look at that full head of hair.

Oh not Shavv. First it is going to be expensive or quite expensive, and secondly i am hopeless in playing ES. But yes Petrified Blood is definitely in my mind, and was thinking of throwing in "Infused Flesh" and "Vampirism". Will test it out once we got more info on 3.17.

I was using mostly Sentari to get the punishment curse and culling on AG.
But if go through all the uniques and some influence mods, am sure can squeeze a few more interesting (meme) options.
I mean for AG, the base should be much more tanky, as in more resistance and physical damage reduction. It is a Guardian for goodness sake.

Indeed i was wondering how could you left out the spectre bank lol. Thanks for adding it.

I try hard to choose the templar, but his hanging arm bothers me a lot.

"

suitto wrote:

Oh not Shavv. First it is going to be expensive or quite expensive, and secondly i am hopeless in playing ES. But yes Petrified Blood is definitely in my mind, and was thinking of throwing in "Infused Flesh" and "Vampirism". Will test it out once we got more info on 3.17.

I was using mostly Sentari to get the punishment curse and culling on AG.
But if go through all the uniques and some influence mods, am sure can squeeze a few more interesting (meme) options.
I mean for AG, the base should be much more tanky, as in more resistance and physical damage reduction. It is a Guardian for goodness sake.

Indeed i was wondering how could you left out the spectre bank lol. Thanks for adding it.

I try hard to choose the templar, but his hanging arm bothers me a lot.

Shavvrones seems expensive but you can buy a cheap one and 5link it, buy a cheap 5link and or buy a really good base which you link yourself while using that 5link unless farming and buying a 6link seems reasonable.

I say cheap but it is true that the base alone can be 1-2+ex depending on the league but as a core item in my Guardian Necromancer its pretty reasonable to me compared to a lot of other very expensive late game items such as empower or even higher tier maven orbed items etc.

On animated guardian one thing that makes me pretty sad is not seeing it used for more than a multi-purpose aura and it is so popular to use in this way that the gear that commonly is used for it is extremely expensive lately.

Animated guardian really needs a rework and some unique items both changed and new added to support a wider range of side-grade buffs for a supportive guardian and others as well as ascendancy changes to allow a more dps oriented setup and ultimately do away with losing the equipment on death.

Making more items available for buffing allies and giving animate guardian some breathing room should hopefully bring down the prices on some items a little bit since not everyone will be using the exact same item on their guardian, This is especially important because there are not a lot of ally buffs available to interact with of merit.

"

Parasite Minions

The giant isopods look at this thread with pride.

We got the conversion trap that could be transformed into parasites gem instead.

"

lolozori wrote:

We got the conversion trap that could be transformed into parasites gem instead.

Conversion Trap, I'll occasionally attempt to justify using it thinking i'll just grab some rares for their buffs with it only to ultimately abandon it on the ground a few zones later.

While conversion trap can control magic-rare monsters i dont think parasites should necessarily be doing this rather if there are no normal monsters available your parasites will latch onto the next highest rarity weakening it or something like this if it is unable to control it.

When a host dies the parasite comes off and cant immediatly re-attatch to an enemy until a small cooldown expires until which they use melee attacks and leap attacks.

An additional thought is having a recall type skill which you can use to pull all of your parasites back to you(to latch onto you) and empower you for a short duration after which all of your parasites die.

+1

lots of good ideas in this thread

"

Antigegner wrote:

+1

lots of good ideas in this thread

Thank you, There's the hope that the parasites will be in PoE2 from something i read a ways back but that could just be wishful thinking :P

The Animated Guardian definitely needs some love, Its been basically the same forever and i remember getting excited once to go make a build for it until i learned the shallow depths at which one could actually interact with it, the potential is there waiting and ill keep hoping GGG see's it.