The Achilles' heel of Raise Zombie and the way I feel they could fix it.

Let me start off by saying that i love raise zombie, they're my favorite summon minion in the game and summoner is my favorite character archetype. Despite the baron helm being nerfed and the skill generally being less viable in comparison to most other popular minion builds i love their animations, and in particular i love the change they made to the Mon'Tregul's Grasp unique scepter, making it very powerful for clearing with zombies.

However there's a big issue.

The elephant in the room holding this build back from being fun and less restrictive to build around in terms of fun is how annoying it is to fit "Your minions are aggressive" into the build. Whereas most meta minion skills get it quite easily, spiders and SRS having it innately, golems getting it from their unique jewel that they always run anyway, spectres being able to use the delve mod on a wand, ancient skull or maw of mischief - zombies really have to give up a lot of potential DPS or clear to achieve this.

Throwing on an ancient skull would replace your baron, equipping a delve mod wand would prevent you from using Mon'Tregul's or a shield which tends to be quite necessary in these builds, and linking your zombies to feeding frenzy makes your already non meta minion build gated to being on a 5 link.

The main reason i'm very confident that changing the accessibility for this tag specifically for zombies would be a non intrusive change that people would have a hard time arguing against is because zombies only really have two usecases, as a main damage skill in which case being aggressive is objectively a positive factor and as a defensive skill in which case meat shield support is always being used which gives them the defensive modifier anyway.

My suggestions as to how this could be implemented in a non intrusive way are as follows:

1. Make raise zombies innately aggressive, it in my opinion suits their characteristics better and still leaves the option for meat shield open.

2. Add the "your zombies are aggressive" line to mon'treguls grasp, making it more usable as it's a super fun unique that gets far too little attention.

3. Add the modifier to a minion cluster jewel notable like Hulking Corpses that doesn't see a lot of use.

There is more potential for where to implement a change such as this but these are in my opinion the least intrusive to other minion builds that don't go all in on using zombies.

This is my first ever forum post as this potential change is one that i've spent a lot of time thinking about and that i've ended up quite confident would be a nice addition for the zombie enjoyers out there. Thanks for reading.

Edit: by this i mean that the shield tends to be necessary, not Mon'Tregul's. That weapon is just a fun one to use.

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equipping a delve mod wand would prevent you from using Mon'Tregul's or a shield which tends to be quite necessary in these builds

The reason why Zombies aren't aggressive inherently is because they are more suited to being meat shields than dealing damage as opposed to Skeletons which are the more damage oriented minion. Besides that all of Feeding Frenzy's effects benefit Zombies a lot. So I don't see a reason to want to make them inherently aggressive beyond making them just a better minion early game than both Skeletons and SRS. They also are permanent minions and not temporary ones too, which creates its own issues.

I think if you want Zombies to be better at being aggressive and dealing damage try the minion gem that marks enemies instead. This will force the zombies to go ape on that enemy and they take more damage which is what you want for Zombies. It won't solve their aggravation issues and it will require a lot of work on your end. But its a solution albeit a rather weak one.

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Besides that all of Feeding Frenzy's effects benefit Zombies a lot.

This is true but since you can link feeding frenzy to a carrion golem in a 2 link and have it benefit zombies just as well, which is what other minions do - it just ends up being a dead link since you'd have the buff anyway.

Zombies aren't really even close to as powerful as meta minion skills so giving up that 6th link is a rather big deal.

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addra1 wrote:

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Besides that all of Feeding Frenzy's effects benefit Zombies a lot.

This is true but since you can link feeding frenzy to a carrion golem in a 2 link and have it benefit zombies just as well, which is what other minions do - it just ends up being a dead link since you'd have the buff anyway.

Zombies aren't really even close to as powerful as meta minion skills so giving up that 6th link is a rather big deal.

But you don't need your Charrion Golem to have feeding frenzy tho, especially if you are using it to support your zombies. Instead work with it in a 3-4 link with a curse on hit vulnerability setup for more damage. Golem AI unlike Zombie Ai has a much bigger aggro range so its way more forgiving to give up the gem on them.

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Deathstar699 wrote:

The reason why Zombies aren't aggressive inherently is because they are more suited to being meat shields than dealing damage as opposed to Skeletons which are the more damage oriented minion.

Except that zombies are terrible meat shields as well...they have terrible health pools and require absurd investment just to keep them alive in even the most middling of content...If they were truly meant to be meat shields, they shouldn't be almost immediately unable to survive a single pack of enemies starting from the 3rd area of the game.

Given that they are "zombies", they should have a built-in "ressummoned after death" mod. 1-19, zombies are resummoned automatically once after dying. 20, zombies are resummoned up to two times after dying. Or, if they are truly supposed to be the meat shield minion, have them have a built-in defensive AI.

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Deathstar699 wrote:

But you don't need your Charrion Golem to have feeding frenzy tho, especially if you are using it to support your zombies. Instead work with it in a 3-4 link with a curse on hit vulnerability setup for more damage. Golem AI unlike Zombie Ai has a much bigger aggro range so its way more forgiving to give up the gem on them.

You realize hextouch can't support minions? And feeding frenzy doesn't support non-minions? So this 3-4 link you are talking about doesn't exist...Unless you are saying to just drop feeding frenzy entirely from the minion build in favor of a hextouch setup, which is a little ridiculous. It's one of the biggest buffs you can give your minions. Plus you can always do both, and nowadays you NEED to do both.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

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Deathstar699 wrote:

The reason why Zombies aren't aggressive inherently is because they are more suited to being meat shields than dealing damage as opposed to Skeletons which are the more damage oriented minion.

Except that zombies are terrible meat shields as well...they have terrible health pools and require absurd investment just to keep them alive in even the most middling of content...If they were truly meant to be meat shields, they shouldn't be almost immediately unable to survive a single pack of enemies starting from the 3rd area of the game.

Given that they are "zombies", they should have a built-in "ressummoned after death" mod. 1-19, zombies are resummoned automatically once after dying. 20, zombies are resummoned up to two times after dying. Or, if they are truly supposed to be the meat shield minion, have them have a built-in defensive AI.

You see the problem is you are talking about their capabilities in the first couple of acts. The person is talking about Zombies in general. Early game yeah they die fast because the earlier acts got reworked to be more brutal while their early levels they are weaker. And again they are permanent minions that can be easily resummonable so your point is moot. They are very tanky especially once you get gem levels, more mana efficient than both skele and SRS and their only issue is that they require corpses.

I never said drop feeding Frenzy, I said keep it on your Zombies instead of the Carrion Golem because right now thats where he has it, and he wants to keep it there so he has his 6th slot available for something else so he can effectively get a 7 slot setup. But the problem is Zombies aren't aggressive so he is forced to slot it on them.

As for Hextouch, yeah you are right, you put that on your shield charge not your golem, they usually take another support like meat shield or something.

^In general, zombies have a survivability problem. Doesn't matter if they can be resummoned. Every minion can be resummoned, except AG. As the "permanent minion" class of minion, they should be naturally more "permanent" when they are NOT. If I wanted to be constantly resummoning the minions then I would be playing skeletons.

As for feeding frenzy in the zombie setup...that is a silly idea. How often do you take your MAIN skill and slot a completely dead support gem in them? Feeding Frenzy as a gem provides ZERO dps/life/utility to the minion it supports. The "aggressive" tag is not nearly enough to make up for that heavy heavy downside. Even "Meat Shield Support" which makes your minions defensive at least offers a whole host of defensive buffs as well.

I agree with the OP: either the minions themselves need more ways to change their AI behavior, or Feeding Frenzy Support desperately needs a rework. There was never any reason for the 3.10 nerf that erased ALL of the dps mod from the gem. It doesn't need to be nearly as high as, say minion damage support, but it needs SOMETHING. And especially since the minion gear rework recently, there should be more ways to get that behavior elsewhere because without it the minion is almost completely useless. Minions have been decimated all too often by nerfs: the least they could do is offer a bit of QoL back into the minion pool instead of offering a SINGLE, bad, mandatory option.

Really...all perma minions in the game shouldn't need a specific support gem to change their behavior. It should be a toggle that the player can control as they like. There should even be more options like: "Target rare monsters first" or "Avoid attacking the same target as another Minion", etc. You can sort of control this with Predator, but it really should just be a toggle-able thing.

I'd rather zombies not be relegated to meat shields and be capable of standing on their own offensively. They were a large reason why I became a big fan of PoE as zombies were literally equivalent to skeleton warriors in Diablo 2. Spectres were another reason, but now that there's no good DPS choices (redemption sentries got nerfed, SOs got fixed), they've also been relegated to being support minions for charge apes.

Reducing them to being walking ablative armor and using temporary minions like skeletons or SRS for damage starts to step on the toes of what ActiBlizz has been doing to necromancers since D3 which I absolutely despise.