The new Dead Reckoning destroys the identity of the gem

The old Dead Reckoning Jewel has been an iconic staple in the scene of minion builds. It's always been a jewel that, at the time, was sought after for minion players like myself, who wanted to play skeletal mages because of the ability to have mages. I would lose my mind if similar upsetting changes happened to Unending Hunger. It's iconic, powerful, hard to get, and has amazing and interesting interactions with minion archetypes, instead of just adding chaos damage based on a stat. This hurts me somewhat emotionally I almost chose to use my voidborn foil on this jewel just because of how iconic it is to me.

I have an idea to rework the jewel that gives it a bit more flavor and gives us an old interaction that was powerful for minions but still required specific interactions and investment.

There previously was a setup using an alt quality gem to give skeletal mages the ability to have returning projectiles giving them fantastic clear and extra damage. This was an interesting interaction while still involving investment using a unique to grant skeletal mages and the alternate quality gem to achieve this. However, we now have a different Summon Skeleton build that just gives us the ability to summon skeletal mages instead of warriors, which has the same interaction as the old Dead Reckoning. The change to this put added chaos damage to skeletons based on energy shield from your equipped shield. This completely devalues what the gem stood for as granting power to skeletal minions giving them interesting projectile interactions.

I have one of two ideas to rework this gem to be interesting, but one of them would probably be too op in the current state of the spectre meta right now with the new corpses.. though i'm LOVING these spectre interactions and i'm sooooo happy that we're finally getting cool stuff to play around with and have so many ways to customize our characters using this spectres! Anyways, here are my proposals.

Dead Reckoning - While there are atleast 40 Intelligence within radius of this jewel, your skeletal* minion projectiles return to them.

It would be amazing if it were all minions, allowing us to have different interactions with any type of minion in the game. Not just skeletal minions. This is a unique mod that isn't available anywhere else in the game and would be a fantastic addition to the minion archetype. You could add a less or reduced dmg modifier to this as well but it would ultimately not be too crazy in most situations. Minion projectiles usually are not the sole power of minion builds, generally they are just raw levels and flat dmg granted by attributes and jewels. Most powerful minions tend to be melee based, from time to time, while some spectres, and in the past, gain power through projectiles such as the Hydra, Frost Sentinels, the Frostbearers, Syndicate Operatives, AW Bows, or the OG Ribbons from Act 8. (The ribbons were why i started playing necromancer in the first place, thanks to Ghazzy's builds!)


This would have some fun interactions with Herald of Agony, AW Bows, Spectres, Skeletal Archers and Mages, and any other ranged minion! This would be a fantastic addition to the game and I really hope my proposal is considered. Prayge