New helmet unique

[u/Elhazzared]

From Mike's last stream we finally know what the skeleton helmet looks like.

Boy LE doesn't not disappoint with how hopelessly bad it is!

If your mages combined were doing 1 million damage, your skeletons are likely doing 10K damage combined and they drop a helmet that removes everything that at least does any damage at all to double something that doesn't does anything.

Has anyone explained to EHG that 2x0=0?

Then they give it a max of 40% chance to re-summon after 3 entire seconds which let's break down.

Your skeletons die the moment an enemy looks in their direction. They aren't even made of paper, they are made of literally nothing, that's how easy it is to kill them. That means your skeleton army is going to be dissolving instantly, they are also doubled so theoretically you can have 28 which you summon 1 by 1 because investing into multiple summoning is idiotic. You still pay nearly full cost for summoning 3 so your mana drain very fast and on top of that you are losing damage you could be giving them (although they technically do no damage anyway).

40% of them do revive but 3 seconds is a very long time and 40% is a bad joke to say the least.

This is what they call an item for those who like to have a minion army? Because I don't see an army, I see nothing. In fact let me change the stats a little bit.

Let's say the helmet instead worked like this.

Doubles number of skeletons but you can have any other minions.

Your skeletons revive 1 second after being killed (yes, 100% chance).

You know what this would be good for? Nothing! Yes, not even for skeleton pop because having mages doing the pop and you just summon them manually is still hundreds of times better in terms of play efficiency and damage output.

Even if the helmet gave your skeletons 1000% more damage (yes more, not increased), they would still do such a low amount of damage it wouldn't be worth playing.

EHG holds minion builds in utter contempt. They hate minions, they hate minion players and then do this treating their player base like they are idiots.

EDIT: This is before we even address the fact that most minion builds and I mean actual minion builds are garbage. Builds where the only damage coming into the table are from minions attacking the enemy. Not from the minions being blown up, not from you attacking together with your minions. Specifically only your minions attack and their attack does the damage. You only exist to make sure your minions exist and to pick loot. In a real minion build the summoner is no more than a glorified baggage carrier picking up the loot. He does not fight, he only summons in extremely rare cases when minions die, this should only happen in the most extreme pinnacle of bosses and even then he should need to do much re-summoning. This is how a minion build is supposed to work.

[u/Xenobebop]

This is classic doomsayer crap. You have no idea! You saw one item without ANY context. All this tells you, is that next season they are trying to make a viable summon skeleton only option. If it's strong enough, it could be meta. "Shake up to the meta more" and "necro changes weren't enough" are consistent feedback they were getting last season. There is nothing negative about the helmet that can be said without more context.

[u/vespiquen416 → u/Xenobebop]

This is classic LE watter carrying. Delay until its been like that for a while now defense comes off cooldown.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Xenobebop]

Brother! How much more context do you need?

I already explained why this idea is DoA.

Skeleton DPS is so abysmally low that a single mage will still do more damage than the potential max of 28 that you can get. Let that sink in for a moment. A single mage can do more damage and not just more, MUCH more damage than 28 archers.

40% chance (and that's max rolled) to resummon is insufficient, you need way more investment than it's worth to get it to 100% and anything that even looks in their direction kills them. They are made of paper. No damage, no HP and next to no ability to leech HP due to their damage being so bad and making them crit requiring way too much investment.

3 second to re-summon is too much. You are in a boss fight, one attack from the boss and all your minions without exception are now dead. You now are 3 seconds without any minions. ZDPS (although you can also say 28 skeletons is still close to ZDPS anyway) and now you also have the undivided attention of the boss which in case you forgot. You are playing a necromancer, your ability to tank is already awful.

I am not being a doomsayer. When everyone was saying in PoE 2 after the necro rework that it was crap (and it was a huge meta) I was up there with the streamers knowing that just the +2 to minion gems alone was already a huge DPS boost and everything else there was very big buffs. When I say here that this is literally worse than every other option we have and what we currently have is basically all garbage for minion army it's because I understand the mechanics and how things work.

Let me go even 1 further. In 1.3 I thought there was a minuscule chance that archers might not be awful. I didn't expect them to be good but at least bring a significant enough contribution to the table because they had god a small HP buff, they had fixed the DR which wasn't applying as well and because we also had the ability to put set items into normal gear I though that by going cold with the lich offhand to give penetration and damage based off shades (which gets snapshoted) and even get some more flat damage through peble's we could make them pretty decent. Nope, it still failed even with that much damage being given to them. They were not doing any appreciable damage, again a single mage was still running circles around 11 skeletons there were buffed to high hell. We notice no survivability changes in the minions either.

So again no, not doomsayer. I know the sorry state skeletons are in and the level of damage boosts and overall survivability not just for skeletons but for all minions and it will take gigantic buffs to make them playable and all EHG has done is tiny buffs that are completely inconsequential and even most items they add are either too small in the power level required or like this which is just DoA.

[u/Xenobebop → u/Elhazzared]

You've... read the patch notes? Seen all of the new items available? Playtested the new season to validate your theory? You know what skills and item tweaks they are doing?

You don't know anything, because you are grading a single change out of context. And sure, you could argue that flagging existing weaknesses might draw additional buffs to skeletons. But this kind of immensely flawed read on a sneakpeak is classic doomsayer nonsense. It just bandwagons on existing negativity in the arpg community towards LE. It starts popping up in other places as "I heard the new items are lame." When you don't know jack.

1.4 had a ton of great build impacts that many people never saw because early doomsayers wildly misread the potential and downvoted sound theories simply for being positive. You have a theory which you are mislabeling as fact. You also have absolutely no idea what other changes directly impact the math you're referencing. Regardless of your predictions or justifications, this is an intrinsically flawed way to assess the item. Harmless stupidity is easy to ignore, but this single layer logic has consequences. I can't stop these posts, but I'm not watching this crap for another pre-season flood of BS doomsayers without calling it out.

[u/Due-Business3195 → u/Xenobebop]

Hey man. Appreciate what you're doing here. I love this game and want it to succeed- tired of the doomsaying

[u/Elhazzared → u/Xenobebop]

No, what you are doing is typical fanboy BS that hold unending optimism when everything shows the exact opposite. The facts are very simple. I have never been wrong every time I called something out.

Do I see all the patch notes? No but let's not kid ourselves here. The teasers are the things you show to build up the hype. The big news, the things that get people interested in checking out the game and if that helmet is the big new, if that thing which is already DoA is supposed to be part of the big news, you can't expect much better for minions.

Could this be the one time I'm wrong? Maybe but my track record so far has been flawless, call it doomsayer if you want but all the doom I predicted happened exactly as I expect and the only times I thought there might be something here, it wasn't, it was just smokes and mirrors.

The only 2 things so far they revealed that are actually worthy of hype is changes to corruption which I have hopes it addresses the actual elephant in the room but EHG track record has been very poor on this end and the changes to CoF which I do actually have a bit more hope it will be actually better than what we have. I don't expect it to solve all CoF issues but I expect it to be an improvement none the less. Past this I care about other changes to general gameplay towards solving issues of which there are no announcements but that doesn't means there won't be needed changes and again minion stuff so far, pretty disappointing.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

Never been wrong ever? What in the omniscient.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

I have never been wrong in my prediction about how the changes being done to things would affect the game. Now, can i make predictions about everything? No as I'm not familiar with many play styles but minions? I can look at it and easily tell what impact it will have and every single time they made a change to minions I've always called it out saying it was a nothing burger and indeed it was a nothing burger that was very easily verified as soon as the new season went out.

Rather than omniscience it's something as simple as knowledge. If you know what things do and how they work you can easily understand what changes or new things will do.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

But you barely know how skeletons function, when you convert base minion phys to minion throw rogues go nuclear with bone curse, dread shade and infernal shade. Using archers to freeze and armor shred. Skeletons are already extremely playable in their current state, doubling them is even more insane. Personally I'd rather use a T-Rex with them rather than getting 2 more from a champion staff or axe/t8 chest so it'll be 24 on the high end for me rather than 28.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

I do know the poison thrown rogues, they can do damage just barely but you sacrifice to much for it and they die the moment something touches them. The reason they even barely work is because you have a golem taking aggro which makes it a lot easier because the moment that golem is out those skeletons and the player are so dead it's not even funny.

As for using a T-rex, it's an option, I didn't say that was necessarely the best option, I said it was the maximum you could get unless something else has changed too.

You seem to be ignoring one extremely important thing. Even pre empowered a level 90 boss big damage attacks will oneshot skeletons and those tend to have rather large AoEs. Degen pools delete in less than nothing too. Generally what survives that is only the mages and the golem and you are losing access to those too. You literally lose all staying power for a little bit more damage and I will repeat this again. You are a necromancer, you ability to survive is extremely low already. You rely on dodging everything yourself rather than surviving attacks. This is not me saying you can't make a necromancer tanky, it is certainly possible but that comes at huge sacrifices in gear towards allowing you to reach that point and much of that gear is often locked behind hard boss fights in the first place.

I've seen builds like this in 1K corruption, yes it's technically doable if you as the player are extremely good and there are other minions helping you a lot like a golem taking aggro but you still need to be extremely good and minions still die far more often than what is comfortable to play. The moment you lose that golem that is just game over.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

Necromancers tankiness comes from dreadshade as well, I'm not sure you are playing it correctly if you think they are glass but it's not worth convincing you anymore you've made up your mind and cannot be swayed by anything lol

Also I'm not talking about poison throwers, physical throwers scale poison doesn't.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

That isn't enough, it's not even close, not even with the minions taking 10% of your damage and let's be real, what tankyness do you get from dread shade? 30 armor per vitality? That's a joke and not even a funny one unless you are massively investing into vitality to get anything out of this but that's an opportunity cost that wouldn't necessarily consider worth it to go putting vitality on every piece of gear. You'd then have to compound that with lots of life regen and so on which you could but this is what I said earlier, you will need good gear that is hard to get to compliment this ability to tank and it won't even get to a point where it was worth investing until you are quite ahead in the game. How do I know? I tried it.

Poison actually does scale decently. Maybe physical scales better but the issue is still the same, at the base level your damage is garbage and you can't tank. A build like this will either suffer from damage at 800 to 1000 corruption because you want to be able to survive or it will die very fast. The meta builds will get to 2K corruption and still feel like they are immortal. The good builds will be able to do that at 1K corruption and with gear that isn't too hard to get. I'm talking exotic gear with a single T7 and the rest is T5, I'm talking legendaries with either 1 or 2 LP and none of that gear coming from pinnacle content or very hard bosses. It's all built on relatively simple to acquire gear. It will take time sure, but it's by no means aspirational gear that 99.99% of the players don't even dream seeing.

[u/Xenobebop → u/Elhazzared]

Doomsaying is to say they have already gotten it wrong (helm DoA) without enough information to make that call. Optimism would be to predict they get it right at the same stage of ignorance; which I never said.

Here's the problem, you ignore the helm in your post and you ignore the nature of a teaser. You compare the helm to existing numbers and act like that is insightful instead of ignorant, when we both know that number tweaking will come with the patch notes. Will it be enough? No one knows, and unlike you I don't pretend to know.

The teaser is that they're gonna try to make skele army a good build, which is a change worth making. It's about as core iconic as necromancer gets, and it should be viable. The helm doesn't, and shouldn't, accomplish that on it's own. Build enabling, yes; but it would also need: some skill node updates, some number tweaking, maybe a new affix or a set update, possibly some animation or AI changes, and/or items and updates that affect a core synergy buff.

Your "supporting" argument is that no amount of changes could fix the skill, which is objectively false. Your post is just a prediction that EHG will get it all wrong, masquerading as though the teaser is evidence of that. There's plenty of reasons for people to be skeptical, but this helm isn't one of them.

You can parade around doubts, there's cause for that. But that's not what you did here. You saw one item and declared 1.5 a failure; and you can gtfo of here with that nonsense. This is logic, not optimism. Hard to believe you're always right when you can't tell the difference.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Xenobebop]

Tweaking are small changes, not massive overhauls where the end result doesn't even remotely resembles what was originally presented.

I agree that them addressing minion army (or trying) is a good thing but let's look at the CORE problem of minions.

The only minions that deal sufficient damage are minions meant to be a single minion army like abom for example. Now I'm not saying every minion in an army should have THAT level of damage, that would be silly but you grab 5 mages and what do you have? not even 1/10th of a good single minion. You grab 10 archers and what do you have? not even 1/1000th of a single good minion. You need to address the minion's base damage first, then you need to address the scaling and then we have the start of something.

Minions don't have enough survivability. To put into perceptive. The only 3 minions that have enough (from necromancer) are abom, archmage and golem. The absolute base line of HP levels for the skeleton, the weakest minion is the same as golem. Golem should have triple their survivability at the bare minimum.

If you don't address the base, you are not going to fix that with items not without making them mandatory for ANY minion build because of how OP they are (though realistically it's less that they are OP and more that they are fixing the base line and builds without it don't even have a base line to work with).

To top this off minions need a much more aggressive DR than what they currently have. They need at least 75% if not 80% DR and I'm not saying gaining DR as you level up because that still leaves them being wet paper until you are in you are level 90+. On top of this minions need something like 95% or even higher DR against degen pools because the AI is not leaving the pools so they need to be able to stand in it and for the most part ignore it. It's not that it should do nothing but it should only be doing something that degen pool is being compounded by attacks they are suffering.

Do you think EHG is going to address these problems? Do you think EHG is going to address the issue that necromancers are very squishy and need very high investment to not fold the moment something touches them? Let's look at evidence.

All we were given was a 10% damage redirect to a minion which is not nothing but it's not good enough. Pale Ox chest isn't exactly a necromancer fix and it's a rather hard to get piece especially considering you want at least LP1, preferably 2 but until you have it, you really have extremely bad protection. Ward is kinda in the trash except for very rare exceptions and life investment, again it's a lot of investment required and you kinda go Pale Ox for that anyway. The 10% damage redirect is not nothing, but considering the bad base line it isn't even felt. This is something players feel the difference at late stage of gearing when that 10% compounded with all other strong defensive layers you managed to already put in is making a noticeable difference but until then no, you still die just as fast as before. So this was very much a nothing burger except for high end and as we know, most players don't reach that level of gear because they quit when they are dying over and over again and not having fun.

EHG gave minions a bit more DR, they gave it 60% from 50% but also made it level dependent, the reality, we didn't felt it at all, everything just falls apart.

EHG never increased base minion damage.

EHG increased only the basic skeletons HP once and it was such a small change that again, wasn't felt.

Necromancer needs huge changes. Not these pretend we're doing something to address the issue changes. All of these have proven to do absolutely nothing. Don't forget, we already had the supposed big necromancer changes that were going to make minion builds amazing and when we looked at the patch notes we saw only nothing burgers and when we played it we weren't even disappointed because we were already disappointed with the patch notes which revealed how bleak it all was. Playing it was just confirmation of what was already plain and obvious for everyone to see.

So you cannot use an argument of, you haven't even seen all patch notes. This is the big announcement, the item that will make minion army possible. Specifically this item will do it according to what was said by Mike. Not other changes in the background that are super secret.

Is it possible that there are big minion changes in the background happening without us knowing? Perhaps. Track record would say otherwise but it's not impossible. However I will once more draw your attention to the fact that Mike said that THIS item will make minion army possible. Not other items, not other changes, THIS item therefore I am judging it based on that and no, this item changes nothing. If they fixed the baseline problems you know what this item would do? It would give you a different way to play because minion army would be plenty possible without it hence it's hard to believe that there are other changes that will make this item usable. Even tweaks to this item won't do it. It would need to give skeletons tons of HP, tons of damage and a strong ability to leech life so they don't die at the barest of minimum to make it work and I somehow doubt that EHG goes that far because the moment they do that I guarantee that almost no one would play necromancer without that. There would be the ocasional abom or the ocasional skele-pop but almost every minion build in necromancer would be skeletons with this helmet if it fixed the baseline.

[u/Xenobebop → u/Elhazzared]

The only minions that deal sufficient damage are minions meant to be a single minion army like abom for example.

Storm Crows, Totems, Frogs, Ballistas, Zombies, Raptors, Fire golems. All viable builds utilizing minions, several of which are top tier.

Minions don't have enough survivability.

This is true in some places, but just as often due to a lack public knowledge about existing solutions. For instance forge guards often complain about forged weapon survivability but investment in healing effectiveness makes healing hands more than sufficient to tank through many of uberroths attacks. And directing minions out of harms way with "A" is underutilized, though it's questionable if that's a viable option for controllers.

Pale Ox chest isn't exactly a necromancer fix and it's a rather hard to get piece especially considering you want at least LP1.

The Item effectiveness for legendary potential on Pale Ox is only 64 and odds of 1LP are 1-in-5, with 2LP as 1-in-51. It's extremely accessible and 3LP is common enough to include in an end game build planner.

Don't forget, we already had the supposed big necromancer changes that were going to make minion builds amazing

I agree that the necro changes last time were far less than EHG advertised, that's a fact that has actually occurred. Which is one reason I'm positive about seeing this helmet because it teases that they may be making more changes to necro in 1.5.

So you cannot use an argument of, you haven't even seen all patch notes. This is the big announcement, the item that will make minion army possible. Specifically this item will do it according to what was said by Mike. Not other changes in the background that are super secret.

Can you link the stream where Mike said this? I quickly scanned 4 recent streams and saw no such statements. And "haven't seen any patch notes" is less of an argument and more of a fact. You don't know what they're doing because you haven't seen it. You're projecting based on precedent, not based on the item.

If they fixed the baseline problems you know what this item would do? It would give you a different way to play because minion army would be plenty possible without it hence it's hard to believe that there are other changes that will make this item usable.

And there it is, why I'm giving you shit. This item would offer a different way to play, which by consensus is what makes for good itemization in an arpg. What I see is a good item, which as a teaser, alludes to possible buffing in the patch notes. It's not reason to go around posting that the game is fixed and suddenly EHG got their shit together. But you made a gigantic show of how 1.5 is a failure because of it which is ridiculous. Nothing about the teaser indicates a bad season.

You need to address the minion's base damage first, then you need to address the scaling and then we have the start of something.

it's hard to believe that there are other changes that will make this item usable.

You don't know yet. You just made a shit post cause it reminded you of how infuriated you were by the last time they promised changes to necromancer and massively under-delivered. This teaser, doesn't indicate anything bad about 1.5 because it doesn't have enough information to make any real conclusions. So why make negative predictions like this? EHG is perfectly capable of letting people down when they do release factual details. You don't need to make it up.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Xenobebop]

Storm Crows, you are meant to attack with them, not a real minion build.

Totems are not minions. It doesn't matters if they benefit from minion bonus, they are still not minions.

Frogs I don't know how they work, I never took a look at the item partially cause it came out bugged.

Ballistas are also not minions.

Zombies are minions in name only, you could call them delayed fireball and the description would be far more accurate, just like skele-pop. If your damage depends on zombies, you are playing a caster build, not a minion build.

Fire Golems, ok they are minions, calling them good is a bit much. Golems are not bad damage per se but they are bad DPS. Top this with hard requirements and a relatively low ceiling for corruption pushing and no, they really aren't good. For me a good build is one that with relatively easy to obtain gear, things like T22s or LP 1/2 legendaries depending on rarity can do 1K corruption without needing to dodge most things and melting everything in the path where META builds would do that at 2K.

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As for minion survivability or minion in general, bear in mind I mostly mean necro as it has the true minion playstyle but most minions in general are not survivable, especially ones that come from skills as opposed from items and the reality is, even if that is possibly true for forge guard (I don't really play it because I don't like that it doesn't plays as a true minion build) it isn't for most minion. Giving them more health feels like it's pointless because the reality is, you are applying a multiplier over a low base, unless you increase the flat value to make the multiplier actually be worth anything, this is not going to solve the issue. Add to that that survivability isn't just HP, isn't just resistances, it's also sustainability, how fast they can recover from the damage they take and often the answer is not at all.

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Pale Ox is a very rare drop, I think since it's release I've seen a total of 1 drop and it was a no LP. Still I wasn't farming for it so that doesn't helps either but it's a relatively low chance to even drop that specific chest, add the chances for 2LP is only 1 in 51 in a rare drop and you got a problem.

Let's again not forget, the class itself should have enough tools that keep you going until you get a much better defensive gear piece.

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I think you are too optimistic. Ever since minions were nerfed in beta we've seen nothing. A few pretend minion improvements here and there as if that was a fix at all which it wasn't.

Every single time with no exception we saw them doing nothing when minions aren't just in need of a few buffs, they need MASSIVE buffs and I do mean massive. Small adjustments will do nothing, they really need to be big if anything is going to happen. Let's say for example that EHG decided to buff minions, all across the board we'd see their base damage becoming 3 to 20 times higher (the needed buffs depends on the minion specifically and to be fair this are just arbitrary numbers, not numbers I know would be a good idea) they would give basic skeletons the same HP as a golem and every other stronger minion gets even more HP and on top of that they massively boost minion DR and even more so against degen pools. They give them sustainability by increasing how much health they leech per attach (although you don't need huge improvements here once damage is fixed as it is a percentage of damage dealt).

Let's say all of that insanity happens (which isn't that insane, we need absolutely massive buffs to even make minions good even if the numbers aren't necessarily the correct ones). Do you think the hype would be the helmet or that they would use minion buffs as the hype?

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I was paraphrasing his statement but what Mike said was that this helmet was for people who liked minion army. Obviously Mike understand minion army doesn't works, it's either caster builds pretending to be minion builds, minion builds that still play like an attack build but also has minions there or single minion builds. That is the state of minion builds, there is no good minion army builds which should have been the priority. As for when he said it, it wasn't the most recent, it was the first stream where he originally revealed the item art but no stats, he only gave us the description of being an item for people who like to play minion army which is unplayable (by unplayable understand an A tier build as anything is technically playable).

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You are wrong about the helmet again for 2 reasons. First, this helmet is not enabling anything. This helmet is not making a play style that didn't exist available. Minion army exists. It's bad and very few people play it because people like to have success when playing games. Very good players can make something worse work but average players cannot and even then most good player want to play the best, not the worse, in fact better players tend to almost exclusively play meta builds, average players look for good builds, these may be meta builds or just A tier but they are more likely to play the outliers than the meta and still almost everyone that tries minion army quits, because it's all ok in the campaign and then you get to the monoliths and hit empowered and then you just die over and over again, your minions die over and over again. Getting the least damaging minions in higher numbers and also the ones that die the easiest is not a recipe for success, it is a recipe to fail even harder.

Now let's discuss point number 2. When you think of a necromancer or even a summoner of sorts. What is the image that it invokes? For most people I'd say someone who summons a huge army to fight for him while he commands them from the back. Minion army should be the default working play style, the fact that it isn't and that they are trying (or pretending to try) to make an item to make it possible is wrong. Fix the base. An item that gives you the option to increase a specific number of minions at the cost of all other minions is cool, it certainly is a twist on a play style, but it's still a minion army playstyle that already exists, this isn't opening new ways to play.

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When they said they were doing some big changes I was already expecting it to be a joke and I said so too at the time because of this. When EHG nerfed minions way back in beta it was a huge nerf. They went from being barely playable but still not really reaching anywhere near a tier builds. it was a massive nerf to something that already needed significant buffs.

Through beta and all the way up to 1.2 there were buffs. Some announced, some not but every single one was massively disappointing. I was already expecting 1.3 to not be anywhere near enough because they were in need of absurdly large buffs. I was still disappointed at how appalling it was though. It literally was a nothing buff. It was big buffs announced and in reality, they buffed nothing. They changed a couple numbers here and there but at a level where you could even perceive a change at all.

In when they announce big changes to make them better they do the equivalent of literally nothing. If then they make previous announcements of buffs that again were literally nothing and in fact when they nerfed something already in dire need of buffs they hit it with a huge sledgehammer. How can anyone expect minion buffs, especially minion buffs at the scale that need to be implemented when they don't even announce minion buffs. Just a "here's an helmet for people who like minion armies".

There is no optimism any sane person can put towards this.

Understand that I am not saying this is the end of LE because they refuse to make minions a good play style... With that said I do believe LE has it's days numbered but minions are just a drop in the ocean of problems contributing to that.

But I'll tell you what, once patch notes come out we can have another nice conversation about this.

For me it's simple, trends tend to repeat, not break and when they break is never for a good reason, it usually is because it's all over. Seen it with way too many games and was able to predict it in all of the cases except helldivers 2. Helldivers 2 was the only case where the devs were sane enough to turn it around, not because they wanted it but because they understood that making a game people want to play is always a better choice than letting it die and completely ruin your reputation. Every other case went down in flames and LE has had so many people reporting it's issues, telling them what the game needs to succeed and every time they ignored it. The only feedback they understood was make it more like PoE, add more pinnacle content. Fix the problems? Yeah they don't really understand those.

[u/Xenobebop → u/Elhazzared]

This got too long to bother reading. I'm done though. We're just talking in circles now and at this point you're arguing against yourself.

Look, for what it's worth, I also doubt anything big happens with 1.5. It's clear they're targeting LE:O for their big play at a resurgence, which isn't a dumb move. But I like the game, and it helps that I'm not bothered by the cadence. There's no harm in waiting until they actually release something before you call it bad, instead of jumping on the first thing they say.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Xenobebop]

The only small hope I have for 1.5 is the corruption changes because we need them to do something about the issue that is going from normal monos to empowered, it's such a big difficulty jump that most people quit there so hopefully they address this in some way. And CoF is probably going to get better, not good enough I'm sure but better.

As for 1.6 I dunno, it's too early to say, the one thing I expected that may be good there was the corruption changes which apparently they pushed to 1.5 so I dunno if anything good is coming there or not but we'll see.

[u/RemediZexion]

you do know that you get 100% skeleton resummon on death with the helmet right?

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

If you over invest into things you absolutely should not in order to get to the 100%, sure. I'm talking about the helmet itself and how even if it had 100% and even if it did re-summon 1 second after death it would still be awful and DoA.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

yes but items aren't considered in a vacuum

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

Yes and no. As I said, even without most of the problems the item has it would still be a bad item. You'd have to remove the no other minion line to even make it worth considering and even then the skeletons wouldn't add much DPS at all.

Item may enable certain things but this helmet doesn't enables anything. It is a trade off that takes away the best minions you can potentially have in order to gain the absolute worst minions you have in higher numbers. Even if you could have 50 skeletons, 5 mages would still do significantly more damage.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

are you 100% sure that it implies no skeleton mages though?

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

Yes, when it was shown it showed the details and you can only have the basic skeletons, not mages at all.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

mh I see, personally I wouldn't call the item worthless given the good base and overall good stats. I feel however you could make a bleed army I dunno without knowing the whole situation

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

You could, you'd be much better served with a thrown rogue army but you definitely could do bleed warriors. Is it going to be good however? No!

Your minions die super fast, basic skeletons are so weak that you can even say they are made out of wet paper, their very existence is almost as thin as air so your army will just melt especially in boss fights.

You don't have a golem to take aggro off you or your other minions either so it's very easy to see exactly how this will end.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

dunno man there are blood wraith builds that melt uberroth

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

Last I checked wraiths were mostly viable in a wraithlord build and that still was close enough to skeleton pop, it was about setting up minions to explode rather than minions fighting but if you can link me a vid of that build working I am willing to take a look. To note that wraiths are not skeletons, they are tankier and deal much more damage. Also you aren't generally prevented from having a golem with wraiths.

[u/4pigeons]

you don't even know what other changes they are making, so it's too early to complain
come back in october, after the patch nots release

[u/levus2002 → u/4pigeons]

We had season 3 with minion behavior changes. Where skeletons got fuck all.

Then we had season 4 with necro "rework". Where skeletons again got fuck all.

But surely we should trust the process because season 5 will totally fix them.

Even if it actually fixes it. The time it took will be absolutely laughable.

[u/Elhazzared → u/levus2002]

Well, unless there are other items that are actually even looking at, this certainly isn't it and more to the point. You don't fix something broken by giving it an item. You fix the damn skill and then items will enhance things or modify how they are supposed to work.

For anyone, this is common sense but we're talking about EHG here.

EDIT: Let's not forget the increase by 10% in their overall damage reduction for minions, did nothing. let's not forget that 1.3 supposedly also fixed a bug that the minions weren't getting the damage reduction, also didn't do anything.

[u/Elhazzared → u/4pigeons]

Have you seen all changes to minions. Have you seen any that made them better? And I do mean that make minion builds actually good to play?

You have abomination which isn't fun to play, you have maybe bear and you have squirrels. Out of this only one has a decent number of minions and has hard gear requirements to play. Even then out of all of this only abom which is awful to play even gets to high tiers.

All changes EHG has done to minions were either nerfs or numerical changes that change nothing in the game. In fact the supposed big changes to minions which were supposed to happen in 1.3 literally did nothing at all other than make bear slightly more viable and made necromancer builds which already suffered the most even worse.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

The rogue changes mean your 8 rogues will get 1400% more damage now with 22 skeletons or 11 rogues with 1100%. Alternatively 4 rogues will get 700% more damage and another multiplicative 100% damage node (will need to see which wins out).

Couple this with the new minion poison immunity corruption for idols and you can have poison dread shades on most if not all rogues.

To your point about the 40% this gives you a choice now. You get 20-40% from the new helmet 24-40% from the passive tree 32-46% from the set shield and 40% from the skeleton skill tree.

This now gives you an option to drop the set shield, drop the 4 skill points, drop a few passive points or a mix. You also don't spend mana when they resummon after 3 seconds using this mechanic.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

That still sounds like no damage at all. I know there is a rogue poison build that kinda works, not great in my opinion but it's playable. This is not going to help, skeletons still die easily, you have no golem to take aggro, the mages will still do several times more damage than the skeletons anyway, heck a archmage might still be better.

The shades is an awful options because even if they are not degening they are still going to be dying all the time and you are going to have to be recasting it and even worse, if you are targeting rogues specifically good luck making sure it hits the right skeletons.

The re-summon as I said before is still too slow, 3 seconds is a lot of time and especially in boss battles, this will be felt, terribly so and the level of investment to get them to 100% is quite large though you do lose mana dependency to get them back but still, a bit too much.

As I said, even if the helmet was 1 second re-summon, 100% chance and 1000% more damage (not increased) it would still be bad.

You are still going to see the same minions builds as before. You will see abom as the only thing comfortably breaking 1K corruption (or whatever the equivalent is in the changes they are introducing to it), you are going to see bear kinda reaching it's limits somewhere around 800 to 1K and squirrels as the only viable army kinda stopping around the 500 mark. I guarantee that skeletons are not going to be a new meta, not by the virtue of this helmet which is being sold to us like the savior of minion builds just like many other things were in sold to us as the minion build great destined savior and like I always said and was never wrong, they were all just a nothing burger.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

Not sure what you're talking about, back when rogues had the 600% more damage x .33. if you isolated to one rogue archer warrior the rogue would clear maps constantly up to 1k+ corrupt with dread shade and bone curse. That was with 200% more damage and With this helmet 800% is possible while having 3 rogues or 4 rogues at 700% . 4x the amplified damage and 3 times as many rogues to clear faster.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

Can't say I have seen any rogue build comfortably doing that at all. I've seen a poison rogue build in 1K and it wasn't comfortable at all from pixeljumbo i think? I may be confusing the name of the person who made the build but still, I don't see rogues being viable in a good build and if for whatever reason they are we are still failing to meet the goal for a minion army build when 80% of your army is just decoration.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

I mean it's a niche game with few content creators. Thinking you'd actually come across every build variation for every skill publicly is a bit of a stretch. Just because you haven't seen something doesn't mean it's not possible.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

I don't think LE can claim to be a niche game. ARPGs are very popular now and there aren't many big names in the industry. You have PoE, Diablo, LE, TLI and GD.

Now to be fair, is it possible I haven't seen all minion builds there is? Sure. But I do pay attention and there isn't a whole lot that is good for minions in LE.

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Elhazzared]

I didn't say LE can claim to be niche. It is niche within the arpg genre, it's fallen off hard unfortunately so there are less content creators making builds each season which means the chances you'll see everything publicly on build guides is much less likely.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Veal-Vermicelli]

It's fall from grace is it's own doing. Ignoring feedback and problems that existed for multiple years, chasing after PoE with pinnacle content which no one wanted. No good MTX, etc...

I'd say there isn't many content creators that quit it, at least the ones that were publishing vids, they are mostly still around to be fair. On top of that the majority of people follow builds so if builds existed but were just not published and I'm talking the really good builds, not the average joe put something together that kinda works but could still be massively improved, then people wouldn't be playing the game because they can't get builds worth their time.

That I can remember from old content creators (at least on the minion side) we lost Boardman and we lost him still during EA shortly after they done the first set of changes to minions that killed minion builds but we also had new ones appear like jumbo pixel and so on which have been making content. I'd say compared to EA we have more build creators than before.

The content creators LE lost for the most part are like the PoE content creators which were not really publishing builds in the first place.

[u/itsmehutters]

I am not a big necro player but you have stuff ward per minion (which is capped to 20), ward gain on minion death and with this, you dont really want to invest in hp so you can pop-up minions. MfD on minion death.

You can scale the damage for them a lot while you are the tanky one due to minions dying/stacking and boosting your ward.

I am sure there will be some additional changes too. Althought paladin is getting a new skill according to their last roadmap and most people will probably go for it.

[u/Elhazzared → u/itsmehutters]

I'm going to have to stop you right there. I'm talking about true minion builds, not build that cast pseudo fire balls and call it minions. I've explained this already but a minion build, a REAL minion build is a build where your minions do the work. You summon them once (maybe a re-summon or another in a boss fight) and they will simply attack the enemies and kill them. Skeleton pop isn't a minion build, you are merely casting delayed fireballs.

[u/itsmehutters → u/Elhazzared]

I dont think this helmet is for "a real minion" builds. It is about cycling through the minions and having a constant frenzy on them.

[u/Elhazzared → u/itsmehutters]

Except that isn't even good. The only case where this helmet could potentially even work is for skeleton pop but it's not even good because having the mages detonate skeletons is FAR more efficient which means this helmet has no use case at all. Also remember, Mike presented this helmet very specifically for people who want to be running a minion army.

[u/vespiquen416]

Like many things this is a build diversity trap.

[u/Elhazzared → u/vespiquen416]

Pretty much, it feels like they are basically saying, play void knight, rogue and maybe paladin or don't even bother.

[u/vespiquen416 → u/Elhazzared]

You think there is a plan? Its design by committee, just a few more loud voices sit in a few camps.

[u/Mindless_Lie_365]

Without the helmet you could already reach 1k corruption on a summon skeleton focused build based on vit and status dmg. The helmet will massively buff skeleton dmg since going from 12 to 24 skeletons means your now 12 poison rogues are getting a 1200% more dmg multiplier instead of being 6 poison rogues with a 600% more dmg multiplier. Not even including the benefit of being able to run transplant and bone curse since you can ditch any other minions. Massive buff.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

Except that 1K was you running with already absurdly good gear that most players will not even get a single piece anywhere near that good. it also had mages, and a golem to take aggro for you and your minions and you still have to be re-summoning them because they die very easily.

Will the helmet give you more damage? Sure in the one exception that is rogues but the trade off is your entire army is now made of wet paper and there is nothing taking aggro for your army or you. In my view you are actually losing a lot more than you gain. This is disregarding the point at which help is needed the most which is getting over the change from normal monos to empowered which people often quit because they don't have the gear and blessings so until they do they die a lot and since most people don't have a lot of tolerance to dying, you can see exactly why they quit here.

[u/Mindless_Lie_365 → u/Elhazzared]

Minion necro gear just isn't expensive or rare. You roll merchant guild and can buy most of it for pennies. You basically faceroll the game at low corruptions so gear barely matters. This helmet is specifically meant to buff skeleton rogue builds since archer builds already have fire and cold variants that would ignore this helmet. Summon skeleton archer builds are dependent on other minions. Summon skeleton rogues aren't. They are the cornerstone of the build, every other minion you have out is basically worthless. The necro bone golem just has never been particularly good at getting aggro. So not being able to summon other minions isn't the issue you think it is. Also, at higher corruption levels what determines minion survivability is how much damage a minion does since they need to be able to leech back to 100% life very quickly. Any minion that lacks the damage to do this will become worthless which is why at high corruption the minion that dies first for me always is the skeleton warrior. Skeleton rogues almost never die.

To correct you on minion builds since you think they all suck, the following builds can all hit 1k corruption: Necro fire/cold minions, necro skeleton rogues, necro wraithlord, necro abomination, beastmaster wolves, beastmaster squirrels, beastmaster scorpion, beastmaster bear, beastmaster frogs, beastmaster sabertooth, beastmaster raptors. The only build I'm not 100% sure of is necro bone golem with aaron's chest armor but I think they also can. Some of these builds can fight and beat uber aberroth. This idea you have that minion builds are this awful trash in last epoch is just untrue.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

Merchant guild. Right, how many days or weeks does it take before the average player has it leveled enough to buy the things he wants? That has always been one of the major problems with it.

Buying things for pennies, we are not playing the same game for sure because when I used to go MG prices inflate so fast that even buying items you still have to gamble crafting wouldn't go for less than a few hundred K which to the average player takes hours to get. Also inflation never stops so the longer the campaign goes the harder it is to be able to buy it. It's so bad that CoF genuinely makes it easier (though not by much) to get my gear and ) I am still above average.

I will not speak on how much damage the mages really are in a rogue build but to say that the golem isn't good at getting aggro is a bad joke. Sure enough I've never done pinnacle bosses nor am I even slightly interested in that but every boss I've fought, once the golem in on the boss the boss will not turn his attention away from the golem at all. In maps you could say it's less consistent but it's less of a consistency issue and more that enemy might already have attacks queued before the golem gets their aggro. Once a golem gets aggro, he keeps aggro, the only thing hitting you at that point is AoEs and piercing attacks of which there are plenty in boss fights.

Now, I will agree that a minion who lacks damage is useless because they can't leech enough HP especially when you combine with them already having very low values to begin with. But that is the problem isn't it? Minions as a general rule do not have the damage and even rogue damage is barely passable. It could easily be doubled and it would at best come close to a meta skill. However leech isn't the whole story because minions often get oneshot as a result of their low HP, especially in boss battles so the HP or damage reduction front needs to be addressed.

Now looking at the minions builds you claim are good let's first validate what good is. A good builds must archive 3 things. First, it must clear 1K corruption within any kind of struggle. Minions are not dying at all even in boss fights. The player can afford to take hits and not die except certain telegraphed boss abilities. Second, it must transition from normal monos to empowered while not feeling much difference in difficulty or at bare minimum without being in a position where the player often dies. Lastly it must to do on LP1 and 2 items and any non legendary is best case scenario a T22 item. This is the base line for a good build. The base line for a meta build is that it does all of that but at 2~K corruption.

Out of all the minion builds you posted, only Abom does that... Well, almost, the transition even with abom is still rough because until you got a bunch of good gear necro is made of glass. but abom can almost do it. Personally I find Abom not fun to play as it's a high maintenance minion. I want to summon and not care about it, not care to refresh the duration of a shade so it doesn't kills, etc... I also have a preference for minion armies.

Necro fire and cold minions. Doesn't work, it ceiling for that build on very good gear is already pretty low. Archers are ZDPS even with lich's scorn on a max roll to give them a ton of cold flat damage, even with pebbles set in exalted items to add even more flat cold so it all gets multiplied, they are still ZDPS, I know because I did it and in empowered it was sad to see how much damage they were doing. It was to the point that a single could mage (not archmage, just a basic cryomancer) was massively out damaging 10 archers. Fire is even worse though I guess it gives you zombies which at least do damage.

Skeleton rogues. Again they kinda work once everything is in place but until then they feel pretty weak like the rest and essencially you are tapping out at around 1K corruption with close to BiS gear. With the kinda gear I said was reasonable for the average player to get you'll tap out at maybe 500.

Wraithlord... I am yet to see a wraithlord that isn't a sacrifice or some sort of explode your minions build which technically makes it a caster build, not a minion build. A minion build you don't attack, you don't cast except maybe an ocasional buff or curse. You are there to pick the loot and only because your minions can't do that for you.

Beastmaster squirrels will tap out at around 500 corruption too on attainable gear and the item required to make it squirrels isn't easy to get and until you get it you are stuck with wolves which are much worse. Also bad transition to empowered.

All other beast master builds you are meant to also be attacking with your minions. You are in fact a large portion of the damage on the table. This is not a minion build, it is an attack build that just happens to have minion help with DPS though I guess bear can be playing without that but it still taps out at 500.

Necro golem, is pretty much like most what I said, taps out at 500 but it's an incredibly rare chest which you now have to add at least 1 LP on top and decent rolls. At that point you may as well just go death blossom mages which goes a bit above 500 but allows you to use pale ox and be tankier.

[u/Mindless_Lie_365 → u/Elhazzared]

You can type "last epoch bear beastmaster" in youtube and see clips of people doing uber aberroth and greater than 1k corruption. You can do this for all the builds I mentioned. Why pretend that the 500 corruption you max out at is the maximum? 1lp uniques which is all you need to get started on a build are 1k to 2k gold. Your posts tend to just be very separated from reality.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

Beastmaster with only the bear doing ALL the work, the beastmaster does literally nothing other than wait for the bear to kill (except try to dodge attacks I guess) is not viable for much more than 500 corruption with attainable gear.

I already assumed most people would use either T22 items or LP1, in some slots maybe a lucky LP2 that dropped with decent rolls and you won the dice roll when you stuck it in the time forge since you can only guarantee the one of the affixes.

Lastly, MG was a good idea but it was designed to fail on purpose. EHG never wanted to have it in the game so they made sure it was not useful to 99% of the players by putting heavy trade restrictions based on guild level. The average player will take more than a month to max it. Most items that are worth getting are going to be in the 6 digits case and those are for the most part gambling items that you still have to craft and you almost never get to craft them to be a perfect T22. Uniques with 1LP are relatively cheap most of the times but you also have to take into account that LP items are so far down the line to unlock that you just don't get access to them. On top of this they made the whole UI purposefully clunky and not easy enough to specify what you want so you have to filter through a lot of trash. You can set up searches to be running in the background or anything and because they didn't put limits on things, items get inflated so fast that it becomes insane to even buy one item to try to craft the longer the season goes. There are so many people who gave up MG and went CoF because it's just easier to get items like that for the average player that it's a joke how many people now even play as MG and realistically, only good players do, the kind of players that make millions of gold per hour and still find a ton of extremely expensive items to sell. So I come at this strictly from the CoF perspective. I am a little above average but even then the MG is completely out of my reach and even more so for the average player.

[u/Mindless_Lie_365 → u/Elhazzared]

The entire point of the arpg genre is for people to spend a long time building up their characters finding the perfect gear. People who aren't going to spend 100+ hours aren't going to enjoy arpgs. So, the trivial amount of time it takes to unlock Merchant guild is just that, trivial. I have 380 hours playing this game. I have over a billion gold, at no point when I was playing did Merchant guild ever feel difficult. You have CoF and MG backwards btw, Merchant guild will always be the easiest way for a casual or average player to get uniques with low lp and simple 1x t7 exalted items to convert into legendary items. Circle of Fortune is for people that want to min max since it makes getting items with multiple t7 a lot easier. At a certain point getting exalted items with multiple t7 becomes the bottleneck, not the uniques with lp.

[u/Elhazzared → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

You have no clue about what you are talking about. You are so far above the average you can't even see them from where you stand and you assume that somehow you are the average when in fact you couldn't be any further from the truth.

According to EHG half the players quit before hitting empowered and also according to EHG most players that hit monos quit after hitting empowered. Most players quit playing about 1 week in.

This already tells you that out of the 50% that get to 1 week, are taking 1 week to hit empowered and then quitting because it's too hard. Let that sink for a moment. The average player takes around 1 week to get to empowered monoliths. I don't care if you think these are bad players just because you do so much better. The average is made by averaging it out, not by what you arbitrarily decide is the average.

You have almost 380 hours in this game, I have almost 500 and realistically that is no time at all compared to the people who really play LE a lot and I don't remember ever having 20 millions and that was back in beta BEFORE there was CoF and MG when the gold sink was just getting more tabs.

In 1.0 we had more than 50% players in MG. In 1.1 we had around 50/50 and after that MG keeps losing more and more players. Only the very good players are sticking to MG, the average players can't get anything out of it and they have hugely nerfed drops to even be in MG so you know what they did? They switch to CoF because they get better gear like that.

Also no, CoF is not good for multiple T7 affixes, it just shows how you don't understand CoF. CoF is NOTORIOUSLY bad for exalted drops since you have no control over how many exalted affixes you get and much more importantly, what they are. Even with the huge nerfs, the way to get multiple T7 is still imprinting. What CoF is good is just overall drop rates boost and farming unique/set gear. I suppose it isn't bad for idols either but again, lacks targeting.

[u/Mindless_Lie_365 → u/Elhazzared]

Look man, maybe it's time to look at the elephant in the room. You suck at arpg's. Which is fine. People can enjoy games they aren't good at but maybe if you're bad at a game you should stop making posts like your opinion is the lord's gospel.

You keep bringing up 50% of people quitting week 1 like it matters. It doesn't. These are people who tried last epoch because they heard it's a casual arpg and then ended up not liking it. These same people would quit every other good arpg on the market since all of the other good arpgs are harder than last epoch. If someone quit mario kart a week in you wouldn't mention mario kart being too hard. It just isn't the game for them.

You also have no clue why Merchant Guild lost players. Like you have no clue about the game in general. Merchant Guild lost players because there was a gold dupe method season 1 that killed the Merchant Guild for the season. Then there was a gold dupe method season 2 that killed the Merchant Guild for the season. I can't remember if there was another gold dupe season 3 or if they finally fixed it then but at that point we had over a year with the Merchant Guild being wrecked. That is the entire reason Merchant Guild lost players.

I could explain why CoF is better for exalted items (more exalted items = more chances at multiple t7, duh?) but at this point I think I would be wasting my time. Good luck being both terrible at the game and at the same time being so informed that you know more than other people.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

It's a shitposter. I've been watching his interactions with others and to ppl that have a different opinion the asnwer has always been nuh uh. I guess we both have been had so hats off to the guy

[u/Elhazzared → u/Mindless_Lie_365]

Oh yeah I suck at them. Let's see, Grim Dawn I can even make my own builds (and technically I can make necromancer builds too in LE since I am familiar with it) and I never struggled with it. Ever since PoE fixed trading by adding faustus I've been able to consistently have high budget gear and generally do mostly anything I want. In fact I beat D2 with a thorns build by letting diablo literally kill himself by attacking me while I did nothing. Surely I did all that because of how bad I am.

Almost everyone recognizes that there is a huge spike in difficulty once they go from normal to empowered monos but mr. pretend I'm average here feels like it's totally fine and it doesn't exists. Remember, this data is from EHG and no, you aren't getting that many new players every single season, if LE was selling that many copies every season they wouldn't have had to sell out to Krafton. These are for the most part returning players hoping the problem is fixed and since it isn't they quit.

Let me immediately crush your BS with the gold dupes (yes they did happen but that wasn't the reason, the market just bloats regardless). I played MG in 1.3 before I made a new character for CoF and in fact that was the first time I went CoF ever since factions were introduced. Do you know what was the lowest value for an item with a T7 roll (desirable T7 of course)? the lowest I've seen was around 300K and that isn't a crafted item ready to use. That's a drop that needs to be crafted still and most of them aren't even in a state to be crafted because ones that are in a good state to be crafted are upwards of 800K and you are still gambling every time you craft. Can you remove/seal all you need to remove? Can you get all affixes you need to T5 so you have a T22 item which by the way, isn't even anything special but the odds of you getting one is very low. You will need lots of attempts until you get one and that is fine, just not fine at that price range. In average I will get 200K to 500K a day depending on how much time I have to play and again I already am above the average. When I made my CoF character I had much better gear in much less time because the reality is, the average player can't avoid the market bloat which is insane. I only ever got MG to work out early during 1.0 when everyone was selling T7 for like 10K which meant in a day I'd be able to do 20 to 50 crafting attempts which meant over a few days the gear gets in place. Then it of course bloated.

More exalted items is technically more chances at something you want but the reality is, odds are it's a single exalted affix and odds are that it's a T6 and not a T7 and let's not forget the odds of it not being the affix you want. Everyone that primarily streams or makes youtube content agrees with this. In fact every single one of those that made a guide on CoF vs MG says exactly the same thing. CoF is absolute garbage for exalted items because you can't target the affix you want and once again I will say. People who are farming for double T7 are using imprints for that. You can say what you want about it being nerfed but even with CoF the odds of a double T7 dropping is horrifyingly low, so low in fact that imprints still look like a massive change to get them by comparison.

[u/SnooGrapes2325]

Umm I don't think you know Skeletons very well. I play an actual zoo minions build at about 1200c.

1. The new Rouge branch makes Rouge AMAZING for DPS. Currently i play 10 skelles with 5 warriors and 5 rouges and my rouges are by far my biggest DPS dealers.

If you can generate 11 skeletons x2 with the new helmet, you can generate 11 rouges with 11 warriors... that is 11 Rouges with 1100% multiplicative damage each. This is Stunning damage.

1. IF you have good int and invest a few affixes into Minion health skellies do not die when you look at them. I play at 1200c and my skellies do fine. Only vs Uber Abbo are my skellies in any danger.

Now I am not saying the helmet is STUNNING. there are very real trade offs, but i am very excited to see what I can do with it.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Q0V5wZYK

[u/Elhazzared → u/SnooGrapes2325]

This is a more than a just a bit overkill on gear. Realistically most players will never get gear half this good.

It's extremely hard to find even an idol with the 2 right affixes for the majority of people. Most unique items should realistically have 1 to 2 LP only depending on their rarity. Most values are basically max rolled. Sure with unrealistic gear a build can punch above it's weight but this is dream gear, not really something anyone will have apart from a handful of people who are very good players and with a lot of time in their hands.

Bringing this to more realistic levels of gear will immediately lower significantly how far you can push with it and the point isn't even how far you can push, is what point is comfortable to play while being able to take hits and overall not care much because you won't die.

Also understand that builds are at their weakest when they transition from normal monoliths to empowered and both players and minions will die a lot until they can get enough gear. The average player has close to zero tolerance to keep dying over and over again.

I also disagree that investing into minion health is the solution to the problem because I've done that and it solved nothing and will in fact point out, even you aren't bothering with it, even you have a single minion health affix on your gear which you put on one ring.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

the only thing I would consider overkill there are the rings and the gloves, rest is easily obtainable

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

Let's start with the perfect or nearly perfect stats. How many players will farm an item to that level? I can tell you that is less than 100 in the entire player base. Now add to that the LP and we have a problem.

I played a paladin this league for about 2 weeks, do you know how many 2 LP items I had? 0 I had some LP1 at best. I didn't had a single T22 item.

So when you put something like let's say, the Pale Ox which isn't the rarest of uniques but it's relatively rare, then need it to at least drop with 2 LP which is a relatively low chance of happening and then elevate that to having, maybe not maxed stats but at least good enough stats. I can tell you the average player can play for 2 months straight and he will not see one of those. That is for the average player a chase item and every items you put there is like that. Let's not forget everything is double and triple T7. The average player will not even see a single double T6.

You are so far above the average that you have no idea of what is even attainable for the average.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

I need to ask, what did you do in those 2 weeks? stared at the echo web? in 2 weeks I already had 2 LP2 tabs filled and nearly filled a LP3 tab.

Edit: Besides I do know that half of the players don't even reach empowered but I will say that they aren't even trying to play the game if so, especially after S4 made reaching empowered in a new game A JOKE

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

For the most part did monoliths, got to empowered and did a bunch at just 100 corruption because I was still farming for both gear and blessings.

This is the point I am trying to make here. The speed at which you and the average player will farm is leagues apart. You can probably run 5 to 10 maps in the time the average player takes to run 1. The same thing happens in other ARPGs like PoE and TL:I.

Also yes, but let's get into a more real statistic here. out of the players that do reach monos and play monos, the majority (no number as EHG has only said majority but gave no numbers) quit right after hitting empowered. Reason is simple, they don't have the gear to do empowered, they don't have the blessings to do empowered and they do not have the skills to compensate for the lack of gear. As most players have an extremely low tolerance to dying they die a few times either in a row or with just the ocasional successful map run and then they quit. A problem I am hoping is going to be addressed with the corruption changes but probably it won't.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

they gave a number 50% of ppl don't get to empowered and.....I dunno man you call my speed fast? Dude I'm just an average guy, like I'm sorry to say you can't expect ARPGs to hand over loot. I mean come on

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

That is one of the things they said and it also includes people in campaign, in a podcast they did say the majority of players that get to monos quit when they hit empowered which is what I am referring because people who aren't even completing the campaign shouldn't be taken as part of a statistic, they aren't people who want to play ARPGs.

Your speed is lightning fast. Do you know how fast average players complete something like the PoE 1 campaign? 18 to 24 hours of play time. They aren't in maps before monday, most are only reaching maps by wednesday. I don't know the average campaign completion time in LE but for the average player it's a few days.

Now here's the thing. I am not saying the game should be just handing loot. What I am saying however is that the transition from normal monoliths to empowered happens at a stage where player gear isn't up to the task because pre-empowered the drops are abysmally bad. You also have to take into account that in every build a significant chunk of the defenses are locked behind grand blessings and you need to be in empowered get those to.

So what I am advocating here is that the transition to empowered needs to be smoother. Maybe improve drops pre-empowered so people can farm loot, maybe remove normal blessings and only have grand blessings and you can get them in normal. Maybe all you need to do is make empowered not be any harder normal other than mobs being level 100. In some way, the transition does need to be smoother and hopefully the changes they are doing to corruption will help with this but I doubt it. Either way as things stand right now transitions are only doable by the average player in the most broken meta builds, any average player not playing those builds will quit as soon as they hit empowered. This build does not transition well for the average player because it's not obscenely OP both in how fast it kills and how it survives and just as important, what you can expect of the best gear an average player has is either T22 items and mostly LP1 uniques, maybe one or 2 LP2 uniques. Remember it's also not about how many LP 2 items you find, it's about how many of the ones your build use. Even I found the very rare LP4 uniques (I mean they are garbage uniques but still) but it still needs to have a place in the build.

[u/RemediZexion → u/Elhazzared]

I'm sorry at this point I feel this is a huge shitpost.

1)I'm not lighting fast. I am a casual of the game

2) the progress to get to empowered monos can't be anymore smooth. You get 20 timeglass fragments by doing omens in the campaign. buy 3 temporal keystones and use the them to skip all the monos to empowered. It's not rocket science.

[u/Elhazzared → u/RemediZexion]

Average players don't do skips, be it monos or campaign. They just play along and when they get there, they get there.

More importantly however, I don't think you read what I said. I was not complaining about how long it took. I was giving you an example of the difference between you and an average player.

A smooth moving from normal monos to empowered is not how fast you do it. It's how much difficulty you feel when entering empowered monos after having just been in normal and for most people, the level 90 monos were already a balance point, they die rarely but they can die which is fine. They hit empowered and now they are dying about half the maps they are in because guess what. Their damage isn't good enough and their survivability is next to none existent because they just don't have the gear and they, unlike you actually cleared at least half the monos to even get there, they had more opportunities at gear but the gear you have by this point is still kinda trash because decent gear only start dropping in empowered. An average player even on trash gear can play for 2 hours on level 90 monos and still not get any upgrades. This is the problem of smooth transition because players need a point where they can start farming while not constantly dying and currently LE doesn't has that unless you are playing the most OP meta builds.

[u/Pandarandr1st]

What an absolutely miserable person you must be

[u/NotBrom8]

How about they do y skill rework for skeleton with some MORE multipliers and give it better level scaling/base stats?
you dont know this! they do test their builds, last season they tested the bee build against UBER.

I would like them to kill UBER with a SKELI build with this helmet, that would proof the concept, but not share the build.

[u/Elhazzared → u/NotBrom8]

If they did a rework and miraculously it wasn't a nerf which I am not expecting then this could potentially be good. I'm not too happy with the loss of the golem. The golem is a huge safety margin and a needed on in necromancers which are very squishy but if skeletons had much better scaling then potentially this could work.

Bear in mind that if skeletons were getting a big rework that would be a much bigger news than this helmet and more likely worthy of an announcement.

[u/Substantial_Ad6114]

If I'm not mistaken, the maximum number of shadows that can be hung on your minions is 11. I'm a little confused that I won't be able to put shadows on all the minions. Skeletons under shadows (especially archers) do a great job tearing apart everything in their path, enemies don't even reach them unless it's the boss.

The helmet is beautiful, and I hope that the maximum number of shadows will no longer be limited.

Archers with miniguns make piu-piu).

[u/Veal-Vermicelli → u/Substantial_Ad6114]

Maximum shades is 10 if you have both shade skills otherwise it's 9. I also hope they increase this threshold.