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Most people would simply pick the toughest, most aggro inducing summon and use it ad nauseam with one or two ranged attacks.
Most likely people will summon as many minions as they are allowed and use them as meat shields while pelting stuff from a safe distance. Not exactly the revolution in gameplay they were hoping for.
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There are a bunch of zombie dog passives; +hps, faster attack, etc. all further down the tree. they were acceptable tanks in the blizzcon build, but couldn't really kill anything by themselves, with just 2 points in the basic skill and no passive boosts.
This is the exact opposite of what they said they would do. They want us to create strong minions with the passives and at the same time we aren't allowed to have a lot of minions since they are supposed to be nothing but cheap easily replaceable cannon fodder. I'm really getting mixed signals here.
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Yeah I agree. They are more meat shields anyway, so no real point taking the time to hit them with spells just to give them effects.
Well they were in the way of where the spells would have landed. Chances are that through regular spam you would have hit all of the mongrels pretty fast.|||Quote:
Most likely people will summon as many minions as they are allowed and use them as meat shields while pelting stuff from a safe distance. Not exactly the revolution in gameplay they were hoping for.
I should've qualified my post with, "assuming that you are limited to how many summons you can have at any one time." I think that given the design, or at least intentions, of the WD that you will be able to have many summons up at once, but if they have one big, bad summon that you can have, but with the exception that you can have no other summons out at the same time then many people would favor it over the tediousness of managing multiple summons.
In a lot of ways the WD reminds me of WoW's Shaman class. Shamans are able to have between 1 and 4 totems on the ground at one time that provide the shaman with either buffs, bonus damage, or other usually useless abilities such as being able to see far off areas. How this is similar to the WD is this, it took the Shaman 4 seconds to cast/summon 4 totems. Shamans only summoned 4 totems in situations where 4 totems were necessary, and in those situations 4 seconds could often mean the difference between life and death. Lastly, naturally, every second you spend summoning something is a second that you aren't doing damage.
In D2, with the necromancer, the class that most people are want to compare the WD to, this wasn't an issue because your summons were either your primary source of damage(skeles, revives), a semi-permanent meat shield/aggro magnet(golems), or non-existent. Now in the first case, that of a "Fishymancer", you weren't taking any time away from killing your enemies so that you could replace fallen summons. If you lost a skele or revive there were ample corpses available to replace it with assuming you didn't blow them all up, and granted the WD doesn't require corpses to summon minions, he is, unlike the necromancer, the primary source of damage so if he's spending time summoning more minions to do his bidding he isn't spending time doing significant damage to his enemies, much like the Shaman who busy placing or replacing totems. Not the most engaging form of game play I can think of and certainly a contributing factor to the Shaman being one of the most underplayed classes in WoW.
Now, in WoW Blizz solved this problem first by making totems last longer than your average fight so that a shaman rarely had to place the same totem more than a couple of times in any given fight. Recently I understand that they introduced a whole new UI feature just for Shamans to use to streamline their totem placement. I'm not clear on the specifics of it as I don't play WoW any longer, but I believe it allows the Shaman to place 4 totems in the time of one global cooldown.
I think I've rambled long enough at this point. I will conclude by saying that I realize that this is not WoW. The mechanics and game play are entirely different and this require entirely different methods of tuning and balancing, and I just hope that Blizzard really realizes that.
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This is the exact opposite of what they said they would do. They want us to create strong minions with the passives and at the same time we aren't allowed to have a lot of minions since they are supposed to be nothing but cheap easily replaceable cannon fodder. I'm really getting mixed signals here.
Well they were in the way of where the spells would have landed. Chances are that through regular spam you would have hit all of the mongrels pretty fast.
Agreed on both points.|||Quote:
Shamans only summoned 4 totems in situations where 4 totems were necessary, and in those situations 4 seconds could often mean the difference between life and death. Lastly, naturally, every second you spend summoning something is a second that you aren't doing damage.
If the Totems are like in WC3 then they are fixed at a location. Minions can be cast without corpses and will travel with you. Most WD's will summon minions at the beginning of a game and only replace when one falls in battle. I'm guessing the summoning wouldn't take to long and most likely will be instant. So as a WD you are probably losing less time than a Shaman in each battle. I see what you are getting at. In the heat of battle when all the minions have fallen and you need a replacement fast I'd go with a single big one because it is faster and probably a better tank.
Still that leaves open the option of using a single big scary minion instead of lots of weaker minions at the beginning of the game. Depends on how good each is at keeping the WD safe and doing damage. We should know more once we get to see some of the skills.|||Quote:
If the Totems are like in WC3 then they are fixed at a location. Minions can be cast without corpses and will travel with you. Most WD's will summon minions at the beginning of a game and only replace when one falls in battle. I'm guessing the summoning wouldn't take to long and most likely will be instant. So as a WD you are probably losing less time than a Shaman in each battle. I see what you are getting at. In the heat of battle when all the minions have fallen and you need a replacement fast I'd go with a single big one because it is faster and probably a better tank.
Still that leaves open the option of using a single big scary minion instead of lots of weaker minions at the beginning of the game. Depends on how good each is at keeping the WD safe and doing damage. We should know more once we get to see some of the skills.
As usual you're right again. Having never gotten to play a WD or any character in D3 my knowledge is limited to mostly dated information that is posted online and my experience with D2 and WoW. That is to say that the bulk of my post was based around the knowledge of the 1 second global cooldown in WoW, I have no idea how long the GCD is in D3, and also based on the one summon I know anything about in D3, the mongrel/zombie dog, which doubles as a source of significant damage when you blow it up. As cool of a concept as that is, that's still 2 button presses required to do a job that for most other characters would require only one button press. And in the end you still have to resummon those dogs which is going to take some time away from doing damage.
Anyway as I said I agree with you.|||This is the first time I've been in the WD forum and I must say, is this for sure? Current etc.? One of the main reasons I wanted to play the WD was because of the lighting minions on fire and plaguing them. It sounded like a really cool mechanic.
So blizzard has dumped this? Because people who are played the game at Blizzcon, never had a manual, didn't really know what they were being shown to begin with, got confused??
Please tell me this is a bad joke...|||Well if blizz said that the mechanic wasn’t fun to play with then I believe them. Do you really think they’d remove a mechanic that was fun to play with. It was probably one of those ideas that looked cool on paper but one that didn’t quite work out in the actual game, at least, that’s my guess.
It could also be that the infusing of pets made a mess out of the skill runes for summoning spells. Anybody ever think of that?|||Quote:
This is the first time I've been in the WD forum and I must say, is this for sure? Current etc.?
For sure and current. Posted during this BlizzCon. They had trouble with the visuals and with people understanding what happened. Big chance that, as popenfresh mentioned, things didn't work out with the runes as well.|||Removed
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Agree with Blizz, this is one of those mechanics that sounds great on paper, but either is fun for the initial novelty and then quickly wears off, or isn't fun at all in practice.
Exactly. I could see this being sort of fun to play around with when you first get a new spell to enchant the dogs with. But after a short time it'll just become tiresome to have to micromanage all these enchantments every time you summon a new minion. Ever use enchant on an entire group of necro summons? Not fun.|||I thought the idea was cool. I was slightly disappointed when Blizz said they were removing the mechanic, but I assume we'll see it in another form (runes, skills, etc.). I'm going to trust Blizzard, at least for now...
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