HechtHeftig wrote:tbh I hate VK as well. There's simply no use to him, because unlike VA, VK has to stand directly in front of the enemy and keeps dying because he can't ignore your own summons hitboxes.
I'd love to see VK being replaced by a new form of Overlord (grants +1 maximum necromancer minions plus another +1 for every 5 hardpoints. +the passive from Embalming is shifted over to Overlord. so 5% max minion life per hardpoint. Embalming from this point on only increases your own life and mana regeneration. Overlord is put in the last slot of the tree, VA is shifted to current VK place in the tree. Give the overlord a strong AoE attack and done.)
That way you can happily reduce the number of each minion to 5-6, which gives you 12 minions per minion type at the very most (if I calculated correctly). That's enough for a summoner to be tanky, but you can also increase the base stats of the summons. +necromancer minions as an item stat can then be completely removed.
Pro's of this change:
+Only those builds that really put points into overlord can profit from summons. That would make Totemancer a bit weaker since you'd have to spend points into a skill that doesn't profit you very much. Same with other builds.
+Overlord comes back
I loved Overlord back in the days.
+useless VK is finally gone!
+You can easily buff/nerf the whole build without relying on one certain item--> better balancing possible
Another possibility would be replacing VK with a ranged summon. Give them a low amount of possible summons (like 3 at max) and give it some kind of AoE attack (like an arrow chain that hits 3-4 enemies.) because summon necs sure lack AoE damage unlike any other build. Even summoner zon has an AoE inplemented in the summon, and Median has a huge monster density, that's why summoners are almost always bad, if they don't get the damage from somewhere else.
Pro's of this change:
+You don't need to rely on a merc for AoE damage anymore, which means you won't have to stop farming unqiues as soon as your money is gone.
+AOE FINALLY!
+you can reduce Howling totem's damage buff (because it's crazy strong af. I'd rather see it only giving CB and maybe DS or OW, but the last one is just my personal wish
That way you can also increase the damage from summons by a lot because the physical damage from howling totem is greatly decreased)
+useless VK is finally gone!