Firstly, thanks for your detailed feedback so far.God_In_Action wrote: ↑Sat Aug 13, 2022 5:25 pmMore on the testing of streams on the main server:
The difference between Create Undead and Create Greater Undead is vast. I previously wrote about how 2x Tier 4 Mummies could battle their way through Malarite Temple in FoD with tactical play, but having taken 3x Tier 4 mummies through Morghunn's the difference was immediate and huge. The 2x mummies struggles managed and at times struggles, whereas 3x bashed their way through with ease.
I have now tried 3x Tier 4 ghouls against mountain orcs. The ghouls remain squishy and difficult to play because of that. The damage is noticeable when compared against mummies, more so with 3x than 2x. However, the ghouls get easily squished if you aren't paying very close attention to them. What's truly frustrating is to lose one summon, and therefore then be at sub-optimal strength unless you want to burn another top spell slot and summon them all again. The real pain comes if you're trying to carefully manage the 3 ghouls with the associate tool, only to click on one of them in a very chaotic fight (easily done in a fight with lots of enemies) which then causes them all to stand still for a couple or three of rounds whilst you sort out controlling all associates again and get them attacking the right target. Even just 2 rounds is enough time of them being flat footed for one of the ghouls to get killed.
So that's my new take: the frustration with the high damage/lower survivability of some of the streams is that once you lose one of the summons, that's your use of that spell slot effectively over. If you start over with casting a high level animation spell again like Create Greater Undead, you're wasting the surviving 2 summons which you already had along with any buffs on them. Or else, you can struggles along with fewer summons that you could have. To be effective, they all have to survive all of the time since you can't top up the summons. Would it be an interesting idea if you could 'top up' the max spawned undead with a lower tier spell? I.e. you cast Create Greater Undead to create 3 undead, one of them dies, so you cast Animate Undead to summon one more and 'top up' back to 3 summons?
This really pushes me towards the tankier summons, so that I don't lose one of them and waste another spell slot and summon sequencer charges having to replace it.
1. I get what you're saying. Ghouls actually are intended to be kind of a squishy, ravenous set of dead. It's possible they need their damage bumped up a little bit to compete, and maybe an increase of durability, at least to help them cope.
2. I like the idea of allowing weaker spells to top off summons, but with the way things are set up currently I am not sure it's possible to do. Let me look into it?